Bear Grease - Ep. 170: Bear Grease Classics: The Myth of the Southern Mountain Lion

Episode Date: December 13, 2023

Bear Grease has been a surprising and rewarding journey of almost three years. Today we’re going back to the beginning with Episode 1: The Myth of the Southern Mountain Lion, with a peek into the genesis of Bear Grease.There are two types of people in the South—those who’ve seen mountain lions and those who haven’t. Supposedly extirpated from the South, the native lion species has lived on through backwoods lore and many believe they’ve never left. But have they? Clay Newcomb explores the touchy topic, interviewing biologists, investigating two eye-witness sightings, and talking with a psychologist about how people can see things that aren’t real. This is a lesson in biology and human nature and a great story revealing the truth about South mountain lions.  Connect with Clay and MeatEater Clay on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop Bear Grease MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware gear at firstlight.com. It seems like just yesterday, but on April the 7th, 2021, almost three years ago, we released the first episode of the Bear Greece podcast titled The Myth of the Southern Mountain Lion. You may remember it. Today we're going to go back to that inaugural episode to celebrate, analyze, and if you've got a minute,

I'd like to give you some backstory on the Bear Grease podcast. It's been a surprising journey for me. And honestly, I didn't think a mainstream audience would be interested in the kind of stories I was interested in telling. From the very beginning, I viewed my interests as niche or fringy, not mainstream stuff. But I seemed to be wrong. We've told stories of gritty Americans who've lived their lives close to the land, of frontiersmen and hillbillies, Native Americans and outlaws, houndsmen and snake handlers, anthropologists and biologists, stories of big rivers and the

complexity of soils, and deep dives with nerdy historical authors. We've told some dark stories of enslavement, murder, racism, and lies. Asa Carter, you remember that? Bear Grease has been an experiment and celebration of the American storyteller, and through it, we've all learned a lot. Or I've learned a lot. But I'm not. I'm not sure that it's been a mainstream audience that has enjoyed these. I'm not sure that you bear greasers are a mainstream audience at all. I think that you're something pretty unique. And regardless of if you is or isn't, I'm shocked at the response to these stories.

Telling them has been a great joy of mine, and I don't take it for granted that you, your families, and your people follow along. I want to go back to the beginning for a minute to kind of give you a peek behind the veil to the genesis of the Bear Grease podcast when the grease was still solid fat, so to speak. When the idea of me doing a podcast for Meat Eater came up, Stephen Ronella said something to me to the effect of, Clay, I'd like to hear you interview people,

but afterwards, I'd like to hear your thoughts. It needs to be an efficient listen, kind of like a Terry Gross NPR interview. That was basically what he said. He was suggesting a documentary-style podcast, which sounded difficult to pull off, and at first, I thought I was opposed to it. Interestingly, though, years before that,

I had the thought, somebody should do a really well-thought-out and highly-produced documentary-style hunting podcast. That somebody isn't me. I had no interest in it. I didn't know how to make one. I didn't think I could find enough content. But mainly, I wanted to do full-length, robust interviews with people.

In my past experiences, the kind of people that I was interested in talking to didn't warm up too quickly sometimes. And I knew I wouldn't get the good stuff quickly. I had to work to get that. And so that meant long-form conversations. And I felt like the documentary-style interviews were short, impersonal, and clinical. but turns out I was kind of wrong. After some time and some conversations with others on the team, I realized I could still have those long-form conversations,

but I'd cherry-picked the relevant stuff, creating a polished, efficient listen. It was actually the best of both worlds. I remember where I was sitting in Montana, in the back country, when I said to somebody, this podcast needs to be called Bear Greene. Bear grease is a metaphor for things forgotten but relevant. At one time, everybody in America knew what bear grease was and what it was used for.

But today, probably 1% knows what bear grease is today. And that's you. There's a lot of stuff that our culture has forgotten left by the wayside that I think is really valuable. And I'm interested in that stuff. to go back to the nitty gritty of the beginnings of this podcast, which I really never shared. Originally, I was commissioned to make three mock episodes, and I quickly put together two. When they were mixed with music and audio mastered, myself and a team listened to them. And frankly, they were flat.

I lacked passion and confidence as a host. Flow and momentum were absent. They were a solid four out of ten. But for the third one, I had a one. wild idea to interview a bunch of different people, some that you'd never expect on an outdoor podcast. I was going to interview a psychologist, a biologist, a guy who sold hunting licenses, and some firsthand witnesses to the elusive and mythical Southern mountain line. I'd do some impromptu interviews and some formal ones. I'd just have fun and say things the way I was thinking

them. I'd forget about any templates that I'd seen and I'd just tell the story the way it made since. After Phil Taylor mixed the episode, The Myth of the Southern Mountain Lion, I literally clenched my fists and yelled. I was listening to it while I was on a walk in my front yard, and I yelled, that's it. That's the Bear Gries podcast. I wasn't sure if I could replicate it, though, or find enough stories that were intriguing, or even another story ever that was as intriguing as this one about mountain lions. But I was going to try. I mentioned his name before, but one guy that does not get enough credit is Phil Taylor for the actual production of the Bear Grease podcast. He's Meteor's Chief Audio Man.

He works extremely hard to put the audio magic in each episode. Thank you, Phil. And in celebration of almost three years of making Bear Grease, I want to go back and replay that episode, the first one about Mountain Lines. To this day, I get more interaction around this first episode than any other topic that we've covered. My online life has basically become a service for people to forward pictures and stories about mountain lions, and particularly Black Panthers. I speculate with great certainty that I have filtered more Black Panther images than anyone in America in the last three years, elevating me to a self-titled but unashamed and humble position of the Black Panther's czar of America. That's right, you heard correctly.

I have an automated response to everyone that sends me a picture of this said Black Panther, and it goes like this. Thank you, sir, or madam, for your interest in the North American Black Panther. I'm very interested in your submission. However, upon further review from our team, team of one, me. I have concluded that your image is, number one, not from North America. Or, number two, is a black cat that you've completely misjudged the scale of it in the photo. Number three, it's a black dog with an odd tail.

Number four, you've fallen prey to an internet Photoshop Black Panther scheme. Or, lastly, number five, confirmation bias has eaten your lunch. Your granddaddy didn't see a Black Panther. I'm sorry to crush your dreams, but you're a grown man and you should have known better. That ain't no North American Black Panther. If you've listened to this episode yet, this will all make more sense to you. So without further ado, here is episode one of Bear Grease originally played on April 7, 2021. How certain are you that you?

saw two mountain lions. 100% no doubt. Have you ever seen a lion, Mountain lion in Arkansas? No. I think there's Panther. I think there's black mountain lions myself.

On this episode of the Bear Grease podcast, we'll be exploring the myth of the Southern Mountain Lion and how the lore, or maybe the hard science, we don't know which one, has forever and inextricably connected itself to Southern

culture. We're going to talk to some mountain line believers, a biologist, and even a psychologist, to get some answers about lions and about human nature. Well, I mean, I don't have any proof of it. I just always have heard that. You've heard, it's like you've heard of cognitive disc, I mean, I've just believed the propaganda. My name is Clay Newcomb, and this is the Bear Grease podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant. Search for insight and likely places and where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land. Presented by FHF Gear, American-made, purpose-built, hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore.

There are two kinds of people in the South, those that have seen mountain lions and those that haven't. Both of these groups carry their own unique stigmas, perhaps both equally as wrought with irony as the other. They seem to huddle tightly and cult-like clans of believers and unbelievers. But to understand the tension between those who've seen mountain lions and those who haven't, and yes, there is tension, you'll have to understand a bit of history. The mountain lion, Puma Concolor, is a large tan-colored feline weighing up to 200 pounds or more.

It, along with the jaguar, which are extremely rare and primarily live south of the U.S. border in Mexico, are the only large cats in North America since the extinction of the giant cats of the Pleistocene, which basically was an epic of time that ended about 10,000 years ago. These Pleistocene cats included saber-tooth cats, American lions, American Jaguars, the American Cheetah. This place used to be crawling with giant purring fruit. predators. However, today we've pretty much got one large cat in the United States in Canada, the old mountain lion, or Puma, or Panther, or the painter, or the catamount, all the same animal, but they have different names and different regions. You might recognize one of these. But the mountain lion's native range extends from the Canadian Yukon all the way down to the Andes Mountains of South America. And from the mountain lions.

East and West, its range goes from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. This is fascinating. They are the most widespread terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere. To bring it home simply to North America, prior to European settlement, they had the widest geographic spread of any large mammal, more than white-tailed deer, more than elk, more than buffalo, more than anything. And herein lies our issue in 2021. They used to be here, but by the turn of the 20th century, mountain lines were extirpated from almost 100% of their eastern range in the entire eastern deciduous forest.

The word extirpated means that they didn't go extinct, but they were removed from a specific region. The eastern deciduous forest basically extends, from East Texas all the way to Maine and from Wisconsin all the way down to Florida. Basically, it's the eastern one-third of the United States. It's worth noting that mountain lions in southern Florida held on and were never entirely gone,

perhaps making them the only mountain lions east of the Mississippi for a very long time. Or were they? Have they been in much of the eastern deciduous forest all this time just right under our noses? A lot of people think so. But for sure, throughout the 20th century, mountain lion populations only survived, according to science anyway, in the rugged, mountainous regions of the western U.S. and Canada.

Though lions haven't been in the South for the last hundred years, or at least that's what the government biologists tell us, lots of people still see them. In fact, I know some of these hillbillies that aren't afraid to stand up against the statistics and against the science and boldly proclaim their eyewitness convictions. Some might even call it conservation slander. The myth of the Southern Mountain Line is so strongly embedded into our culture. They might as well actually be here.

Or maybe they are here. Maybe they've been here all along. The only way that I know how to get to the bottom of this is to hear some of these stories for myself. and some of these stories are pretty close to home. Just for the record, I've never seen a mountain line in the South, but my dear sweet dad, Gary Newcomb, has, and here's his story. When was it? Tell me when it was.

Oh, I would say 20 years ago, 15, 20 years ago. I was going to say late 90s. Well, yeah, probably, probably. And I was in one of my favorite hunting areas, driving on a warehouser road. But then I looked to my left, and when I turned my truck in the middle of the road to make that turn, I looked up there, and there was what I thought was a bobcat. I thought that's a big old bobcat.

Is it's daytime? Yeah, yeah, it's later in the afternoon, but still real clear light. I mean, it wasn't like dusty or anything. And I thought, big bobcat. And then I saw the tail. And I go, holy cow, yeah, I saw it. amount line and you know it was 100 yards you know it was pretty good ways off that you saw a distinctive distinctive distinctly no question about it so what color

was it I want to say blue yeah it was it was just a tan colored animal really yeah I mean like okay so you're my dad and I inherently trust your judgment you've been around 72 years yeah how certain are you if you if there was a way to tell i mean like if there was really a way to know whether it was a mountain line or not and your life depended on how certain are you that you saw it was a mountain line it would be a mountain percent oh yeah i mean i don't know what has a tail that was as long as the body it seemed to me like what did it do was it standing the road and ran on it it took his time came across the road by the time i saw it's pretty close to the ditch and it and if if i remember correctly

it looked at me so it did it do you do it do it do it do it? didn't just dart across the boat. No, no, no, it was moving slow. So you got a good look at it. Yeah. And so, but I didn't catch it from over here to here. I caught it towards the, you know, just maybe two or three steps from the ditch. And then it just eased off in the ditch and then went into the cutover, you know, 10 year old cut.

And when I saw the tail, you know, I sit here, I was just thinking mountain line, you know. I mean, it's just, I mean, what has it? That's simple. Yeah. Brent Reeves would be considered a hillbilly if he didn't live in the Arkansas Delta or the swamp country. Regardless of semantics, he's a close friend of mine, a veteran outdoorsman, and he's been in law enforcement for the last 30 years. I've only known him to stretch the truth on occasion, and he claims to not just have seen one mountain lion, but two, I'll let you judge his story. So Brent, tell me about not one mountain line, but two mountain lines that you've seen in Arkansas.

I will gladly relate the following. The first one was probably in 19, I'm going to say it was in 88. Me and three other guys were working for a private timber management company. And we were in Ashley County, Arkansas, which is right next. There's two counties away from Mississippi. in southeast Arkansas. We were driving down a timber company road going to manage some timbers probably nine o'clock in the morning, good daylight.

And a Panther, Mountline, Cougar, whatever you want to call it, jumped out in front of our truck at about 30 yards and loped down the road in front of us for 20, 30 seconds. And we're right behind it. And it ran off into a section of timber that we drove down another quarter of a mile and went in ourselves to cruise the timber to see how much timber was in there. That was the first one I'd ever seen. And we got back that afternoon. There was no cell phones or anything back during that time.

So when we got back to the office that afternoon, I called a friend, and we then reported it to the game at fish, and we got a call back, I think the next day, that they had had reports to that in the area and actually attributed it to one that had escaped, captivity. And so it was it was known in that area to be rambling around. And so that wasn't the only mountain line you've seen. You've seen another one.

How'd that go down? My friend David Boudra and I were going to cune hunting one evening. This would have been... Is that even a real name? It is. It is. It is. It is getting fishier and fishier.

It is. It is a real name. And he can attest to it. But David and I were going coon hunting one of evening in Cleveland County, where I grew up. And it's dusky dark. You don't have to drive with your lights on. And we were driving next to this big clear cut, a fresh clear cut. And there was two or three big trees that weren't merchantable for logs or anything. So the timber company left them out there. And this tree was probably, it was a big white oak tree. It was probably 150, 200 yards

away from the timber access road. And we're driving down through there. It's in the fall of the years so the leaves are coming off pretty good. And I look out there and I can see a silhouette of what I thought was a turkey. And I told David, I said, David, look that big old turkey sitting on the limb out there. And he said, yeah, I see it. Well, I had my coon hunting light on. I just turned my light on and see if I could see if it was a gobbler or a hen. And when I turned it on, the eyes were glowing back at me, which turkey's eyes don't normally do that. And we slowed down and David said, man, that's not a, that's not a turkey. And we slowed down to look. And we slowed down to look at it and it turned, started walking down that limb, and you could plainly see that big

long tail out from out behind it. That thing walked down towards the trunk of the tree, got to where the limb leaves the trunk of the tree, put his feet down there, pause, and just drop down into that clear cut. And then we turned around and went back the other direction and turned their dogs loose. Let me ask you this on both of these sightings. Now, 30 years, later if your life depended on it and there was a way to know the absolute truth and they said they're going to burn your house down if you're wrong how certain are you that you saw two mountain lions 100% no doubt and the thing about it is both times i had a witness with me of course one of them was a coon i'm gonna need their phone numbers one of them is a coon hunter and they you know he's not

vaccinated against Lyon, but I'm telling you, no doubt about it. I'll let you be the judge of whether you believe these two stories or not, but I've got somebody that has the credentials to validate them or take away all their credibility. I'm not sure which one it'll be. Myron Means is the statewide large carnivore program coordinator for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. If there's an expert on mountain lions around these parts, it's Myron Means. I think he can give us some insight into the facts of whether the mythical mountain lines or the South are real or if they're just a farcical relic of folklore passed on from a time when they were actually here.

Myron, when I first met you 10, 11 years ago, you were the Arkansas bear coordinator. Black bear biologist, that's right. And now you're not. Your title has changed. What's your new title with the Arkansas Game of Fish Commission? My new title is statewide large carnivore program coordinator for Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. Okay. That's a mouthful.

So something happened because at one time there was just one large carnivore acknowledged by the game and fish. That's right. And your title change, which indicates what happened? Well, long about 10 years ago, right after I took the Bear Program coordinator position, we started seeing mountlines in the state. And it's not that they weren't seen prior to that. It's just that, you know, we didn't have, there were very, very few ways to document a sighting. I mean, you know, if you think back historically, people didn't have game cameras back much in the 80s, you know.

And that's kind of come along in the past 15 years or so. But anyway, basically what happened was mountain lines started showing up in the state. state from time to time. And Game and Fish recognize that, you know, you need to have someone that's kind of coordinating the sightings, coordinating the verifications, and just kind of packaging the mountain line stuff. So it's not necessarily that now there are lines here and there weren't before, but we're, we just know about them.

Is that what I'm hearing you say? That's right. That's right. You know, for a lot of years. Primarily because of game cameras. primarily because of game cameras or, you know, if someone has one like on a phone video or something like that, but it's primarily been the game cameras. That's really what has helped us, you know, document the occurrence of mountain lines in the state.

So here's the question. Where did they come from? Because Bears mountain lines, this would be historic mountain line range here in Arkansas. Absolutely. And in all of the eastern United States. So where did our lines come from? Well, that's a million dollar question. Who knows?

The only evidence that we have currently was from a mountain line that was shot by a deer hunter back into 2016 now. That was harvested or shot in Bradley County by a deer hunter. That mountain line was also previously documented on a cash in Marion County about two months prior to that. So that would have been in, that was in 2014, I'm sorry. So the DNA evidence that we collected from that cat in both instances, told us that number one, it's the same cat, told us that number two, that cat had origins from the South Dakota population. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that cat was born in South Dakota. it just means that its DNA origins came from that South Dakota population. Now, if you think of it in terms of where would it most likely come from?

Well, there's established mountain-line populations in the Dakotas, South Dakota. Which would be north and west of us slightly, primarily north, but still in the Mississippi River drainage for the most part? Well, it'd be kind of, it'd be probably closer tied to the Missouri River drainage. There's an established population in northwest Nebraska. There's an established population out in the panhandle of Oklahoma. There's an established population of lines in the panhandle of Texas and in southern Texas. So, I mean, and of course you have the Florida Panthers in Florida. So those are really the closest, quote, established population.

That would be 500 miles from here? You know, the closest population. population would probably be the panhandle of Oklahoma, you know, out in the Black Hills area. But is it likely that those cats would move all the way across Oklahoma? Probably not because the travel corridors and the habitat just isn't there. Is it likely that a cat could move out of the Dakotas across northern Nebraska into eastern Nebraska and hit the Missouri River drainage and follow the Missouri River down through the Ozarks of Missouri and then into the Ozarks of Arkansas and then go who knows where else.

That's probably the most likely. So it's almost like highways, like habitat highways. Like you could track good lion habitat habitat all the way back to the Dakotas and Nebraska. Sure, you could. I mean, you know, there's going to be some spances of maybe 100, 150 mile, maybe even 200 mile gaps. but you have to think in travel terms, you know, that's something that a mountain lion could do in a day or two. Yeah. Myron, what about captive lions getting out?

Because I remember growing up in Western Arkansas, you'd hear the odd person say they saw a lion. And it was always thrown back up on captive. They said somebody had a captive line and they let it loose. What do you think of that? Yeah. And matter of fact, you know, that was really kind of the official, I guess, position of the agency through the 80s. and 90s that more than likely, if someone saw a mountain line, more than likely, it was the result of an escaped cat or a cat that someone couldn't care for anymore. They were moving. Maybe the owner died,

maybe something. And so what are they going to do? Just turn it out. So that was really kind of the official position of the agency for a couple of decades. That more and likely, if you saw a cat, it was probably a release cat or an escaped cat. You know, that takes all the fun out of seeing the mountain line. Well, it certainly presented a lot of gotcha opportunities, you know, for the agency for a long time. Back in the early 2000s, is probably when the agency started turning around and saying, well, more than likely, rather than being an escaped cat, because a lot of those captive breeders kind of fell out. You know, when I was a kid growing up, regulations got more difficult to keep cats.

Yeah, and it just wasn't the thing. I mean, I could remember, believe it or not, when I was a kid, I knew two people that I went to a grade school with that had pet mountain lines. I mean, you know, so. Right, in western Arkansas. So, I mean, back in the 70s, you know, it wasn't that odd of a deal for someone to have a mountain line as a pet. You know, we still have no proof. A lot of people try to play gotcha all the time with us and say,

well, gaming fish says that, you know, we don't have mountain lines. Well, you know, we've never said we don't have mountain lines. What we've said for the past 40 years or plus years is that we don't have any evidence of an established reproducing population of mountain lines. And has that changed? No. Still has not changed. We still don't have evidence of a breeding population of mountain lines here. We do not.

Well, let me ask you this. Do you feel like today in Arkansas there are mountain lines that are living here year round? I think there are mountain lines that live here year around. I think virtually all of the mountain lines that we have documented sightings of over the past, well, since 2010, I feel like they're all males. You know, either young males or older males, a lot of the picture evidence translates to them being older males. I'm not talking really old males, but mature males. And that would be very characteristic of an expanding population of large carnivores, whether it be bears or lions. That would start to see these fringe areas that would start to get satellite males.

And, you know, a lot of people don't realize with mountain lions is that, you know, you're talking about a young animal that gets pushed out of the population, a young male, that basically gets kicked out on the streets. You know, that's not something that they're just going to travel another. 50 miles down the road and establish a, you know, a territory of their own. I mean, you're talking about animals that have no qualms about traveling hundreds of miles in order to find a suitable territory that has food, cover, and females. Well, in the absence of females, they're not going to establish a territory. I mean, it's just that simple. So when you think of the behavior that takes place in these animals. They move in to say if they did come from the Dakotas, they move into the Missouri, they go down

the Missouri drainage, they're starting to mature. They're no longer six months old. They're a year old. They're a mature male. So there are a couple of things that are driving that young mountain line to exist. One of them is food and the other one is reproduction. And until he finds both of those, he's not going to say. up shop. So he's looping down into Missouri and going back probably. He might be going back. He might just

continue to keep going until he does find a female. And whether that means he has to cross four or five, six states to do it, they'll do it. Wow. In the 1990s movie dumb and dumber, Jim Carrey, when he's confronted with the fact that his girlfriend is leaving him forever and she gives him an inkling of hope that perhaps she'll come back to him. He says, So you're telling me there's a chance. I feel like what Myron just said in talking about the dispersal of mountain lions

and their ability to travel such long distances, give some credibility to the lore of the southern mountain lion because we have an established population of lions in southern Florida and then in the west, and it would not be unheard of for lions to travel that distance. So maybe there is something to all these mountain lion sightings. Regardless to the fact that many of these sightings could have and very well may have been

captive lions released that people were seen. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called Prime Cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love my. because it's easy to use. I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call,

I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts.

Check out prime cuts. at Phelps game calls.com. I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Rinella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. So do you foresee a time?

So with the habitat structure that we currently have between here and these populations, do you forecast a time? It might be 20 years from now, 50 years from now, five years from now, I don't know. Will we have an established breeding population? Because what would typically happen, as I understand, dispersal of these large carnivores, is like, the males start making these satellite loops, and then at some point, females. You know, like at some point, we're going to get a picture of a female in Arkansas.

Well, you know, Missouri came up about four, I believe it was about four years ago, and they collected some hair off of a confirmed sighting. They confirmed that it was a female. The experts that I have talked to about mountain lines, all of them have been pretty consistent in saying that if you do have a female in a geographic area, a male will finder, it's just a matter of time. When you do have a female show up,

you will have a breeding population. What I want to kind of talk to you about now, it's like mountain lion folklore essentially in places where there historically haven't been lions in the last hundred years. So in Arkansas, we have Ozarks and Washhtaws, which would have these big, vast sections of public land. Yep. That would be, for all of our deer populations would be less dense populations of deer than on private land. There's less deer in the mountains than there are in these agriculture areas and civilized areas. Well, it seems to me that there is an unorthodox shift in mountain line folklore in these backwoods places.

And I'm like, well, there's not enough deer there. Like, there's not enough game for these animals to be living. Like, I think people would have this idea that a mountain lion, if he was living here, he'd be living way out and, you know, XX Mountain, which is far back in there. But what we're seeing with these lion sightings that you guys are confirming is that they're not necessarily in the back. backwoods. They're in places with higher deer density. Is that true? I think that would be the natural place to set up a territory. Yeah. Exactly along the lines of what you're speaking of. I'll give you an example. Custer, South Dakota is a very, very small mountain town. And if you look, a lot of the mountain towns up in the Black Hills, you know, they're very small communities in the

lower portions of these valleys with road highways running through them. And when you drive through them, you can see the edge of town, you know, up on the side of the mountain over there, you can see it to the left and right. When we were driving through there, one of the houndsmen that I was spent some time with, it'd be like, oh, yeah, you know, mountain line took a Labrador from that guy's house right over there, and we'd go down the road, and, well, that guy had his truck parked up at this, you know, this bar or whatever it was sitting on the edge of town that you could see up there, but it's on the edge of town. Well, he came down and drug a deer out of that guy's truck, you know, and he's telling me all these stories.

and, you know, mountain lines just don't have that secretiveness to them that I really thought they did. I mean, I thought they would stay, you know, a hundred miles away from a civilization or whatever. And really, they're not. It kind of cues back into what you were saying. They're going to go and they're going to set up shop where food is available, where it's the easiest and where there's the most of it. It might be more natural for a mountain line to say. set up an area that they're going to stay in a territory in the heart of the Ozark National Forest or would it be more likely that he set up in a territory on the fringes of National Forest?

Probably more likely to set up a territory on the fringes of National Forest. But you're still talking about an animal, even in prime mountain line habitat. You're talking about an animal that has home ranges of, you know, 100 plus square miles. So let's talk about where lions have been seen in Arkansas and how you guys determine that one is a siting is valid. Describe that to me. We get probably 150 plus sightings that people contact us a year. Now, of those sightings that we're able to have physical evidence of whether it be a track, whether it be a game camera photo, whether it be a phone photo or video, whatever else. something that we have physical evidence that we can go out.

We take a field investigation form. We go out on any siting that has physical evidence. And we'll record it. If it's a game camera photo, we're going to record where the picture was, you know, whether it was yes, verify that it was taken from this camera at this spot. You have background. Yeah. You're doing everything. Yeah.

You're doing an investigation to verify that, A, you know, it was a mountain line. B, it was taken at this location because there's a lot of internet hoaxes going out there. You know, this mountain line was taken at a friend of mine's, friends, uncles, you know, best cousins, whatever camera last week. Comes out that's been floating around the internet for six years and it was, you know. I was going to say that if the gaming fish gets 150 sightings per year, I know about 50 of those guys, and I can tell you they're full of it. But it boils right down to it for the last decade or so, the amount of sightings that we have been able to verify and hold on to your seat, the amount of sightings that we have been able to verify per year averages to about one.

Wow. One to two sightings per year that we're able to verify and say, yes, that's without a doubt, a mountain line. What is your personal feeling on all these other sightings? And just because someone can't verify a sighting doesn't mean that it's not legit. It just means that they didn't have a... Well, it just means that us as a conservation agency or a scientific agency, I mean, you know, we can't... I can't go out there and say, well, we've got 100 mountain lines in the state because we've had this many sightings. I mean, I've got to have evidence.

I've got to have evidence of it. I got to have proof of it. I mean, you know, we don't just go out there on a whim and say we've got this many bear or this many deer. So what's your gut about all these other sightings? Are people wrong or are people right and that's just not verifiable? I think about 98% of the sightings that we get are misidentification. What do they see in? You'd be surprised at the amount of video or picture sightings that are sent to me every year.

And I'm not talking about three or four. I'm talking about tens, 50, 60, you know, maybe more. Pictures or videos that are sent to me every year that are house cats. House cats? You mean to tell me that people are mistaken house cats for Mount Lions? A 15-pound cat versus a 150-pound cat? Believe it.

Farrell house cats are estimated to number 70 million, maybe even more. They're everywhere. And people don't understand scale. often when they see an animal get a picture of it. The biggest misidentification is by far and away, domestic house cats or just feral

house cats, house cats in general. I do have a lot of bobcat pictures that are sent to me, even videos of bobcats. And, you know, there's some anatomical features that bobcats possess that house cats or mountain lines don't possess. One of them, of course, is

the obvious the bob tail. But I've seen a lot of pictures where a hind foot actually looks like a continuation of a tail. And then you look up at the head of it and you see these big huge white dots on the backs of the ears, which are specific to bobcats, not mountain lines. Mountain lines don't have white patches on the backs of the ears. Okay. Here's the question of the hour.

Okay. I've found living in the south, living in Arkansas, there's two kinds of people. There's people that have seen mountain lines and there are people that have not. So, Myron means taking out of his position at the Arkansas Game of Fish Commission, have you ever seen the lion, mountain lion in Arkansas? No. I have not. Good.

Thank goodness, Myron. I wish I had. But, you know, I mean, you know, I tell people this all the time, the amount of people that have seen mountain lions and everything else. I mean, if you think about that, it's a lot of people. A lot of people claim to have seen them. And I'm not here to tell anybody that they didn't. see what they thought they saw. We're up to like, since 2010, we're up to 19 verified sightings. In the last 10 years in Arkansas.

Yeah. To understand why people so badly want to believe in mountain lines, we're going to have to understand a bit about human nature. Dr. Richard Back has been a clinical psychologist since 1979, and he has some unique insight into why humans act the way that. they do. Dr. Back, of the hundreds, if not thousands of mountain line sightings that people would have claimed over the years to have happened here in Arkansas, and the actual number of verified sightings being so small, why do people believe that they've seen a lion? When statistically, they probably actually didn't. Well, there's probably two things going on there.

One is that it's kind of an exciting thing to think is possible. And if people have any sort of belief established already, whether they've read articles on mountain lines or they had an uncle or grandfather talked about, the mountain lines, if there's some connection somewhere, and the person probably can't even identify where it was. But if it's an established fact that there are mountain lines, then when they see something that can be fit into that perception,

they'll tend to do it, and then you can't talk them out of it, no matter what you show them. And they are really confirming what they already believe or picked up somewhere. Is there a psychological term that would describe somebody that had a belief that may not even be true? And then something happened, and they slotted the... that event that happened into a belief that wasn't real. Is there a psychological term for that? Yes, it's called confirmation bias.

And it's just practically every person has it, but is unaware of it and would certainly deny it if you ask them. It's all over our lives, I guess. Yeah. It's all over our lives. We end up believing things, not even knowing where that comes from in terms of what we think is the best model car or the best football team. or the best state to live in.

We end up believing that, and we couldn't really even probably voice reasons why we just like that. And then we cherry pick any sort of evidence, whether it's from newspapers or sports announcers or neighbors, but we cherry pick in terms of selecting information that supports what we already believe. Yeah. So it would be like really reasonable if you were a young child growing up in somebody that you respected, or maybe some of you didn't respect, told you that there were mountain lines here.

Regardless of that was like patently false, you would probably go through your life with a slot in your mind that there are potentially mountain lines here. So if you saw a flash of brown fur across the road, that might just easily slot into that place and it just be fact inside of your mind. Yes, yeah, that would happen. Can you tell me about naive realism, what that means? Yeah, naive realism is, I guess, in a sense, the foundation of confirmation bias. Naive realism is really kind of a fancy term for what I think we've probably all noticed, and that is almost everyone else we deal with thinks that they're right. And that's because most people do think and believe that their way of perceiving the world

and interpreting data and selecting and making decisions. We all believe that we've come up on the right way of living life. So it's like you could be living, you could just kind of have this false reality. Well, yeah, lots of people do. And if anyone tries to convince them that they have a false reality, then they fall back on confirmation bias to really ignore anything they're saying that disputes what they believe, but they'll select all sorts of data, does support. That confirms their bias. That confirms their bias.

This is a great place to hear a story that actually happened. Scott Brown is my longtime good friend. He's a veteran woodsman, and I trust whatever the guy says. You're going to get a kick out of this story. But I want you to ask yourself, which character in this story are you? So, you know, where I work, we sell hunting licenses. And usually the first, the week right before modern gun deer season opens, it just gets really busy. So I'm back there one night, I'm helping out.

And just trying to help them sell licenses. And a guy walks up and he says, hey, I need to buy a license. And I said, okay, no problem. I said, what license do you need? And he said, well, I just need the big game license, the annual big game license. license and I said okay no problem and so I asked for his driver's license and I'm I'm plugging in his information he says well that license allow me to kill one of these and I said well what is it and he shows me his phone he's got this picture on his phone and when he shows it to me it is without

question a bobcat I mean it's it's without question a bobcat I've seen a lot of bobcats and I'm a hundred percent certain it was a bobcat had speckles on its belly I mean it was yeah it's a bobcat it's a bobcat it's a bobcat and it's a bobcat had no question. Yeah. And I said, yeah. It's a trail camera picture. Yeah, it's a trail camera picture.

Something he had on his trail camera there around his house somewhere. And I said, yeah, yeah. You can shoot bobcats, coyotes. It'll allow you shoot all that stuff. And when I said that, he was just, I mean, he just snapped at me. He just said, that's not a bobcat. And I said, oh, it wasn't? And he said, no.

And he kind of hands the phone back over to me again. I'm thinking maybe I made a mistake. So I'll look at it again. and I come to the same conclusion. It is a bobcat. I mean, there's just no question about it. And, of course, you know, I didn't say anything. I just said, yeah, yeah, sure enough, you know,

just kind of blew him off, you know, if he wants to believe that, he can believe that, I suppose. Well, it gets better. So as he tells me that, there's three or four guys waiting, and they're just standing around us there waiting on us, you know, so they can get a license. And the guy goes, Did you say you had a mountain line on camera?

The guy said, yeah, yeah. So he kind of turns his phone around and shows this other guy, and it kind of draws a crowd. And there's three or four guys there, and they're all like, oh, man, sure enough. You know, it's a big mountain line. Look at that thing. And they're all just handing it around there.

So in the span of about one minute, he had convinced five people standing back there that he had a mountain line on camera, and every one of them believed it and had no trouble believing it. The only person back there that thought otherwise was me. And it was because it was clearly a Bobcat. You were like, this is how it starts.

Yeah, and I thought, man, this is how the legends and the myths and all these things you hear about people seeing Mountain Lions get started. It just takes one person to see one. Now, all those five guys, they left, went wherever they went for the rest of the day and told how many people they saw a mountain lion on some guys' game camera. And then thus, there's a mountain lion around, Everybody's seen it when actually only one guy saw it, and it wasn't even a mountain line. Now, back to Myron.

Do you want to delve into the Black Panther myth? Absolutely. Yes. I meant to say that. In the South, particularly, Myron, you hear this, you hear people talking about Black Panthers. Like, I with my own ears have heard countless grown men that I believe to be, like, rational thinking people tell me that they've seen black panthers what's the deal with that well i'll speak in scientific terms of black panthers we can't have this discussion without talking about

black panthers my oh my what a topic before we start let me ask you a question do you believe in black Panthers in North America? If you do or you don't, I garon tea you, you know some people that do, and they're probably normal, maybe even successful humans. I want you to think about that for a minute. I was shocked when my own father told me this story. When I was a kid, we'd go to Bucksnord. Ain't Allie and Aunt Ollie. They weren't Aunt. They were ain't. Ain't Ollie and and And then you'd go down to Ollie's house and she had the dog trot. And you'd spend a night down there and you'd hear a panther scream every now and then. Now, do you, okay.

I don't, to be honest with you, I would be afraid that it was this cognitive disconnect where Lewin had talked about it so much and they talked about it so much that when you, but when you were there, it was like, in this place, you can hear panthers scream. Oh, man. And when you drove, when you drove into. buck snored. It was like if you were a city boy and a guys like you and I that have a heart for the outdoors, even as a little kid, I mean it would just be so exciting. The trees were over the road. And when you pulled up in A.A. Allie's house, the yard was all sandy dirt with doodle bugs

everywhere and this big old dog trot down the middle and a big old porch across the front. And June bugs, we'd always catch June bugs and fly those June bugs. and we doodle bug and then at dark, you know, occasionally these stinking panthers would scream, or, you know, mountain lions. I think there's panther, I think there's black mountain lions myself. Do you really? Well, I mean, I don't have any proof of it.

I just always have heard that. You've heard, so you've heard of a... Cognitive disc, I mean, I've just believed the propaganda. You, so you, you have, like, you're 72 years old, lived in Arkansas all your whole life, and you believe that. Is this thing on? Yeah.

I'm not worried about you believe in that. I'm just trying to get to the root of where that comes from. Hey. Who told you about my parents? Hey, when I was a kid, when you'd have a group of kids around and your favorite aunt would be there and she would say, hey, tell us a story. And they'd go, well, you know, there was this little family.

And when they were, you know, they were walking home one night. And all of a sudden they looked around there was a Black Panther. and they'd take the booty off the baby. And, you know, those stories, that just was all through my childhood. They're just always there. Yeah, you know, throw a booty off, and then the diaper, and then the shirt. And then all of a sudden, you pitch the baby back, you know. So anyway, but I'd hear adults talking about Black Panthers.

Now back to Myron. People for generations have called Panthers, Mountlines, catamounts, cougars, lions, they're all the same animal. You know, they have a whole litany of common localized names that people have called them. But when it comes right down to it, they're all mountain lions. They're all the same animal. There's no other species in North America, big cat. No. Currently on the landscape. Well, not in the United States anyway. Well, jaguars down in South America. The only animal, large cat that has, known to exist or have occurrence for a melanistic color phase, which is a, quote, black color face.

Are two of the large cats, jaguars, and leopards. Okay. So there has never been a documented melanistic color phase of a mountain line in history. Okay. So not even in this. You just broke some people's hearts. Myron. Not even in the Smithsonian Institute.

So if you think in terms of Black Panthers, what most people are calling Black Panthers are Black Mountain Lines. And scientifically, the animals never existed. I think a lot of it is folklore. I think a lot of it is misidentification, folklore, you know, things of that nature. And, I mean, is it plausible that a large black cat, a jaguar or leopard, could never occur in Arkansas? It could if one of two things happen. Either A, it escaped from someone's cage somewhere, and it was a jaguar or a leopard. Or B, you had maybe a jaguar move up from Central America into Arkansas.

saw. Which is just not plausible. You'd probably have just as good a chance to see an ostrich as you would have black, you know, jaguar. I have a lot of people, you know, that getting mad at me, well, you're trying to tell me I didn't see it. No. I don't try to tell anybody they didn't see what they think they saw.

Or someone they know didn't see what they think they saw. I just stand on the scientific facts of the issue and the scientific fact. behind the whole Black Panther deal. It's just that that particular animal does not exist or has never been documented to occur in a melanistic color phase, a black color face. Believing and trusting people is part of the community structure of humankind.

It's part of what separates us from the animals and what's made us biologically successful as a species. If we doubted everything people said and demanded proof of everything, we wouldn't have made it past the difficulty of our archaic past of slinging rocks at stuff and huddling in caves. Blind trust in our fellow man is evidence of our humanity. And deep down, I believe that we want to believe people.

Deep down, we want to trust our brother or sister. If there is any good in the folklore, the mountain line, in the Black Panther, it's found in the social mechanics of wanting to believe the best of your neighbor in taking your friend at his word. Perhaps we need some more of that in today's time. Though mountain lines were certainly gone for the large part of the last hundred years in the south, wouldn't you know it, the truth has swung back around and found us still sitting here believing. Mountain lions are back.

And this is a conservation success story, but it's also a story of how the truth, though temporarily labeled as folklore, and it was, has once again been found as truthful. Mountain lions are here, and maybe they always have been. And if anybody ever doubts that Gary Newcomb or Brent Reeves did not see a mountain lion, I'll punch them in the teeth. because I'll believe those two until the day I die. Long live the beast and long live the good word of our brother and sister. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use.

I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. but when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to.

I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelpsgamecalls.com. I think you'll be glad you, You did, and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.