Futility Closet - 186-The Children's Blizzard

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 10,000 quirky curiosities from a double misfire to a replicating train. This is episode 186. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In January 1888, after a disarming worm spell, a violent storm of blinding snow and bitter cold struck the American Midwest.

Starting point is 00:00:36 It trapped farmers in fields, travelers on roads, and hundreds of children in schoolhouses with limited fuel. In today's show, we'll describe the Children's Blizzard, one of the most harrowing winter storms in American history. We'll also play 20 Questions with a Computer and puzzle over some vanishing vultures. Futility Closet is a full-time commitment for us and is supported primarily by our amazing listeners. We want to thank everyone who helps us be able to keep making the show. And this week, we're sending out an extra special Futility Closet thank you to Nicodemus and Kit, our newest super patrons.

Starting point is 00:01:13 If you would like to join them and all the other wonderful supporters of our show to help us keep bringing you your weekly dose of the quirky and the curious, please check out our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futility closet or see the support us section of the website. The winter of 1888 was unusually bad in the American Midwest as a flow of arctic air settled over the region. In late December, some weather observers in Minnesota couldn't record a low temperature because the mercury in their thermometers had frozen solid, and in January, temperatures fell even lower than that. The winter of 1880, a few years earlier, had been one of the most severe on record in the Dakota Territory. The pioneers there spent hours in their snowed-in houses twisting hay to

Starting point is 00:01:54 use as fuel, grinding wheat in coffee mills, and hoping that the trains would get through to save them from starvation. If that sounds familiar to you, it may be because you've read Laura Ingalls Wilder's book, The Long Winter, which accurately describes that winter when she was 14 years old. I did read that book, and it did sound like that when you were saying it. 1888 was looking like another one of those bitter winters when, abruptly, January 12th dawned bright and clear. A massive warm air had arrived from the Gulf Coast. The sun was out, temperatures were warmer, and there was a breath of breeze from the southwest. After two weeks of frigid weather, this break brought almost everyone outside. They did chores,

Starting point is 00:02:28 they visited neighbors, nearly every home sent someone into town for supplies. Farmers turned animals out of their barns and ventured into the prairie to fetch hay. And many more children went to school that day than any previous day for weeks, many of them without coats or gloves. Many of the settlers thought that the break might be the start of a January thaw, which could mean a week or more of mild weather. But at the same time, it seemed peculiar. The temperature had risen almost 40 degrees in 24 hours, and there was a strange soft quality to the air and an odd copper color in the sky. What they didn't know, because no warning had been issued, was that a dynamic blizzard was headed in their direction, an enormous mass of Arctic air with violent winds and bitter temperatures. And it was coming very fast as it

Starting point is 00:03:09 crossed Montana and northern Colorado. It covered 780 miles in 17 hours and it would hit the Midwest with devastating suddenness. People in the Midwest could see this storm approaching. It appeared over the northwest horizon as a soot gray cloud. In eastern Dakota territory, 15-year-old Allie Green said, we could see the blizzard coming across Spirit Lake. It was just as still as could be. We saw it cut off the trees like it was a white roll coming. It hit with a 60-mile-an-hour wind. It had snowed the night before about two or three inches. It just sucked up that snow into the air and nearly smothered you. Others described it as a gray wall. One South Dakota schoolboy said it looked like a long string of big bales of cotton, each one bound tightly with heavy cords

Starting point is 00:03:49 of silver and then all tied together with great silvery ropes. The broad front of these cotton bales looked to be about 25 feet high. Above them, it was perfectly clear. Twelve-year-old Walter Mitchell and his brother were turning out the livestock on their family's farm in the Dakota Territory around 10 a.m. He said, we looked to the north and saw what appeared to be a large cloud rolling over and over along the ground, covering everything as with a blanket. My father called to us to hurry and bring the cattle in. We barely had time to get the cattle in the barn when the storm struck. To get to the house, we crawled on our hands and knees. We could not stand upright in such a wind, and the only way to see was near the ground. If we stood upright, our faces were soon covered in ice. The eyes frozen shut, we could barely breathe. In the time

Starting point is 00:04:29 it took us to reach the house, the fine particles of ice and snow were driven into our clothes, and we were fairly encased in icy armor. It's hard to exaggerate how suddenly this happened. One Dakota school teacher said, in an instant, the warm and quiet day was changed into a howling pandemonium of ice and snow. Just north of the Nebraska line, one teacher watched another struggle against it. She wrote, the wind struck her with such violence as to bring her head down to her knees and take away her breath. She said she was near falling on her face, and she knew that if she fell, she would not get up again. The storm brought darkness, intense cold, and roaring wind. The temperature dropped 18 degrees in three minutes, and by midnight, wind chills would be down to 40 below zero. The wind was so strong that it pulverized

Starting point is 00:05:09 the snow into powder, which gave it the consistency of flour and reduced the visibility nearly to zero. The air was so thick with these ice crystals, which were blown sideways at 60 miles an hour, that people couldn't breathe. It sifted into their clothing, it coated their eyelashes, and it literally froze their eyes shut. Farmers quickly became disoriented even on familiar ground, and there weren't many buildings, fences, or landmarks to guide people once they were lost. One woman near Sioux Falls froze to death with a key in her hand just a few steps from her door. A husband and wife both died while blindly circling their farmyard trying to find one another.

Starting point is 00:05:45 A Minnesota cattleman named David Fife managed to cross the 101 feet between his barn and his house only because he stumbled over a bobsled that he'd tied up at a pump halfway across the yard. He wrote later that if it hadn't been for that, he would never have been heard of. There was no house nearer than a mile. The newspaperman Charles Morse said of his apartment in Lake Benton, Minnesota, it was astonishing the manner in which this fine stuff would be driven through the smallest aperture. My sleeping quarters were on the second floor leading off a hallway at the head of the stairs. On arriving home, I found the wind had forced open the door and the stairway was packed with snow. And when I reached my room, I found my bed covered with several inches of snow, which had filtered over the threshold and through the keyhole. Through the keyhole? Yeah, it's

Starting point is 00:06:20 amazingly fine stuff, apparently. To try to guide people who'd been caught in the storm, families kept candles burning in their windows and stood at their doors, shouting, ringing bells, and beating kettles and wash tubs with hammers and spoons. But they knew it would be fatal to go out themselves, so there weren't many rescues. If you were caught outside, it was up to you to save yourself. One Dakota pioneer remembered afterward, all around no one knew of anyone else's predicament, so each acted as he or she thought fit, and people survived or died according to their temperament. You can't preach about it. If a young fellow had every penny of his cash tied up in an uninsured head of cattle, what would most of us have done? No one knew then that this was the day which was to be remembered when all the days of 70 years would be forgotten. This storm would have been a disaster at any time, but it has struck at the worst possible moment.

Starting point is 00:07:09 An estimated 20,000 people had been lured out by the warm weather and now were caught unprotected. Farmers in fields, doctors making their rounds, salesmen and peddlers on the road. And in particular, the storm hit just as thousands of students were being released from school, and that spawned hundreds of dramas. At the Groton School in Dakota Territory, the teachers decided to send the students home when the storm struck. Men from the town organized a procession of drays, which are wooden platforms mounted on bobsleds and pulled by horses. The children got on the men. The procession had started when 8-year-old Walter Allen jumped off to get a glass bottle he'd left in the schoolhouse. He used it to clean his slate, and he realized that it would freeze and burst when the stove died.

Starting point is 00:07:47 By the time he got back outside, the drays were invisible in the snow, and it didn't occur to him to go back in the schoolhouse, so he set out for home. He was blinded by the snow and by his own freezing tears, and snow penetrated his clothing and covered his face except for his mouth and nostrils. All of this happened in moments. Finally, he collapsed and curled up in the snow. When the drays got the other kids home, Walter's parents realized that he was missing, and a search party returned to the schoolhouse. But they didn't find him there. Finally, his brother Will, crawling like a dog in the snow, stumbled over his body. He was unconscious but breathing.

Starting point is 00:08:12 Will got him home, and he survived. In Holt County, Nebraska, a 19-year-old teacher named Etta Shattuck had already closed her school due to the cold weather. She had planned to travel to her hometown the following morning to rejoin her family. So she would have been safely inside when the blizzard struck, except that she needed to get an order signed to receive her final wages, $25. So late that morning, she'd set out on foot to visit the school district superintendent. When the storm hit, the man she boarded with stood in his doorway and shouted for her until his lungs gave out, but she didn't appear. She actually wasn't far away. The farmer had fenced a 40-acre pasture around the house, and she was still inside that. But she couldn't hear him, and she couldn't find the house.

Starting point is 00:08:49 She knew that if she kept walking, she'd hit the fence, and then she could follow that back to the house. But when she found the fence and followed it, it seemed to go on forever, and the house didn't appear. Finally, she crawled under the fence and wandered a short way beyond it, and it disappeared behind her, leaving her in open country. She reached a haystack and dug her way into it, rather shallowly, but by that point she couldn't use her hands very well. When she was found there But she survived. But she survived. That's amazing. These schoolteachers weren't much older than their children, and when the storm hit, they all faced the same question. Should they keep the students in the schoolhouse or send them home? The ones who knew the dangers of traveling on the

Starting point is 00:09:27 prairie in a blizzard tended to keep them in, but that was dangerous too. If the schoolhouse ran out of fuel, then they'd have to go out and find shelter elsewhere, possibly in the middle of the night, and they might not find it. Minnie Mae Freeman had 16 students in a school, in a country schoolhouse just east of the Nebraska Sandhills. The schoolhouse was built of sod, with a door on leather hinges and a roof made of tar paper overlaid with sod. Around noon, the storm started to blow the door into the room, and they had to nail it shut. She knew she had enough coal to heat the schoolhouse all night, so she decided to stay in with the kids. But then the wind ripped up a piece of the roof, and she knew they'd all freeze to death if they stayed. She herself boarded with a family that lived half a mile north of the school, and she decided to take the children there for the

Starting point is 00:10:07 night. Some accounts say she found a length of rope and tied the children together. Others say that's not true, but either way, they all set out together into the storm. Some of the smaller students stumbled and fell on the way, and so did Minnie herself, but all of them safely reached the two-room sod house where she boarded. May Hunt, a teacher at Wessington Springs in the Dakota Territory, tried to lead seven children 100 yards to a neighbor's house. 100 yards. 100 yards. They lost time trying to cross a gully,

Starting point is 00:10:33 and then they couldn't find a house as darkness was setting in. They found a pile of flax straw, and one of the older students hollowed a space in it, as Etta Shattuck had done. They all piled in, and then three boys volunteered to look for the house. They made a rope out of the aprons that the girls had worn to school that morning, and then holding the end of the rope, they walked in a circle around the pile, which I think is very, shows a lot of presence of mind in those conditions to think to do that. But they couldn't find the house. They returned to the pile, and all of them began shouting, but no help came. Finally, Fred Weeks, the oldest student, dug a deeper cave into the pile and took up a position at the outside.

Starting point is 00:11:05 None of the children had eaten since noon, and all of them were thinly dressed. They passed the time by telling stories and singing songs, and May called the roll over and over to assure herself that all seven kids were still alive. At 4 a.m., Fred went out of the cave and realized the stars were now visible overhead, and the farmhouse that had eluded them was less than 100 feet away. He got help there. All the kids were okay except Addie Neerum, whose feet had got wet when she tumbled into the gully. In the end, doctors had to amputate one of her feet and the toes of the other.

Starting point is 00:11:32 Altogether, hundreds, possibly thousands of children spent that night in schoolhouses, breaking down tables and chairs to keep the stoves going, or traveled through the storm to their teachers' boarding places. And at least several thousand people spent the night out on the prairie, most in the southern and eastern parts of the Dakota Territory, the eastern half of Nebraska, and in southwestern Minnesota. The storm blew itself out before dawn. It probably dropped four to five feet of snow altogether, but the depth was hard to estimate as it had blown into snowdrifts 30 feet deep. It would be months before all the damage was reckoned and all

Starting point is 00:12:01 the dramatic stories came to light. There are many more stories than I can tell here. If you want to read more, the best book about this is The Children's Blizzard by David Laskin. But here are a couple of particular stories. In the Dakota Territory, south of Sioux Falls, a man named Peter Hines, who had lost three boys in the storm, was on his way to the schoolhouse yelling that he was going to kill the teacher for letting his children out in the storm. When a neighbor stopped him and told him that the teacher had actually begged the children to stay and even locked the door, but the children overpowered him, got the door open, and ran out. The Hines boys made it two miles before collapsing in a pasture, and all three of them died.

Starting point is 00:12:32 And in Dubuque, Iowa, May Henning and a boy named Julius, who was 12 years old, had set out in a sleigh to attend a party that day, accompanied by two young men. When the storm hit, they lost their way, and the young men deserted them, so May and Julius had to stay out in the storm all night. In the morning, they were found partially covered with snow. In the end, she lost both her legs and the boy's hands and feet were badly frozen, but she had saved his life by wrapping him in the only blanket they had. There are many such stories. For years afterward, at gatherings in Dakota or Nebraska, there would be people with wooden legs or who lacked fingers or ears, and many communities invested in sturdier schoolhouses.

Starting point is 00:13:08 This blizzard is considered one of the worst winter storms in American history, and in fact one of the deadliest blizzards worldwide, with between 235 and 500 people dead. There's no precise number because many of the dead weren't found for days or even months. One traveling peddler in southern Minnesota wasn't found until April 1st, when enough snow had melted to reveal his body. Also, many people died of pneumonia and amputation infections that weren't attributed directly to the storm. If most people haven't heard of it, that's because a second great blizzard hit the East Coast just two months later, and that affected many more people and got greater news coverage. The Children's Blizzard has a lower death toll, but it affected a greater proportion of people because there was so little shelter on

Starting point is 00:13:41 the plains and because many of its victims were newcomers who weren't familiar with the treacherous weather on the plains. The World Atlas lists it as the sixth deadliest blizzard in world history. We have some updates on Episode 181 and Operation Gunnerside. Ben Schwartz wrote, Hi Greg and Sharon. In the recent episode about Norwegian efforts to destroy the heavy water plant occupied by the Nazis, you mentioned the movie dramatizing the events, The Heroes of Telemark, and noted that it was not particularly accurate.

Starting point is 00:14:21 I thought you'd be interested to know about a more recent and more accurate production, The Heavy Water War, which was a Norwegian TV miniseries released in 2015. I saw it on Netflix a year ago or so and really enjoyed it, but it seems like it is no longer streaming. It is available on Amazon or other sites and sometimes under the alternative title The Saboteurs, in case anyone is interested. Your podcast did have many interesting details that either weren't in or I didn't remember from the film. For example, leaving the submachine gun behind as a deception. Thanks as always for an interesting and enjoyable podcast. Even on the rare occasion like this one, when I already know about the topic, I always learn more. And Tony Hart let us know that PBS's Nova series covered the same subject in Hitler's Sunken Secret, which was originally broadcast in 2005.

Starting point is 00:15:09 You can find more information on the PBS website and find uploads of the episode on YouTube. And we'll have the link that were sent to and from one of the Norwegian resistance fighters involved in the mission and the London Special Operations Executive that was directing him. Rob O'Farrell wrote, Hi, Greg, Sharon, and Sasha. Thank you for your fantastically entertaining and expansive podcast. I'm a weekly listener, delighted to be able to contribute some hopefully new information to you. I was browsing a local magazine called The Hollybow, which is published here in Cork by the Evening Echo newspaper, especially for the Christmas season. It contains many amusing tales and puzzles, which usually focus on local history and traditions,

Starting point is 00:15:56 or on little local nuggets from bigger historical events. This year's magazine had an article about Operation Freshman, which I think may have been the failed mission before Operation Gunnerside you mentioned. One of the Welsh soldiers involved was Lance Corporal Trevor Masters. He met and married an Irish woman just before he was deployed. He died and never met his unborn daughter. The article goes on to mention, that daughter attended a memorial service in Norway many years later

Starting point is 00:16:23 and met a nurse who tended her father's injuries. Of personal note, the barracks where Masters was stationed when he met his wife was beside a farm my grandfather owned during the same period. I've always enjoyed the podcast and got a particular kick from the puzzles because many of your early ones were based on books by Des McHale, who was a professor here at University College Cork. Keep up the good work. Yeah, what a coincidence there. And Rob included a scan of the article on Operation Freshman, which was the failed mission that Greg had mentioned. This article called the operation extremely naive and an unmitigated disaster. The plan had been for 34 commandos to land in gliders

Starting point is 00:17:03 five hours march from the heavy water plant, and that after attacking it, they would escape 400 kilometers across mountains to get into neutral Sweden. Unfortunately, according to the article, none of the commandos could ski, and they had only learned a few Norwegian phrases such as, I'm going to the dentist, which if true, we can add that to our list of rather useless phrases to learn in other languages. As Greg had noted, the gliders crashed and many of the men were wounded or killed, and those who didn't die in the crashes ended up being handed over to the Germans by the Norwegian police and were killed by them, which was the fate that befell young Lance Corporal Masters. To compound what a total disaster this operation was, it alerted the Germans to the Allies' intentions as they found sabotage equipment in the glider wreckage, including a silk map with the intended escape route clearly marked

Starting point is 00:17:53 and the targeted plant circled in blue. So a bit of a giveaway about what was up, huh? That was the worst of it, I mean, apart from all the deaths, obviously, but it just totally tipped the Allies' hand as to the fact that this was even being contemplated. Right, so there was kind of no way that it could have been a worse disaster than it was. We also heard from Tilo Buksenshoss, who wrote, If Sharon actually wants to pronounce my name,

Starting point is 00:18:18 I'll probably chortle like mad. I would give pronunciation pointers, but I'm pretty sure English doesn't begin to have an equivalent for the umlauts in my surname, and I'm picturing you chortling madly. Tilo also said, I just stumbled upon another confirmation that your podcast topics are extremely good movie material, the series The Heavy Water War from Finland. And Thilo said that he's miffed that he missed it when it was shown on German television, so perhaps Ben's comments that I read earlier might be helpful for him finding it. Thilo adds,

Starting point is 00:18:58 One interesting note, the German trailers heavily emphasize the scenes about very angry Nazis decrying the terroristic British, amusing but not really what was so astonishing about that operation at all. Thielow also commented on a topic that we had originally covered in episode 75, that of Felix von Luckner, a German nobleman who tried to wage war as humanely as he could in World War I. Almost two years ago, in episode 97, I had read an email from a listener in the city of Halle, Germany, about how Lucknow was still celebrated there for his part in keeping the city from being destroyed by American troops in World War II. Coincidentally, Tilo was also from Halle, and he said,

Starting point is 00:19:38 That city was saved by Count Lucknow, the Seawolf of episode 97 fame. He negotiated the surrender of the city and saved it from heavy fighting and shelling. For the longest time he was regarded as a hero, but now his association with the Nazi party and his suggested pedophilia has soured the historian's view on him a bit. Even the swanky restaurant named for him has closed down. And the newly erected statue for the saving of the town mainly features the Timberwolves, the American company that accepted the surrender. I'm a little saddened by it all, but it's difficult to know the exact truth about historical figures, I guess.

Starting point is 00:20:13 Why should they be more uncomplicated than the rest of humanity? I'm trying to remember now. It's been so long since we did that story, I can't remember all the research. But yeah, I do recall there was a sort of a cloud gathering over him toward the latter part of his life and afterward yeah some suggestions of some inappropriate behaviors with children that i as i recall hadn't been definitely proved but it was concerning yeah yeah we also heard from alexander churkovich who thankfully provided help for his last name as i would have had no clue what to do

Starting point is 00:20:44 with it and who told me not to worry if I don't quite manage it, as many have failed already. Alexander said, Dear Futility Penguins, I reckon some kind of penguins must be involved, since there's one in your logo. After hearing about Stuart Armstrong's email in episode 177, in which he mentioned the game 20 questions,

Starting point is 00:21:03 I feel I have to contribute to this, as this has been occupying my mind and time for a while. The programmer Robin Bergener developed an artificial neural network, call it an artificial intelligence slash AI, already in 1988 to act as an opponent for human players, with the ability to learn from each failed attempt, including the possibility to add questions for the next time. This AI learned pretty quickly and became undoubtedly the world's best 20 questions player, and it went online at 20q.net in 1995 and has been there ever since, so check it out. I had been on it because I liked the principle of the game, finding out something by asking the right questions, and I wanted to

Starting point is 00:21:39 turn it into a diagnosis tool that would ask you questions to find out what could be wrong with you, but it was only after doing a lot of work that I found out that someone else had already done it. So that's kind of like in many of your stories where people pursue some futile goals for all of their lives. Hey, now I found out why it's called the futility closet.

Starting point is 00:21:58 I must also tell you that such an AI for solving lateral thinking puzzles doesn't exist yet. Sorry, but it may be only a matter of time until AIs start thinking laterally. Anyway, thank you for your stories. They're the only reason to look forward to commuting. And by the way, it's really intriguing how after listening all by yourself to two other people talk for hours, you somehow get to feel like you know them.

Starting point is 00:22:20 And in reality, they're like 5,000 miles away in another country. Thank you, Internet, for that. And it is amazing how far flung many of our listeners are, which is something that would have been impossible when we were growing up. We were actually quite surprised the first time we learned that we even had listeners in other countries. We hadn't been sure if anyone in the US would even be interested in what we had to say. And we hadn't even considered that people in other countries might be. So as Alexander says, thank you, internet, for letting us meet so many fantastic people in so many interesting places. And so many overseas, as you say.

Starting point is 00:22:51 I think we have an unusually large proportion of international listeners. Yes, which does make it all very interesting, the mail that we get. As for AI starting to think laterally, I guess we aren't actually looking forward to that as it might put us out of a job. But 20Q did turn out to be a rather fun and interesting program. It follows the standard game of 20 questions where you think of an object and say if it is animal, vegetable, or mineral, though this version extends that a bit so you can also choose concept or unknown. Then the AI asks yes or no questions trying to determine what you've chosen. Its creator claims that it can figure out your item 80% of the time with 20 questions and 98%

Starting point is 00:23:30 of the time if you let it ask 25 questions. In 2007, Bergener said that his program had played over 50 million games and that the AI had learned 30,000 unique objects. But since it's learning from fallible humans, it can learn incorrectly. So for example, 20Q thinks that rabbits are rodents and that dolphins are fish, because that's what the majority of people who've played the game think. Bergener said, you learn all kinds of things about human society. Like for example, humans are not animals. If someone is thinking about a person, they'll choose other over animal. Also, since the program doesn't think the way a human does, it sometimes asks questions that can seem pretty odd or to come out of nowhere.

Starting point is 00:24:19 Humans would usually play this game by trying to get a vague idea of what the item might be and then focusing on one object at a time to try to prove or disprove it. The 20Q AI, however, considers every object it knows simultaneously. It will consider some objects more likely and some less likely, and then chooses questions that will try to cut the number of likely objects in half. Because it doesn't follow a binary decision tree and continues to consider every item in its database, 20Q is also more flexible than humans are. So if you give it some incorrect answers, for example, saying that your object is a vegetable when you're actually thinking of a horse, it can still get to the correct answer. And I guess this would explain my experience with the game when I picked chewing gum as my object,

Starting point is 00:24:53 which it surprisingly did guess on its 20th question after trying some rather odd guesses, like that it was a cat, even though I had indicated it was mineral and not animal. Yeah, that kind of confused me. It's also interesting that if it doesn't guess your object, it'll tell you why. So for crown, which it couldn't guess in 20 questions, though it did within 25, it told me that I had given several answers that differed from what it had been taught. So it said, for example, you said it's classified as mineral. 20Q was taught by other players that the answer is concept

Starting point is 00:25:25 does it break if dropped you said no 20q was taught by other players that the answer is yes and there were several of these so apparently my idea of a crown is rather different than most other people's idea of a crown which makes it i guess more impressive than it managed to guess it at all yeah i was just going to say that it's it's very impressive especially if it's getting bad information or just conflicting. Yeah, I apparently answered several questions differently than the majority of people about crowns, which would throw a human player off entirely. Completely, yeah. Like you would just not even pursue certain objects anymore.

Starting point is 00:26:06 a talk that Bergener gave in 2007, he said that 90% of the games played with 20Q involve only about 100 objects, and that one in 100 times the object chosen is a carrot. So make of that what you will. Thanks so much to everyone who writes in to us, and I do really appreciate being given pronunciation help with names. So please keep that in mind if you're sending your questions or comments to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me an interesting sounding situation and I have to figure out what is going on, asking only yes or no questions. This is from listener Eugene Grabowski. yes or no questions. This is from listener Eugene Grabowski. Vultures are dying out in Nepal. Why?

Starting point is 00:26:56 Oh, no. Okay. Well, there could be lots of reasons. All right. Are they eating something that's bad for them somehow? Yes. Are they eating something that's non-nutritive? Yes. Like mistaking something for food and eating it and it's actually not food. No, I wouldn't say that. Okay. Because I've heard there's reports of like sometimes animals eat plastic because it smells kind of like food, but it's not nutritive. No, this isn't that. So, okay.

Starting point is 00:27:18 But they're eating something. Would you say they're eating something that's been sort of a recent-ish change in their diet? I think I would say yes to that. Okay. Are they eating something that's been sort of a recent-ish change in their diet? I think I would say yes to that. Okay. Are they eating something that's man-made? Yes. I don't want to mislead you. Yes, they are. Okay. Is it that they're dying because they're eating this instead of food that would be better for them? No. Is it that they're dying because they're eating something that's making them ill? Yes. It's actually making them ill? Yes. Is it like medications or drugs that they're ingesting? Are they ingesting, I don't know, they're ingesting other things that contain medication or drugs? Yes. As opposed to eating the drugs directly. Okay.

Starting point is 00:28:07 Are they, I mean, vultures have a reputation for eating dead things. Are they eating dead things? Yes. Okay. Are they eating things that were poisoned? No. Okay. Are they eating, I don't know, they get rid of lab rats or something and they feed them

Starting point is 00:28:21 to the vultures or they throw them out and the vultures eat them? No, that's not it. Okay. Okay. lab rats or something and they feed them to the vultures or they throw them out and the vultures eat them no that's not okay um okay does it matter exactly what the dead things are that they're eating yes actually yes it does okay would you say it's some kind of small mammal no ah other birds no fish no humans no um they're not eating cadavers from hospitals uh what am i missing No. Humans? No. They're not eating cadavers from hospitals. What am I missing? Reptiles? No. Amphibians? No. Other vultures? No, that would be birds.

Starting point is 00:28:56 Oh, insects. Insects. No. Oh, come on. Arachnids. It's important that this is in Nepal. It's important that this is in Nepal. It's important that this is in Nepal. It's also happening in India. Oh, I asked about small mammals. Is it large mammals?

Starting point is 00:29:09 Yes. Oh, I put an adjective on that I shouldn't have put on. Shoot. Okay. They're eating large mammals. Large mammals that exist in Nepal and India, but like presumably we don't have here in the U.S.? No, we do have them here. We do have them here in the U.S.

Starting point is 00:29:26 That's important. That's important that we have these large mammals here in the U.S. But here vultures aren't— Don't eat them. Right. Would this be some kind of livestock? Yes. Like cows?

Starting point is 00:29:40 Yes, it's cows. Okay. And the cows have some sort of drugs in them. Are the farmers treating them with drugs deliberately? Yes. To produce some beneficial effect on the cows? Yeah, I'll just tell you. It's called diclofenac.

Starting point is 00:29:54 It's a painkiller that's used in cows. And it's fatal to vultures. It is, is it? But why is that happening in Nepal and India and not here or elsewhere? Because the cows are in pain in Nepal. No, that's not it. They care about their cows. They don't want them to have headaches. Is it believed that the diclofenac will do something else besides be a painkiller? No. So are they giving the, oh, do they want them to produce something differently about their milk?

Starting point is 00:30:26 No. Okay. Are these cows that would be intended to be eaten? No, and that's important. In this country, they would be. Oh, is that because they're sacred and so they wouldn't be eaten? Yeah, that's basically it. White-rumped vultures lost over 99% of their population in the 1990s

Starting point is 00:30:46 through eating diclofenac, a painkiller used in cows. In Hindu-majority countries, such as India and Nepal, cows aren't eaten, so it falls to vultures to dispose of them, and diclofenac is fatal to vultures. Happily, Nepal is now creating bird restaurants to offer safe food to the vultures, and this is helping to reverse the decline. So basically, in this country, it doesn't happen because we just eat our cows.

Starting point is 00:31:05 Yeah. But over there, the vultures are central to the whole system because they're needed to dispose of dead cows. And over there, they're ingesting this painkiller, and it's killing them. Interesting. So thank you, Eugene, for sending that. Thank you. And if anybody else has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to try,

Starting point is 00:31:22 you can send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. This podcast would not still be here today if it weren't for the generous support of our listeners. If you'd like to help support the show, please check out our Patreon page at patreon.com slash futilitycloset, or see the support us section of the website at futilitycloset.com. While you're at the site, you can also graze through Greg's collection of over 10,000 concise curiosities. Browse the Futility Closet store, check out the Futility Closet books, or see the show notes for the podcast with the links and references for the topics we've covered. If you have any questions or comments, you can email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com.

Starting point is 00:32:06 Our music was written and performed by the exceptional Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 186-The Children's Blizzard

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