It Could Happen Here - Bears! And the Guys Who Don’t Like Them

Episode Date: June 1, 2026

James is joined by Molly to talk about bears, and the campaign to remove them from the Endangered Species Act.  Sources: https://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/news/missing-hiker-and-bear-encounter-victim-identified.htm https://www.hcn.org/issues/49-9/zinke-went-to-bears-ears-to-listen-but-supporters-felt-unheard/  https://x.com/RepRyanZinke/status/2054303113549381650?s=20  https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2017/10/25/16-30033.pdf  https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/Endangered-Species-Act-at-50/  https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5829a2.htm  https://coloradosun.com/2024/04/16/dying-wolf-struck-by-snowmobile-shown-off-in-wyoming-bar/  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261982557_Efficacy_of_Firearms_for_Bear_Deterrence_in_Alaska  https://www.bearwise.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/efficacy-of-bear-spray-smith-et-al.-2010.pdf  https://alaskapublic.org/news/environment/2026-05-07/after-legal-challenge-alaska-judge-approves-states-revised-bear-cull-in-southwest-alaska  https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28097859-250506-mulchatna/  https://www.akleg.gov/basis/Bill/Text/34?Hsid=HB0364A  https://propakistani.pk/2026/05/28/mma-fighter-killed-in-bear-attack-in-canada/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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It's Bear Time. Yep, it's Bear Time. Hi, everyone. Welcome to It Could Happen here, a podcast where I talk to Molly Conger about animals. Hi, Molly. I am so excited to learn about bears. I've been thinking about it all week. That's fantastic.

Good. I hope you've had good better thoughts. Because there are people who think about bears a lot, and I think it's not good for their mental well-being. I was trying to find if I took a picture of that time a baby bear was, like, standing on the median strip outside my old apartment, and I couldn't find it. So I was thinking about him.

Okay. Yeah, I hope he's okay. I hope he's found a better place to be than the median strip. I bought a show-and-tell item today. Molly can see it. No one else can. I was hoping it was going to be a live bear. It's not a live bear.

I don't. I'm not allowed. Because of woke, you can't have a pet, grisly bear. If you're about to tell me that those are, bear antlers, I'm leaving. Yeah, these are actually original jackaloupe antlers from the California jackalope. No, it's a mule deer shed antler. I thought it was cool.

Thought you'd like to see it. It's beautiful. Yeah, I think lots of people don't realize that their antlers fall off and regenerate. I feel like he spent a long time growing those. Yeah, he did. And then he just left them there as a gift for me in the wilderness. So I have a few of these. He's not getting laid this spring.

Oh, no, he's going to grow some more. Oh, okay. And he's going to fight another dude with him. them in order to get laid. So that fell off in a fight, so he's just walking around with one right now. Looking like a uniform. Oh, he shed them. Okay, he shed them. Yeah, they shed them and regenerate them.

Okay. Like, this is how they get bigger and more robust antlers each time. But they put a lot of a caloric energy into growing these. And that seems like that would really take a lot out of you. Yeah, well, then they get horny and fight with other male deer for quite a while. No, those are antlers, not horns. That's correct. But the horny is not related to them.

Yeah, they go. And then, yeah, they lose a lot of weight in that rutting time. And then they have to gain it all back before the winter. Just so focused on fighting and fucking. They can't even eat. Yep. It's the many such cases. Many such cases.

Yeah. So I'm not talking about mule deer today. They are cool. The first time I saw one, I was like, I see why they call it a mule deer. Really got the ears going on. Oh. I want to talk about another type of charismatic North American megal corner bears.

So there are three species of bear in North America. Should we do quiz, Molly? Do you know what they are? Okay. Grizzly, brown, black. Polar? Close. That's four.

You've got to keep spraying. Those aren't even bears. Nominally they are. But I think, yeah. You did get them all during your period of guessing. Brown, black, and polar. within brown bear, we have grizzly bears, brown bears, and kodiak bears. We used to think that the California bears were a different species, they're not.

They just lived here. They just have different politics. Yeah, yeah, exactly. We'd have been legalized, so they just saw things differently. The brown bear is the one I want to talk about. So I'm going to use brown bear as like a blanket term for when they're on the coast in Alaska, they're called brown bears, right? And those are generally the biggest ones.

I know if you've ever seen it. Have you been to Alaska, Molly? No, I would love to go to Alaska. I've never been. Yeah, Alaska fucking rips. I love Alaska. I found out recently that black bears can be brown. And I just think we need to re-evaluate the naming system.

It's not good, yes. Because people are, you know, the advice about a brown bear versus a black bear is different. But if a black bear can be brown and you're relying on a rhyming phrase to know what to do, you don't know what kind of bear that is. Yeah. They call them cinnamon bears sometimes, the brown, black bears. Yeah. You can tell a grizzly bear, right?

The bigger, they've got that more pronounced hump. They have a different shape to them. No, you can tell. I cannot. You'll fucking know the grizzly bears coming. They don't make themselves, you know, quiet. But yeah, the big hump, they've got a more pronounced hump. Grizzly bears can also really get into like a blonde coloration even.

Well, yeah, in California, sure. Everybody's blonde out there. Yeah, they get frosted tips. when they lived by the coast for too long, and they listen to Sublime here. Yeah, let's talk about bears. My bear interactions by way of establishing some credibility. I want to point out that interacting with bears doesn't make you an expert. I'm not an expert.

And what we're going to talk about here is non-experts interjecting their in-expert opinions about bears and why that's actually a problem. I'm probably interacting with bears. It's not a desirable outcome for most listeners. Yeah, I love a bear. Like, I see, because I come from a place where there's very little that can kill you. Well, I mean, there are things. They're not cars.

And we have cancer in the UK as well, of course. But, like, animal-wise, you're more or less in a clear. We have adders, which is a type of snake, and they are venomous. But, like, I can't think the last time I've ever heard of someone getting killed. I'm sure someone has been killed by an adabyte. But it's very rare. Now, you don't have, I mean, you have a lion on, like, a flag or something. Somebody has one.

But there's no lines. Yeah, we have a few lions. We've got some flag lions. Yeah. The lions, in fact, I love the lions on a flag because they're drawn by someone who's never seen a lion. Just like a game of telephone has resulted in... But he knows they're very majestic.

Yeah, it's majestic, kind of like a dog, longer hair. I think there was the input before he drew the lions. I kind of like being on the landscape with animals that are bigger than me. And they are the apex predator. First time I saw a grizzly bear, I had bush-plained to a lake in the rank. St. Elias Wilderness, that's in Alaska, southeast in Alaska, massive wilderness area. And we were going to hike around a bit and then pack raft off the end of the glacier there.

It goes into like a meltwater river, right? And so the river's kind of different every year as it melts and the river streams brayed together. Then we were going to pack a row for a few days and then hike out. And that was a fun adventure. So we landed, we hiked a bit, we inflated our little boats and we paddled across the lake at the end of the last year, and then we got to a place where we're camping, went on a walk, and immediately saw a sowl grizzly bear and her cups, which was sick. That's cute as hell. I would love to see that. I would love to see some baby bears.

Yeah, it's sick. It'd best to stay away from them. That's when they can get angry. I would like to see them from like over here. Yeah. And then they can be over there. Like maybe on the other side of a river. Yeah, well, bears can, there's not afraid of water. That's true. That's true. They do love to eat a salmon. Yeah, it was sick. That was a sick trip. generally we got to see the glacial carving. So, like, that's when a little baby glacier is born, right? But the glacial, a section of it broke off. And I'm talking a section of size of like a city block here.

But it's so shiny when it breaks. Yeah, it's shiny. And it's allowed. I mean, it's like an earth-shattering rumble, right? And then this thing, it was majestic, right? Like, it looks like a mountain has fallen into the water and that was cool as fuck. And then you realize that, like, it has. has displaced a mountain-sized amount of water.

You better move. And now there are like fridge-sized ice blocks coming at head height towards you. So yeah, we did some fast uphill running in that moment. But it was Alaska. So it was summertime. It wasn't getting dark, right? You have like 24-hour sunlight. So at least it wasn't dark when that happened.

Plenty time to run from the glacier. Yeah, great time to run from the glacier. I wouldn't want to do it in the wintertime. I don't think they carve in the wintertime. Maybe they still do. I think it's to do with temperature rising. So that was my, I've seen a lot of black bears. I'm a San Diego black bear truther, but it's another fun thing about me.

For some reason, people don't think there are black bears in San Diego, and that is not true. I have seen bear footprints. People have seen bears on game cameras. Bears pop up on top of Mount Palomar all the time. It's like the ongoing feud about whether or not we have panthers on the East Coast. Oh yeah, you guys love to. It's like a Carolina panther or something. People are very sure.

I have no skin in this game. Yeah. I think there's a breeding family of mountain lions now, or maybe in Michigan. So they're getting closer. They're coming your way. You soon will. I've seen a lot of bears,

or a good number of bears. A lot of black bears, where we have them in California. The fact that I've seen bears does not make me a bear expert. And another non-bear expert has been diving into the discourse on bears after a tragedy.

Like, genuinely a terrible thing when a hiker lost their life in Glacier. We're trying to say it the American way. Glacier National Park. I'll just say we're going to get messages about this. This British word. Yeah, right. It's not like a buffalo issue. I'm just straight colonizing it.

I'm sure it had an indigenous name. And so, so are you, if you're saying, Glacier. This is really sad, right? A hiker from Florida was mauled by a bear and tide. Very shortly, in relation to that, serious injuries occurred in another malling in Yellowstone National Park. Not so long ago, a contractor at a uranium, mining site was killed by a black bear in British Columbia, in Canada, a couple of weeks ago, maybe 13th of May. It looks like unusual to be killed by a black bear. Probably worth pointing

out that very rare for black bears to kill people. And also someone at that site clearly had a firearm because they euthanized the bear. Euthanized is a phrase they used there. They killed it, right? Like it wasn't suffering, I don't think. But they killed the bear pretty shortly thereafter and it's undergoing a necropsy now. But that's a... another incident, I guess, to add to this list. And again, right there was a firearm present there, it seems, and that didn't prevent the person being mauled by the bear. And so, former Interior Secretary, Ryan Zinke,

has decided to wade into the debate. Do we remember Ryan Zinke? He's not the one from real-world road rules, right? Now, that's the transportation guy. I don't think so. If he is, I'm not aware of what real-world road rules is. I'm just having trouble remembering which members of Cabinet have been on reality TV. And I don't think this is one of them.

Okay. Sorry. No, not to my knowledge. I think he was a Navy SEAL officer. He's now representative from Montana. He was Interior Secretary in Trump's first administration. He presided over a series of attacks on public lands that we saw in Trump 1.0. Exactly what you want to see from your secretary of the interior. Yeah. Yeah. He's trying to rebrand himself as some kind of protector of public lands now. He's kind of too late on that one, in my opinion. But he's certainly not a protector. of bears. Last week, he tweeted, maybe he zeted. I don't know. We're not doing that. Yeah, we're not doing that. We're going to keep dead naming it.

Last week, two grizzly bear attacks claimed the life of a hiker in Glacier National Park and seriously injured two others in Yellowstone National Park. The tragedies are a sobering reminder that grizzly bear populations have recovered well beyond sustainable levels and it is time for... Oh, so we should start killing them? Yep. It's past time for the federal government to de-list them and give states and management tools. Kill them back. Yeah, we've got to Kill them back. This is what we do. Eye for an eye for Florida man.

Yeah. Fuck off. I was speaking to a bear, a scientist who studies human bear interactions this week. And he referred to these as revenge killings. Yeah. Because they won't just kill. They often, in many instances, don't know which bear. Sometimes we can know the size of the bear, right, from like the size of the jaws.

We can have several bears. There are different sides of jaws. Things are distance between the different teeth, stuff like this, right? Right, like if one bear is like if it's like a jaw situation and like one bear just has it out for hikers. Yeah. Sure. I guess go get him. But that's not like they.

But that's not what's happening. Yeah. And they will end up killing a number of bears in an area when this stuff happens, right? Which is, it's just a revenge killing. So we're taking out like we're taking out our anger on that species because they came after our species. It seems like the problem is not that there's too many bears. That is correct, Molly. That is that is why we're here today.

He seems to be positioning this as. There's just too many bears. People just can't avoid the bears because there's so many bears. Then it's not the case. Millions of people every year visit the greater Yellowstone ecosystem and very few of them see a bear, right? And even fewer of them touch a bear. Yeah. If you're touching a grizzly bear, it's a bad day for you. Unless I guess it has decided it wants to be touched. I don't want a victim blame. Obviously, like these are wild animals. They're unpredictable. You're in their home. What's this guy do? Why was he so close to the bear?

We don't know exactly what this guy did. There are a number of bears. safety things which I do want to talk about. And I spoke to Tom Smith last week, and I'm going to turn that into another podcast. But like, this is the person who is the guy who writes the studies on human interactions with bears, right? And specifically on how those could be like de-escalated. And he said he's not aware of an incident in which someone has been killed by a bear in which they were adhering to all the best principles, right? Now, I'm not blaming the victim. Like, if you don't know, you don't know, you're an inexperienced outdoorsman or whatever. But I feel like there's a series of just like pieces of advice that if you follow them, you're not going to get in that

situation. Most of the time. Most of the time. Yeah. I think if I was going into bear country, I wouldn't take a dog. A lot of people take dogs. Dog is a great way to find a bear. You're looking for a bear. You could go send out your dog and it'll come back to you with a bear in tow. Some like hunting dogs can also tree bears, but that's not what I'm talking about here. It's because the bear sees the dog as a delicious snack. I think the dog sees the bear as a threat, right? And it'll stop, back, back, back, back, and they'll get, and then, like, the bear then obviously sees a dog as, what the fuck is this little animal doing? So now we're just engaged. I'm the apex predator here. Yeah, like, we're locked in. And the, uh, the dog can smell

the bear, right? So it's going to find it. Uh, the bear can smell the dog. So they're going to find each other. I guess I was thinking of my dog, which a bear would definitely see is a delicious snack. Yeah, your dog, I could see. Maybe it'll be sub snack size. It wouldn't be worth it, but, uh, like a little cocktail weenie. Yeah. A sausage dog would try it. It wouldn't give it like I've seen, I've sent you a video of a sausage dog. Oh yeah. Chasing off a mountain lion. They didn't give a fuck.

Very brave. So yeah, don't take a dog. Don't try and pet it. Yeah, don't take a dog. Don't try and pet it. In this instance, I think the person was moving through thick country where the bear was probably foraging for berries and they probably startled the bear. So you don't want to startle the bear.

If you're moving through thick country like that, that's when people will say, hey, bear, or they'll use a bear bell. or they'll talk loudly and converse with people in their group. It is generally preferred to be in a group when we're in grizzly country, right? Not on our own. We don't know the details of this incident. There have been some reports that the person discharged bear spray. And I want to get on to the bear spray topic later because I have a lot to say about that.

Let's go back and talk about bears in history. Yes, contextualize the bear. Yeah. Renzigke wants to delist the bear from the endangered species. Act, right? Bears haven't always been protected by the Danger Species Act. That's why California has a bear on its flag that doesn't live here anymore.

Oh, we don't have those anymore? No, we killed the ball. We don't have brown bears here. So is he on the flag because you're sorry about it or because you're proud of it? No, I think it's more of a pride thing. I think it's more of a... We got him. We're fucking, yeah. I don't actually know what he's on the flag. I'll do some searching. I'm pretty sure it's not

because we're sorry about it. We have a good source, right, of what European people did when they first encountered bears. It's not my story from Alaska. Oh, I bet they did not know about them. Well, they did. Because as it turns out, as Lewis and Clark were moving across the plains, right, they encountered indigenous people who very specifically told them not to fuck with bears. Let me quote from Lewis's diary.

I feel like you would not have to tell. Like, if I have never, if I have no concept of bear and I see a bear, my instinct is going to be, I'm going to leave that guy alone. See, yeah, but maybe these guys are just built different. As it turns out, their bear poking desire is extremely, turns out, kind of productive for them. Let's read from the Lewis and Clark Diaries, a first on the podcast. Quote, the Indians give a very formidable account of the strength of ferocity of this animal, which they never dare to attack but in parties of six, eight or ten persons,

and are even then frequently defeated with a loss of one or more of their party. This animal is said to more frequently attack a man on meeting with him than flee from him when the Indians are about to go in quest of the white bear. Previous to their departure, they paint themselves and perform all these superstitious rights commonly observed when they are about to make war upon a neighboring nation. I think he's talking about brown bears when he talks about white bears there. I was going to say, is he talking about polar bears? Because you definitely don't do that.

That's an even worse idea. Yeah, do not fuck with a polar bear will end you. That was on the 15th of April. So he's like, yeah, you take eight or ten guys, usually one of the, dies, they don't always succeed. I want to go check it out. I got it. Yeah. Yep. So by early May, Captain Clark and Drya killed the largest brown bear this evening,

which we have ever yet seen. It was a most tremendous looking animal and extremely hard to kill, notwithstanding he had five balls through his lungs and five others in various parts. He swam more than half the distance across the river to a sandbar, and it was at least 20 minutes before he died. Then they go on to say they thought it weighed about 500 pounds, but they didn't have any apparatus to weigh it. So that's the first interaction with the bear.

Less than a month later, quote, six good hunters of the party fired at a brown or yellow bear several times before they killed him. And indeed, he had liked to have defeated the whole party. He pursued them separately as they fired on him

and was near catching several of them. He pursued two of them separately so close that they were obliged to throw aside their guns and pouches and throw themselves into the river, although the bank was nearly 20 feet perpendicular. Oh, my God. Yeah. So enraged was this animal that he plunged into the river

only a few feet behind the second man he had compelled to take refuge in the water when one of those who still remained on the shore shot him through the head and finally killed him. That's not fair. They should have him have that guy. Yeah, it's just eye for an eye. It's fascinating to me, right? That, like, you do see this sometimes in, like, indigenous,

like, people's records, right? There was a guy, I forget his name. I forget, I was reading about this one indigenous American guy Like, every time I see a bear, I've got to go try to take it on. But, like, he recognized that was, like, not a normal response, right? Whereas apparently everyone in Lewis and Clark's party was immediately after killing the first bear they saw, despite having been told. We found the murder monster. Yeah.

It tells me so much about the American psyche, right, that the indigenous people were like, you know, they will kill you. And, like, how much bear meat were they eating? Yeah, I mean, maybe a bit. I don't know, like, you can eat bear meat. It's kind of greasy from what I understand. So they're just going after bears just because it's fun. I do understand that Lewis and Clark had to collect and catalog animals, which obviously they didn't bring them back alive, right?

They brought back skulls and hides and that kind of thing so that the Western way of understanding the world could catalog and understand these animals. And there is a great deal of knowledge that that way of seeing the world gain from that expedition. But they also mixed it up with a lot of bears. You can read more examples in their diaries. There's this idea that still exists in part. of the American sort of psyche that we don't have to live alongside nature. We have to conquer it, right?

That we have to prove our like apex position. And that doesn't always go well for us. I don't need to prove anything to a bear. Yeah. I'm at peace. I'm happy to coexist with bears. I'm happy that they're there. They're happy that I'm here.

I hope we can have a nice time. I don't want to fight with bears. Lewis and Clark, by the way, I find the Lewis and Clark exhibition fascinating. Like at the time they were crossing the planes, They were meeting with indigenous people who had been to Paris to check it out and come home. I have no concept of that. Right. Like, we see them as like questing into the great unknown.

And these people are like, yeah, no, I went over. Right. But those people have, they've been out back. Yeah, yeah. They just didn't want it, right? They came back because they liked it. They were having, they were fine. It wasn't that they hadn't been exposed to the European world.

It was just that the European world had not physically expanded to attempt colonize the places that they lived. So, like, this idea that they're going in... That really makes what they did a lot less impressive. Yeah, I mean, it was a long journey. Sure, right? I mean, people hide the Appalachian Trail every year. I'm not impressed. That does go a perpendicular to the...

Sure, but I'm just saying, people walk a thousand miles all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they did a lot of canoeing. It's a weird hobby. It's a fun hobby. I like walking. But, yeah, I mean, it's an impressive journey, but, like, I think sometimes we have this idea of some, like, questing into the unknown, and that's just not it. They'd have met people who have been like, oh, yeah, I've been there.

Like, what do you think of Paris? Sadly, the Lewis and Clark expedition was not the low point for the grizzly bear population. But, Mully, talking of low points, now is a time for us to transition to an advertisement for products and services. Pride is like love. You feel it in your heart. IAR Radio. Canada's number one streaming app for radio and podcasts, including IHart Pride Canada, your favorite hits and must have party bangers. Plus, personalized and curated.

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All right, we are back. I want to quote from a federal court case here on protections for bears. By the 1930s, just 125 years after European settlers moved into country, grizzly bears were found in only 2% of their former range. Nor did this mark the low point for the grizzly. The 37 separate grizzly populations were identified in the contiguous United States in 1922.

Only six remained in 1975. So is this largely habitat encroachment or overhunting? Or, I mean, obviously, both. It's all of the above. So we were just going out there and shooting them just... Yeah, they're bounties. There were bounties for bears. By the millions.

Yeah, they were paying people to shoot the bears. We got a buffalo situation. Yeah, yeah. We got a buffalo situation here. So this wasn't just like people doing hobby hunting and like concurrent habitat encroachment. This was like an intentional destruction of bear. The bear doesn't coexist well with like human habitation and specifically like animal agriculture, right? Yeah, it's not a great neighbor.

Yeah, it doesn't, it doesn't give a fuck. And it's a big animal and it will tear shit down and people are scared of it. Bears used to live all across the plains, right? It was only a small segment of the bears that lived in the mountains. They're the ones that survived just because those are the areas that it was harder to make amenable to capitalism. That never occurred to me. Yeah. That never occurred to me that they have retreated from the hills to get away from us.

Yeah. I don't think it's that the plains bears went to the hills. I think it's that the plains bears are gone. Right. They're just the ones that survived because they were like, that's crazy. The bears just used to be roaming around down here. Yeah. The bears would be out and about.

But actually, the easternmost grizzly bear sow with cubs that I'm aware of is on the APR, like in the Missouri River Breaks. So the American Prairie Reserve, people who didn't listen to our Buffalo episode. Callback. Yeah, that's what they call a callback in the industry. The bears used to be all around, right? Like, I guess maybe the planes, right, are an area that's especially kind of appealing, especially when we look at, like, the period after the 1920s, right, when people were trying to break.

the planet to heal through the application of technology, right? I think it's Aldo Leopold who talks about the way humans fuck with ecosystems as a bit like somebody who doesn't know how a watch works, taking a part of a watch, just being like, I know, that fucking cocktail doesn't look like it's doing much to me.

Let me whip that bad boy out, like make it lighter. I always think of, um, what was it? Somebody who's colonizing and farming in Hawaii brought mongoose because they thought the mongoose would eat some, they thought the mongoose would eat something that was causing a problem for the crops. It turns out the mongoose don't even eat that.

So now it's feral mongies. Sometimes like around sunset at the beach, you'll see all these like mongoose just like coming out of the underbrush and taking over the beach. Okay, that's amazing. Because like they have no natural predators there. Yeah, right. Like introducing animals into ecosystems and removing animals from ecosystems

has all these downstream effects that like we never think. Like I am, I talked to Sophie about this today. Like I grew up in the UK right where we have tons of rabbits. Oh, she has. has a rabbit in the garden today. Did she show you? Yeah, yeah, I've seen the rabbit, yeah. It's able to identify it. The rabbit population is high in part because we've removed many of their predators, right? The wolves are gone in the UK. The bears are gone in the UK.

We have some foxes, but not as many because they are dangerous to sheep populations, right? We have some raptors, but not as many. So now we have tons of rabbits. One of the rabbits do, well, they eat crops in part, right? And they come in and eat your carrots as depicted in the Peter Rabbit. Oh, a Peter Rabbit is just tearing the garden apart. Yeah, every day. Mr. McGregor was right.

Molly, that is a bold statement. Molly, Molly Kong, a childhood villain. Now the rabbits have a disease called mixomatosis, which is this horrific disease where they sort of become almost like zombieified. Yeah, I think it came from Australia. They got a rabbit problem. Well, they were trying to eradicate them, right? Oh, so they invented a rabbit disease? I don't know. This is what now I'm wondering if they invented the rabbit disease. Let's, uh...

Because they did that to another invasive animal, right? Well, they lost a war. They gave them a disease. I'm not sure they didn't they lose a war against emus? That's right. Yeah, the Australians really have a bad record. Yeah, so basically it is a disease that existed in American rabbits only causes mild issues with them, but it is horrific in European rabbits. Yeah, it looks like they did it on purpose.

Yep. You know, great job, guys. Yeah, Mitzematosis and rabbits, like, is a thing that, like, genuinely as a kid would, like, so I used to shoot a lot of rabbits when I was a kid, right? And you'd shoot these rabbits with Mixomatosis and be like, what the fuck is this? Like, how have we done this to a living creature? They become so incapacitated that, like, sometimes crows will start eating them before they've died or, like, they wander onto the road and get hit, right? It's really, really, really horrible. Oh, I'm looking this up.

And I regret it. Yeah, no. Yeah, Google mexomatosis pictures at your own risk. No, don't. Actually, don't. Yeah, it almost looks like they have like cataracts over their eyes. It's, uh, it's really, really horrible, right? But like, this is what happens when we continually try and mess with an ecosystem that has existed in harmony.

And like it changes based on inputs and changes in the climate, right? Like, it's not like it's a fixed thing. It has, it has shifted and changed through time, but it has found a balance. every time. And then we come in and just keep pressing one side of the scale. This will fix it. Yeah. This is more. But we just keep chucking more on there and wondering.

Kill the Bears back. I just, I can't get over. That's just like a child's approach to things. This is our policy, right? Like, okay, so let's talk about Zinke. Right. Let's talk about, let's talk about the protections that he wants to take away. These protections were passed into law by the Endangered Species Act in 1973.

And the Endangered Species Act lists Grizzly Bears in the lower 48 as threatened. If you're not familiar with the ESA, it prevents you from hunting, harming, or harassing listed species without a special permit. Maybe he thought he's supposed to threaten them. Yeah, like harass them. Like maybe it's going to do it. They're threatened. These are threatening animals.

We should threaten them. Yeah. He was going to post a mean tweet about them that he didn't want to be accused of harassing them and violating the ESA. One thing the ESA does not do is prevent you from defending yourself. off against these bears, which seems to be the implication in his post, right? That, like... Because you're allowed to defend yourself against a person, so I'm sure an animal.

It's likewise a bear. There was a ninth case not so long ago about someone who had killed three grizzly bears. So if you get arrested for killing an endangered animal, is it like a murder trial where you have to, like, prove self-defense? I think it would depend on where you did it, right? I was standing my ground, Your Honor. Yeah, sure. I was...

I don't even want to make jokes about standing your ground, those, because... fucking horrible. The ninth second opinion says, we hold the good faith belief defense for a prosecution and then they give the legal code, right? It's governed by subjective rather than objective standard and it's satisfied when a defendant actually, even as unreasonably, believes his actions

are necessary to protect himself or others from perceived danger from a grisly bear. That's interesting that the language, because you don't see that. So in self-defense, like if I harmed you and argued on... It's been actual. No, it doesn't have to be actual, but it has to be a real.

reasonable assumption. Like, my belief has to be reasonable. Yeah. But in this and they're saying, it's okay if your belief was unreasonable. Yeah, if you're just scared of bears. It's okay if you're dumb as hell. Yeah. If you, if you have no idea what you're doing, you can still kill these bears, right? Like, it gives you a very broad remit for self-defense. Because you could just say you felt that way because it doesn't matter if that's reasonable or not. Yeah. So it effectively doesn't matter. Yeah. Effectively, if you, if you're willing to state in court that you were threatened by the bear. I felt that way. Right.

It seems like you can, you can shoot the bear. I almost just scared. I'm a scared. Maybe it relies on toxic masculinity to like self-police itself. Right. I ain't scared. No. It also, of course, the ESA does not include animals based on how dangerous they are.

So, like, Zinky's argument that we should deal with bears because two people got hurt, one person got killed. It doesn't line up with why the ESA exists. And like, I'm very sorry for those people, of course, but like that's not like an epidemic of bear attacks. No. cattle kill more people by a factor of 10 than bears. Doblers kill more people with guns. Yeah. Lightning kills more people than bears.

A dog shot a lady with a gun the other day. Oh, wow. Well, good for him. It's good to see people pushing boundaries. Bad for her, I guess. I'm sorry to hear that. But I do think there are some best practices that could have been followed there than I prevented the dog shooting.

The dog was certainly not certified on the range. Right, yeah. The dog hadn't gone and taken his apple seed clinic or whatever. So the ESA, right, it distinguishes between a threatened and engaged species. An endangered species is, quote, endangered species is, quote, endangered extinction throughout all or a significant part of its range. A threatened species is, quote, likely to become an endangered species within the foreseeable future throughout all or a significant portion of its range. Right, like if we start killing them? Yeah, or keep killing them.

Right. If Ryan Zinkie just opens up on bears? Yeah, yeah. Zinke taken his Navy SEAL training and going to... Seal Team 6 is going to Yellowstone. Yeah, they're going after that bear. Then they look at reasons for this, right, disease, predation, destruction of habitat, commercial take, inadequacy of regulatory mechanisms to protect them, or natural or man-made factors, including Brian Zinke, killing them.

Because grizzly bears in the lower 48 are threatened, there are defined ecosystems. There are six of them in which we're trying to recover the bear populations. And one of these is a greater Yellowstone ecosystem. The Yellowstone bears have been ping-ponged around the ESA for some time, as it turns out. Bears were removed in 2007 and then returned in 2009 by a court decision. Then it was removed again under Zinky in the first Trump administration. I feel like if you're on the cusp like that, leave it alone. Like obviously if every time you delist them, they become threatened again.

Like, leave them alone. Yeah, that's it. Well, in this case, it wasn't the reason for the delist. The sting was challenged in court and found to be insufficient. It wasn't that a population like took a dive. We're just changing our mind about how much we care about bears. Yeah. Or like in this case, basically what the court said,

I can actually read to you from the court order. It's Crow Indian tribe are Al versus USA. The policy implications are greater Yellowstone. Grizzly de-lesting are significant, but they cannot affect the court's disposition. Although, the order may have impacts throughout grizzly country beyond. This case is not about the ethics of hunting. It is not about solving human or life.

five-stocked grisly conflicts as a practical or philosophical matter. These issues are not before the court. Then little ellipsies, where I've skipped a bit, by delisting the Greater Yellowstone Grizzly, without analyzing how delisting would affect the remaining members of the lower 48 grizzly designation, the service failed to consider how reduced protections for the greater Yellowstone ecosystem would impact the other grizzly populations.

Thus, the service entirely failed to consider an important aspect of the problem. So the bear's got a good lawyer. There were two different court cases and they were combined in this Montana case, that they got a good lawyer. Essentially, what they're saying, though, right, is that, like, this is an issue which we have to look at, like, nationally, because if we have state control it and Wyoming or Montana, the three states, right, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho,

one of them says, are we got too many bears, killing too many cows, let's open it up on the bears, open season on bears. The bears don't know what state they're in. They simply do not respect borders. They do not. They, yeah, they refuse to... The jurisdictional boundary is meaningless to him. They engage in interstate commerce.

So it's got to be like a federally controlled issue. Unfortunately, our federal government right now is not one that's massively amenable to conservation. It's run by bear murderers. Yeah, they would love to murder. I mean, Donald Trump's son, right, is big into. Oh, he does love big game hunting, doesn't he? It does, yeah. He goes on those, like, rich boy safaris.

Yeah, he's got, it's funny. Someone was like, oh, someone was talking to me the other day about like, you should pitch this outdoor publication. And then I realized it was owned by Trump Jr. So that's a no from me. Just a clear no for me, dog. I bet they love conservation stories. Yeah, I would be down to picture hunting publication about the damage that the border wall does to our landscapes

and I've seen a mule deer try and get through the border wall. And it's very, yeah, it's really sad because she had been habituated to going that way for water genetically, for generations, right? And now she can't. And yeah, that's pretty fucked. I'd love to write that for a hunting publication, not writing it for Donald Trump.

juniors one. I don't think he's commissioning it either, to be honest. I don't think they'd pay for it. No, I think they're probably using a VAD hat to guess, some artificial intelligence. But I've never actually read it. I'm not going to. Don't care. If you're interested in the ESA and what it's done for grisly bears, I'm going to link to a Center for Biological Diversity Report, which is pretty good. This was published when the ESA was 50, so it's a few years old now. But people will be thinking, I have seen pictures of people hunting grizzly bears. I thought that you couldn't do that. That's because those bears are in Alaska.

So they are not considered to be threatened. Different bears. Or like the same species of bear where they just live somewhere else? Versus Arribus, Herblus. Yeah. The same. Horribles? Horribless.

Yeah. That's bad PR for him. Yeah. They really screwed him on the name. This is part of the way the colonial mindset interacts with nature, right? Horrible bear. Like they named him Mr. Horrible. Yeah. Horrible bear.

That's mean. The other, like, I'm aware of like Ustas, Arctos Syriarchus, which is the Syrian bear. Fine. Acceptable. That makes sense. That's descriptive. Yeah. It also lives in other parts of the region, but that's okay.

Misleading. Yeah, yeah. We could call him Ustsus Arctos-Al-Sham, I guess, if we wanted to get with it. But there were translations to the Bible that used Syria to describe the whole region as well. So it's okay. But like horrible bear? Yeah, horrible bear. They really did them dirty on that one.

Could I call it nice bear? Maybe I'll petition for that. He should call up those lawyers from Montana. Yeah, I got the coalition together again with the Crow tribe. The bear is not inherently horrible, right? We've just been horrible to the bear. He's just doing what he does. Maybe that's why he's so bad.

Maybe. Right? He's like, you know, if you're going to call me horrible, I'll be horrible. Yeah. Maybe he's playing to the stereotype. So the Alaska bears can be hunted, right? They are hunted. Things do get a little complicated in Alaska,

with different rules governing sport hunting and subsistence hunting at federal land and state land. There is a coal program in Alaska right now that is understandably very controversial. The idea is that they will cull the bear to help the caribou population recover. You are looking at a thing which is multifactorial and only, this is like taking the part out of the watch, right? That I was talking about earlier. Like there's other things going on for the caribou. Yeah, yeah. It's not the bear who moves into the caribou.

caribou's home. It is people, right? Like, it's not the bear who caused climate change. Right. Like, there are other factors we could address, but we're taking it out on the bear. Yeah, which will be a common theme throughout our discussion here today. But I understand that we want the caribou herd to survive as well. But if you're trying to manage the caribou herd for hunting by controlling bear populations to allow more caribou, I don't think that's... We're modifying the wrong variable. Yes. It's a good way, pretty good. Yeah. There is Alaska legislation that I thought was interesting to make such programs go through peer review

that appears to be going absolutely nowhere. It seems stuck in the Alaska house. So we had to get a bunch of scientists to determine whether or not there would be environmental impact of Buffalo going back to where Buffalo live, but we can't get a scientific review of whether or not we should be killing the bears.

Yes, I know that there are other reasons for us to do environmental impact studies like hydrology and stuff. Thank you, EIS, people who reached out. We appreciate all our science listeners. But yeah, it is pretty sad that we can't get up I guess the argument would be peer review takes too long.

Okay. But like, you could get a couple of people to be like, you know what? It takes a lot longer to get all the bears back. Get a couple of scientists. It wouldn't take that long. Like they need jobs right now. Got a couple of bear scientists and employ them. See how it goes.

So let's talk about, I guess, like, why Zinke wants to delist them. A bear stole his wife. Not like in an eating way. No, she's fine. They live together happily. She lives in the woods now. Yeah, she's living her best life. It seems that one incident was a sow with cubs who was foraging for berries.

And the other one was a bear foraging for berries who was surprised. This is nothing to as a population level, as I said earlier. Right, it's just like it's an unfortunate thing where somebody was in a bad situation. Yeah, we live in a landscape where things can kill you. Most of those things are cars, but some of them are animals. Well, we should start shooting the cars. Yeah, but we don't do a revenge attack on Ford every time someone gets. in a motor accident, right?

I looked at Bear Vault. So Bear Vault, if you're not familiar, money makes bear cans. You familiar with bear cans? Is it like tin cans you wear around your neck? You jingle jangle? Yes. You can talk to the bear.

He holds one can. You hold the other one. There's a string. He's in his tree house. You're in your tree house. Exactly. Yeah. And you say, I'm coming through.

Please don't eat me. No. A bear can is a thing that you put your food in when you're camping. I was picturing like a big necklace made out of like old tin cans. Like an old time. me like a lay, but for bear countries. Yeah, but made out of like cans of beans. Yeah.

I don't know why you wouldn't need to buy that. You could make that at home. Yeah, you can make that for free. Bear Vault keeps like an open source collection of bear mallings. Bears, according to their data, have killed 66 people since 1974. That's not very many. It's not a lot of people, right? That's like one a year.

Yeah. A little more than that. It's very, very hard to make a public health argument for delifting brown bears. More people, more people have. that I have measles, like in my immediate area. Yeah, well, that's a whole other fucking public health issue, I'm afraid. When they do ESA studies on what kills bears, it's human interactions. I noticed a lot of bears.

Probably guns, mostly. Trains. Trains kill a lot of bears. That's so sad. Yeah, it's really sad. So maybe... Wait, so you're supposed to make noise of the bear here as you come in. Trains are loud as hell. They come pretty fast, I think.

Oh. And I think they're not, like, super loud if you're just like... if they're not trying to be loud. You know, like if you're in a linear direction to the train, maybe they're habituated to it because the trains come so regularly. I don't know. That's so sad. Yeah.

Never thought about a bear getting hit by a train. Yeah, it's good bears get hit by cars too, especially black bears. I mean, I'm sure brown bears do. They're just bigger. I wonder if that's part of why, you know, like there's a sort of, we can't afford to keep smashing our trains on bears situation here. I'm not sure. I think the train's probably fine.

Yeah. The train keeps going. Some of those bears are pretty big. I'm sure it delays their train operations. I mean, if there was like a massive train derailment, yeah, that's maybe we need to build a bare fence or something. I don't know. Yeah, well, we have these wildlife underpasses, right, that allow wildlife to go under or over freeways. A while ago, the right was getting really mad about one in Santa Monica.

This was like a, I think Benny Johnson had done like an investigation into this overpass. His theory here was that the overpass was allowing, I'm not joking, terrible cougars to come into neighborhoods and kill people's children. We came into the cougars neighborhood. The cougars, Benny, are already fucking there because... And how many children have been eaten by cougars in Santa Monica? I'm aware of one person in California being killed by a mountain line in the last few years. And a few more people have been killed. I can think of a couple more people.

But mostly on like hiking trails, right? Like, got their yards. Yes. I'm not aware of a cougar coming into anybody's house. It's not really how the mountain lion lives its life. I mean, sometimes people's chihuahuas have lost their lives to this scourge. I understand. Yeah, yeah.

But not their children. Not their children. Animals aren't coming to your house and taking your child. And the idea that they're not there anyway. If they want to come into your neighborhood, they can come into your neighborhood. They're good at moving across country. That's what they do. This will just keep you from running into it with your Lexus.

Yeah, exactly. And it's going to allow, like, the little mice and other. small creatures, right, that can't so nimbly jump over highway barriers. The obvious other argument for delisting bears is that people want to kill them. Get a different hobby. You can even kill black bears in most states in the Western United States, if that's your thing, right? It seems like a lot of people just don't want bears around. And that makes me sad because I think sharing our landscape with bears is beautiful.

And I think it's special that we have this thing in this country that, like, it's one like national symbolic mammals, right? I mean, he's like a gigantic guy who just wants to eat berries and hang out. Yeah, he wants to kill stuff. Sure, but like just I love the idea of just like this huge animal just like roaming around looking for a little sweet treat. Yep. Yeah, they, they're incredibly adaptable, right? They can eat berries, they can eat meat, they can eat fish.

I love when they just take one bite of a fish and throw it back. So wasteful. He's just like me for real. It's too fishy. He wants it like a fresher one. The other argument, I guess, is a certain population to recover, which kind of, it shows a misunderstanding that the importance of having a population for genetic diversity, right? But also, like, I just, I'm really stuck on, like, just because there's a lot of them doesn't mean you have to kill.

There's a lot of squirrels in my neighborhood, but I'm not allowed to shoot them. And you can't just do a squirrel genocide, yeah. Oh, there's just a lot of these. I'm going to do violence on them. Just don't do that. There are a lot of these, and it's been incoming convenient for us, like, and therefore, It's interesting to look at like the certain populations that are doing well at the Yellowstone Bears. The Yellowstone Bears have a much higher meat content in their diet than they used to.

Well, the tourists are eating. Yes, that's right. Yeah, that's mostly it. They feed them into the moor. Every year they drop off a bus at the Bear Cave as an offering. And then the bears violated the treaty. That's why they're mad. No, it's because climate change is making it hard of them to find their berries.

Right. And human pressure is pushing them further and further. from certain areas. Eating more meat is going to lead to more conflict with hunters, both in terms of them both being in the same space at the same time, trying to do the same thing. And honestly, it's so harmful for the bears that they've all been listening to Jordan Peterson.

The carnivore diet is not for everybody. Just imagining a bear. It's not good advice, you guys. Yeah, they've become terrible transphobes. That's really why we want to t-list them. I think we can look at what happens when animals lose their protections. We can see the way that Wyoming, for instance, dealt with wolves, right? Are you familiar with this incident last year of that wolf that was, like, horrifically mistreated in Wyoming?

No. It was really fucking gross. Did they, like, torture it? Yes. Why? Because I guess it made them feel big and strong. Right, so again, this isn't about, like, managing conflict with livestock. It's not about, like, you know, ecological management.

It's not, this is about people who just want to hurt animals. Yeah. Because they didn't just kill this wolf because they didn't want it around. They did something horrible to it. Yeah. I mean, this guy, there were videos of this, right? But this guy... So they tormented in an animal and then they made a video of it.

They made an animal snuff film. This is just about torture. I'm not saying everyone who wants to de-list Disney Bears, grizzly bears, wants to torture them in this way. But like... But it is this desire to engage in this violence. Yeah. Like, for certain people, right, there's an idea somehow that they can prove their, like,

strength and virility and masculinity. Get into powerlifting. Yeah. So what this guy did if people aren't familiar, his name is Cody Roberts. Never met a good Cody. I've met some nice Cody's. Oh, no. Okay, we know one.

Yeah. He hit the wolf on his, he ran down the wolf on its snowmobile. So it wasn't bother you. You pursued it. Yeah, he chased it on his snowmobile. He taped its mouth shut and took it to a bar. Does this man have a wife and is she okay? That's a good question.

I'm trying to work out if he went to jail. 18 months probation. Promation. And he gets a prison term if he fails. He filed a guilty plea to felony animal cruelty. I understand that there are people like within the hunting, ranching, outdoor space who think this guy is a piece of shit. There are many of them. I know many of them.

Because that's a very weird thing to do. Yeah, it's psycho. What is the thought process here? What is shooting it? I don't agree with, but I... I understand that you would do that. That's the thing people do. But why did you, like, chase it down and abduct it?

Yeah. Why did you choose to make this animal suffer? Like, did you just show no respect for life? Right? Like, we joke like, oh, just he have a wife. She's okay. But genuinely, this is a person who is like a psycho. Like, yeah.

No, I'm not joking. I'm not joking, actually. Like, if you, if this is your first instinct for how you treat a living creature, like, I bet he's not good to women either. Yeah. Like, this doesn't seem like a person. person who people should feel safe around. Oh, it was a young female wolf, too.

Yeah. Oh, no. What have you found? Sorry, I just found a picture of her. Yeah, no, it's really sad. The whole thing is really sad. Like, to injure this animal, right, to the extent that it can't get away or defend itself and then tape up its mouth and then drag it to a place where it's going to be in fear for

the rest of its life before you kill it, it's, it's unconscionable. It's horrific. I'm not saying that that will happen to bears, but I'm saying that like... A bear would be a lot harder to do that too. Yeah, yeah, it would be. You know, I think, as his punishment, this guy should try to do this to a bear. What I am saying is that even if we go ahead and deal this bears without serious controls, if we start to manage them just as like a vermin, right, like as a pest,

like this opens up all kinds of avenues. And I think a lot of people will find themselves in a situation that is beyond their grasp. Right? Like if suddenly you're, if you're a guy who's like, yeah, I'd love to shoot a bear. Now you're allowed to. I think people are going to find themselves in situations they didn't anticipate. Yeah. I know in Alaska, for instance, if you want to hunt a brown bear and you're not an Aska resident,

you have to go with a guide. That's probably a good thing. Right. Like, I think if we start killing the bears back, more people will get care of my bears. A lot of these guys are going to die. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the bear deaths will go up, without a doubt. Yeah, yeah. Already your best chance of getting into an encounter with a bear is probably hunting, right?

Like if you're not hunting bears necessarily, but let's say you're in bear hunting. Yeah, because you're moving around the woods quietly. You could start one. Right. So that's already against the advice for not encountering a bear. And then if you then you're able to shoot something and then you, let's say you're in a backcountry hunting, right? You have to pack, backpack the... Now you have meat.

Meat out. Yeah. But then now you're coming back to the carcass for your second load of meat. A bear may have found that carcass, right? Somebody might already be there. He might not want to give that up. It's his now. Yeah.

You find yourself in a difficult situation. Talking to difficult situations, Molly, I have to pivot to advertisements again. Oh, no. Yeah. Hopefully this one's not for Wolf tape. Pride is like love. You feel it in your heart. I are radio.

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We just contributed to it. We're the first people to do podcasts. Pretty, yeah, pretty wide range of podcasts. We're starting a trend. But this one's extra special. So how do we actually come up with a name Hey Jonas, guys? I honestly don't remember. I think it was on a call about what we should call it.

Well, we were thinking I'm originally calling it one of the early names of our band before Jonas Brothers was... This is how you guys remember it going down? Yes. I have a very different memory of this. We were talking about a thing, a bit for the podcast,

where people could call in and say, Hey, Jonas. And then I wrote down on my little notepad, Hey Jonas, and offered it up as a potential title for the podcast. But thanks for remembering that, guys. Listen to Hey Jonas on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

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Humor me with Robert Smygel and Friends from IHart Media and Big Money Players. Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smygle and Friends on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We are back. Let's talk, Molly, about safety in bear country, grisly country specifically, right? After this tragedy where this hiker died in Glacier National Park, I have seen a number of articles claiming that bear spray is, quote, a placebo or that you, quote, shouldn't bet your life on it.

Well, I think if you think it's a placebo, you should taste it. Yeah, it shows a fundamental misunderstanding, if not only how bear spray works, but also what a placebo. is, right? Like, you, three of the words in your title, all of the nouns, you don't understand. The bear doesn't know what it is. The placebo effect will not work on bears. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, the placebo effect actually does work on bears. You can spray things that are not bear spray, and they still don't like it. Oh, if it's been bear spray before. Yeah. It's just the, I guess not maybe the placebo effect. Yeah, it's a noise. It's the cloud. Like,

I guess it's not really a placebo. This is a bewildering, because it's startling to them. Yeah, yeah. But you're not saying it's a balser. The balser will not work. Not actually a placebo. The bear will not have sort of imaginary symptoms of bear spray exposure due to their belief. Yeah.

Yeah, that they have been bairsprayed. I should note that most of the articles are written by the same person. So what's his motivation here? Why is it? He's like, does he own a company that sells something that, like, rivals big bear spray? No, it's a person who, it's got a guy called Wes Silo. he used to write for Outside magazine and no longer does. There's an escalating trend in the severity of his claims about the lack of efficacy of bear spray

that correlates with him making income that is directly related to the number of views on the articles making those claims. That is really destroying the information landscape. Yeah, I mean, I think also people not knowing what the fuck they're talking about and being given a platform is also destroying the information landscape. Right, but both of those are at play here. really see this sort of escalating way people write because their income is dependent on clickbait. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. The clicks to cash pipeline is not helping us. I make the same amount of money, even if none of you listen to my podcast. Yeah, you guys, you could all turn this off right now. I'd still be poor. This is not true, right? I take really strong offense at this. I don't know.

It was quite a way to say that this is bullshit, right? Like, if Bear Spade never worked and couldn't work, He wouldn't be the only one saying it. Correct. There would be scores of people saying, I tried this had nothing happened. Yeah. Also, like, we have data on this, right? This is not a thing that we need to pull out of our ass. This is not a thing that we need to rely on individual anecdotes for.

This is not a thing that will be determined by the outcome of a single incident in Glacier National Park. This is a thing that we have masses of data on. There's bare scientists. I spoke to one, Molly. Oh, I can't wait to hear that. And I had a very lovely conversation. He has the two studies. And to be clear, where site sees,

and I don't know if it's just that he didn't read them or he didn't read them well or that he read them to the best of his ability. And this is what we're getting. I mean, scientific literacy is pretty poor. Sure. It's always okay not to write an article making claims about something that impacts people's safety if you don't know what you're talking about. It's always okay to be quiet when we're discussing other people's well-being.

that's fine. The adults talk about bears. Yeah, it doesn't impact your substack in the same way. Oh, it's a substack situation. Yeah, it's a substack situation. I would suggest that writing that bear spray is dangerous or useless is akin to saying that seatbelts are dangerous or useless. And that we can, if we look hard enough, find one person who was killed by their seatbelt. No one's ever been killed by bear's bray, to my knowledge.

I have been bears brayed more than once, didn't kill me. And when we were talking about this earlier, this is the most shocking. fact of all to me so far, bear spray is less potent than police pepper spray. I believe there's less OC in bear spray. I would have assumed it's more, but it's less. Yeah, I think the idea is... Because bears have such sensitive noses. Very sensitive noses. To be clear, it's still very unpleasant for humans.

Like I consider myself to have a nose of average sensitivity and having been a recipient of bear spray. It's highly unpleasant. Right, but I just, I thought, you know, I would have assumed you said, oh, I've been bear sprayed, like, oh, that's like way more hardcore. Sure, yeah, yeah, because a bear is bigger. But it's not. So the bear spray, part of the reason I think that it has less of the O.C. oil in it is that it has to be propelled out at a velocity that allows it to be used even if the bear is coming at you and the wind is blowing towards you. Right?

So the bear is coming with the wind. So you're spraying the spray would be, you don't want the spray to all be blown back to you, right? You want it to be able to get out to create that barrier between you and the bear. And it does, again, Dr. Smith studies have shown that bears bay does work even with an unfavorable wind, right? I will link to both these studies. Everything he's done, which I think is really cool because this stuff impacts, like, your safety in Gris country. Everything he's done is available publicly for free. Hell yeah.

Very unusual in the academic research space, right? But I think it's great because it allows you to look at this bearspe as a placebo article. And then you can go find the study. I will link it right here. and you can say, huh, sure seems like this guy can't read a study. And does he, has he read those studies? He claims to, yeah. He quotes them.

So it's not that he just isn't aware of them. He just doesn't believe the expert because of a personal experience. I think he either didn't grasp the table or didn't grasp. So again, like the person who wrote these studies is extremely easy to contact and anyone doing reasonable journalism would do so. Right. So I guess he's saying, I read this study and it's really. wrong? Or is he saying I read the study and it agrees with me? He's saying I read the study and it says bear spray doesn't work. It agrees with me. Oh no. Yeah. Yeah. He could have just emailed

the author. Could it just asked. Could it just asked? Yeah. So like there are incidents in the study which are considered successful and non-successful uses. Some of the non-successful uses are with a black bear when you spray it and it comes back later. Then it's still, the brown bear is not killing you in that situation, right? I'm sorry, a black bear. It still works. Like, efficacy doesn't mean permanent. Yeah, and at some point when you're making a study like this, you have to decide, like, what a... You're trying to create a binary relationship about a theories of things, right?

The other study he wrote was efficacy of firearms for bear defense in Alaska. It's worth noting that in the efficacy of firearm study, more than 120 bears died out of a data set, something like 250. None of the bear spray bears died. Oh, that's a lot. Right? Yeah, it's a lot. And I feel like it's better.

if everybody survives the encounter. Yeah. It's better for all of us if we use this extremely well-researched tool, right? And again, having read zero studies, I read zero studies, but I know only

1.1 persons a year are killed by bears. Yeah. So if this never worked and couldn't work, more people would have been killed by bears. Maybe, yeah, yeah. Certainly a lot of people

who use the best spray didn't get killed by bears. Right? None of them did. It is possible to use bear spray and be killed by bears, like, especially... It's happened to maybe 50 people. Resid, yeah. Residues of bear spray will attract bears in the, like... Well, that's unfair. Well, it's an interesting smell, right? And they have an amazing nose. So I'm guessing, like, they will come check it out.

And I know that, like, there are incidents where people have, for instance, use bear spray in the way that one might use bug spray, are you spraying their tent? That's not going to work, yeah. Yeah, well, you're going to bring them in. That's like saying I'm going to use this gun to protect myself by making a circle around me with bullets. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Smearing myself with the bullets in a circle around my 10. It's not quite cargo cult thinking, but like it's a, I know, it's like magical thought process, I guess. Like, that's not her best way works. You spray it out the best.

A homeopathic gun is where you just lick the bullets. Yeah, yeah. Let's talk about the things that you can do, right? Like, you can keep a clean camp. This is really big. Don't attract them. Yeah. So if we look at like Yosemite, right? Yosemite and that like Yosemite Kings Canyon, Sequoia Park system, you can't bring bear spray in there, right?

Oh. But you have to have a bear can. So I backpacked in that area. They have done surveys that showed that like most people were acquainted with best bear practices, but we're not following them on the trail. So it's not that they didn't know butters, they don't care. I think people, it's hard to like fathom a giant several hundred pound, half ton creature. it's going to come in and steal my cliff bars. Right.

But it will. And it's hard to fathom how good their smell is. Because they love a delicious snack. Like they're berry boys. They're berry boys. They're going to come get your little treats. Yeah, they love a high carbohydrate, like energy snack. They're endurance athletes.

They want to eat your cliff bar. If you're keto, you're fine. But they would like candy. But they love candy. Yeah. I know it would be unethical to give a bear skittles. No, they'll be wrong. So we want to keep a clean camp.

We're in bear country, right? That means stuff with odors. It's not just our food, but also like the, maybe the clothes we cooked in. We have a scented toothpaste, stuff like that. Wow. Yeah. Like if I had, if I was in the habit of using a shampoo that smelled like, I think I spoke to Dr. Smith about this.

Like he said, if I used apricot shampoo, probably wouldn't bring it with me. Wow. Because they just want to come check out that sweet tree. Yeah. Like, it's a, if you think that they eat berries, right? You make yourself smell like a fruit. Like, it's kind of on you. Like I get...

Yeah, it makes that. Like, Winnie the Pooh, he's just like following his nose. Yeah. Find a sweet treat. Yeah. I don't want to blame anyone for not knowing things. We're not all,

none of us are born knowing anything. And it's not like, they issue PSAs about bears every day. I bet there's a pamphlet at the trailhead. Yeah, there's definitely, well, when you go to Yosemite, you have to sign in with a ranger for a wilderness permit,

and then they'll give you that once over. But there are other things we would not do, right? I would not sleep alone in a tent in bear country. And there were two, of us had probably two tents, right? Like just gives one of us a chance to deploy the bear spray and the bear does come in. We can get bare fences. We can try very hard not to surprise bears, right? So I was trail running in Alaska last year in some pretty thick brush, right? I used a little bear bell. Yeah, it's dorky. But like... No, it sounds cute as hell. I'm going to look it up.

Yeah. Well, there's an unfortunate video that you'll probably see when you Google Bearbell of a hiker who thought the bail bell with a repellent. And so the black bear is charging him and he's waving his bell. Oh, just ringing the bell on it. No. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it sounds like people are purchasing these solutions, but not understanding the functions of them. Yeah. And like, I don't want to, like, blame people for that because part of the way we get to a place where we could destroy so much of our megafauna is so few people care about or understand it, right? That's an education issue that we can't solve quickly or, like, on a podcast. I think that, it would behoove anyone who's going camping in, especially LaGris country, right?

So in Alaska, Wyoming, not all of Wyoming, Montana, Idaho. And I've camped in those places. I've camped in all those places to learn about these things, right? Because it's not just a negative incident for you. Like, it's also a negative incident for the bear. Even if you have to bear spray a bear, right? That fucking sucks for the bear. I mean, I've been pepper sprayed.

And the bear can't even go, like, wash his hair with dawn. Right. Yeah, he can't stand in the shower, like, looking down. I don't know, I guess the positive outcome of that is that the bear will be like likely to not want to come around people so much, right? Because they'll associate this negative interaction with the bear spray. Right. So this seems like it's that it does work. And then also if we're all doing it, you'll have you to do it as much.

Yeah. Because the bears will leave us alone. Yeah. We have the solution for being in bear country, right? Like it is to carry our bear repellent. Unless the bears are like me. You know, I've been pepper sprayed by all kinds of cops. And I'm still going to go look and see what they're up to.

Just keep on tanking. I'm not a very stupid bear. These, like the Yosemite, I guess. They just keep spraying me. These people, why are they? There were some incidents where I guess brown bears got sprayed, charged the person. But like, as they were charging the person sprayed them and they came through to spray. But then as a spray got more condensed, I guess, I don't know, they knocked the person

over and kept on charging. They were like, okay, I don't want any part of this. Yeah. Which is obviously not a great outcome, but it's a better outcome. than you're getting more by the bear, right? Better than get eaten by bear. But, like, I really want to push back on this narrative that we should be all carrying firearms.

First of all... Most people, most people don't need a gun. Yeah, I mean, like, there are reasons to wearing guns. I had lots of them. But, like, defending yourself from bears probably isn't one, unless you're already very proficient with firearms. And even then, I don't want to kill a bear.

Like... But I just think if you're telling every casual... hiker who goes to where bears might be that they need to own a gun. A lot of those people would not have otherwise owned a gun are not good at handling a gun in a situation where they need to use the gun against the bear is going to go badly, but also...

Now there's a gun in their home that they would not otherwise have had in their home. And the odds of a firearm accident in the home are now higher. Yeah, well, yeah, infinitely higher than it didn't have one, right? So it's not going to work out for you in this limited instance that you think you need it for. Yeah, and then you've introduced

a dangerous... And now you have a gun you didn't need. Yeah. Like, it is impossible, Mully, if you are getting, if I am getting more by a grisly bear, and you bear spray that bear, I will have spicy eyes and hopefully survive. If you shoot that bear, it is very possible and it has happened that you will also shoot me. Because the average person, not a good shot under controlled circumstances, bear attack, not a controlled circumstance. Yeah. Like everyone, like, this is especially a thing with men, right, they will tend to overestimate their ability with firearms dramatically, in my experience. This is not a fuck around and find out a situation.

You don't want to find out that you're not very good at shooting as the grizzly bear is charging you. And even if you are very good at shooting at the range, you're not in this situation. Yeah, you're not. You have to deploy the firearm right now and we have to like... Your hands are shaking. There's piss running down your leg. Yeah, we're scared.

Yeah, you have to incapacitate the bear. Like, I've been in up-close situations with big animals. It's scary. Like thinking I'm going to die now It has a profound effect on the human body And it's not one that It doesn't improve your age It doesn't actually enhance your John Wick characteristics

Yeah So I would highly recommend that if you're going to bear country You get some bear spray Don't fly what you can't fly with bear spray So you're going to have to buy it when you get there This is not like big bear spray This is also an accusation that like big bear spray sort of funded these studies or that

This is silly Right? The Dairspray industry is not that big, guys. It works. It is statistically more effective than using firearms. It works. What, does it cost like 40 bucks? Yeah, not even that. And how much does a gun cost? A lot more than that. Yeah, a lot more than that, especially if you're going to actually practice with it, right? If you're going to get bear spray, I would suggest you get a, you can get a dummy. It's just got water in it and you can practice, right? There are a couple of safeties on a bear spray. I don't have I got one. I do have one here. With like within arms reach in your office? Yeah, I got one over here. Yeah, I've got my rack of stuff. my bear spray. But like, it's a safety on it and there's actually a zip tie when you get it to stop the safety coming off just to stop it like going off in the shipping container, yeah, or in the Walmart or whatever. So you're going to want to remove that, right? And then they sell packs, which has the water one and the spicy one. And you're going to practice deploying the water one, right? And like, that's smart. Yeah. When you're carrying your bear spray, if it's in the bottom of your

backpack. Oh, the bear doesn't give you that much advance notice. Yeah. So the bear spray is like when I was, when I'm running in places where there are grizzly bears, I wear a little running vest. I put it in the front here. If I have binoculars and I have a little binocular pack, I put it on the side there. I've done it on my belt before.

I've Googled bear spray and the pictures. Yeah. The pictures that are used to advertise this product. I got to see this. What's, uh, yeah. Well, how do I say? You can just put it in the chat. This is not a real picture.

Is this a real picture of a man spraying a bear? Because the bear is sort of enveloped in this cloud of spray. So it just looks like one of those soft effect paintings of the bear's silhouette in like a cloud. Yeah, it looks like a, I'm a big fan of T-shirts of wolves howling at the moon. Exactly. It's like that. It's a bear and an old man spraying. I don't know why.

If you're staging it, this is bizarre. Because that's not a real picture of that happening. I don't know. I don't think so because there's no bear body. And you can see this, you can see the bush, right? Like, it's just its head. They haven't bothered. It's very close.

Yeah. And the bear doesn't look too upset. It's kind of, yeah. That is a fascinating. Okay, so if we scroll down, there are better images of people using bear spray. Which is incredible, incredible product photos. Yeah, that is really quite remarkable. I would suggest everybody who is going into bear country,

buy bear spray and practice using it. Like, it's better for you. It's better for bears. It's cheaper than a gun. You can, if you want, buy a bear fence, the electric fence that goes around your camp. If you're camping in the backcountry, I think that's a good idea if you're in an area with lots of bears.

They weigh very little now. I'm by myself one actually after talking to Dr. Smith. Well, I won't because I haven't got enough money, but I'd like to. Maybe I'll hear from the bear fence people. you can follow all the best practices, right? And you're not just going to learn them from a podcast. You're going to look up the park system.

You're going to look at Dr. Smith's research. Ask a park ranger. He'll tell you. That's his job. Some of their jobs. Depends what kind of rangers are. Some of them are cops. The overwhelming bulk of evidence suggests that the way to go with bears is bear spray.

Until a bear kills an oil rig, we will have, we will continue to have bears. on a landscape. But it is something that we should, like, genuinely care about, right? Like, the trophic cascade is not as much of a thing as it was once made out to be. Like, I'm sure you've seen that thing about how wolves change rivers. No. You have to tell me about wolves, too. A whole other episode.

Yeah, well, fucking wolf management is a whole other thing. The bears have entered the discourse this week because a bear killed someone. We don't talk about it when someone kills a bear, right? like Alaska, they're culling bears from aircraft right now. And I'm not saying that like a human life is equal to a bear life, but I'm saying that... Hunting from an aircraft is such bitch behavior. I know. If you want to take a bear, do it with a knife like a hero or a bow.

Or, you know, do it Lewis and Clark style. Use a musket. That's fine. Yeah, yeah. Try it. Eight of your friends and a musket at the edge of the river and you don't have bears brace, your only option is to jump into the river. 20 feet off a cliff.

Just with a bear that you could have left alone. So, yeah, I want to, I guess, like, end by saying that, like, the outdoors isn't entirely safe, and that's part of what makes it beautiful. There have been times when I have been in the wilderness where I thought I was going to die. And I keep going back to the wilderness because, like, it's also one of the things that makes me feel so grateful to be alive. And it's okay if it isn't entirely safe. We know that when we enter the wilderness and we do our best to mitigate that risk, right? We plan. We take safety precautions.

We bring our first aid kit and our bear spray and we tell someone where we're going and when we're coming back and we do all this stuff. But we understand that there is some inherent risk. And that's all right. Like if we wanted to see wildlife and have no inherent risk

and have it be comfortable, we would just go to the zoo. Right. And the zoo sucks compared to the outdoors, right? Like I don't want to see a bear in a cage. It's undignified for the bear. It's so sad for them in there. Yeah.

Like it's demeaning to me to see. something demeaned for my entertainment in that fashion. Like I, I, and we can't comprehend animals outside of the habitat, I don't think. Like, seeing a grizzly bear in Alaska trying to eat salmon or seeing a black bear in California doing its thing,

having some berries, like that's cool. And I want you all to have that. I want your children and grandchildren to have that. And so, like, I think we should be very skeptical about people making safety-based arguments for destroying our

mega fauna here. You'll hear it with wolves, right? You're hearing people doing it with cougars, which is absolutely ridiculous. Most of these animals will not bother you if you leave them alone. Yeah, and like if very occasionally people have been killed by cougars who are not bothering the cougar, right?

Very occasionally. You know, a freak accident does it justify destruction of an ecosystem? People get killed by lightning, but we're not just killing clouds. People get killed by cars. We don't go bombing the Ford factory. I understand the desire to be safe, but like we will take away a lot of things that are really beautiful if we just want to be safe. But again, we're controlling the wrong variables. If you're

worried about people dying in unfair and, you know, terrible accidents, there are things we could talk about. Yeah. There are policy decisions that could be made that would save thousands and thousands of lives. Yeah. If you want people to be safe, then be concerned about free health care. Bears have killed 66 people. I bet that many people died today from not being able to get insulin. Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, there's a perfect example, right? Like, if you want to keep people safe, then think about things or we'll keep them safe. And I think we can, we can very easily keep people, bears safe, but the threat to the bears is us. That's it. The only other thing that kills bears really is other bears. And so it's on us, therefore, to advocate, right? Like,

the bears can't advocate for themselves. Luckily, they had people who brought that court case in 2019, but like, if we want to continue to enjoy the outdoors and the way that they are, we need to stop randomly removing shit. And bears are one of those things, especially brown bears, that it's very easy to whip up fear about, but I think we should just leave them alone. I think we should be worried also of sort of anthropomorphizing them. Like I see this sometimes with people and animals. Like, they don't exist for entertainment.

They don't see the world in the way we do, and that's okay. that they're animals, they have their own logic. We coexist with them, but like, it's not like a Disney animal. It's an animal which goes about the world using its own logic, using its own understanding, trying to pursue its own ends for its own means, right? Nonetheless, it is a majestic thing to see on the landscape and something that we should take care that, you know, we don't let corporate interests and people who find it entertaining destroy.

I would love to see a bear. Okay, we'll do that. We'll add that to our list, okay? Yeah, take me to see a bear. Yeah, I am going to take Molly camping. We will go to, we'll go to, we go to Yellowstone area. I've never been. Haven't you?

Have you not been to Yellowstone? I've never been out west. Wow, okay. I've got some friends who got a cabin outside the park. Maybe we could have a little cabin trip. Sophie said me to Yellowstone. We can go in there and look at the guys. Enjoy the Yellowstone ecosystem.

No disrespect to my Yellowstone friends. but that's a lot of tourists. Like, I ain't going outside to be around that many people. Yeah, like, there's Yellowstone-style nature outside the bounds of the park. You go there. Yeah, I mean, even if you're getting away from, you can get away from Old Faithful,

and that park road, and you can get away from people just fine. But yeah, we could go to Yellowstone to see a bear, maybe see an elk. Pretty cool. Elk make it pretty cool. I bet that's big as hell. Yeah, elk's a biggest shit. They're like a cow with horns.

Well, not the cows. Caves have horns. Elk have antlers. of mistake. But yeah, we could go to, or like that, like the greater, yeah, like outside of the park, like that Wyoming area just outside of Yellowstone. It's really beautiful. Be a fun place to go camping. Maybe see a bear, have a clean camp. Maybe we can find a way to, find a way to expense that bear fence. As I'm saying, we'll podcast from out there. It becomes business. Yeah, yeah, we'll podcast from bear country, proving that we can happily coexist with bears.

Thank you to all the ferret people, by the way. I can't believe how many ferret people contacted you. Yeah, massive outreach from the ferret people. So, yeah, if you are someone who can help me get on one of the ferret counting surveys, I will count ferrets with you. We will make a ferret podcast and we will change America's perception of the blackfooted ferret on your behalf. It's already working. You got me.

I love them now. Yeah, Molly's team ferret. Yeah, you can't see this because it's a podcast, but she has a massive tattoo. It's one of the big. It just says... Around the neck, yeah. Around the neck, yeah. And there's a further one in the lip, but it just says team ferret.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, Molly's become a ferret advocate. I hope you have all become ferret and black bear advocates. Send me pictures of your bears. Molly, do you know what Fat Bear Week is before we go? That is my favorite thing about Bears is Fat Bear Week. Okay. Sick, good. Yeah. Bears getting plump in the autumn before they hibernate is...

I mean, how could you hate them? How could you hate them? They're just roly-poly little guys hunting for a little sweet treat. Yeah, their bulking cycle is incredible to me. Like the way a bear just adds thickness in a relatively short period of time. It's remarkable. Yeah, it's powerful. Yeah, it's powerful. That's the power of salmon.

Maybe we didn't have trawlers. We'd all eat more fish. But, yeah, check out Fat Bear Week if you haven't. If you're not from the U.S., I hope this has been fun. Fun little diversion into animals that live here. They used to live all the way down into Mexico, actually. But now, sadly... Mexican bears.

Yeah, well, there are still Mexican black bears. They have bears too. Yeah, yeah. I got to look up where bears live. Yeah, they live... God, we could do a whole other one on the Jaguars that are being fucked by the border world right now pretty badly. But that'll be a fun episode up in, over in Arizona there.

Yeah, bears, pretty cool animals. Our friends don't kill them. Don't do it. It Could Happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app,

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That's probably what the driver who killed a four-year-old told himself. And now he's in prison. You see, no matter what you tell yourself, if you feel different, you drive different. So if you're high, just don't drive. Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council. You think you're in control until you realize you're not. As they're having this gun battle, thousands of feet up in the air, many of the bullets start to puncture the aircraft. I thought we were going to die then.

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