It Could Happen Here - Creature Feature Crossover

Episode Date: October 28, 2021

Creature Feature's Katie Goldin joins us to discuss the spooky and broadly terrifying effects humans have had on some adorable animals. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Spooky! All right, we're done. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show that this is on the week that this is, which is the spooky week of the year where things are spooky. Today, my guest, Katie Golden. Katie, say hello to the audience.

Hello, audience. Now say goodbye. Okay, bye, audience. Now tell the audience that acts of industrial sabotage are always morally justified in defense of the climate. Acts of... Wait, okay, so... Are you... Do you guys have a team of lawyers that I can access, or...

Absolutely, they say it's fine. They say it's fine if you tell people that. Then, you know, industrial sabatooi or whatever he said is cool. I love it. All right, everybody. I wouldn't have made that kind of claim,

but you heard Katie. So, you know, there you go. We've now made a full-throated defense of the Niger Delta Avengers. That is true. That is an upcoming

episode, Chris. Katie, what are we? What are we? What are we? We're all stardust, Robert. Oh, okay. Well, that sounds soothing, actually. Well, first, Katie of the Goldens

is the host of Creature Feature and writer for Some More News. You write for Some More News. You're the host of Creature Feature. That's right. Jesus, Sophie, you gotta remember these things. Yeah. Everything's always my fault. What are we doing today? What do you got?

What's happening? I mean, this is your podcast, but... Barely. I thought, all right, fine. It's my podcast now. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, hosted by Katie Golden. I thought we could right, fine. It's my podcast now. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, hosted by Katie Golden. I thought we could talk about animals, because I like animals. All right.

You got a spooky thing about an animal for us? Yeah. I thought, because the theme of your podcast seems to be, you know, sort of the future and how things could get pretty fucky in the future and i thought there are some examples of things getting fucky with uh animals in the current present that seems to it could maybe be a bit of a crystal ball for things that could happen in the future with climate change that is kind of spooky. All right. Let's do it.

Have you guys heard of the Saiga antelope? No. I mean, I've heard of antelopes and I've heard of the Saiga. And I guess I'm not surprised that there's antelopes in the Saiga. Do me a quick favor and just Google Saiga antelope and just take a gander. Take them on then okay as i i'll describe them to the audience while you're oh wow yeah they are kind of some of the cutest doofiest little ungulates in the world little they have the best little face i know it's weird it looks like just too it like just a big nose.

Yeah, it's just a big ridiculous nose. My God, that nose looks silly. They must be endangered because they look like they're terrible at staying alive. Their face is all nose. It's like someone's whole face was just a nose.

Like someone strapped an anteater to like an animal. They look delicious. I'm just going gonna say it i would hunt and eat them they kind of have like what they did with voldemort's nostrils in the harry potter movie but like long yeah they look ridiculous yes they kind of look like a star wars animal yeah some of them the their patterning makes it look like they have teardrop tattoos under their eyes, which I think means they've all killed someone in prison.

That's hard. They go hard. Anyways, I want one. Are you going to tell us something horrible is happening to them, Katie? Yes. Are these racist antelope, Katie? We're going to milkshake duck these antelopes.

As far as I know, they're not too racist. They have some problematic views on like, you know, gender. Abortion. Yeah. I mean, all antelope have really regressive attitudes towards women's reproductive health. It is frustrating. Yeah.

But these guys look like Star Wars animals to me. They kind of look like a Star Wars animal named like a grass honker or something. Yeah. They look extremely fake. It's amazing. They look like a guy you'd meet at the bar where the aliens play jizz. Yes.

Yes, that type of music that Katie's doing is canonically called jizz. And if you are a musician who plays jizz, you are a jizz whaler. Oh, right. jizz and and if you are if you are if you are a musician who plays jizz you are a jizz whaler and oh right the best thing about that is that i know all of the thought that george lucas put to that was oh someone asked what the type of music they play in the cantina is but jazz is a real kind of music let me just put an eye in there let's change the vowel it's jizz now well that's gonna be the day for me he didn't even put an apostrophe in it which I feel like is really lazy

it could have it could have it could have been j-is right it's so funny he didn't even the effort wasn't there

because but yeah these are okay sorry no I could talk about this for hours I just the differences between

J.K. Rowling and George Lucas as creators who both made very popular fiction franchises and want people to think they thought about them more than they did is absolutely hysterical. Because J.K. Rowling does that by creating all these convoluted backstories. And George Lucas replaced the A in jazz with an I and didn't realize that jizz was a thing. Right. What an incredible person. It is pretty good. Sorry, Katie.

No, it's fine. It's fine. So these Saiga antelope, a.k.a. jizz whalers, are found in the grasslands and semi-deserts in Central Asia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. They actually used to have a much wider range, but because of all the Roberts out there wanting to taste their delicious, adorable meat, overhunting...

Oh, my God. Yeah. Just that nose on a plate. Their population declined, and it's now limited to a small territory. That's horrible. So there's still enough for me to eat a couple is what you're saying.

No, Robert, if you try to kill one, I'll kill you first. Thank you, Gare. I'm going Saiga antelope hunting. We have to protect the jizz whalers. They look stupid as shit. They can't possibly be good at stuff. Actually, with that nose, I bet their senses are incredible.

They could do a lot of interesting things. Can we let Katie tell the story, you interrupting fox? Go. Sorry, we all got jizz-pilled now. Not so cool. It's okay. I understand the excitement about these guys. I do want to paint a mental picture for

the audience just so they get why people are freaking out. They have this elephant like imagine a little antelope and they're they're small they're about two to three feet tall about 60 to 150 pounds yeah they're little babies and it looks like you took like a cute little deer and just glued like a big elephant nose to it it's not as long as an elephant trunk, but it's sort of like a it curls under like an elephant seal nose stuck to a little deer. And that snout is called a proboscis. And yeah, it's a they're kind of a they have sort of a light tan white coat.

They can get really fluffy in the winter. They have these really huge tubular nostrils on that nose, and that gigantic honker helps them filter dirt as the huge herds sort of trample on the ground and kick up dirt clouds. And it can also act as an AC unit that cools the Saiga antelope's blood. So as blood flows through it, you have this spacious chamber and it cools the blood and it recirculates. And then in the winter, it can act as a space heater that warms the air before they breathe it in. So AC heater, yeah, filter system. It's really a cool nose, which is why it was absolutely horrifying when entire herds of the Saiga antelope started dropping dead en masse within days of each other.

Just like a biblical plague. So there are photos. All that meat. What? Sorry. Robert. Unbelievable. Unbelievable.

You're so embarrassing sometimes. Katie, I'm so sorry. world just all suddenly dying. So there are photos in Kazakhstan of these fields just littered with these white lumps. And when you zoom in, you realize they're all Saiga antelope corpses just covering the ground. It's pretty bone chilling. It kind of looks, okay, this is a little bit um it kind of looks like a cult death a mass cult death like jonestown yeah antelope oh boy i was gonna say when you go grenade fishing but yeah same kind of idea grenade fishing yeah what is that when you drop a grenade in a lake and then it kills all the fish and they float to the top so you can scoop them up.

Oh, okay. I thought it was like you were fishing for grenades. Fishing for grenades, yeah. Like running around a field going like, is that a grenade? Is this a grenade? If you go fishing in a lake where people go grenade fishing, you may in fact catch a grenade, but no. Right. Two grenades with one stone.

Well, kind of. I'm having this image of bobbing for apples, but you bob for the apples to grenade. Extra points. Careful with the lakes in Iraq. Is it because they've got grenades in them? Yeah.

Wow, really? That's how you fish, yeah. Oh, okay. If you're lazy. I'm still obsessed looking at these pictures okay so what caused all this this this nightmare plague that killed all of the all of the weird nose the gonzo antelope right the gonzo antelope it was kind of a mystery so in 2015 200 000 saiga died off in that year alone. And how many of them were there? Not that many.

I hate that stat. Yeah, it was like they wiped out the majority of the global population because they were already endangered. Yeah, they just like keeled over, died without explanation. And so researchers were obviously horrified and confused and slightly curious. Ooh, yeah. That's more than there are left. Yeah. Yeah.

So there are like 100,000 left. And so they started investigating the mass deaths, and they found that the cause was a bacterial infection of Pasturella multocidae type B bacteria, which is a really catchy name. And it caused hemorrhagic septicemia, which is a horrible. I looked up the symptoms. It's like internal bleeding and just it's like the worst cold ever. But also with your organs bleeding inside, which doesn't sound great. It sounds and honestly looks like Captain Trips.

Like the the the plague from Stephen King's The Stand that killed all of the people, like just this horrible plague that makes everybody bleed out and drop where they're standing. Yeah, that's essentially what it happened. What happens also with a lot of snot, like a of yeah that's also very captain trips yeah yeah yeah yeah i mean maybe that yeah yeah so neat fun so yeah what is thought to have happened is that basically this bacteria pastorella has often been found in saiga antelope large noses they're also found in other like ungulate noses that have big these big sort of proboscis noses and it lives in there but it's normally not a problem because the immune system is able to fight it off fine and maintains its balance. But the climate,

I don't know if you guys have heard, but climate's kind of getting weird. That is something I've heard of. This is the first time I'm learning about it. It may be changing from what it used to be a little bit. It's called change of climate. Change of climate. Kind of on a global scale,

everything getting slightly warmer. Yeah, it's climate hottening. Climate hottening yeah that's what they call it because of climate hottening this bacteria it had much more ideal uh kind of of an environment to grow so inside yeah beautiful proboscis of the antelope, you can imagine it's moist, it's warm, it's great for bacteria. It's moist and warm and yeah, it would infest inside the nose. Right, exactly. And so when it gets more humid on the outside, more hot and humid, that nose increases in temperature as well. And it became the perfect incubator for hosting this bacteria such that it overwhelmed the antelope's immune system.

And literally they just started dropping like flies from this infection, like an entire herd dying within a couple of days. When you first mentioned this, you're talking about how like they can use their nose as like an air conditioner. I was thinking like, oh, maybe these animals will be like well adapted to climate change since they can like self-regulate. But no, of course not. Of course it's not a good story.

Yeah. No. I think that's what's so creepy about climate change to me is the obvious effects are things like more fire. We get real hot and we die because it's too hot. But things like, oh, this means bacteria loves lives and life and like starts eating us from the inside out. Like that's not a really, I guess, intuitive consequence of global warming. But it is one of the things that seems to be likely to happen.

So it's really creepy. What's fun is when you started this and talked about like a whole herd of these antelopes dropping at once. I thought it was going to be like, Oh, another one of those like horrible sulfur bubbles that killed like a city's worth of animals, uh, in a matter of seconds because a bunch of ice melted. Um,

and I'm not sure which is creepier actually. This is worse. Cause like they died in like horrible pain. Yeah. I don't think the sulfur wasn't painful, but yeah, they're both horrifying. The sulfur is at least pain. Yeah. I don't think the sulfur wasn't painful, but yes, I mean, they're both horrifying.

The sulfur's at least faster. Yeah. They're both very frightening and it's also both things that like, oh yeah, that could, that could,

that could drop some people. That could jump right across. There's a couple of ways this could go bad for us. This is the thing me and Robert was looking a little bit into to put together

the first five scripted episodes of the daily is we, in the few books we read, there were, there were, there were sections, like large sections This is the thing me and Robert was looking a little bit into to put together the first five scripted episodes of The Daily. In the few books we read, there were large sections about how this is going to basically just make plagues be a thing forever now. Yeah, this is going to be hard for people to really get their heads around. But imagine a plague hit in the 21st century. How scary that would be. Just really try to get your head around that.

Global plague. People dropping. It's frightening. this is just the world coronavirus coronavirus is technically it's not a plague right because it's not a bacteria it's not bacteria it's yeah yeah i think it's viral but any disease that's gonna a lot of people a plague yeah like it's it's both both both like pathogens and bacterial pathogens with globalization can spread at a much faster rate than now with global warming there's going to be more breeding ground for literally new bacterias

and with stuff melting in the ice caps and all that kind of stuff there's just a lot of reasons to just assume that yeah we're just going to kind of live with plagues constantly being a problem now there never is going to be a live with plagues constantly being a problem now. Like it's, that's just, Oh, like we're there. There never is going to be a post COVID-19 world. It's just this forever.

COVID was just the first plague that really got through the defenses that were never going to hold up to the damage we're doing to the climate. Like there were a couple of plagues beforehand that like we, we were able to kind of cat tamp down on, get a lid on. And COVID was just the system actually finally shattering, and it's never going to get fixed. And the plagues are just going to get plagier, and it'll be fun. But on the upside, Katie?

On the upside, here's the math. Oh, okay, yeah. On the upside, capitalism. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We are back. I've unfortunately, I've got to the point where I'm scrolling through these pictures where I've now found the mountain of dead animals. Yeah, it's horrible. Yeah, it's real fucking The Stand shit.

Yeah, it's a lot of them. A lot of them dead, just in a giant pile. Like, imagine the cutest Sesame Street character, cuter than Snuffleupagus, just lying in heaps. Oh, and that big nose has to make him extra vulnerable to fucking horrible nose bacteria. That's what we were just talking about. I know, but it's sad.

It's just so sad. It's as bad as Big Nose. That's just what we were just talking about I know but it's sad it's just so sad as big nose that's just what we said I know Katie just explained that I know but it's so sad it is very sad this is not an isolated case that will never

happen again researchers warn that it's very likely stuff like this will keep happening with climate change. And they're warning that reindeer populations are at risk because reindeer actually also have a really, even though it doesn't seem like they have a huge proboscis, they have a very impressive nose. It's very spacious. It also actually works like a little space heater and warms up the air as they breathe it in. It's pretty amazing. But those same characteristics that are so beneficial to the reindeer now could

actually become very dangerous for them with climate change if this bacterial growth happens. So we're looking at potential risk to reindeer population. And there's also a lot of risk to farm animals as well, like for something similar to happen where this bacteria can infect farm animals like cows and other types of ungulate farm animals. And so, you know, even if people don't care about the adorable Saiga antelope, which I guess would be just psychopaths, murderers, you know, even if people don't care about the adorable Saiga antelope, which I guess would be just psychopaths, murderers, you know.

Fair. But like, you know, we also have very important species like, you know, reindeer that are a keystone species and also, you know, our farm animals that, you know are farm animals that you know yeah they're very important for a lot of people to basically how they live their lives are based around cultivating these animals and hunting and raising it yeah yeah yeah so i mean in my opinion every species even if no matter how obscure it is it is typically something very important for humans. It just, it's sort of the like seven degrees of Kevin Bacon. It's like, you don't have to get too far away to realize that Kevin Bacon, like his survival is really important to the planet.

Um, except instead of Kevin Bacon, it's like any animal. And that is basically all, yeah, all animals and all ecosystems, no matter, even if you feel like they're not super important,

the way our world works and how ecosystems work they're all incredibly intrinsic and reliant on each other so even you know that we're seeing stuff about like why don't we just like turn entire deserts into solar fields and be like well no because the desert ecosystem actually serves a very like it serves a very important purpose like you can't just be like oh deserts aren't important like no like you have an actual ecosystem that's actually very important to the surrounding area so we can't just bulldoze it and turn it into a solar field it's just sand

garrison which is coarse and irritating and it gets everywhere it gets everywhere is that an actual quote from uh from Star Wars episode 2 Attack of the Clones by Hayden Christensen playing Anakin Skywalker. The Padawan with the rat tail.

Classy. I love that. Yeah, his rat tail. Amazing. The courage they used to have in Hollywood. The courage of 2003. Really stunning. How could Padme not?

How could she not want that? How could you resist? It's like that Ween song, Every girl wants a guy with a rat tail. Yeah. I'm just assuming if that were a song, it would be by Ween. You know I'm right. It's called a love lover, I think, rat tail. Yeah, that's right.

That's right. So what's up with these animals? Yeah. You want some more animals? Because I talked about how those animals mostly all died. Oh, I'm just thinking, do you know what's happened with them since they all dropped? There's a whole 124,000 of them left alive. Yeah.

Yeah. That is bleak. Yeah, they're not currently all dying of this bacterial infection. Yeah, they're not currently all dying of this bacterial infection. I think like some of them are apparently outside of the danger zone, I guess outside of the area where they're more north. Yeah, that's about the best you can say for any species in 2021. Some of them aren't in the danger area currently. But obviously that's going to change as global warming progresses. So, yeah, it's pretty grim.

It's also, I think, you know, obviously when you think about these things, humans obviously don't have like these big snuffleupagus noses, which is really sad because I'm imagining us with it and we're way cuter. But we'd all be dead. We'd all be dead, but really adorable. Which would be better for the planet, so I don't know. But we would be way better at wailing jizz. And honestly, I feel like that's a fair trade-off.

We would be wailing the hell out of some jizz. Ah, man, one can dream. We would be nose deep in a big old pile of jizz. Oh, wow, yeah. How does the Bible quantify jizz? Cubits. Okay. A cubit quantify jizz? Cubits. Okay. A cubit of jizz.

That's what Noah said when he wanted to get the jizz on the ark. Yeah. God's like, Noah, you must bring one cubit of jizz. Back that shit in the cubits. Two jizz of every kind. Well, Noah was big into, now we're just dropping the pretense that it was ever about music. All right. Sorry, Katie.

No, it's all right. I asked. So, yeah, I mean, I thought another thing we could talk about is how animal folklore is really important to pay attention to and to kind of listen to as both information and warnings for the future. Because we often dismiss folklore as like, oh, you know, these are just spooky stories that we tell around the campfire. They're just legends. They don't mean anything. We're especially dismissive i think when it comes to indigenous peoples it's like oh your folklore oh that's so cute and quaint but yeah we listen

to it we look at it as we like really like infantilize it as like oh look at you primitive people still doing folklore which is extremely extremely disrespectful and also like very naive about how things work. When you look at how heavily engineered all of like the forests were in the entirety of the Americas, like from the Amazon up to the Pacific Northwest, it's a little like the architect of a building comes in and says, hey, you can't knock out that retaining wall.

The building's going to collapse and we're going to be like, ooh, Mr. Architect with his magic walls. And then the building collapses on us. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter

Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Son enter. Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You know, there's a bunch of paintings, like there's like these drawings from these drawings from, like, this is, like, the early 1600s of people, like, in North America, and it'll be these drawings, it's all these European guys standing on a tree, and what they're watching is, like,

it's one of the, I forget exactly what tribe this is, but it's one of the people, like, they figured out how to have, like, a fire that's, like, it burns it like exactly like like perfectly in this ring around the tree does not catch anything else inside of it it's like anything else and and it's funny because it's like you you look at this and it's like

okay like the people like the people who are drawing this painting cannot do this and it's like it's very clear that they're just like incrediblyuddled by this, but it's just sitting there. And then all the people who paint, all the European artists who do this, they're like, no, no, no, it's fine. We don't know how they're doing this fire control stuff, but we're Europeans. Ignoring everything other people say is going to go fine and great, and we're not going like yeah turn half the country into a dust bowl what do they got to teach us we figured out how to make boats that only kill half the people on them only half barely i mean that i mean that is a really good point uh controlled burns have been practiced by a number of civilizations for millennia. But when European settlers came and colonized North America, we're like controlled burns. But we want to sell the timber.

And that sounds dangerous. So let us handle it. This is all immortalized in the biographical song Timber by Pitbull, which tells this story in lyrical version. Please continue. And in Timberland Boots. And in Timberland Boots. That's right. Every Timberland Boot has a piece of the story.

Yeah. And Timberwolves, the I'm going to say hockey team? Yes. The hockey team is... Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Sophie's shaking her head i'm sorry sophie minnesota triple wolves are an nba team i'm sorry i apologize to everyone you should be uh but yeah i mean so uh in north america especially in California, indigenous American tribes practice controlled burns for thousands and thousands of years. The Yurok, Keruk, and Hupa tribes of California did controlled burns, which in addition to preventing larger, more dangerous wildfires by getting rid of dead brush. It also promoted new growth of vegetation,

like really important plant species like oak and hazel. It even had unexpected effects like supporting the salmon population, because as you did these controlled burns, created a block from the sun, so that the ash clouds, and then that would cool down the temperatures of the streams. And I know what you're thinking, that, hey, to counter global warming, we should burn everything so that everything is cooled down. The problem with burning everything, like these uncontrolled burns, is they also kill living vegetation. And it's just like it burns everything in sight and leaves basically nothing

and it burns off a huge amount of carbon stores so the great thing about controlled burns is it very slowly burns off these carbon stores in this dead wood and then it gives it time to regrow so that you recapture the carbon rather than just like burning all this carbon at once releasing it all at once and then it's like trying to play catch up it's like if you spill like a little bit of milk on the table and you use a paper towel and wipe it up it works but if you just like pour out the entire milk jug on the table uh you know just on like a sloppy Saturday, just pouring out that milk. It's like a paper towel is not going to do anything. That's like trees and carbon.

You know what I'm saying? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I do. I do. I do. I do pick up what you are putting down.

Yeah. They say, although I still think milk analogy, we should try a controlled burn on, let's say, Boston. See how it goes. Right right just give it a shot very um i've been there didn't care for it didn't care for boston don't see how we need it even north end yeah yeah didn't care for it they've got good cannolis there though i'm sure they do you know where else has good cannolis i don't because i don't got good cannolis there, though. I'm sure they do. You know where else has good cannolis? I don't, because I don't care for cannolis either. Okay. Well, all right.

I'm actually living in Italy, and so if they find out I've been on this podcast, I'm going to get kicked out of the country. Oh, you need to be very careful. It's filled with Italians. They're everywhere. Oh, you need to be very careful. It's filled with Italians. They're everywhere. If you can get up to the Alps, there might be some Swiss nearby who can protect you. But you're in dangerous territory.

I didn't realize there were Italians here. That's scary. Yeah. It's one of the main problems that Italy has. Yeah. So, yeah. So, but when basically indigenous tribes had a pretty good system of controlled burns in California. And then when, you know, colonizers came to North America, we were like, hey, stop that. In fact, we're going to make it illegal to do controlled burns because that seems dangerous.

And they focused on fire suppression and protection of timber stores rather than, you know, paying attention to the way people had been doing this for thousands and thousands of years and how it kind of worked. And so they just thought like, hey, if we just stop fires from ever happening, they'll never happen. But spoilers, they just started happening. They still happen and it's worse and they're out of control and they're big problems every year and learned nothing. Yep um but another thing is that we could have learned about controlled burns much much earlier if we had decided to listen to the aboriginal peoples in northern australia um about fire hawks so fire hawks are uhors, that is like birds of prey, who seem to either accidentally or intentionally spread wildfire by picking up smoldering twigs and sticks from a burning area and dropping them elsewhere. And then once they start that fire, they watch for all the little scared mice and rodents and lizards and just feast upon the fleeing animals.

It's extremely metal. That does sound very fun. Yeah. And so research published in 2018 detailed about how three species of birds of prey in Australia seem to do this. Three species of birds of prey in Australia seem to do this, but of course this is not news because Aboriginal peoples have known about this for thousands and thousands of years and have documented this in their own folklore. Yabadurwa, in which people act out birds carrying smoldering branches, which sounds amazing. But essentially, they are teaching this sort of naturalist history of how they have seen these hawks, these fire hawks, carrying these burning sticks and distributing it. And if we had listened to this earlier, we may have had more research on how maybe these birds of prey have been terraforming the Australian outback for thousands

and thousands of years. And that's really cool. And it may be really informative. But unfortunately, we kind of really only decided to start researching it in 2018 and those researchers started doing it because they listened to uh these stories from the aboriginal uh people so yeah yeah i feel like everyone should i feel like everyone should be more okay with understanding why folklore exists and what purpose it serves. This is something I got into years ago because of the lore podcast, learning about just how folklore influences culture and politics in a whole bunch of really interesting and weird ways. And that is something I wanted to talk about more because it's it's a thing and folklore is different for us now in terms of how we have like cultural stories but it's it's still the same it's still the same purpose and we just kind of deny it in a way that is kind of silly yep yeah i think there's often

this idea of there is a clear distinction between fact and folklore. And while it's true, like we can't necessarily just take folklore for at its exact word, because like, it's sort of like a telephone game throughout years and years, folklore is going to take on new shapes every generation but we really should take it seriously as a part of very important data set of like this is human observational history maybe some of it has been sort of uh uh turned into myth but a lot of it could be genuine observation that people are relaying over many many generations which i think is really important well thank you, Katie Golden, for talking about those very silly gonzo things that are unfortunately dropping dead. Yeah, the little gonzo climate change genocide. And then the other climate change issues around folklore. Where can people find you on the old internet?

Wormst. Interwebs. Whamst. Yeah. I got a podcast. I don't know if you've heard about those. It's called Creature Feature. And I talk about stuff like this all the time about animals.

It's not always about animals dying in horrible ways, but sometimes it is. It's a good mix. You know, it's like sometimes animals being alive, sometimes animals being dead. Sometimes some animals making other animals dead in interesting ways. Those wacky animals. Yeah. You can never predict.

Never predict them. And, you know, you can find me on Twitter at Katie Golden. That's K-A-T-I-E-G-O-L-D-I-N. Yeah. Where I just, you know, just post it on the Twitter. Doing that whole thing.

So listen to Creature Feature. Find Katie on Twitter. And shoplift. Sure. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. Sure. here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow Brass. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of rife. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America.

Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.