Stuff You Should Know - How Coyotes Work

Episode Date: March 10, 2020

The coyote truly is wily. Even after a century-long attempt to drive them to extinction, this close relative of domesticated dogs not only hung onto survival, but actually doubled its range and expanded its population. Coyotes are here to stay. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hello Vancouver, hello Portland. We're going to be in your cities Sunday, March 29th, Monday, March 30th, go Chuck. That's right, and this is Portland, Oregon. Since we've been to Portland, Maine,

we need to specify now. Oh yeah, that's right. But that'd be weird to go from Vancouver to Portland, Maine. It would be. But yeah, we can't wait. We've been to both these towns, they've always been kind to us, but we are performing in larger venues this time.

So we need you to come out and support us so we don't feel like dum-dums. And you can find out all the information, including where to buy tickets at sysklive.com. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's your other host,

Charles W. Chuck Bryant there. There's Jerry Rowland, our producer, and this is Stuff You Should Know. Coyote edition. So how are we gonna pronounce it? I mean, it's coyote, but coyote's kind of fun. But you could also pronounce it coyote, coyote. Sure.

There's a lot of ways. Yeah. So I say coyote, but I don't think that that's technically correct. You think it's coyote? Maybe. Coyote. I think I just swallowed my tongue.

There's a lot of good band names in here, by the way, I noticed. Oh yeah? Call them all out. Well, I'll call out the first one right away, genus Canis. It's pretty good. Okay.

That is the, coyotes are members of the genus Canis. Yeah, and Canis includes all dogs. Yeah, jackals, dogs, wolves. And dogs. That's why I said dogs. I know, but there's so many great dogs that you just gotta say it twice. Well, I don't wanna shortchange the jackals of the world.

Who likes jackals? Nobody likes jackals. That's right. You know? Screw them. Right. Say them once. As a matter of fact, let's go back and beep out

the second time we said that name. But hey, one thing about this, about family Canada, which all dogs belong to, it's a really old family. Sure. And it's native to North America. So like all those jackals, if you wanna talk about them some more,

that made it outside of North America, they started here. They didn't come from anywhere else. They started in North America. Coyotes is North American is Apple Pie and Granny and baseball. And dogs. And dogs.

That's right. We've done a lot of episodes that are dog related over the years. That's right. And I still haven't knocked out the one that I really wanna do, which is the first dog, like the first domesticated dog.

That'd be a good one. They made that movie, but I'm not sure if it had any truth to it whatsoever. Trained spotting. When that stuff happens, do you just say the first thing that comes into your head? No, first thing that came into my head was never cry wolf,

but I was like, that makes too much sense. Oh, I remember that movie. That was a good one. Yeah. That was a good one. That was when we were kids, right? Uh-huh. A Disney Jam.

It was a Disney Jam, but I think it was like a little, was it scary or is there something about it that made it like groundbreaking for Disney? I don't remember what it was. Yeah, I remember too. And then that terrible looking Call of the Wild thing is out now.

Why can't anybody just use real stuff? No, man. It's driving me crazy. Have you seen these Spectrum ads with Ellen DeGeneres on them? No. Apparently they're just using CGI Ellen. Because Ellen, if it's not.

I was making a joke. It's the weirdest makeup I've ever seen that actually makes her look CGI, but it looks so much like that. It seems likelier to me that it's a CGI Ellen and I don't understand why. Surely not. Prove me wrong, world.

Well, I'm thinking now, if I'm Ellen and they say, hey, we wanna shoot a bunch of spots with you, we'll pay you $5 million, or we'll pay you three and a half million for your image likeness, you could stay at home. I would stay at home. I would travel.

You would? Sure. That's true, a million and a half bucks. Yeah. That's a lot of dough. I would travel. Plus also, I mean, her spots in these Spectrum commercials are so small and limited

that it couldn't possibly take more than half of a day per spot. Yeah, and when you're a big star like that, you can dictate it. You can be like, sure, I'll do it. You've got me for two hours. Right, you have to pay for the teleportation. That's right.

You know? So yes, they call the wild thing, just stop. Stop, everybody, stop. Yeah. Of course, maybe Harrison Ford was so stoned, he didn't even realize it. That wasn't a real dog? God bless him.

All right, so back to coyotes. There are, the scientific name is Canis Latrans. Barking dog. Sure, boy, they make a lot of noise. We'll get to that. They're 19 subspecies. Generally, it has to do with their range, but sometimes they can be bigger or smaller,

different kind of coats, and they, one thing we will learn throughout this whole thing is, and we need a T-shirt that says this, is dang it, to the coyote cannot be stopped. No. Boy, do they persevere. There's probably no greater survivor. Maybe.

Currently alive on earth. That's a mammal, at least, than a coyote. Yeah, I mean, we will see there have been efforts over the years to extinct them on purpose. Like a coyote holocaust. Yeah, and the coyote just trots away with that signature bounce and gives it the finger. And is actually, good luck.

Yeah, and has actually expanded their range and swollen in population, despite an effort to drive them purposefully to extinction. Yeah. A well-funded, really. Yeah, at different times, too. Yeah. It's pretty amazing.

Yeah, it really is. I mean, I feel very bad for coyotes. I do, too. One reason I wanted to do this one is because there's coyotes in Atlanta. There's coyotes in every major city in America, almost. Yep. And there's coyotes around Umi's and my neighborhood.

And that means it's Momo's neighborhood, too. And so Umi went off on this, she found out about that and just started learning everything she could about coyotes. It's like, we need a new fence. We got to get a coyote vest for Momo, which she now has. Is that one of the spiky things? Yeah. She looks adorable in it.

They work for hawks and things, too, right? Yeah. I think they're one and the same. Yeah. Predator vest. Sure. But I think it's called the brand name as a coyote vest, I think, I think.

Like, we know a lot about coyotes because they're in our neighborhood. And the more we learn about it, the more it's like, I hate them in that they would take Momo if they had a chance. But I also do feel bad for them, too, because they are just trying to make their own way and live their, you know.

They're just being a coyote. Right, exactly. I mean, Emily and I saw coyotes in our neighborhood in LA, in Eagle Rock, on walks. And we saw, we've seen them in Atlanta. We saw one a few months ago at night. That looks very sick and was alone. But we will dispel some myths.

Not every coyote you see alone is rabid. Not every coyote you see during the day is rabid. And we'll get more into this, but they, if it weren't for people, coyotes would be out all the time during the day. Right. They're not nocturnal by nature. No, they're not.

They're diurnal. Or naughty by nature. Well, they may be. The ones that live closest to humans in urban areas or suburban areas have actually adapted their behavior and become, I don't know what you'd call it. I guess they are nocturnal, but they're most active at dawn and dusk.

But they're definitely not diurnal where they're active during the day and sleep at night. Like they normally are. They've actually altered their behavior. Which is just, one of the many coyotes are like, fine, that's fine, we'll change. We'll change to stay alive. That's right.

I think another urban coyote was another band name. I thought was good. And I actually looked that up. And of course, there's an urban coyote band. Oh, is there? Yeah. Speaking of urban coyotes, they actually caught one at Metro Atlanta recently.

Oh, really? Very, very rare all black coyote named Carmine. Wow. And they trapped him. The big ragu. Interesting. But I mentioned that trot. That's how you, like if you're out walking at night

or walking your dogs and you see what you think is a dog and it's got this, there's this little signature bouncy trot. You're like, oh, no, no, no, that's no dog. That's a coyote. That's a coyote. Yeah. So back to coyotes in general, they are wolf-like, but they have more narrow snouts.

They're not quite as muscular. Ed Grabinowski helped us put this together. He wanted to point out that they're bigger than foxes, which I thought was funny. It seemed obvious to me that they're bigger than foxes, but maybe not everyone knows that. Well, the first coyote that was spotted by Anglo-Americans, which was the Lewis and Clark expedition,

they thought it was a fox from afar. And then when they shot one and got up close, they're like, oh, it's a kind of wolf. Yeah, they don't look like foxes at all to me. No, but I guess it was like staying far enough away that they couldn't tell. Who knows? People were much dumber back then.

They were all smoking opium on that trot. I also like, would like to acknowledge a stuff you should know first. Okay. We had a mid-show producer change. Right. Jerry started out the show about eight, nine minutes ago. She said, to heck with this.

She's had it. Now, Jerry had to go do a call. And so, Josh... Josh T. Josh T stepped in. Welcome, Josh. Never happened before. No, thanks for doing that.

I wonder who's gonna finish up the show. I don't know. Our little pecking bird, perhaps. Yeah, okay. You act like you didn't get the reference. The dipping bird. Yeah, the dipping bird. So coyotes, bigger than a fox, smaller than an elephant.

Sure. They're nose to tail body length, usually about two to five feet. Yeah, they basically look like somebody took a shrink ray on a wolf and just dropped it by like 30%. Yeah, 20 to 50 pounds. They're fur, brown tan, kind of gray, kind of mottled.

And, you know, that's a coyote. Yeah. They eat mammals mostly, but we'll also, there are omnivores. They'll eat berries if there's a lot of berries. Oh yeah, they'll eat, they love fruit. They love figs, apparently. But 90% of their diet is mammals, supposedly.

Here's the thing. If you're just kind of like coyotes, cool, whatever, they're related to dogs and they're, you know, all over the place. I want you to just, first of all, listen to this episode, but things just start like researching coyotes. You will be astounded and amazed at every turn. Coyotes like fruit.

So do you know what coyotes do? They climb trees and balance on branches so that they can get all the fruit that they want. Look it up. Look up pictures of coyotes climbing trees. They take small animals like dogs out of the backyard so coyotes can jump over fences six feet or under and squeeze through slats of pickets three inches or wider.

They also dig under if they need to. You know what else? They do all sorts of crazy stuff. A coyote will say, hey, lizard, come here, your lunch. Yeah. They'll eat lizards. He will. So they'll eat just about anything.

They'll eat insects? Yeah, they'll eat insects. They specialize in rodents, small mammals, rabbits, that kind of thing, but they will eat just about anything. And one of the things that astounded me the most is, and I know we're hopping all over the place here. That's right. And I don't want this to just devolve into like,

here's a cool coyote fact, but it may. Hey, that's all right. They engage in this social behavior called fission fusion where they can be, they're totally fine hunting alone, living alone, but they're also totally fine hunting impacts, living impacts, depending on the kinds of resources available. So if there's like deer in an area, a coyote can't take a deer down on their own,

but a coyote, if there's deer available in the area, they'll get with other coyotes in the area. So you see that guy over there? And hunt in a pack. But normally they just hunt by themselves when there's like, say, lots of rabbits, because all it takes is one. But depending on the food available

and the resources available and how many other coyotes are in the area, they'll come into and out of these fluid packs depending on basically the situation. Like what you got to do? Yeah. Here's another thing. Like we said, they eat small rodents and mammals usually. But if you're an elk, like with a head cold, watch your back.

Because that coyote knows it. That's true. And he knows that you're not feeling well. And he might come at you with a buddy or two and feast on you for a few days. Because of that fusion. They've entered that fusion mode, and now they're hunting in packs.

Here's one thing you don't really need to worry about is a coyote attack on yourself. It has happened, but it's very rare. One of the most astounding things I've ever seen is a coyote that was sneaking up on a little kid, playing in their driveway, must have been in California or something like that. And the family cat comes tearing around

the side of the house at the moment the coyote is about to pounce on the kid and jumps onto the coyote, pushes off of the coyote. The coyote takes off. The cat saved the little kid's life. It's the most amazing thing I've ever seen. I saw one just from last night, a pack of coyotes was fended off by a cat.

And someone caught it all on their house camera. You don't mess with cats, man. No, I know. They're vicious. Yeah, so yeah, in that one, if you watch closely, you show me that one. One of the coyotes. She's all over the cat, she's basically watching

animal snuff movies for a while researching. I'm like, you have to stop this. It can't be healthy for you. But she'd just be sitting in bed with her knees pulled up to her chest, like they're not gonna get momo, they're not gonna get momo. But one of those coyotes, to get out of the way, the cat just jumps right up on this five foot wall

right next to it, like a vertical leap up onto the wall. Yeah, like it's not even there. Like it's nothing. But yes, cats don't mess around with coyotes. It's pretty amazing. So they live usually only about six to eight years in the wild. They have seen them as old as 10 or 15,

but I kind of wondered about dogs and like just a dog in the woods that never, a feral dog that never was claimed. Like if that really was a short life span as well. Probably. Kind of curious. Compared to a domestic dog for sure. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. If you are a coyote, you will choose your mate for life, which is very, very sweet. Yeah. Unless that mate dies and then they are allowed to go out and find a new mate. Socially, it's okay. But yeah, they mate for life.

They raise their young together. And the young grow up really quick. They usually have about litters of, I think I saw six on average, but it can be as low as three. I'm sure it can go even lower than that, but it can get up into the teens. Yeah, if they need them.

And this is why coyotes have proven utterly impossible to exterminate, thankfully. We stopped trying to do that, but for a very long time we tried to and we'll talk about that more later. But the reason why it proved impossible is because coyote mothers basically change the number of coyotes they have in their litter,

depending on how the population is expanding or can attract. It's amazing. And they do this. One of the ways that they figured out, they do this is that coyote howl, where you hear a coyote howling nearby and then some other one is off in the distance

and then another one even further off. They figured out that they are basically taking a census. How many you got? And the lack of a response will actually trigger a hormonal change in female coyotes who are reproductive age and they will have more pups than they would have if they'd gotten a response to their call.

Unbelievable. They have their, we'll talk about their families in a sec, but they raise their young in dens. Sometimes they will make their own den, but a lot of times they will take over the den of another animal and renovate it, make it their own, usually expand it, make it a little bigger. Put up a little macrame.

Yeah, maybe add a steam shower perhaps. Oh, nice. You never know. They return to their dens if they can, year after year, if it's available. And sometimes you will find them in weird places though, like a drainage tunnel or in the crawl space of a house or something, but those are obviously urban coyotes.

Yeah. And so their territory actually is, it can be really big, it can be really small, it depends on how dense their food sources are. Yeah, they're really flexible with how they live their lives. Like in every single way, shape or form. So much so, I mean, we talked about the fission and the fusion social structure.

It's just this fluid social structure. In a pack, the basic unit of coyote society is the family, the mother and the father, the two alphas. And then their offspring are betas. Yeah, this gets really interesting. And their offspring, again, depending on the resources, they may stick around and help raise another litter. Those are called helpers.

They may stick around and basically just mooch. They call those slouches. Yeah, slouches are the ones who come home from Appalachian state and spend a lot of time on the couch. But they're there, they're in the pack. But it just says here they're not contributing in any way. Basically, yeah. And then so some betas,

depending like if food starts to get scarce or whatever, some alphas will be like, you need to go. It's time for you to go find your own territory, your own range, go be a loner, go find a mate, just get out of the basement basically. Yes. But other times they might be allowed to stay depending on the food sources.

And that's where that fusion and fission kicks in. That's right. All right, maybe we should take a break here. And we'll talk about loner coyotes right after this. ["Loner Coyotes"] On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars,

friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

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called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

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on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Oh, step, you should know. All right, we're back and we were talking about the pack size, how it can shift depending on the resources. There are also loner coyotes. Maybe they're a beta,

they got kicked off the couch finally. Or maybe they are an aged out alpha. And like I said, if you see a coyote by him or herself that doesn't mean, maybe I should say itself, doesn't necessarily mean they're rabid because you get on these Facebook neighborhood pages and there's coyote sightings and people lose their minds and give out a lot of bad information.

It goes both ways. People are either like, say, kill them, kill it, kill it with fire as fast as you can. Or else other people are like, well, I've been feeding it for the last couple of weeks, it's nice, it likes to come play with my dogs. Right, or it's out during the day, it's rabid for sure.

Or it was by itself, so it was rabid. There haven't been big outbreaks of rabid coyotes in many, many, many years. Yeah, apparently they made a concerted effort to eradicate rabies among coyotes. And so not just coyotes, but I think mammals and the wild in general. And so they started basically dropping vaccines.

Dropping wolf bait. Basically, but vaccinated, would you say wolf bait? I don't think that's a widely known term. That my buddy Eddie used to say that for farting, he's dropping wolf bait. He might have made that up. So imagine if that was vaccinated, that's what they were doing.

And drop in wolf bait, that's good stuff. I gotta say, it's nice having Josh T laughing over there. Not Jerry's just permanent lack of care. Right, no idea. No idea. So they actually managed to largely get rid of rabies among coyotes from what we understand. Yeah, so maybe we should talk about the beginnings.

Go ahead. I was gonna say, but they do definitely carry distemper. And they can carry rabies, it's not to say like there are rabid coyotes. It's just not a big problem. And one of those Facebook commenters, I quoted saying, likes to come play with my dogs. That actually happens.

Coyotes are known to play with dogs. That's how Carmine, the rare black coyote was trapped. He made friends with a great Pyrenees in Smyrna and was playing around. And like they finally set up some traps in the yard and he fell for one of them. Those Pyrenees are beautiful dogs. They really are.

But that Pyrenees hopefully had distemper vaccines because just playing with the coyote, it can get distemper. That's not something you want your dog to have. No, not at all. So let's talk a little bit about the beginnings of the coyotes. They were, or at least what we think,

is that coyotes and wolves and then now extinct other kind of dog, basically, were around and they were sort of the starting point for what are coyotes and wolves. But they were apparently much more like coyotes and wolves. So they generally think that coyotes were sort of the OG, evolutionarily speaking. Right, right.

I saw also that there's a line of thinking that they descended from red wolves. Oh, interesting. Whose range still is over the Southeast and Texas. I think there's still a few around today. However they started, it happened anywhere from I think two million years ago to 300,000 years ago coyotes evolved.

And again, here in North America, this is their home continent. But as they started to evolve, the ones that first came along were bigger and heavier than the coyotes we know today. But the problem is they were in direct competition based on their size with wolves. And wolves are, and have always been,

much more aggressive hunters. They don't tolerate other aggressive predators in their range. So they'll go after a coyote. And so this is really interesting. Over the years, just from living with wolves, coyotes apparently started to shrink down in size so that they could fill an ecological niche

that had been left open, rodents and rabbits. Which wolves don't care that much about. Wolves want to take down like caribou and elk and they hunt and packs exclusively. They don't care about rabbits, right? So that left the rabbits to the coyotes. And coyotes kind of shrunken size and started going after that.

And then one other thing that happened to Chuck was that meant that because they were confronting wolves, the coyotes that were more aggressive and went after wolves or went to go fight wolves when wolves are around. They would die. They died out. Which left just the timid ones, right?

Yeah, so coyotes, that's why you won't find coyotes that are super aggressive these days. Because in order to survive the wolf challenge, that's another good band name. Wolf challenge is an amazing band name. Yeah, that's not bad. There's a lot of wolf bands though. Wolf Parade and.

Wolf Mother. Wolf Mother. Other wolves. That's not the name of a band. Other wolves. They might be. They might be. Yeah, so those are the ones that stuck around.

And like we said, coyotes are, that's just another example of how bad they want to survive. These days, they are listed as a species of least concern, which means we don't have to do anything. Nothing. No conservation efforts whatsoever. The only conservation effort that has been hung on coyotes is that there's a law

that says we are not allowed to drive them to extinction, which is a reversal of original policy, as we'll see. Should we go ahead and talk about that? Well, yeah, let's. So yeah, there was a policy, when was it, in the 1930s? Starting in the 19th century, I think. Oh, okay, where they basically said, I mean, a lot of it was sensationalist journalism,

but that basically the coyotes were the scourge of the earth, and they will kill every chicken and every sheep and every cow on your property, and your horses, and we got to get rid of them all. Yeah, so basically it was a response to Anglo-American ranchers, well, actually any American ranchers moving westward, farming cattle and sheep and all that,

and they were just being predated on by wolves. So really they went after wolves first, and they were really successful at almost driving all wolves to extinction because wolves hunt in packs, and so if you kill enough wolves, they don't have enough wolves to hunt in that pack any longer, and the remaining survivors starved to death, right?

So they really worked at getting rid of wolves, and it was really effective. Coyotes were less effective, but they started, the coyotes started preying on the prey that the wolves were no longer around to prey on. So they went after coyotes, and they went after them big time. They killed hundreds of thousands,

millions and millions and millions of coyotes over the years. Yeah, with like sponsored, I think they said, Congress give us $10 million for the next 10 years, and we'll take care of them all. Right, and about the same time, so that was the biological survey. Yeah, that was 1928. The eradication methods laboratory

of the Bureau of Biological Survey. They basically said, we're gonna start coming up with strict nine pills and like little misters that shoot cyanide in the coyotes face, and they were lacing carcasses with all this poison, and they were killing off all sorts of other animals too, but no one cared, because everyone hated the coyotes so much

that they just didn't care how many other animals died just as long as we were getting rid of the coyotes. But around that time, biologists started to be like, wait a minute, I'm not entirely certain it's a good idea to get rid of predators or any kind of animal that we find in nuisance. Like that's probably not the way we should be doing things. Yeah, and it also coincided

with sort of an anti-poison movement where people were like, wait a minute, maybe we shouldn't be putting poison all over our forests for just any old animal to die if it comes near it. Yeah, and that was around the 30s, the beginning of the 30s, but the government said, no, we're getting rid of coyotes. The ranchers' interests are above the coyotes' interests.

Yeah, big money, talking. Right, so not only did they poison them, they would shoot them from airplanes and helicopters, and still today apparently killed tens of thousands of coyotes by shooting at them from helicopters, like taxpayer-funded programs do that. Yeah, they definitely are still culling coyotes, and coyotes are still giving them

a little skinny paw middle finger. Right, so by the 70s, Richard Nixon apparently banned the use of poisons, had no idea about that. Look at him. Signed the Endangered Species Act of 1973, and that gave the coyotes enough breathing room to basically say, okay, we're not gonna go extinct, but here's the thing, because we were so successful

at wiping out wolves, the coyotes, which had been limited almost exclusively to the Southwestern United States, started to spread, and where the wolves had once been, coyotes started popping up in places they'd never been seen before. Yeah, Southeastern United States, they've been spotted in Central America at this point.

They were found in 1940 on the Apostle Islands in Wisconsin, which is at least from what I could tell, a half a mile swim from the mainland. Amazing. And apparently they're pretty good swimmers too. And then they started to move into the suburbs, and then they started to move into the cities, and now today there's a guy at Ohio State

named Stanley Gertt, who specializes in studying coyotes in Chicago, downtown Chicago, has hundreds of coyotes living in alleyways and crevasses and all sorts of places right out of sight of human beings. And they just come out at night, and they've learned how to navigate traffic, and just basically stay out of sight.

Oh, if you look, if you just type in urban coyotes to your favorite search engine and look under images, there are pictures of coyotes in the middle of strip malls and with casinos behind them, and they're just everywhere. I'm surprised I haven't seen one in Times Square at this point. Wasn't it in heat where they show that coyote crossing the street or crossing the highway?

I haven't seen that in so long. Pretty sure it's in heat. Good movie. Yeah. Should we take another break? Let's do it. All right, more coyote speak, right after this. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s, called David Lasher

and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to

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bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So just to point this out one more time, if you remember from our Lyme Disease episode, we concluded that if we hadn't a wiped out wolves, ticks wouldn't have been able to take over and expand because the deer population wouldn't have exploded.

That's right. There would not be coyotes in Chicago right now if the wolf population was stable in the United States or North America. Yeah, and coyotes also were able to live in, and are able to live in urban environments whereas wolves could not. Oh, no way.

And so they really were basically like, hey, we'll go where the wolves won't go. We'll eat what the wolves won't eat. We'll hunt by ourselves because the wolves can't. And look at us, we're going to thrive. Yeah, and without wolves, there's nothing to keep them in check, to keep their population in check. No, angry Facebookers, that's it.

Basically. So that whole eradication campaign has been put to the side. There's definitely still lots of coyotes that are killed every year. Yeah, I think between 2006 and 2011, they killed more than half a million coyotes legally. I saw that there's a half a million that are killed a year.

Still? Yeah, like one a minute every year. I've also seen 35,000. I don't know if it's just certain divisions are responsible for like half a million. Or maybe certain years they ramp up the efforts more than others. I don't know.

But there are definitely still a tremendous amount of coyote deaths. But as we've seen, coyotes have been extremely successful in the face of this extermination campaign, just by reproducing, depending on the local population. Yeah, and if you're a rancher, you don't have to be a part of some program. Like you're taking care of things in the rancher way,

which is traps, guns, poison. Yeah, there's no laws protecting coyotes whatsoever. Again, the only law, as far as I know, I think is part of the Endangered Species Act that says we're not allowed to drive coyotes to extinction. But that's it. You can kill a coyote. The only things keeping you from shooting a coyote

like in city limits are gun ordinances, basically. You can kill a coyote any way you want. But here's the thing. Put a pill over its face. Go visit in the hospital. But the thing is, is what they're starting to figure out now is because they're so successful that you don't actually want to kill them.

Killing them has this ripple effect through their society where they start reproducing more pop. It takes them stronger. And here's the other thing. If the coyote is still not, if it's not acting aggressively towards humans, if it hasn't started to take pets, if you just know it's in the area,

but it's trying to keep its distance, you may actually be better off with that coyote. Right. Because if you get rid of that coyote, another coyote is going to move in. And that coyote might be much more aggressive than the last one you just got rid of. Yeah, like if you've got a decent neighbor,

maybe that's good enough. So that's kind of like the idea that's dawning over people with coyote management is coyotes aren't going anywhere. Right, we tried. They're staying put. And the best you can hope for is one that keeps its distance and is afraid of humans.

Yeah, which is generally what's going on in urban areas. When talking about ranchers, the reason they're doing this is not just because they hate coyotes, is that they lose a lot of animals due to these predators. That just sounded so mean, these predators. It's hard to get good stats, but the USDA said in 2015, there was self-reporting, which you always got to kind of wonder, of 33,000,

a little more in change of adult sheep, 84,000 lambs lost to coyotes, and again, the self-reported, so take it with a grain of salt. But they do lose a lot of animals and chickens and things like that. Right. I've gone on my soapbox before about keeping your cats inside. Not going to do that again, except to say,

keep your cats inside. Yeah, if you have like, you know, you're on the fence about keeping your cats inside, you just watch some of the videos that you may see. Yeah, or just cats being taken. Do I want my cat to live several years longer? Right. Because the statistics show that outdoor cats don't live as long.

And not just that, not just with cats, too, but also with dogs. If they're coyotes in the area, and there's a really good chance there are no matter where you live in the US, you should not leave your small dog, in particular, outside unattended. You basically let them out, hang out with them, and then let them back in. You definitely don't leave them out at dusk or at dawn

by themselves or overnight. That's right. We said you don't need to worry too much about being attacked as a human. There were a couple of kind of grizzly cases, one that's just very difficult to even talk about, frankly, in 1981. A little three-year-old girl was dragged from a driveway

in California. And the dad did rescue her, but she died as a result of her injuries from that fracas. In 2009, there was a really strange thing in Canada where a 19-year-old woman was stalked and killed by at least two coyotes while hiking in the middle of the day. And this is apparently the only adult human killed by coyotes on record.

So yeah, and the only explanation for that that I could possibly come up with is that she was around their den. It was around their pup raising time. Right. Say, spring and summer is a pretty bad time to be around a coyote. They get real defensive of their turf.

And then thirdly, that those were mated with wolves. Interesting. Because when the coyotes will mate with dogs, they'll mate with wolves. It's not like super widespread, but it does happen in producing coy dogs and coy wolves. But the coy wolves in particular can be much more aggressive than your standard coyote.

Yeah. So I wonder if those three factors played a role in it. Probably. It was definitely an outlier. It's very, I mean, it's sad no matter what. But that girl also, she was like an up-and-coming country singer on the verge of breaking out. Oh, really?

Taylor Mitchell? Yeah. Wow. So they say, like we said, that these kill coyote programs don't even work that well. And there are statistics to back up the fact that non-lethal methods of coyote control are more effective, which we're talking about scaring them,

like wind chimes and air horns. They're really skiddy and jumpy. So if you make a lot of noise in front of a coyote, they're probably going to bolt. Yeah, it's called hazing. Yeah. And you don't like, any time you see a coyote around your area, really anywhere, just be a good neighbor,

you want to haze them. You don't know my house. Do not just let it happen. Just don't just let it pass by. Like you need to take that opportunity to haze them to keep them feeling insecure. Drink! The more secure a coyote feels, the more

audacious and brazen they're going to become coming into your yard, trying to take your dog or your cat. So you want to haze them every chance you get so that they know to stay over there. This is their turf, this is your turf, right? That's right. So if you have an umbrella, you want to open the umbrella. This says to pick up your small dog.

Oh, yeah, sure. And throw it at the coyote. I've also read you don't want to do that because you make yourself small when you do that. And when you're hazing a coyote, you want to make yourself as big as possible. What do you mean you make yourself small? When you squat down to pick up your dog,

you seem smaller than you do standing up with your arm spread. Well, but do it very quickly. Well, but the better thing to do is keep your dog on a non-flexy lead, like a straight leash. No stink, anyway. It's no more than like six feet in length. And just pull it back close to you while you're waving your arm and shouting at the coyote

to go away. Yeah, and I also thought it was funny that Ed pointed out that even if you have a big dog that could kill a coyote, like is someone going to say like, oh, I think you can take him. Go. Get him, Zeus. Yeah, maybe not.

Some people would. No, you never know. Have you seen those Irish wolf hounds? Sure. They're like the largest dogs. Yeah, wolf hounds. They're like bred to take on wolves. So they could take on a coyote.

I could see that having that temptation be like, you know, my dog really could take on this coyote. Maybe. What did I, oh no, that was Dingo's that I petted in Australia. Of course they weren't coyotes, not North America. But Dingo's were a little, they weren't dogs either. And it was. Were they like foxes?

No, I mean, they look like dogs, but when you're around them and this was at a place where you can hold koalas and stuff like that, it was obvious that it's not a dog. No, they're wild dogs, right? Well, I don't even think they're wild dogs or maybe. You keep talking. They're totally related. But I just remember getting the sense.

Scotty and I both did, my friend that was with me, whom you know. They just, there was a certain, the way they carry themselves. I'm just like, you're not a dog. It literally is a dog. Canis lupus dingo. So it's a subspecies of like dogs. Yeah. But what I'm saying, not a dog, like not a domesticated dog.

Yeah, no, I got you. It's a wild dog. Yeah, you can just tell the difference. Yeah. And I'm sure the same is true with coyotes because coy dogs, like you said, are things. Look at that cute little dingo. Coy dogs are, and coy puppies are super adorable.

And technically, you can raise one. And even a full coyote, if you get it as a puppy, you could have it as a pet. This is a really bad idea. It's not a good idea because they are coyotes and the coyote is going to coyote. It has happened. There are, you know, you see those eccentric people out there

that have like a pet coyote. It's a thing, but it's just not a good idea. They're unpredictable. Yeah, you don't want to like get a cat companion for them. In the United States, so the coyotes image has really gone through some weird transitions. Early on, it had a really bad reputation. It apparently was made way worse by Mark Twain

when he wrote Rough in it in 1872. Oh, really? There were a few pages dedicated to how lowly a coyote is. And everybody was like, yeah, we hate coyotes from that point on. But that actually followed in partially this view that had been around for ages that Native Americans had of coyotes.

Not necessarily that it was a lowly animal, but that it was a trickster, kind of like a brer rabbit type. I think so. But then he was also in some groups, like the creator god, the creator deity. There's all sorts of different roles that the coyote played in Native American mythologies because there were so many different Native American

mythologies. But it was very prominent in Southwestern tribes mythologies. And very frequently, it was a trickster. Very frequently. Yeah. Good stuff. Yeah.

I don't have anything else. I don't believe I do either. If you see a coyote, haze it. Really shouldn't kill it. No. But make sure that it's kept on its feet and insecure. That's right. Your pets will thank you.

If you want to know more about coyotes, go look up a coyote standing in a tree, and that will really set you off. Since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this grizzly trigger warning email. It has to do with our body under the bed episode. So if you're not into listening to this kind of stuff, tune it out.

Hey, guys, Listen to the Body Under the Bed episode. And I was reminded of a similar awful case in Jacksonville, Florida, where I live in 1998 in my neighborhood. An eight-year-old girl, Maddie, disappeared while playing outside one afternoon in her yard. Long story short, her neighbor, Josh Phillips, who was 14 at the time, was playing with her and accidentally hit her in the head.

She's with a baseball bat injuring her. I looked into this. Apparently, the story was she threw the ball, he hit the ball, and the ball hit her in the face. Oh, man. She started bleeding and crying. And this is me talking now, not the email. He freaked out because his dad was an abuse of alcoholic.

And he was afraid his dad was going to come home and see what he'd done. So he panicked back to the email. He ended up killing her to keep her quiet and stashing her body in the cavern beneath his waterbed on the second floor of his house. In the eight days that follow, a massive community effort ensued to locate her.

And Josh, her murderer, even participated in this handing out flyers. He slept in that bed for seven nights over her body. Police had even searched the home several times. And the odor in his room was attributed to many pet birds and cages he had, and a typical 14-year-old boy funk. Not a bad band name either.

She was discovered when they searched. That's a terrible band name. 14-year-old boy funk? Typical 14-year-old boy funk, yeah. Well, no, I just think boy funk, maybe. No, no, that's good. I take it all back. All right.

She was discovered when they searched the home again and noticed a stain on the ceiling, on the floor, below his room. I thought it was a blood stain, but I looked it up. I think it was a leak from the waterbed and stain. Oh, thank God. And that fortuitously led to finding her. He remains in prison, which has always

been a big debate here when it comes up for parole, which just recently happened. How old is he now, does he say? I looked it up. I think this was in 98, and he was 14 then. Oh, wow. Wow, he's been in prison that whole time, huh? Yeah.

And it's a very tough thing, because his father was an abusive alcoholic. He reacted because he was afraid that he was going to come home and find him out and freaked out and hit this girl with a baseball bat, put her under the bed, and when he found that she was still making noise, this is where it gets really bad. He stabbed her 11 times and killed her.

Oh, dude. So it is just a sad, sad, tragic case all the way around. That is from Mary. She said, I love the show and have my husband hooked now, too. She said, the trauma then, emotions of those eight days is something I will never, ever forget. I'll bet. Yeah, very tough case.

I don't know if thanks is appropriate, Mary, but I can't think of anything else to say. Yeah, I don't even know why I decided to read that one. That was really sort of. It really caught my attention. Yeah, I can see how it struck. Well, if you want to get in touch with us like Mary did, don't. If you want to, anyway, you can send us an email

to stuffpodcast.iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.