The Economics of Everyday Things - 7. Animal Urine

Episode Date: June 26, 2023

One creature’s trash is another’s cash. Zachary Crockett flushes out the numbers with a man who found profit in pee.

On a recent Monday morning, I found myself comparing aromatic notes with the true connoisseur of sorts. When you're in this business, you have a lot of opportunities to smell things. They each have a very unique aroma. I've often thought to describe it the way wine is described. Mountain lion is my favorite. It has a very unique burnt umber smell. The wolf has the darkest color.

The smell is rich and it has, I would say, notes of earth. You make it sound so great. Well I can't help it you know in a crude way. To me it's the smell of money. This expert smeller, his name is Ken Johnson, but in certain circles he goes by a different moniker. Well I'm known as the P-man. I started and operated Predator P.com. Johnson sells a product that is generated every day in huge quantities. Most of us think of it as waste. But were one man sees animal urine?

Another man sees treasure. It's really the ultimate recycling. You take something that would normally be just disposed of. It's really the ultimate recycling. You take something that would normally be just disposed of and put it to work in a way that's natural. For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crackett. Today, animal urine. As a kid in New Jersey, Ken Johnson loved the outdoors. The first chance he got, he moved

to one of America's most rugged states to study forestry at the University of Maine. After school, he stayed up there. He found his way into the ad business and eventually started his own marketing firm. But in the mid-1980s, he took on a client closer to his interests. It was a little company called Foggy Mountain Hunting Sense and Lures. Foggy Mountain was run by a local hunter named Wayne Bosphuits.

He was everything he would expect in a bear hunting guide. All right, he was big, he was rugged. Bosphuits' company filled a critical need. in a bear hunting guide. Alright? It was big, he was rugged. Bosswitz's company filled a critical need. In the hunting world, if you want to get close to the game, you don't know your hunting. The way you do that is you either attract the animal or you camouflage your human scent. A white tail deer has around 300 million ol' factory sensors. It's sense to smell 60 times stronger than ours.

That means the deer can usually smell you before you've seen it. To solve that problem, Basowitz enlisted an age-old hunting trick. He doused himself with animal pee. And not just any animal pee, it had to be something that didn't scare the deer away. Foxes are naturally occurring animals in the same territory as a deer, but they're not a predator of a deer.

So deer, when they smell a fox, there's no concern. Hunters use fox urine on their clothing and they can get closer to the deer. Now the more inventive hunters will use something as strong as skunk essence. Bosphuits started bottling animal pee in mayonnaise jars and selling it at trade shows. When he eventually decided to sell the company in 1986, Johnson saw an opportunity to expand. And with a little financial backing, he took over. At first, the business catered to hunters. Then, Johnson began to notice something strange. He was getting a ton of orders outside of hunting season. He called one of his customers and asked what was up.

He said, oh yeah, everybody around here uses the Keeprabbs out of their garden. That's a light bulb moment. I realized that urine is a communications player in the wild. It's how wild animals find a mate. It's how they protect their territory. and it's how they detect the predator. As it turned out, Johnson's entry into the animal pee business was well timed. The wilder areas were being developed, home suburbs, that sort of thing. And deer were wandering everywhere. And when they were looking for food, the shrubs, the garden were easy pickings. Between 1900 and 2020,

the deer population in the US grew from around 300,000 to 32 million. All those deer were wreaking havoc on newly created suburbs and rural developments. A Clemson University report paid the total damage that deer inflicted on gardens landscaping at $250 million per year. And that study only looked at 13 states.

Homeowners were in desperate need of a solution. And Johnson had just the thing. Coyote urine. Think about Deer. They come onto your yard. And there it is, the scent of a coyote. So there's a decision that deer has to make.

Is it gonna risk the coyote to get the food or not? These days, the market for animal urine has never been hotter. You can find an impressive array of pea products on the shelves at Big Box retailers like Walmart, Home Depot and Lowe's. On eBay, small outfits sell artisanal batches of private stock urine from their personal collections. Companies with names like the pea mart and sensational, move the stuff by the gallon. According to Jungle Scout, a tool used to track e-commerce sales, retailers sell around

$200,000 worth of coyote and wolf urine each month on Amazon alone, and Johnson's company controls a substantial share of that market. On his website, predatorp.com, a 16-ounce spray bottle of Caio Diurin goes for 33 bucks. It's one of his two best sellers. The other one, Wolf. The Wolf's urine is an interesting one that's grown as a major product for us over the years because of the coyote problem. Ah, yes, the coyote problem. Since the 1980s, the market for their furs has been way down. With fewer trappers on the prowl, the coyote population has tripled. And while wolves no longer live in most of the U.S., Johnson says says their scent in bottled form still makes and Wolf P. are Johnson's biggest sellers. But wait, there's more.

We sell fox urine for the squirrels and rabbits, skunks, chipmunks, bobcat urine for mice, moles, various small rodents, mountain lion urine for wild boar, javelina, armadillo, bear urine is a smaller product category, but in northern areas where you have animals like moose and the mule deer, Bear pee is very effective. Now, if you want to sell thousands of gallons of animal pee, you need a steady stream of product. The animals are in various places, zoos, game farms, refuges. They collect the urine with a floor drain,

and they ship it to us, and that's about it. It's not very complicated. The P is stored in 55 gallon drums and transported by the truckload to Johnson's processing facility in Maine. From there, it's bottled up and shipped to customers all over the world. So, who's buying all this animal pee? That's coming up. Ken Johnson says the demand for animal urine has shown up in some unexpected places. Our largest customer is our distributor in Japan.

He's been buying our products for 10 to 15 years now, and they use it agriculturally over there to keep wild boar out of the rice patties. In 2013, Johnson's predator urine even helped solve a problem at Denver International Airport. The long-term parking was infested by rabbits. A lot of the car wires are now made with soy and rabbits love the soy. We have a product we call P-shots, which are small canisters with vented caps that you can

put in your engine compartment. But most of Johnson's business comes from homeowners. They buy $100 worth of P to keep raccoons out of the chicken coop or discourage chipmunks from foraging for butter lettuce in the garden. This raises a question. If you want to protect your home from pests, you have plenty of options. Chemical agents, pellets, you know, fences. So why would consumers choose to spray their gardens with urine? Well, there's some science behind it. When we started doing this, we would get inquiries from laboratories that wanted to research how this works. The scientific conclusions on the effectiveness of Predator P have been mixed.

One study found that applying Bobcat urine to apple trees reduced ground hog damage by up to 98%. Another study showed that leopard P had no effect whatsoever on the determined spirit of small rodents. But some customers like using a pest control product that wasn't made in the lab. Here's an all natural product that takes animals' natural instinct and puts it to work for your customers. As it turns out, animal urine has a few other uses, too. People have sent bottles to their friends as a prank. They've sprayed it on storefronts

to keep people from loitering around their businesses. And they've used it as a form of retribution. We've had people send it to their ex-wives, to their ex-wives lawyers, or to their current-wives lawyers. For Johnson, though, the market for animal waste has been a golden ticket. It supported our family for 37 years. It now, my daughter and her husband are in the process of taking it over. It's been good to us.

For the economics of everyday things, I'm Zachary Kraken. This episode was produced by Sarah Lilly with help from Lyric Boutic and mixed by Jeremy Johnson. Are there ever concerns about transporting animal urine? We're very careful in our packing and everything because the mailman would not like it to burst open in his truck. The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything. Stitcher.

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