The Joe Rogan Experience - #2213 - Diane K. Boyd

Episode Date: October 15, 2024

Diane K. Boyd is a wildlife biologist who has devoted decades to studying wolves. She is the author of "A Woman Among Wolves: My Journey Through Forty Years of Wolf Recovery." www.dianekboyd.com https://greystonebooks.com/collections/frontpage/products/a-woman-among-wolves Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Shrain by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. What's up? How are you? I am great. Long flight in from Montana, but I'm great. Thank you.

Well, it's very nice to meet you. And I really enjoyed you on Steve Rinell's podcast as well. Oh, good. Oh, good. You got to watch it. Yeah, Steve, well, Steve made the introduction. Yes. He told me I have to have you on because he knows how fascinated I am by wolves.

I'm not going to lie. I'm not going to lie. I'm not going to lie. I'm not going to well Steve made the introduction. Yeah. He told me I have to have you on because he knows how fascinated I am by wolves. So I'm really excited to talk to you. Thanks and I'm excited too because I thought well you got, we're both hunters, we're both dog lovers, you got an interest in wolves. It's all good. How did you start getting interested in wolves and start working with wolves? Well I grew up in Minnesota and probably tell from the wolves? Well, I grew up in Minnesota, and probably tell from the Fargo accent, but I grew up in Minnesota, and back in the 60s and 70s when I was thinking about a career, Minnesota was the only state in the lower 48 that had wolves, with the exception of a few, like 25 maybe in Iowa, a couple here and there in Wisconsin.

And so I was interested from the beginning with that. And then when I went to the University of Minnesota, Dave Meach, who was like the god of the wolf world, his office was on my campus. So I just stopped by and kept bugging him. I wouldn't go away like a good parasite, persist, persist, persist. Why wolves? Why were wolves so interesting to you? You know, I'm just just I'm kind of a wildlife person they're the ultimate in a really wild and smart animal they're carnivore they're social like people and I think I was denied having a dog most of my life

growing up till I was about 15 so I had this come this passion for canines in general. I love dogs. I do too. I love them. And I love wolves. I'm so fascinated by them. And I'm so interested in the whole history of them in this country, how they were sort of eradicated from most of the Western States and the reintroduction of them. So you were there for all of it, right? So when you first started, they had pretty much been wiped out except, as you said, in Minnesota.

You said Idaho was the only other place that had them? No, Isle Royale, which is an island in Lake Superior. It's actually technically part of Michigan. They walked over on the frozen Lake Superior ice in the late, like, 1949, 50s early, and they stayed and they got seated there and they had endless amount of moose to kill and eat. So they were kind of a wolf paradise with that. And is it still like that there? Yes, and the populations of wolves and moose go up and down because you know in nature

nothing is here. We always want it to be here but it's always doing this. And yeah they're doing there and then interestingly when they arrived they migrated on their own power. There was very little immigration. There was a couple of wolves documented showing up here and there, but apparently genetically there was no influx of new genes. So the wolves that came and went didn't breed. And eventually they became so inbred, they started having physical anomalies. And eventually, just a few years ago, four or five years ago,

they got down to just a father, daughter team, and only two wolves left, and it was over. And so they wouldn't breed, because they don't breed close relatives generally. So they just did a reintroduction to IORL, too, that's been relatively new, just a handful of years. So they had to reboost the population if they wanted to keep them going,

or wait for the lake to freeze again, which may or may not happen in our lifetimes, you know? So when they reintroduced them, this is one of the sticking points about the reintroduction to Yellowstone. A lot of people that were against it were saying that they reintroduced a different size wolf, that they reintroduced wolves from Canada. Is that true? Sort of? No. So in my book I've got a chapter called Slaying the Super Wolf and so

people call these wolves super wolves because they say that they're not native, they're Canadian super wolves and they weigh 170 pounds and it goes on and on and on. But I documented a wolf that I caught in the Glacier Park area, wolf 8551, and we just had VHF collars. We didn't have satellite collars in those days. And she hung around for a while and then she just disappeared. And seven months later, the British Columbia Environmental Ministry Game Warden called me, says, we got one of your wolves killed. Do you want to call her? Yes, please.

Where is it? Puskupe. I said, oh, where is that? Well, it turns out that is 540 miles north of Glacier Park in seven months. So we didn't know if the guy, a farmer shot it in July. If they hadn't shot it, we would never have known what happened to her. But if she would have gone south instead of north, she'd have been about a hundred miles south of

Yellowstone Park. So clearly they have the ability to disperse that far. The other interesting thing about that wolf is when she went north, they got the reintroduced wolves from two areas from Hinton in Alberta and Fort St. John's in British Columbia and she dispersed past the Hinton population and ended up almost at where the Fort St. John's wolves were so this little wolf, 80-pound wolf, showed us that it's one continuous population from Yellowstone, almost to the Yukon.

Wow. It's connected because it's a walkabout for a wolf. It's not a big deal. We just didn't back then, we didn't have the tools to document kind of those long dispersals. But I just read this week that a wolf that showed up in Colorado that was shot this year, they just did the DNA on it apparently pretty recently. And it was from the Midwest. Think about that, to Colorado. Wow.

Yeah. So Midwest like Wisconsin? Yeah. Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan. It just said the Great Lakes region. It didn't identify because they're all kind of the same, but it was not a Western wolf. It was not from Wyoming or Montana. Really interesting. Is there any speculation as to why she went so far north? This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Pressure can be a good thing, like on the mat or in the ring. It can push you to do your best, break personal records, and make smarter choices.

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Download FanDuel and get more from North America's number one sportsbook. Please play responsibly. 19 plus and physically located in Ontario. Gambling problem call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. This episode is brought to you by Uber Eats. You can now get almost anything you need for the season delivered with Uber Eats. What do I mean by almost? Well, you can't get a snowboard delivered, but you can get a charcuterie board. A hot sauna? That's a no. But a hot soup?

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Well that's a yes. Uber Eats can definitely get you that. So, whatever you're looking for this season, know that you can get almost, almost anything delivered with Uber Eats. Download the Uber Eats app today to order now. Alcohol in select markets, product availability may vary by region. See app for details." So she was originally from a northern population. The wolf that I'm talking about, 504. Yeah, she was born in Glacier Park.

We caught her first as a pup, so we know where she was born, we know the den. And then at about a year and a half of age, almost two, she dispersed that far. And she didn't have to go that far. I mean, if she wanted to find other wolves and start a pack or join a pack, she could have gone any direction, 50 or 100 miles, and found other wolves. You know what?

You tell me why wolves do what they do, and I'll buy a lottery ticket. I mean, I don't know how these things work. I just don't know. So is that common that they would travel that far? It's becoming more and more common. So now that we have satellite collars, we've been using those for years, we can track them without having to stay in touch physically with them. In the old days, we just had VHF collars and you had to physically be there within range,

like from an airplane or track them. But now that we got satellite collars, I mean my gosh we've got wolves going from Washington to Montana and one of the wolves from Wyoming went all the way down to Arizona to just north of the Grand Canyon. Wow. With the satellite collar was tracked and then it turned around and started home and it got shot in Utah. So when they're doing this and you track them, how long do those collars' batteries last? Well, sadly, for the VHF collars, the wolves generally die before the collars do because wolves don't live very long. An average VHF collar lasts about four years.

An average satellite collar, one to two years, and I don't understand why the technology is not better to prolong some kind of a new battery because when she put all the trauma of going through the wolf with a helicopter and catching it or whatever you'd think they could get some kind of a super battery that would last a long time. Probably too heavy. Heavy, yeah and they're you know wolves are on average a hundred pounds and the batteries are pretty big but I'm waiting for Elon Musk to develop a super radio color battery Well, they're pretty close to developing some pretty spectacular battery technology. I just was reading about that. Yeah Yeah, they're trying to implement it in automobiles. They're gonna be able to do I think I believe Samsung is at the forefront of that

Yeah, you know because obviously they make batteries for their phones and electronics and things along those lines. Yeah. Isn't it a hydrogen battery or something crazy? I do not know. I was just reading, I'm sorry, I don't remember. Yeah, so they're wearing this heavy collar and they're good for about two years and a wolf in the wild lives how long on average? That's it. I always, when I do have a talk, I ask audience, how long do you think the average wolf lives? So if you guess from the time they're visible from the den emergence, like you start to see them at four weeks, and if you die before that, until they die,

do you want to take a guess? I would be cheating, because I listened to the vanilla podcast. I think it was 4.3 years. 4.3 years. Dr. Randall got that. I Was shocked I thought they would live older because you know an elk You know like a bull elk like if you shoot a mature one, they're seven eight years old sometime Yeah, I shot one that was 11 you did. I bet the antlers were getting smaller by that. Yes Yeah, they were and the teeth were worn down. Oh, it's nothing. They're not they're not evolved to live that long

right they just aren't They usually die sooner because they burn up so much energy in years of mating and breeding that they get worn down and then they die. The wolves, I mean in a zoo or a captive situation, they can live to be 15. Like a dog. Yeah, but that's extraordinary. I think the longest I had a wolf, a wild wolf, that I knew her age, because I caught her as a pup, and we recaptured her and we tagged her, 12 years. That's extremely long for an old wolf. Wow, 12 years in the wild. Yeah, there's a few in Yellowstone that I got that old. We had one of mine that dispersed to Idaho, and he, kind of interesting, I caught him in 1990, and he dispersed about a year later on his

own, went to Idaho in the middle of the Frank Church River of Norwich Turned Wilderness. There were no other wolves at that time and he just hung around. We'd see him once in a while from an airplane. By himself. By himself. He was a big male. When I got him he was 111 pounds. But this animal had to survive by killing animals alone.

You think about it. That's crazy. trying to pull down an elk with your teeth. Is it because the old males don't get accepted into a new pack? He went to where there weren't any wolves, interestingly, but he had a success story because he just waited it out. And when they reintroduced those wolves into Idaho in 95 and 96, A little black female wolf pops out of her crate and just hits the road as fast as she can go and she bumps into this wolf and they set up a territory in Kelly Creek and they became a breeding mating pair for years and years till he died of old age. Wow so he was just kind of

chilling on his own for years. Yeah. How many years? Four. Wow. And that would be... Four years without seeing any other wolves. Without being having helped to kill for your food item either. That's what amazes me. Wow. Because he could have gone to Montana and found other wolves, but he didn't. Was there any understanding of what he was basically... because like they usually hunt in packs. Yes. So it's probably very difficult for him to take down anything larger than a fawn or a deer. So what was he eating? I would guess he was killing elk calves, deer fawn, some deer. And if he got lucky, if he had a really deep snow winter, it's the advantage of the wolves because they got big snowshoe feet and elk, you know, punch through where they got little sharp wolves.

But he did well. Whatever he did, we don't know't we didn't follow him that long we didn't pick up scats it's just speculation but that I mean they can kill a big elk but it's it's they risk being killed every time they have to take a meal like that. Right they risk being dismembered too like like yeah broken legs and broken jaws and getting kicked. Yeah I saw a video of a wolf from Yellowstone last year had been kicked in the jaw by an elk and it had a broken jaw that was hanging and a month later a month month and a half it was healed enough and it was in the process of killing another elk and and wolves came along and killed

the wolf other wolves. It wasn't his own pack obviously, but he survived that. They're tough. His jaw healed up and he got enough food while his jaw was healing. That's incredible. I imagine he was scavenging around, picking up on kills and whatever. How was he even chewing? I don't know. Because he's not always got a fork. Or a spork.

Or a knife where you can cut up the pieces. He's got to bite pieces off with a broken jaw. It's mind-boggling. I mean, you know, people think, oh, wolves can just kill it. Well, they can do whatever they want. They have a hard life. They just, they live in packs because they're not very efficient killers. You know, mount lions, bears, they're a more efficient predator, especially a mount lion. And they got all the claws to hang on, but a wolf can only go with its teeth. And so it generally takes numerous wolves to successfully hunt an animal, especially something big like a moose or bison.

What a friend said to me, so I want to run this by you to find out if this is true, he said that mount lions are killing more elk because of wolves, because what happens is the mountain lion will kill the elk, but then the wolf will scare the mountain lion off and steal it from them. And so the mountain lion then goes and finds a mule deer, finds another deer, and so the mountain lions are killing more animals because in the areas where mountain lions and wolves cohabitate, the wolves are really good at chasing mountain lions off of kills. That does happen and I saw some in Glacier Park too, but to that end I'll say there are three times more mountain lions than there are wolves in northwestern Montana.

Really? Two and a half to three, it's been documented. Wow. If you think about that. I would have never imagined that. Yeah, and mountain lions are on average a little bit bigger than wolves I don't know if you've ever hunted them or not, but my god, they're really I've never hunted a mountain lion But I saw one in on yeah

I saw one in Utah a couple years back and it was a big one like a present 70 pound one Oh my god, it was enormous. Did they did they did they tree it with hounds? No, no, we were driving and we were about 25 30 yards from it and my friend stopped the truck and he said, look at the size of that cat. It was under a tree and it was just as dawn or just as dusk was happening so you could see his eyes glowing. And so I'm in the front seat of the car looking at him through 10X binos and just getting a good look at his face.

It was incredible. They're beautiful animals and I always think when I'm out in the woods, I got a little cabin way up northwest Montana. I wonder how many times mountain lions have watched me. Oh, a bit a lot. I worry about mountain lions. They're stealthy. I don't worry about wolves. Yeah, you should worry about mountain lions. You're out there by yourself too, right? Yeah, you should worry about mountain lines. You're out there by yourself too, right? Yeah, a lot. Do you have like modern amenities up there? Do you have satellite, internet, no ledger?

My little cabin is 55 miles off the grid and it's dry. I don't have any water. I don't have electricity. No electricity? It's way off the grid. But I built it. I took down an old historic homestead and I moved the logs up to where it sits. You did it all yourself?

Well, no, no. I had help with a lot of friends helped me over the years. It took me seven years from the time I got the logs and had friends help me take it down till it was livable. Wow. Long time, because when I had money, I didn't time and when I had time I didn't have money, right, for building it. So, but I eventually got it done and a lot of friends, very dear friends, helped. But I poured concrete and I cut logs and you know I did everything. But when I built the place, where was I going with this? Sorry. You were just talking about what it's like out there, no electricity, no water. So for years I've lived without and I haul water from a spring. In the winter I melt the snow

because we get a lot of snow. But three summers ago now I was there alone and I fell down the hard the stairs, all the wooden stairs, and I broke the top of my foot. And I said you know this isn't gonna be very fun for a while because I got to close up the cabin and I have a propane fridge and stove and I got to undo the propane and empty the fridge and I got a lot of shutter because I'm not going to be back. I got a broken foot. So I'm hobbling around and I said, okay, now I'm going to get Starlink. That was my motivator because if I had had a phone, I could have called somebody for help, but I didn't and I couldn't. So after that, then I got on the Starlink. They were still in the beta development, I think.

Anyway, I got on. So I have Starlink available to me at my cabin, but only when I choose to turn it on. It's not like if you were to email me or call me up there, you wouldn't get me. And when I choose to turn it on, I get the messages. So it's kind of the best of both worlds. But I don't live there full-time anymore. I live in town. That is actually the best of both worlds. Yeah choose to turn it on yeah, right I brought a portable one up to Utah with me

Yeah, it's like smaller than this cigar box the new one that's got the router with it It's incredible. It is incredible. It's just it's so light. I couldn't believe this was it Yeah, and it works amazing. Just yeah pointed at the sky and also and you're on YouTube For better or worse. For worse, definitely for worse. But it's, you know, it allows me to call home and talk to people. There's good to it, but it sounds like living up there must have been amazing. But the water thing sounds like a real issue. There was no way you could build a well? I drilled a well. I didn't hit water. Oh you only did one? I did two and I hit didn't hit water twice. But I'm on a creek. I sit on a bluff above a creek. The water's about 90 to 100 feet straight below me. Oh. And I drilled my wells 140

feet. But it's a really interesting limestone shale in the water. I don't know how it works. I even had a guy witch it for me because I'm a scientist but what the hell it might work, right? So they witched the spot. I didn't know water. You say witch. Are you talking about with the sticks? Yeah. Divining rods. Is that what it is? Divining rods. Is that real? Like I said I'm a scientist but if it might help why not? But I didn't hit water. It doesn't seem like it could be real. I don't know.

I don't know either. But people have been doing that for a long time, and it seems like a massive waste of time. Jamie, see if you can find a video of someone trying to find water with divining rods. If you haven't seen it, they use two sticks, right? 2 sticks, sometimes metal, but usually wood, like a willow or something. And they claim as they're walking around that the sticks move. They cross.

They cross when you get to an area where there's water. You're a scientist. Tell me how that's possible. How could it be possible? Has anybody analyzed like what factors could be I don't know at play I have to tell you I don't know and I'm kind of a skeptic on that stuff But I had somebody do it and we didn't hit water. So it's okay. So here it is This guy's walking around these it looks like he's got Those are probably metal like coat hangers or something. Whoops Right there code hangers How is that possible? I don't know.

So it just spins in his hands? That looks like booger. They crossed. And then of course, but then they're going to go sink and do it really well. It might be two feet. It might be 200 feet. I don't know. So he's walking.

He's not moving his hands. They did. Wow. It does really look like they move on their own. You know, there may be people in the world who have some kind of a gift. Their electrical lights are different. I don't know how it works. I have been told that I can be a woman of science and superstition. At the same time. Yeah, but I'm not. Usually science wins. Well, I bet you if you live in the woods a long time, you

get a little bit of superstition, a little bit of intuition, a little bit of you feel the woods a little bit differently than you could measure on a scale. I can think of twice only in my life. Before I built my little cabin, I lived up this very even more remote outpost called Moose City, loosely Moose City, because it was not a city at all. It was an old homestead with a lot of empty cabins. Twice up there, I got this feeling that there was something dangerous outside. Twice. And something just said to me, don't go outside. And I'm not afraid of anything. I mean, I spent my life dealing with wolves and grizzly bears and angry humans. But I listened to those feelings

because I don't know any different. Why not? Why not listen to it? Like I think we have some primordial part of our brains. I don't know if you ever had that happen. Do you want to have been out walking or hunting? I have not. Okay.

No, I've never had a moment where I was terrified, like something's out here. Yeah, and I have no idea what it was, but I've never had that feeling around wildlife. I tend to think it was human. I don't know if we... Oh, you feel like it was a human out there? Yeah. I don't know if we can smell and not register in our forebrain what we detect. Maybe it's really primitive. I don't know. I'm just saying I had it happen twice. If you're not around any people and then all of a sudden you feel a person, I bet that kind of person... Any person that you run into in the woods is scary. It's weird.

Like if you, I always said that everything in the woods is scarier. Like if you saw a naked baby in the woods, you'd be like, what's that baby doing here? It's nuts. Baby just standing there looking at you, you'd be like, what the fuck? Like there's something weird about the woods in general.

And if you were walking through a mall and a man was walking your way it's just another person like hello hi you know you're at the park see a guy normal but if you're in the middle of nowhere in the woods and you see another person there's this moment where you're like what's this guy up to who is he what's he doing is he dangerous yeah and I think that's because we're all raised in an urban environment, more or less nowadays, and so having lots of people around is normal, but to have one person in a pretty remote area, we don't experience that very often anymore. But there's also no one that's going to help you there. Like if you're at the mall, it's very difficult for someone to get away with attacking you.

If you're alone in the woods, there is this weird, like if you're some crazy serial killer guys out there, like and you, you know, you're backpacking, you're like, uh-oh, like now I'm at the mercy of this person if they're crazy. I have a chapter in my book, early in the book, where I describe an event that I'm basically been a real private person all my life until this book came out and once I Wrote this book. I had to bring up stories that are very personal to me and I had an event one night that was Terrifying probably the most terrifying thing that's ever happened in my life and involved humans So yeah, I totally get that people in places where they should be Do you want to read it? Do you want me to spoil it? You want me to do the spoiler thing? Well, we're talking about it.

Okay, I'll just give you the elevator speech part of it. So I was in my cabin at night and the dog started growling. I had very big dogs. I always have dogs. And I looked out my window and it was winter and it was cold and I could see a couple of guys out there lurking around and I was in the middle of nowhere and then it kind of digressed from there. So I am I for the only first and only time in my life I pulled the gun on these guys. Really? Yeah I was in danger. What were they doing out there? Well they came to pay me a visit. They knew who you were?

They called me by name, which was really freaky. So you think somebody in the woods walking around is scary? Wait till you see somebody who you don't know who it is and they call you by your first name. That's freaky. And what did they want? I didn't find out because I pulled a gun on them. Wow.

I drove him off. And it was terrifying to me at the, it was not terrifying at the moment because I was absolutely focused, like predator focused calm. But after they left, I started to shake and yeah, kind of after the adrenaline surge happened. Were they menacing? Were they? Yeah. Yeah?

To me. But the way they were communicating with you? They were drunk. Oh. Yeah. It wasn't good. And so how did they know who you were? Do you know?

Oh, it's a long story. But I was working up there. I was kind of a novelty, a young blonde woman. I was only about 25, living alone, studying wolves. And at the time, there were other people coming and going, studying wolves. But at that winter, I was alone. And I had been working.

It's a long story. I was working behind the Customs Station right on the Canadian border. And they were hauling logs down out of Canada, bringing in the Customs Station right on the Canadian border and they were hauling logs down out of Canada, bringing in the Customs Station. They would have to transfer the logs to an American truck and then the Canadian trucks would go back. And I temporarily took a job as the knot bumper at the log deck landing, which means my job was to run a chainsaw, trim off the branches, trim the length of the log to exactly fit the log bed. Anyway,

so I was around, so these loggers knew who I was, and I was, you know, I was cordial enough. But it was two of those guys. Yeah, and I don't, I never told the story till I wrote this book, and I just thought it's a part of me that's very personal. It's a part of me that I learned from. It's never happened again. And I had one old logger, old Bob, he saw me on the road the next day. I was pretty shook up. And he stopped, we chatted often.

And he had seen a wolf, he'd taken a picture of it. So anyway, we chat. And he says, so I hear you had some visitors last night. I looked it up because he's up in his log truck. I said, yeah, he says, you don't have to worry, that won't happen again. He's kind of watching out for me. Oh, that's nice. Yeah, because we had kind of befriended each other because he'd spotted this wolf and he'd taken pictures of it anyway. Yeah. So how did he find out that you had visitors?

The logger network, the CB radio, I don't know, I didn't tell anybody. But he knew right away. Hmm. Yeah, it's humans that you have to be scared of. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, you asked, that's...

There's no serial killer mountain lions. Right? They just have a purpose in nature. Yeah. They just kill because they eat. That's what their job is. People are weird. Yeah, people are creepy. They'll sign about they're being weird. I love that. Yeah, especially men. Men in the woods are scary. So when you were living out there, how many years did you live out there by

yourself? Well, off and on. So when I arrived there, I joined a team of young researchers. We're studying wolves and grizzly bears, and we helped each other with their work. So we started all that. And then when we ran out of funding, then I was up there alone for about three years. But other than that, there were people coming- Buy yourself for three years. Well, I had two dogs. I wasn't totally alone.

And people were coming and going seasonally. I had summer help and I had winter help. But certainly there wasn't people there on the shoulder season. Does that get lonely? You know, it's interesting because it didn't. Really? Back when I was younger, I was a bit of a misanthrope and I liked being alone. And when I was alone, being alone is different than being lonely. It just is. Now as an older person, I feel different

about people. I'm more engaged with people. I enjoy people. So yeah, I get lonely now, but I didn't back then. I mean, how could you be lonely? You're living in the majestic mountains and wilderness of Glacier National Park and everything is new and there's tracks to find and on and on and on. Well, it's all amazing stuff, but I would be lonely. I like to be around people. Well, that's why you're really good at what you do, because you're a social person.

You like to engage in conversation. But I didn't used to be that way. You wouldn't have wanted to have interviewed me 30 years ago, let's put it that way. Really? Nah. I bet we would have worked out. It'd have been all right.

But I would have worked out. I'm more conversational now. I mean, it's just I would have worked out. It would have been alright. It would have worked out. I'm more conversational now. I mean, it's just, I would have been fascinated by who you were then, because I'd be fascinated by a person who doesn't want to talk to people. Like if I could just peel back the layers of the onions to find out what that's like. Like because I would imagine there's a very different relationship with nature when it's just you and nature alone by yourself for prolonged periods of time it's very different than taking a jaunt taking a weekend excursion hiking you know even camping for a week

it's there's a big difference between that and living there for years this episode is brought to you by uber eats you can now get almost anything you need for the season delivered with Uber Eats. What do I mean by almost? Well, you can't get a snowboard delivered, but you can get a charcuterie board. A hot sauna? That's a no. But a hot soup?

That's definitely a yes. A fur coat? Sorry, no. But a gravy boat? Happily, yes. Baby kittens? Unfortunately not. But knitted mittens?, well that's a yes.

Uber Eats can definitely get you that. So, whatever you're looking for this season, know that you can get almost, almost anything delivered with Uber Eats. Download the Uber Eats app today to order now. Alcohol in select markets, product availability may vary by region. See app for details. Yes, and it's sort of like It's like when I go I go up to my cabin for a visit now I'm no longer live there full-time, but I live there a couple of months a year Maybe three maybe usually two when I go up it takes me like three to four days

To decompress and get back into the mode of, oh, I can't call, oh, I can't go on the internet. Do I want to hook up this darling? No. Go out and just sit outside and have a cup of tea and listen to the crick and then think about what you're going to do for the day. Go on a hike. But it takes me a few days now to get to that frame of mind.

It doesn't, it's not instant anymore. So I've changed who I am for sure. And then once you get to that frame of mind, then you can just it's not instant anymore. So I've changed who I am, for sure. And then once you get to that frame of mind, then you can just like, today we're gonna go on a hike. Just bring the dogs, just go walk around. Go fly fish. Enjoy yourself. Whatever.

Wow. Yeah. And were you living off the land? Were you catching fish for food and hunting for food? Like how were you getting your supplies? I did that, but I bought stuff in town and I would buy a lot in November while I could still drive in because sometimes in the winter you couldn't drive in anymore. So I would stock up and buy you know three four hundred pounds of dog food and bulk supplies of flour and oats and and I can.

Back then I actually did some canning. I don't know I, I don't have time. I don't care about it. I can buy canned peaches or whatever. But I, and I never grew a food garden because of the bears. Oh, yeah. See, I didn't want to attract grizzlies. Right. So I didn't grow food except lettuce. How often did you run into them up there? They're always there, but you don't see them very often.

So it's sort of like all the wild things that are up there are pretty wild and and there weren't a lot of people up there then now everybody's discovered Montana and there's people everywhere. It's so interesting because our senses are so dull compared to theirs. We move so slow and we're so loud and we're so clunky and they see us a mile away, they smell us a mile away. They know exactly where you are and most of the time they just avoid us. Totally true. I mean, I've just come back from bird hunting. I just was 31 days on the road and I just got home three days ago and I'm here. And I was out bird hunting with

friends and I said, I told them, I said, so when I hunt with my pointers, I got a griffon and a wire hair, I said, don't talk. Don't call the dog's name. Don't holler about, just watch and enjoy and smell and feel what goes on and trust the dogs. If you see them getting birdie, get ready. Because so many times you hunt with people and they're hacking their dog, they're calling, they're hollering, they're talking to you about something going on over here, and hey did you watch the Vikings game? Well nobody watches the Vikings game. Anyway did you watch this? It's like we're out there seeking a smart bird that has ears. Watch the dogs. So I feel that way when I'm out living

in the wild too with out hiking. I'm not going to see elk or bears or even fox if you're yammering away. Right. That's why I like being alone. Yeah, that is part of the problem with people. We do like to talk just to just be reassured. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, you know, and it's fun to interact.

I mean, but even when I go to Yellowstone, I go to Yellowstone at least a couple times a year to watch wolves. I love the wolf watchers They're so enthusiastic, but something's going on and you can't take a video because everybody's Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, even if the wolves are howling you have to go shh. I Went to Yellowstone a few years back with my family and I felt Like it was very weird. I felt like I'm enjoying, my daughters are really young at the time, I'm enjoying that they're seeing bears and they're seeing, well we didn't see bears, we did see, they had, there was this place in Montana that has this grizzly bear preserve, it's like a place where they

take care of bears so they would like feed them frozen watermelons, which is crazy to watch a bear chew through a frozen watermelon like it's a grape. They just go right through it. It's a frozen watermelon. And they just come like it's nothing. But we did see a lot of elk and a bunch of bison. And the elk was strange because I'm sure you know this, but for the people at home, elk understand that wolves don't come to these community centers, these areas

where there's vending machines and buildings. So the elk are all over the place out there. Yeah, on the lawns. Yeah. So I don't know if I put it on Instagram. I think I did. I took a selfie with a cow elk that was like 40 feet from me, just lying there. And she wasn't worried about me at all. And I was trying to tell my kids, I was like, this never happens.

This is weird. It's weird that they've become so habitualized to being around cars and people. They just know the people, it's safe when you're around these people, so they just hang out there. Yeah. That's probably at Mammoth, Gardner area. That happens all the time up there. Well, it happens in Colorado too, like in Evergreen. You see them, there's these huge

herds of elk that walk down the middle of the street in Evergreen because they know there's no mountain lines in the middle of the street. No predators. Right. And so they just like, in the rut, they're walking down the street and there's like 30, 40 elk and they stop traffic and they're sitting on people's lawns and it's wild. Sounds like vamp. The same things happen to the wolves in Yellowstone because they were taken from Canada where

they don't see people and they had never exposure to livestock. They're very wild at first. And then they can't get away from humans. So after a while, they just start disregarding people. And like if they have to cross the road, there's a wolf jam and everybody's crowding with their cars and they're trying to bring their pups across the road to a better spot. And they can't even get through because of everybody. So they get kind of laissez faire aboutaire about it, and they get used to people, conditioned or habituated.

And that's passed on to the next generation next. And then when they leave the park, and they go outside the park and they walk down some open public land spot where there's a hunter with a rifle, they don't think anything about it. So they're pretty easy targets. That's unfortunate. Yeah. The habitualization is unfortunate because

like you just want to see them in the wild you don't want to see them in an intersection. I know and yeah it's tough and the unfortunate thing is a couple of years ago there were 25 Yellowstone Wolves killed just outside of the park because they're used to people and they wander around anyway that's like out of a hundred so it's about a quarter of the population and there were a couple of particular individual wolves that were very well recognized and loved by the wolf masses and photographed and they got killed in this. This just went viral and this huge hatred for these people who shot these wolves because

they were so special and I make the point when I give talks and stuff I said you know if you really feel that strongly you should really be concerned because every year there's about 300 wolves shot that way in Montana but you don't know them they're not famous they have just as important of lives they live die eat breathe get injured heal up The same as these movie star wolves in Yellowstone. And you should feel that way about all wolves in my mind. Oh yeah. Well, that was the case with Cecil the Lion. You remember the Cecil the Lion? Right. Yeah, yeah. The dentist, Dinah Dentist killed him, right?

Yeah. They named him. And so when they named, and I remember after Cecil got killed, another lion got killed, and they thought it was Jericho, who is Cecil's brother. And there was a story, like, oh my god, they killed Jericho, Cecil's brother. And then they realized that Jericho was not dead. So, oh, it's fine. Jericho's still okay. But that lion is just a lion. You didn't name him, but that's still another lion. But because it's not this named lion's brother who also has a name, no one cared. Exactly. That's so bizarre. It is bizarre. Thank you for understanding that. I forgot about Cecil. But like when

we were first monitoring the wolves and glacier, there was just a handful and we would catch them and we would give them names because it's easier like Phyllis was wolf 8550 and Mojave was wolf 8963. They had both names and numbers and so when we did our scientific papers and reports we used a number because we were told by the officials that we don't want you to name the animals because what happens when Phyllis kills a cow if that happens? Then you can't manage Phyllis. So we went along with it, but we used the names and we did the scientific stuff with numbers But then when you go into the park people would want to know what's going on You need to talk about these different wolf numbers 8654 and they said well who is that? Oh, that's Aspen

Oh, yeah, they would know by the name so whatever works. Then all of a sudden they become like a pet. Even more like a majestic wild pet like it's a different thing it's a pet that's this iconic North American you know apex predator. Yes and I know the wolves in Yellowstone they don't have names they have numbers but they're so identifiable by 907 or whatever that it becomes like a name, even though it's still a number. But if you shoot 907, it's not as rude as if you shoot Jake. Right. Jake the wolf.

Right. It's like, oh, yeah, Michael. Michael. You know, you name a wolf a human name and all of a sudden you shouldn't shoot it anymore. I know. Which is just a weird anthropomorphization thing, right? You know it's been interesting to me because I, for my career, I've done everything. My first year, my first job, I worked up in northern Minnesota in a little tiny 300-person farming community and I was hired, US

Fish and Wildlife Service, to go in and help prevent livestock depredation and when wolves killed cattle or sheep to go in and remove prevent livestock depredation and when wolves killed cattle or sheep to go in and remove, which meant trapping the Holloway and they were euthanized. And when there weren't depredations, to go out and research trapping and put collars on the other wolves. And it was, I mean, this is big, big stuff for a girl from Minneapolis, starry eyed and pretty naive to go up and save the folks of North Home from the wolves, you know?

Oh my God. It was such an important summer for me to learn professionally and personally. And I wrote about that. But I learned a lot, and it was interesting work, but I realized, yeah, wolves can cause conflicts for people. And it was a new concept for me. So when they captured the wolves and they removed them, why did they euthanize them? Why didn't they just relocate them? Well, they would be me, because I was the one catching

and trapping me. Well, obviously someone was telling you what to do though, right? Right. So I had to bring them to the main office in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, where they were euthanized. So prior to that, in 1978, you couldn't euthanize wolves. They changed the status from endangered to threatened. And so when they were threatened, then under Endangered Species Act, you could actually euthanize them. And they didn't translocate them. This is a really good question because they found over the years with studies in Minnesota and eventually in Montana too that when you translocate or move a wolf who's causing a problem, that wolf very, very rarely survives to reproduce because it gets killed by other wolves, it comes back to depredate again, it moves onto another farmer ranch

and does it again. They don't generally survive and so it was determined that it makes officials feel good to move them and it's a good facade for the public to believe in but sometimes it results in a pretty prolonged and inhumane existence for a few months or a year till they die anyway. So yeah, it's... Is it because they're habitualized to start preying on cattle? It's tough once they learn to take cattle or sheep. It's tough to break that pattern, let's put it that way. Because it's so easy?

Well, yeah. I mean, if it was me out there walking around and I had a choice between a deer that's going to kick me in the teeth or take in the cow, I'd pick the slow dumb groceries every time. Of course. And if they know the groceries are all penned up. Exactly. So it's a difficult challenge and wolves are continuing to expand everywhere in the West, the Midwest, Europe. And so there's more and more challenges and a lot of the early excitement about wolves has changed into a bitter battle. Yeah.

It's a really interesting complex battle because there's a lot of hunters that do not like the reintroduction of wolves. And they'll say that the elk populations are down and they're down dramatically in Montana because of the reintroduction. What was it, 1996? When was it? 95, 96, and then 96, 97. Those winters.

So, but the reality is it's not natural to not have those predators there, and you're going to get an overpopulation of elk, and that that's gonna lead to starvation and disease. Yes and so kind of the the the die was cast when those wolves were removed and basically by the 1930s there really weren't viable populations in the West anymore. There are wolves here there and a pack here there but there weren't thousands and and they went into inside the national parks and they have a picture in many books of rangers with cute little wolf pups that are like seven eight weeks old and they took the pictures. This was in 1926 and then they killed them all. So they even removed all the predators within

national parks. So people, historic memory, you know we have really short memories. Historic memory of say for example the northern range, northern herd range of elk out of Gardner. It was about 20,000 before the wolves were introduced. Way over carrying capacity. Elk were starving, the browse lines as high up as they could reach they ate everything they could eat. They were paying people, people being paid to come in and kill deer and elk. And then they started the late hunting seasons out of Gardner, which I went in because my boyfriend at the time had a tag.

And they just have a shooting line in February and kill all these elk because they aren't going to make it anyway. And so you shoot a starving cow in February. Wow. Because it wasn't predators. So then when the wolves came back, two things happened. Number one, it was a new predator, but number two, in the winter of 96, 97,

we had some of the deepest snows ever recorded in the mountains, ever. And so many of the herd died from snowfall. And I have hunters tell me, yeah, the population elk went from 20,000 to 10,000 in two years, damn those wolves, and it's like, do you think 35 wolves killed 10,000 elk? Come on, let's just do the math a minute. Yeah, that is the problem with people that don't have a nuanced perspective on what's

happening because they have a vested interest in it being a problem that the wolves are keeping them from being able to be successful on an elk hunt. Right. And I'm a hunter. I get it. Yeah. But the die-offs are huge. Like, the place that I was just telling you about before the podcast that I was in in

Utah, they lost 80% of their mule deer population a year ago. From what? Snow. Yeah. And so... Real bad winter. Yeah, yeah. And winter die-offs are a big thing.

It's a big thing. I would say, to best my knowledge as a biologist, that winter die-off is the limiting factor for ungulate herds. It's not lions and bears and wolves and humans and cars. So often, every 20 years or whatever, you get a massive winter die-off. And it takes quite a while for those populations to build back up. Predators can keep that at a lower rate, they cannot affect it. You know, I have to think back to the people say about wolves killing all

the deer now. I think if you look to statistics at Montana and Wyoming, which you both have had a lot of wolves for a couple decades, they're giving away more elk permits. I just was reading they proposed unlimited elk permits in Wyoming and Montana's got basically in most of its management units more elk than ever. I just say there's more going on than wolves and to point your finger at wolves all the time you need to look at habitat, you need to look at access issues. You know there's a lot of places where hunters want to go shoot these elk but they're on large private ranches and you can't get on them. Including landlocked public land where you, there is public land where you're allowed to hunt

there, but you can't get there. You'd have to fly in a helicopter and a lot of places that's illegal. Right. And so there's all this talk of, for people that don't know, there's one of the things that happens is a thing called corner crossing. So there might be a piece of public land that you're allowed to hike into, and then there's a small area. It could be a very small area, just a few yards even, of private land that you are going to have to cross in order to get into the next piece of public land.

But people block access to that because these people that have these ranches and most of them probably don't even live there and a bunch of wealthy people, they're terrified that someone's going to go through that and then go into their private land. They don't want to give people the access at all to their private land, so they stop these corner crossings and it's a giant disaster because then you have these areas that are public land that should be available to all of us and no one can get in there. Right. I mean, if the viewers can think of imagining a checkerboard and you're trying to get from

one black square to the next black square, but you have to step over a tiny piece of white square to get there, right? Yeah. It's being battled in court right now. Yeah. It's a disaster. It is. Yeah. It's being battled in court right now. Yeah. It's a disaster. If I owned the land, I would carve out a big pathway and give it to the public. Yeah.

Why, if you have 50,000 acres out there, whatever the hell you have, why is it so hard to take a few acres and just make a path? But you're not most landowners. It seems so simple. It's like the simplest of, you just make some sort of an easement. Well, that would be good, and some ranchers do, but many people have been in this business four or five generations on their family ranch, and they've had bad experiences with hunters who come in and cut their fences, shoot their cows, leave their gates open, and they just say, I'm done. I'm closed. And they get really angry. I just hunted on a

guy's ranch about a week ago up in north central Montana, and he owned 60 sections. That's 60 square miles of land, which may not be a big place in Texas, but for most of the rest of the world. That's huge. It's huge. And he gave us permission, but he had to tell us all the challenges he's had and why he had a big sign. Don't even ask, basically. But I know that he was going to let us because some other friends of mine had hunted there. But he had all these heartburns over things that had happened to him.

Hunters gave him a really bad taste in their mouth. And I, I as a single individual person can't do a lot about it and I'd like to see you know hunting organizations, many really good ones help promote better hunter behavior and better hunter-landowner relationships. You would be very generous to do that, but most people will not give an easement. Well I would understand that if you've been burned a few times, people poached on your land, and there's this attitude that people who don't have anything and they see someone who has so much and they're like, screw this guy,

I'm just going to go on his property. Look, the elk are right there over the ridge, 400 yards away. Let's just go over there, shoot those elk. He won't even know. We'll pack it out. That happens. Yeah. And then they get caught.

And then this guy's like, god damn it, they're poaching on my land and then he hates hunters. Hunters are like everybody else. There's people that are amazing plumbers and they're real honest and they work hard and they're sweethearts and you're happy to hire them and call them and there's people that are just liars and they're crooks. It's just like any other group of people. Exactly, exactly. And I know in my business with wolves I've always tried to be very transparent, I'm very honest, and if somebody asks me a question I'll give them the best information I have. If I don't know an answer I'll say I don't know but you know you could call so-and-so who's maybe had the experience with that. I

got nothing to hide by being dishonest or trying to sell somebody. It's like hunting impacts of wolves on hunting. You look at populations and they go like this all the time. Sometimes wolves cause it, sometimes not. Sometimes it's winter, sometimes it's accumulation of lions and bears and wolves. But it's like the stock market. People want to see it do this. Well, it's like the climate.

Exactly. Nobody wants to admit to that either. Well, it's like the climate. Exactly. Nobody wants to admit to that either. They hate looking at long-term data. I know. And people want to talk about the sky is falling. Well, it's actually not. Look at it over a long period of time and you see this trend has always existed. And in fact, this is one of the cooler times in history. Where we're facing interesting times. It's bizarrely ideological. I think the hardest thing is so much social media. Everything goes on instantly and whether it's true or not. Everything goes on instantly and everything is ideologically connected.

There's people that just don't want any animals ever killed ever. And there's people that want no predators and the easiest hunts possible. And they don't have a nuanced perspective of the ecosystem, of what biology is and like what these animals, there's a whole world that they live in. And this world is like interdependent. There's so many things going on. And so people like I remember there was a documentary that came out how wolves changed rivers in Yellowstone.

And they made this incredibly rosy picture of wolves coming in and it brought in beavers and they changed the rivers and the lakes and everything was better. And it's like, no, not really, no. There's a lot going on all the time. And to single out this one aspect of this ecosystem and say this is the cause of this, there's a lot of different causes. There's a lot going on.

Yes. And that film or the video ran viral big time. But there's no one species that's gonna make or break the world except maybe people. But in terms of the impacts, no. And it's been shown since that video came out, the movie, that that might be true in a short time period in small places, but it's not the global picture for Yellowstone Park.

Wolves have not saved the planet. They just haven't. It's just not that simple. Well, what they have done, though, is brought some balance, right? I think, yes. So you can go either way. And I think people who are out on either extreme

can actually make people in the middle more involved with conservation efforts. Like that guy with the movie. Well, it's a rosy story and pieces of it may be true in certain places for a temporal or spatial time period. But then there's the guy in, where was it, Daniels, Wyoming, who roared over that wolf in the snowmobile and crippled it. You heard about this, didn't you?

Oh, that's a terrible story. And then he brought it back, crippled, to the bar, taped its mouth up, and had it in the bar so people could be entertained for an hour before they took it out back and shot it. Now that's a pretty horrific thing, whether it's a deer, a mottling, or a wolf, it's horrible. Any animal. But that horrific act got a lot of people in the middle fired up to become more strong conservationists. So I'm sorry that that happened, but on the other hand, it brings a lot of awareness to people who are not aware of the level of capacity of people to be stupid.

And evil. That's evil. When I saw the photos of the wolf, I'm like, that is an evil act. Right. Like that thing is, that's an incredible animal, you know, and you have no right to do that. And if you crippled it, if you crippled it with a snowmobile, the right thing to do is to call someone or have it euthanized. Yeah, shoot it or call someone, but to drag it to a bar is just sick. Well, I mean, he ran it over intentionally and he had a gun. Oh, we did it intentionally. Oh yeah, and he had a gun. No, it was all for show. Well, the level of vitriol that people have towards wolves is very strange.

And I think it goes back to like the Little Red Riding Hood and, you know, the Big Bad Wolf and there's just like this thing that we have in our mind that we don't have for other predators. We don't have it for bears. We don't have it for cats. No. It's weird, right? I thought about this a lot.

So why wolves? What's the deal with wolves? Why does it create that... If you look at the facts, I mean, elk, coyotes, lions, bears, coke machines, whatever, kill people, lightning, every year, lots of people. Wolves, it would be a very rare experience, it occasionally happens, but it's so much rarer than everything else, and yet people don't hate lions or grizzly bears.

I have a theory. Okay, let's hear it. I think it's a historical thing. I think wolves are not a problem when you deal with civilization, when you deal with agriculture and people have guns and people have land and they have property, but I think at one point in time it was a much bigger deal when there were larger populations of them and they would hunt people they would attack people. Are you aware of the World War I story? About them eating corpses? Well not just that about the the Germans and the Russians having a ceasefire because so many

people were getting eaten by wolves. They actually I talked to Steve Rinell about it once and he didn't He wasn't even sure if it was true I so they actually researched it and found out it was true and they wrote an article on meat eater about it No way, so I haven't seen it. So the story I don't remember where I heard it from But the story was you know the thing about war especially trench warfare The horrific nature of it is that you don't necessarily always kill people. You shoot them and hurt them and wound them. And these wolves were aware that these people were living in these trenches and that they

were wounded. And so they smelled blood and they came in and there was so many instances of people getting dragged out of the trenches by packs of wolves. And there were so many instances of parties going out like two or three men and then they just find a boot with a foot in it and they realize like, oh boy, an animal's gotten them. And so they decided to have a ceasefire between the Russians and the Germans to just to get together and kill the wolves before they go back to killing each other.

I'll have to look that up because I haven't actually heard of it. See if you can find that article. I believe it's on meateater.com. I'd like to know where the references are. Thanks. Was there a ceasefire during World War I to hunt wolves? But I want to know what the references for this story were. I think it's the New York Times.

Okay. Multiple newspapers in 1917 report this story, including the El Paso Herald, Oklahoma City Times and New York Times. Since then, it's become a favorite bit of barroom banter among amateur historians, oh like me, Joe Rogan. February 19th, it says it there, February 1917, a dispatch from Berlin noted large packs of wolves moving into populated areas of the German Empire in the forests of Lithuania and I don't know how to say that word, Volhynia?

Volhynia? How would you say that word? Close enough. Locals hypothesized the war effort displaced the wolves so the canines started seeking out new hunting grounds. The hungry wolves infiltrated rural villages attacking calves, sheep, goats, and in two cases children. They also showed up on the front lines feeding on the fallen and sometimes taking advantage of incapacitated fighters. Parties of Russians and German scouts met recently and were hotly engaged in a skirmish when a large pack of

wolves dashed on the scene and attacked the wounded, reported a 1917 Oklahoma City Times article. Hostilities were at once suspended, and Germans and Russians instinctively attacked the pack, killing about 50 wolves." So these are, one of the things that happens in Russia is you get these super packs. I'm sure you've heard about those where they've had problems with them descending on whether it's a cattle ranch or horses. They've taken out horses. Poison, rifle fire, hand grenades, and even machine guns were successfully tried in attempts to eradicate the nuisance according to a 1917 New York Times article. But all

to no avail, the wolves nowhere to be found quite so large and as in Russia, were desperate in their hunger and regardless of danger. Yeah, I'm reading it too. I just would say... You're a little skeptical? I'm very skeptical. Hmm. Um, number one, there weren't... It says, though seemingly far-fetched, it turns out these claims are mostly accurate. Historians estimate that soldiers killed hundreds of wolves during the war and

that the surviving wolves fled to escape a carnage the like of which they had never encountered. Click on that link. What is that? We're looking at news stories from 110 years ago. I know. Look at that. 1917. Right. Wild. I'm just saying. You're a little skeptical?

Well, they lie. No, I'm not a little skeptical. I'm very skeptical. Very skeptical. They lie in the news now. I know. But it seems like something happened. I'm very skeptical. They lie in the news now. I know. But it seems like something happened. Something happened. I don't think they made up the fact that they all got together and shot wolves.

And have you read about Russian super packs of wolves? No. No? Okay. No, and I read the literature, but... But this is recently. Okay. Within a few years ago, there was a problem with these superpacs where they, I don't remember what the theory was as to why they had formed such large packs.

But there was large packs of up to 100 wolves that were going into farms. So my question about this story, and I'm not, I'm just saying I'm not I'm not skeptical 2010 2011 a super pack of wolves numbering up to 400 reportedly terrorized the Russian town of boy good luck with that yeah sounds like a vodka for Cory boy Coyansk population Guinness Book of World Records. Northern... It's like Wikipedia? No, they're a little better than that. Wikipedia's sketch. One of the remotest inhabited areas of the Northern Hemisphere, more than 30 horses were killed in just four days.

And I remember reading about this in 2010. It said, according to local officials, teams of hunters were established to patrol neighborhoods and shoot the wolves on site. Animal experts suspicious of the claims say that wolves usually form packs of no more than 10 to 15 animals, although the particularly harsh winters may have killed off the wolves' usual prey, forcing them to attack larger animals." This is a, this is multiple sources have this story. And I remember it about a decade or so ago.

Well, I'd love to look up more detail, but I can tell you about, I can't tell you about the news source, and I'm not familiar with that, and I don't read that kind of stuff usually, but if it's true, it's true. I don't happen to believe it's true, but what I can tell you about the true about wolf biology is wolves live in packs that are generally a family group. They have a genetic investment in their pack members, there's oftentimes one or two that aren't related, and they defend that territory to the death, whether there's five of them or 25 of them, and that would be a large pack.

The largest pack I've ever heard of was in Yellowstone, I think it was 34 because three females had pups. So to have 400 wolves move together. Why would they do that? What's the benefit to them? They're gathering, collaborating with animals that aren't related to them that have no genetic benefit to see them each survive. And normally, packs that are not related kill each other. It's the biggest cause of mortality in Yellowstone Park is wolves killing non-pack members. Wolves are very,

very intelligent though. Oh, I know. Extremely intelligent. Oh, yeah. And could you imagine a scenario where resources were so diminished that wolves recognized that killing each other had no benefit and that moving together as a group, they could do something to these farms. So like if you are a pack of 400 wolves and you choose to attack horses, that seems to me a lot more success than three wolves or five choose to attack horses that seems to me a lot more Success than three wolves or five wolves I get you saying but you ask would I believe it and I have to tell you no I wouldn't believe it

Well this is based on your real-life lived experience, but I wouldn't believe it but things do vary according to very Unusual circumstances in terms of the environment right so if there So if there were 400 wolves that were starving, they would starve. I mean, they wouldn't pack. Unless they knew that there were horses. You're giving them some human reasoning skills. They don't think like humans do. They just don't.

And I'm sorry. Don't be if I'm not calling you a liar. No, it's not me. You're reading the story. I'm just saying I'd have to investigate that. But I'm 100% skeptical on it. Just because of everything that I'm familiar with. But it doesn't, you know, stuff happens. I have no pun intended, no dog in the race. But my thought is that in perhaps unusual

circumstances like Siberia, where it's so incredibly harsh that if you do find a population that had been surviving because there was a sufficient amount of wildlife for them to kill and then all of a sudden there wasn't but there was farms they all might kind of like descend on these farms and perhaps not even fight for resources because they realized there was no benefit in that. You asked me I just said I don't believe it. So I hear you. Beth, I don't have anything to contribute further on that.

I guess you're just a science denier. That's okay, Diane. I'm a science denier. There you go. I like that. Is that a fun thing to call people? That's great. It's such a horrible thing to say to people.

Like, what are you saying? When you, so what is the largest that you've observed? The largest pack that you've observed? I have only observed probably 15, but that's not Yellowstone, that's in my history. And I know in Yellowstone, like I said, I know one year they get up to 34 and I think that probably the largest I've ever heard of being recorded that I know as factual, it might be 40, but that's extremely unusual. And is that Yellowstone as well? Might be Canada.

I'm trying to remember my source, I can't remember but 34 in Yellowstone, that's unusual. Do you think the large number in Yellowstone was because of the unusual circumstances of the reintroduction and a bunch of animals that weren't used to having wolves around? Yes, I think well three things happened. Three different females had pups. On average they have six pups, seven pups. So there's recruiting right there, 18, 20 pups, right there. In addition to the adults that were there, they had a good year, they had lots of prey,

and so all those pups presumably made it to their first year. So for one winter, they were a huge pack, and then mortality happens. Wolves are not designed to live in packs of 34. I mean, packs in the Midwest where the prey is smaller and that wolves are not designed to live in packs of 34. I mean, packs in the Midwest where the prey is smaller and the wolves are smaller, they live in smaller packs. In Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, average pack might be somewhere between 10 and 15. And every year, you gotta remember, every year they have six to seven pups, and by the next spring they're back down.

That's six or seven through mortality or dispersal or whatever happens, hunting. Yeah. So, stuff happens. Yeah. It's a hard life. It is a hard life. Another thing, I've heard lots of people, well I've heard several people and people I know quite well tell me stories about they encountered a wolf or

they encountered a wolf pack and they were really frightened because they were they had their dog with them and the wolves are interested in the dog like little Carl there or something and and the wolves were circling around and these people were terrified and when they told me to start two people they told me this story and they said yeah yeah, they could have killed me. And my response is, yeah, easily. But you're here telling me this story. So it's not very common for wolves to attack people. That's just what it is.

Not anymore. Not anymore. And I don't know how good the reporting was way back when. But way back when, if you think about people that were living in a time where there was no guns or at the very least muskets, and you're dealing with people that are completely isolated and you're dealing with harsh climates. Like the homesteaders. Yeah.

And there might be a time where the food source for the wolves is diminished. The homesteaders didn't really have a problem with wolves though attacking people, right? That's what I'm saying. Right. When we had time. But they had guns. They had guns, they had poisons, they had traps, they had livestock, they had children. That's just what I'm saying.

In this country, with probably a, I don't mean to be offensive, but a better base of information with all the opportunity in the world for all those things you just set up, remote living, no protection, harsh winters like the winter of Charlie Russell paintings where all the cattle were starving. You didn't have packs of 400 wolves coming in and killing everyone. I'm just saying. Right, but isn't that a different environment than Siberia? Siberia is unbelievably brutal. Oh, you asked those homesteaders.

Have you ever seen the Werner Herzog's documentary, Happy People, Life and the Taiga? Yeah. Isn't it amazing? It's beautiful. Incredible. It's beautiful. I just actually watched it within the last year. I thought about that when I was thinking about you living alone by yourself.

That's how those people did. They would go out there and they would just go with a dog and they would go live by themselves in these cabins that they had fortified for the entire winter and just live out there amongst the walls. And they loved it. They all loved it. They all couldn't wait to get out there. How many were killed by wolves?

None. None. But again, tigers. Tigers are awesome predators on people. Yeah. Oh yeah. Well, Siberian tigers, they're like known to kill people. I know that. Yeah. Oh yeah. Well, Siberian tigers, they're like known to kill people. Oh yeah.

Yeah? I'm trying to remember the name of the book I read. It might just be called Tiger. I'm trying to remember the name, but it's a story of a predatory tiger and these guys, the story of the tiger's life and how they go to finally try and kill it. It's a terrifying story. Wow. In Siberia?

It's a true story, yeah. And it's modern times. There's something super scary about a tiger in the snow. A cat that's 600 pounds stalking you? In the snow. I know, no thank you. No thank you. No, no.

Yeah, it's just a matter of whether or not you zig when you should have zagged and you're in the wrong spot of land where he's at. Yes, and I think that tiger had an injury that was caused by humans. And that's often the case. It wasn't able to hunt real proficiently. Or in the recording, I mean, when you're reading the book, you get the drift that it had a vengeance against humans because it was injured. I would imagine that's probably the case too. It could be.

Just as they're scared if they survive a situation. Senator Stor of Vladimir Markov, a poacher who met a grizzly end in the winter of 1997 after he shot and wounded a tiger and then stole a part of the tiger's kill. The injured tiger hunted Markov down in a way that appears to be chillingly premeditated. The tiger stalked out Markov's cabin, systematically destroyed anything that had Markov's scent on it, and then waited by the front door for Markov to come home. Wow. Yeah there's no doubt that animal according to the story here definitely had vengeance on its mind. Wow it was an impulsive response. Valiant says the tiger was able to hold this idea over a period of

time. The animal waited for 12 to 48 hours before attacking. When Markov finally appeared the tiger killed him, dragged him to the bush and ate him. The eating may have been secondary, Valiantly explained. I think he killed him just because he had a bone to pick. The book is called The Tigers. I had the title right. It's a fascinating story. Wow. Yeah, and you know, it's interesting because with... Look at the footprint. Oh my God.

Look at the size of that. Look at the guy's hand next to the footprint. Oh my God. It's it's amazing oh that's the author with the size of a female's paw print so that's a small one that's a small oh my goodness yeah wow fascinating story and it I and then there's this the tiger is just trying to be a tiger is that a photograph of those guys it looks like a drawing 1885 so is that different time era is that a photo yeah era? Is that a photo? Yeah. Why would I buy a shitty photo? I wouldn't buy it. If someone said that's a photo I'd go get out of here. It's 140 years old. You drew that bro. But some of the interesting things looking at that is like in Glacier Park or

anywhere I play were wolves overlap with with mount lions which we call lions. Mount lions and grizzly bears and coyotes and whatever. When they kill one of their other competing predators, just like that tiger, they don't usually eat it. It's secondary. It's to kill off a competitor. So wolves don't get eaten by mount lions? They do get killed by mount lions occasionally, right? Occasionally. Matter of fact, one of the Colorado wolves that was just introduced was killed by Moutland really yeah one of the ten that was just introduced so they kill him because they

are a competitor and one-on-one a hundred twenty pound cat and a hundred pound wolf 101 the cat's gonna win but when you have a pack of wolves I mean we've watched them treat the cat and they'll wait till they can get it. But one on one the cat doesn't have a chance. But no one, I mean... Well the wolf doesn't have a chance one on one, you mean? Right, I mean when the cats won and you got a pack of eight waiting. Right, right, right.

But we've documented a case where the wolves treat a cat and when it couldn't stay up with the tree any longer it was on a skinny lodgepole and it was sliding down and as soon as it got to ground they killed it and they just ripped it apart and they didn't eat any of it. Wow. It's strictly to vanquish a competitor just like the tiger. It's interesting because wouldn't you think that food is scarce and that meat is precious and that if they did kill the mountain lion they'd realize why don't we eat this thing? Well they had better options. they did kill the mountain lion, they'd realize which why don't we eat this thing? Well, they had better options. Have you ever eaten my line? I have it's good. Yeah, I had it once that's why it's weird

I don't actually you know what we did. Did I eat it? I don't know I have Why I feel like someone gave me some it I don't think I ate it. I think it's in my freezer I think somebody might have served it to me somewhere. Like the backstrap of a lion. The loin. It looks like a pork tenderloin and you cut it. It's very light colored. I've only eaten it once. Well, Steve killed one and cooked it and he said it was tremendous. It is. He called it superb. He said it was like a superior pork.

Without the fat. Yeah, he said it was really good, which is like most people would not think you even eat mountain lion. Wolves apparently either, huh? Well, that was what I was reading about one of the trappers, one of the original people that was traveling across the country in the 1700s. His favorite meal was wolf. Oh, you're kidding me. No, this guy was eating like wolf meat. I don't think it'd be very good. They're skinny and stringy and sinewy Yeah, I don't know why I mean, I don't know why that would be anyone's favorite then

Maybe that's like a cool thing to tell people that I like You know you find some guys Your you know, he wants you to be scared of him. What do you was he's up there alone? He's eating wolves And that's his favorite. He lives by himself and he just eats wolves. Right, doesn't that sound like something a man would say? Or, worse yet, wolverines. Oh right, imagine eating wolverines. No, anyway, no, it's, I'm glad you showed me that stuff

because it's nice to know the stuff is still out there and alive and well, I hear it all the time. I hear about the Canadian super wolves. Well, there is a thing about mammals, right? That mammals, as they get into a colder range, they are larger mammals. Like if you see, let's say, northern Alberta white-tailed deer versus an Arizona white-tailed deer. To a certain point, and then when you get to where it's so cold and Arctic that the resources, the availability to get food is diminished. Right. Like Arctic

wolves on Alzheimer Island are pretty small and they're white. Because they're tiny, they don't have any food. They're smaller. Right. The the Piri's caribou up there are smaller than say the caribou in Alaska. Because it's hard to make a living. Right. But yeah northern climate, like the wolves from Canada, most of them are pretty big, and same with the... everything. Well, it's a resource issue, right? This is the reason why most people think when they think of grizzly bears, grizzly bears have a very similar size, but then you get to coastal brown bears. They're much larger. And it's really just access to protein,

right? Salmon. Yeah, you got it. I've been up to McNeil to watch the bears and, yeah, my God, they're just enormously fat. They're almost obscene, waddling around with their rolls, you know? Having a good old time hibernating. And they're so content because they have endless food resources. That's why you can have tourists go out and sit and watch grizzly bears feeding within 100 yards of you sometimes eating salmon and you're under no danger. Why would they bother you when they have thousands of pounds of salmon in the river?

There's a fantastic video. I don't know if you've ever seen it, but there's a photographer and he's got like a little lawn chair set up and he's photographing all these enormous brown bears that are feeding off salmon and this one walks up and gets as close to him as where Jamie is to us. Oh wow. And it's huge and it just sits next to him. Oh my god. Sits next to him and looks down, watch it, this is it. Oh, that's a big bear! Look at that little folding chair. Oh my god. I mean just imagine that. That is literally where Jamie is.

Oh my god. And it doesn't care at all about these people. It's not thinking of them as a food source. No, my question is why did the bear bother? Because he's looking at the river. He doesn't even care that the people are there. He's just like looking at the river going, hmm, let me take a nap here. So he just chills out. Oh my God.

I mean, any other time. So if you were in the middle of the forest and you saw that first of all, they wouldn't be that big in the middle of the forest. But if you saw a bear like that in the middle of the forest, it'd be absolutely terrifying. He'd be scared of you. You'd be scared of him. You'd have your bear spray out. Yeah. Look at this guy. He's so close. Yeah. And the bear just sort of walks off you'd be scared of him. You'd have your bear spray out. Yeah. You'd be scared. Look at this guy, he's so close. Yeah. And the bear just sort of walks off like, see ya, bye. Because he's got so much food.

I kind of had a similar experience, McNeil, not that close, but close enough that I was uncomfortable. I live with bears because I'm used to bears that have skinny resources and they're voracious and they're pretty aggressive in the fall, they can be, because they're getting into hyperphagia where they got good enough calories to hibernate. If you keep them from getting their calories, it's you or the huckleberry badger maybe or you or the elk that you just hung in the woods the night before and you went back to get. That happens.

People hang their game in the woods and they go back the next day and the grizzly bears found it. Have you ever heard Steve's story of that? No, no, tell me. You never, oh my God. They were on a Fog Nack Island. Where's that? It's in Alaska.

It's connected to, it's like one of the island chains that's right near, what is the big one where they find all the big brown bears? Kodiak. Kodiak, yeah. So it's right off of Kodiak. So they were elk hunting. And they shot an elk. Elk hunting on that island?

Yes, elk hunting on the Fog Neck, yeah. It's a very hard hunt. Wow. Incredibly difficult hunt because of the terrain. It's almost impossible to traverse. So to get a few miles takes hours and hours and hours. So they go through this, they're basically bushwhacking through this incredibly dense terrain.

They find an elk, they shoot the elk, and then they're very far from camp. So they take some of the meat and then they hang the meat in the trees and they set up. They didn't know that when they came back the next day that a bear had claimed that elk. So there's a gut pile, there's all sorts of stuff there for the bear, obviously the smell of the meat. And so it took a long time to get where the bear was, and they all sat down. There's a large group of them because they were filming for this television show, my friend Remy Warren, my friend Yannis Poutelis, and then Steve and a few other people working on the crew. And they sit down to have lunch. And little do they know that there is an enormous like 11

foot bear that had claimed that. And he comes running through the camp. And one guy, our friend Dirtmouth, was actually on his back The bear plowed through the camp and through the people and just I don't think it recognized how many people were there So it didn't know exactly what to do So he wound up literally on the back of a bear for like 10 to 15 yards Oh my god before he fell off of it So then the bear goes in the woods and starts woofing none of them had their their guns out. None of them were ready. They were just eating lunch. They really fucked up. They made a huge tactical error. They also ignored scat, which they weren't sure whether or not that was a bear that had recently been, you know, so they were there for quite a while,

guns drawn, like trying to fend off this bear. So they eventually got out of there. But both Steve Rinella and Remy Warren have told a story on my podcast and it's bone chilling. Oh yeah. I hadn't heard that one. Steve said that this thing was literally feet from his head, gnashing its teeth as it's running through the camp. And it's enormous.

He said, you have all these thoughts in your mind of what you would do and how you would feel and he said, it's just reptilian. Like your brain goes to the most base survival. There's a recognition of this enormous predator, unbelievably sobering experience. Yes, and what I would point out with that is that that bear had every chance in the world to kill every one of those guys. Yeah.

It didn't hurt any of them. Well, it was just trying to protect its kill, what it thought was its, but his theory was that the bear didn't realize how many people were there. It wouldn't matter, they weren't armed. And as it ran through the group, bear didn't realize how many people were there matter they were Ran through the group it didn't know like who to hit Yonis hit in the face with trekking poles hit the bear in the face Yeah, bear in the face with trekking poles like that close to him, right?

Imagine a head that big no that close and you hit it with trekking poles, right? Ah, and it just ran past them probably trying not knowing what which one to target or what? To do right and then they got their guns out And then I don't know exactly how they eventually Got to a point where they felt confident enough that they could walk right and then walk with meat on their back, right? right, so they have to they went there to pack out and They have all these guys so they can make the pack out a little bit easier.

It's terrifying. So now you're walking even slower, because you've got 50 pounds on your back. Maybe they left a little behind. They should have. That's a good move. I mean, yeah, I probably would have. Leave the shoulders and the neck.

Yeah, leave something. Yeah, leave something to fill them up. But my point is, that bear could have run through and killed one of them or all of them in a moment of anger. It didn't. It did a bluff charge. It turned around.

It woofed and gnashed its teeth. Yeah. And it could have killed them, seriously. Sure. Even if they had their guns, it would have killed one or two of them. Right. And then we have this happen a lot in Montana. Every year, at least one person is killed by a bear or many can be injured.

And the thing that's common is they say the bear charged them and before that it was woofing. And a lot of times they do what's called a bluff charge. But people don't want to wait until the bear is 15 feet away to figure out if it's a bluff charge or not. So they shoot them. And bear sprays is very, very effective because you can do a longer distance, and it's accurate, but I personally don't. The science shows, and many of your listeners won't believe this, the science shows that average hunter is better off with a bear spray than a firearm.

But in a moment of panic, you can't say what you would do. Better off to survive? To survive with less injury or at least fit less fatal. And people have sprayed a bear that's in attacking somebody and the bear breaks off and leaves. Of course you got to deal with the after. Have you ever been around bear spray, pepper spray? Yeah I have. Oh my god. Maybe we did it in the... We pepper sprayed a bunch of people on Fear Factor once. Oh it's awful. How did you get everybody to go off

camera and get... You run away because the breathe... Actually it was... You can't breathe. It was tear gas. Now that I'm remembering. Okay. So what we did, we put these people in this like, this cement structure. It was like, how long can you tolerate it? I forget exactly what the stunt was, but the wind took a lot of it and blew it through the crew and we were all running away and it was in your eyes. And I'm sure tear gas is probably pretty similar to the effects that you get from pepper spray. I think pepper spray, yeah, it might even be worse, because otherwise they'd have tear gas for bear repellent and they don't, they have pepper spray.

I'm sure. It's bad. But I'm just saying, and people can argue this, and it all depends on the situation, but in general, bear spray is a more effective tool because you can spray it three times past where you're sitting, and the bear hits that spray and they run away. And I guess I've heard the bear biologists say to me, try shooting a rolling tire at 40 miles an hour and see how accurate your shots are,

because that's what you're shooting if a bear is charging you. And it's difficult to keep your arc together. That's the big problem. Right. Is panic. Right. It's not necessarily the killing factor. It's just that you're not gonna hit very well. Whereas if you have bear spray it's just this cloud you're spraying out. It's more effective. So it's like you got a flamethrower. I always carry bear spray when I'm hiking. You don't carry a gun? No. Really? Unless I'm bird hunting. Do you ever, does bear

spray work on cats? I've heard it and I have never heard about it being used on wolves because generally wolves aren't sneaking around but I, if I had a cat stalking me lying on, boy you bet I'd have my bear spray out. Yeah. Absolutely. You've never been in a situation where you had a cat stalking you or close to you? Not that I saw. Oh that's what's scary, right? Exactly. Have you? No, not really. No. I had one kill my dog in Colorado. Oh. Little dog, little tiny. Sorry. Yeah, it was a bummer. But there's a big difference I think between what you see and what's there. Oh yeah I think if you had infrared vision for the heat detector and you could see what's out in the woods you'd never go outside to take

a leak when you're at your cabin. You probably wouldn't. Because they are so aware of you. And everything's out there. We're basically almost blind. Yes. You know and especially at nighttime we're almost blind and they have senses that are beyond our wildest imagination. Like we were talking earlier today, where someone brought up that stuff that hunters use to spray on them to kill their scent. I go, listen to me, this shit is nonsense.

First of all, whatever that stuff is, they're gonna smell that stuff. Exactly. And it's not going to hide your scent. I don't know the science behind it. I don't want to kill anybody's business. But as you were with the wolf thing, I'm super skeptical that a deer or an elk is not going to smell you if you spray some junk that you bought from Cabela's on you. I'm not going to kill anybody's business either, but I can tell you from traps too I do the same thing. I'm incredibly careful about scent, but they can still smell it. It just be more careful, be as careful as you can be. But I, yeah, I just don't think

we can even imagine the kind of sense that they have, the kind of ability to smell and hear with those enormous ears and those noses and those eyes they can see at night I think we're just guessing and we're trying it's almost like when you try to imagine the size of the universe and someone says oh 13.7 billion years old like light years and like Okay, how big is that like you know your head just? Someone tried to explain to me in a way that actually resonated that it's similar to how you can smell skunk except much more directional you know like a skunk can die a mile away and you

can smell it which is really weird because there's no other scent like that in the nature no that you can pick up at animal, sprays one thing a mile away, and you're driving in your car. Right. And you're like, oh, you smell that? Right, right. There's a skunk around here, which is crazy. Now, what this guy was saying to me is that now imagine that, but directional and better.

Yeah. And that's like what a bear can do. Or a wolf. Yeah. Or a wolf. I've read studies, and if the wind is right, I've read several miles so you can smell something. Unbelievable.

It is unbelievable. Incredible. Yeah, I think, yeah, the whole scent thing, it's way beyond our ability to detect. And when I've been burying these traps after being so careful with everything, it's kind of voodoo and science mix, it's art and science. You bury everything. You bury the trap, the hook, the grapple cable. I mean, just everything. And then you cover it up and it's been in the ground two weeks. Nothing's disturbed it. Then one day you see where a wolf has come by, taken its paw, dug at the backside of the trap and lifted it

out by the spring and pulled it up onto the trail not snapped and then there'd be a scat two feet away. Wow like fuck you. Yeah! Wow. Why do they do that? Well maybe because they know it's there and they probably have had some experience in their life with traps. But why mess with it at all if they know it's dangerous? Right. I mean, yeah. What do you think? They're trying to tell people, I'm not that stupid?

My imagination and my theory is that maybe this is a wolf that's already caught, been caught, and it's got other pack members that are naive. Right. And it stops because it smells. It's like, oh, man man I know what this is maybe it's time to show Junior what's going on here and maybe they pull it out I I don't know. Have you ever seen the video of they caught a rat and the rat takes a

stick and blows the mousetrap so it can get the food. No kidding. The rat actually brought over a tool to spring the trap and purposely springs it. I haven't seen the video but I watch the problem with the video the problem I have with the video is I don't know the source so I don't know if they train this rat I don't know if they may have right so they may be done that just to make a viral video, but it's still Pretty extraordinary that this rat figures out It could take a stick and it like moves it and puts the stick on the rat trap the rat trap springs Yeah, and then it goes over to and by the way, it doesn't even flinch when the rat trap springs

Which is no see we can find Jamie. So it's really weird. Yeah. This is it. Oh, so he smells it Yeah, he smells it. It's a big rat trap. Yeah, so he goes away and I'll check this now There's the thing about him not flinching is the craziest so he gets a stick He's had experience it up And drops it he didn't flinch. He didn't flinch at all Isn't that insane? I mean imagine you're a wild animal seems like it something something maybe he's done it before But there was something weird about it where yeah He must have known that that's going to happen. And the camera with the full eye reflection sitting indoors in a room, that doesn't smack

of wildness to me. That's something that's... Well, it's rats. It's not really wild, right? They're domesticated in some sort of a weird way. Well, you know, there's as close to as many rats as there are people in New York City, by weird estimations, which I'm sure they don't have a good accurate account of how many rats there are, but there's so many of them. And there's an amazing documentary called Rats that's on Netflix, and it's really good. And it shows you how intelligent they are. And one of the things that they do is they take the young brash rats and they let them

go try the food out first, see if it's poison, because they've been poisoned so many times. So they'll get this young dummy. It's like, I'll eat it. Send Sam. Sam's a dumbass. So Sam the rat runs over and eats the poison and gets sick and like let's get out of here and they take off but they have some very bizarre survival instincts that's highly tuned to this recognition that they're being at least tried, not preyed upon necessarily, but something something trying to kill them, right? And then they're not eating them with some weird situation where it's poison so they've figured out what poison is

So they're like really smart crazy So they'll send a dummy to go out a young guy to go out and eat the poison Give it to Mikey Mikey likes everything a young guy to go out and eat the poison. Give it to Mikey. Mikey likes everything. I mean like what kind of natural adaptation is that and like what is that from? It's like there's it I'm sure you're aware of this but there's a very bizarre study that they've done where there's a thing there's a concept called morphic resonance and the idea is that once one animal learns this, the other animals will learn it easier. And that this is scientifically proven.

And that the idea is that there's some sort of a sharing of information that is not local and that we don't totally understand. So the concept is, the way it's been proven is that rats on one side of the country, if they go through a maze, the rats on the other side of the country, if they go through a maze, the rats on the other side of the country will go through the maze quicker. The exact same maze. See if you can find that. So they don't know what this is.

Like, you know, I think we have a very naive belief that the senses that we have recognized, all of them, whether they're sight, sound, touch, taste, whatever they are, this is it. This is all that's available. And that the concept might, the idea is that there might be something that we're missing or something that we really, we as dumb blind human beings in terms of our ability to see things, we don't have the ability to tune in to what these animals can tune into. I think there's a huge portion of our brain that we never, never touch and I think animals are more tuned in. I think in many ways many species are smarter than us just because they can sense their environment more acutely.

Yeah, maybe smarter is not the right word. Maybe not. But there's something. Rat learning and morphic resonance. Yeah. So according to the hypothesis, formative causation, there's no difference in time between innate and learned behavior. Both depend on motor fields given by morphic resonance. The hypothesis therefore admits a possible transmission of learned behavior from one animal to another and leads to testable prediction, which differs, or two testable predictions which differ not only from those of the orthodox theory of inheritance, but also from those of the Lamarckian theory and from inheritance through epigenetic modifications of gene expression. So animals of an inbred strain are placed under conditions in which they learn to respond to a given stimulus in a characteristic way. They are then made to repeat this pattern of behavior many times.

X-hypothesis, the new behavioral field which will be reinforced by morphic resonance, will not only cause the behavior of the trained animals to become increasingly habitual, but will also affect, though less specifically, any similar animal exposed to a similar stimulus. The larger the number of animals in the past that have learned the task, the easier it should be for the subsequent similar animals to learn it. Therefore, in an experiment of this type, it should be possible to observe a progressive increase in the rate of learning not only in the animals descended from trained ancestors, but also in genetically similar animals descended from untrained ancestors.

This is pretty wild stuff. It's pretty wild, yeah. It just speaks to this. I think we naively look at our senses as being the only ones that are available. There's obviously some kind of communication that transpires between animals that allows them to hunt in packs, right? Particularly wolves. Like they have strategies.

Yes. They do things like they know how to corner animals. They know how to funnel them into like pinch points. They do it on purpose and they seem to be aware of what they're doing through whether it's gestures or pheromones or something that we're just guessing on. But they're accomplished at it. It's not like a singular individual event that you could point to like maybe that was just dumb luck, they ran the deer through this area and the other wolves just happen to be

there. No, no, they have specific tasks where they have wolves that will get on the top of the ridges and let themselves be known so they get these animals running and then the other wolves are ahead of them and then they have wolves that follow behind them. The Yellowstone has been a great place to observe hunting. I mean when I was working up northwest Montana it's heavily forested. We never almost never got to watch wolves chasing prey unless we were in the airplane. But in the Lamar you got scopes and everybody's watching it. And I've seen some pretty incredible chases.

And there's certain, in some packs, certain individuals are the chasers, the younger animals, and some of the individuals are the coup de gras. They go in for the kill after the animal's been tired. And I guess there was some older animals that are too valuable potentially to risk being injured early on. But they join in the chase and they know how to kill an animal. So one thing I've always wondered, I don't know if this is with the morphic resonance, but that's something different maybe.

But I've always wondered when wolves were first walking down from Canada and dispersing from glacier before wolves were reintroduced and there was a very thin population of wolves out there. How do they know where to go? For example, there was a wolf pack in the Nine Mile, it's a river drainage, outside of Missoula and this pair of wolves had formed a mating system and they had a litter of pups. The female was poached on Memorial Day, which is, those pups are born in middle April. So they were pretty young. They were five, six weeks old. They were still dependent on mom. And the concern

was that the dad wouldn't be able to raise those pups because he's got to go out and hunt and they may be, they're just being weaned and blah, blah, blah. Well, two weeks, two weeks after the female was dead, my colleague Mike, who was working down there, says, hey, Diane, are you missing any collared wolves from Glacier? I said, yeah, I'm missing several that I don't know where they went. He says, because I just had a collared wolf show up here and join the nine-mile male. I said, really? I said, well, here's my list of frequencies of the missing wolves that had been missing. And he put ran through the receiver and listened.

And one of those wolves was one that I'd caught in glacier and disappeared six, seven months earlier. So like, so she wandered around and that cyberspace but mountain space, trying to look for a place to fit in. And all of a sudden, when this female gets shot, boom, she's there to fill in the slot. Wow. How does that happen?

And that happens in Yellowstone too, where one of the breeding animals will be killed and very soon after, a wolf of unknown, well there they know a lot of the wolves, but a wolf would just show up, the right gender, the right age, and potentially bond and start a new pack. How do they know? And I guess all I can say is with that there's scent, the wolves smelling the air in this gat can detect all kinds of things harmonally and the dominance of an animal. If the female went missing, all of a sudden they won't smell it anymore and maybe it's a female coming

in and she knows it. But geographically, how do they know where to migrate? Right. Two hundred miles and show up exactly when the other wolf disappears. Well, they've been trying to figure out forever what's going on with birds and how birds, like sandhill cranes, for example. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, Canadian geese. Like, what's going on? Like, how are these birds figuring out these incredible migration paths? Right. It's amazing to me. So have you ever heard of the book called World on the Wing by Paul, I think the last

name is Whedon, now it's something. It's about the world of migration. It is mind boggling. If you like to read nature stuff and science, it's written so anybody can enjoy it. You don't have to be a scientist. But it's fascinating and full of facts about the world of bird migration and how they get places in like a particular important flat in China that was critical habitat for a group of birds suddenly gets developed and it's like the wintering ground for half a million of these

birds or whatever it was and certainly where do they go? Right. I don't know. Migratory birds are very fascinating. Oh I know. Like what are they following and what GPS do they have in their little tiny brains? They have little tiny brains. But yet they're able to use something. Like there's a theory that it's the magnetic poles. Right or the stars or whatever. The stars really? I've never heard that one. I just heard a lot of stuff.

I've had, I remember, yeah, one winter. One winter night I was at my little remote cabin and it was at Moose City and it was stormy and it was like November and it was stormy. And I went outside to UC outhouse and I heard this calling and it was dark and stormy and it was calling and calling and got closer and closer and I put my bright flashlight straight up and there was a and calling and got closer and closer and I put my bright

flashlight straight up and there was a flock of snow geese. I'd never seen snow geese up there, never. And they were circling around and they were lost in the storm. And there's no lights up there except for my house light and my flashlight and they were circling around the meadow and I listened to that haunting call and I thought how are they gonna survive it this is the valley bottom are they gonna try and go up over the mountaintops in the storm are they gonna crash land in the meadow for the night anyway I got to thinking about him I thought why how did they get here they got blown off course I just shut my

light off and I don't know what happened to him never saw him again wow but I. But I think about these birds. A lot of them die migrating. Yeah. They don't have a good ending. You know there's birds that fly across the entire ocean. It's mind-boggling. Mind-boggling. They sleep while they're flying. I know. I wished I could do that when I was driving. I try sometimes. There's one of them. One of them is a very big bird. Albatross. That's right. Albatross. And they literally sleep while they're soaring across the sky. Yeah, they just put out those big old wings. Just ride the wave. Yeah, for months or years. Yeah. I mean it's crazy, right? Like what are you doing? So why are you doing that? There you go. Here, albatross can fly non-stop for over 16,000 kilometers. Wow. That is so crazy. For example, a gray-headed albatross flew

13,670 miles around the world in 46 days in 2005. Oh my god. That's crazy. Laysan albatross can travel 1,600 miles on foraging trips to feed their chicks. Large albatross species can spend up to five years at sea. Albatross can go up to six years before returning to the island where they were born to mate and lay eggs. Unbelievable. Yeah, I got to see albatross one time when I was down. I think it was down in New Zealand, but they were amazing. I like the comments. It's crazy here where it's talking about how they can fly over vast areas without

flapping their wings. They just use the wind, expending almost none of their own. Wow. So it would be interesting to me, I would hope the day would come with wolves and other large carnivores where people learn about the science and they get just as excited as this instead of the wolves have killed all the deer now. Well, I think there's a narrative in this country, right? Yeah. I think the narrative is first of all, they were killed off a long time ago by poison,

by ranchers and by settlers. And because of that, we grew up with this narrative that they had to kill off the wolves. So then these damn hippies come and vote and bring, and I wanted to ask you about that too, what your feeling is on biology that's done by vote, which is how informed are these people that are casting this vote? How emotional is this? And how much of this, these decisions that people are making, like one of them being that I think was like particularly egregious was the delisting

of grizzly bears in BC. Because I have a good friend who lives up there and he's like, there's a lot of grizzly bears up there. They will still allow black bear hunting, but they're not controlling the grizzly bear population because of the people in Vancouver. That's the large population. They have the most votes. They decided to go to outlaw what they call trophy hunting.

Right. And so biology by vote, by people that probably don't know anything about what's going on. They don't have to, other than have this emotional response. But I think going back to what we're talking about is that we have this narrative that the wolves are bad, the wolves are killed off for a good reason. We don't want wolves, oh my God, people are bringing back wolves, what are they doing? We want to kill those damn wolves. And so there's a good percentage of the population that lacks this nuanced perspective of the complexity of the ecosystem and how amazing, first of all, how amazing it is to be able to see wolves.

Like, if you're a per, I've never seen them in the wild. I saw one once. Did you? Yeah, in Alberta, but it was so brief. It was dusk. It was like, it was actually after last light, so it was running across this dirt road. And I was like, is that a wolf? Is that a wolf?

But there are a lot of wolves up there. Yeah, yeah. Plenty of camera trap photos of these wolves. So that's most likely what it was. And they give out wolf tags. You can get as many wolf tags as you want up there. But good luck finding one, you know. They're a lot smarter than you, or a lot better at living in the woods than you are. But we have these ideas that are ingrained in us that the wolves were killed off for

a good reason, and they're only being brought back because of morons. Well, you summed that up pretty well. Isn't that how people feel about it? Yeah. So a couple of things. I, as a wolf conservationist, I guess I'd say, and researcher. And a wolf lover. And manager.

Well. Don't you love them? I love wolves. I love dogs. I love foxes. I love white tailed. I love wildlife. That's better.

And I'm kind of in the middle, but obviously I'm passionate about wolves and I lean towards whatever we need to do to ensure that they continue as a species. I'm not saying they're gonna live in Iowa and Texas. I'm just saying there's places that they can live where they more likely belong. I'm just gonna put it that way. But I am not in favor of reintroductions and I was not in favor of reintroductions and I was not in favor of the Yellowstone and the Central Idaho reintroductions which usually surprises people because I promote wolf conservation. But I felt that wolves were coming down on their own from Canada and before those wolves were ever

reintroduced by 1995 we had like eight packs of wolves in the state of Montana, 70-75 wolves. And you can Google that with the US Fish and Wildlife Service early reports. They were making it. And I feel like some of these places where reintroductions are happening, because of ballot box initiatives, like Colorado, wolves are already starting to get to Colorado and the people who are wolf proponents say we want them reintroduced because they'll never make the great desert across Wyoming. They'll all be killed. They can't make it. Well, a few of them have, and they even made pups in 19, I think it was 2020 or 2021. And

then this wolf was, did I tell you about the wolf from Michigan? Yeah, the wolf that was killed, trapped in Colorado this year that came from the Great Lakes. My God, how did it get there? But it did. So I feel sort of that Colorado is on the cusp of natural recovery. If it's going to be one year or 10 years or 50 years, it's a time issue. And I think the same was true for Yellowstone in central Idaho. They were already getting to those places. Wolves had already been seen, two of them confirmed, in and around Yellowstone Park in 1991 or two before they were reintroduced and my wolves going to Idaho. It's just a slower wave and people want to jumpstart this with reintroducing wolves. Well, in my humble opinion, I'm not a psychologist, but I think that social tolerance of humans for anything is better

when it isn't forced on them. I don't like having things forced on me. Of course. Yeah. So when you force wolves on somebody, it's going to meet with human resistance. If they walk around on their own, I believe they will get there. Our science has shown that they do. It just takes longer.

The other thing of interest about the reintroductions is that people think the wolf-loving hippies push to have the wolves reintroduced into Yellowstone and Idaho. I'll just say Yellowstone, but it's the same. And to some point, it is that faction, but the reason it happened was because two conservative senators, one from Idaho, McClure, one from Wyoming, Simpson, very conservative ranching supporting base promoted to Congress to pass laws to get those wolves reintroduced. Because they could see the writing on the wall that the wolves are coming anyway and if they walk down there on their own they're gonna be fully endangered.

Well if we reintroduce them they get a different classification called non-essential experimental population. Meaning because humans put them there you can manipulate them and kill them if they're taking livestock. It's just more flexible management. So the senators thought we're getting there anyway, let's just put them in there. Really? So yeah, that's a little bit of the interesting background that people aren't aware of with the reintroductions, that it was really people way on the right and way on the left coming towards a common goal for different reasons. Want to see a crazy video of a wolf that was in Bakersfield? Yeah in California. Yeah my friend filmed this so this wolf he was driving down the freeway in Bakersfield California and they looked off and there was this wolf I've sent you this right Jamie?

Yeah do you think you still have it? I know Cody sent it to me. I can I can find it So my friend who was out there filmed this wolf off the highway and this is like Five miles from an in-and-out burger Yeah, and it's in California. I mean we're talking about an hour 40 from Los Angeles. Oh my gosh. Yeah and he was speculating that perhaps this wolf was brought there by someone. Damn it might be on my other phone. Did I send it to you Jamie? I know I saved it. I can find it but this might be a little bit of a pain in the ass.

Maybe it's here. pain in the ass. Maybe it's here. So this wolf was very cool looking, like this very big black wolf, and he's like wandering around these cows, and then someone comes and shoes him away, and he runs off. Huh. Damn it, don't laugh. Does he have a collar on? No, he does not. I think I read about this wolf. There's a wolf that went down through the central California

Valley and ended up going down through the vineyard country, and I think I read about this wolf. There's a wolf that went down through the central California Valley and ended up going down through the vineyard country. I think it was probably that wolf that it was seen. Oh, probably. I mean, there's not that many wolves there. A lot of people are super skeptical, like how would a wolf wind up there? They do. They do. But what you're saying in terms of the amount of land that they can travel on is insane. Oh my gosh. And so-

Hundreds and hundreds of miles. Historically, back eons of time, wolves had the largest global distribution of any mammal in the world except people. I mean, wolves live from the Arctic to the prairies to the temperate forest to the Gaza Strip still. Really? There's wolves in the Gaza Strip? There's wolves in the Netherlands right now. Wolves have expanded. They will live anywhere that we don't kill them off because they did historically. I mean, there were wolves on Staten Island, I'm sure, historically. Now we have different wolves there.

Giants. But I'm thinking, yeah, anyway, stock market. Wolves of Wall Street. Yeah, exactly. That's where I'm going. So but they live anywhere because they can eat anything, but mostly what they need is four-legged hoofed mammals, usually deer elk, caribou, moose, whatever, occasionally livestock. They need a place where they can secure that they can whelp and raise pups, and then they need a freedom of persecution from humans, being it traps, poison shooting, whatever. If you have enough of those three factors, they will be there. They've been showing up in Iowa and Missouri and the Dakotas for years and years now, but

they don't make it because they get killed. But they're trying. Yeah, I think I might have saved it under wolf if I look. There's like videos. I'd love to see that video. There's a thing that you can do now with your iPhone where you can just search for wolves. Really? You can search for stuff.

It's showing me the werewolf in the lobby. It's showing me all the pictures I have of Carl and Marshall. It's not showing you that one wolf? No. Sorry. It's not showing me either. But you saw one, or your friend did? No, our friend did.

He filmed it. I know I had the video. So if you get a chance, Joe, if you're really interested in seeing wolves, just take a trip to Yellowstone and go I would suggest not in the summer because it's it's just crazy. I'd go in the winter, you can hire a hire a wolf tour guide or you can go on your own just stay at hotel but you got to get up before dark.

What was that, Jamie? Those mountain lions crying. Oh, wow. And you got to go out dawn and dusk and in the wintertime, they're easier to see because of the snow and it's really fun depending on the season. If you go in the fall they got bigger pack because the pups are all still alive. You go in the winter they get breeding behavior and stuff going on. It's just there's always something to see. I go there

myself but I know a lot of the wolf watchers I just drive the roads till I see people pulled over and I get out and watch and they might be a mile away, they might be 400 yards away. But bring a scope and I'd suggest you just hire a guide. You'll see wolves, guarantee it. Just to be able to hear them would be cool. Yes, I mean it's amazing to hear them howling. One thing we did come across when I was hunting in BC,

we were moose hunting about 10 years ago or so, and we found a calf that had been killed hmm, and it was really interesting because like they had stripped it down to the bone and What was wild was all the hair? It was hair everywhere. I'm like, I didn't even think of that I didn't think there'd be hair everywhere for some stupid reason how long ago were they killed it? Was there anything laughter? It was pretty recent. It was real recent, like within the day. Really? I know that's on my Instagram. Wasn't a bear kill or a lion kill? No, it was a wolf kill. Yeah, my friend who was up there. I just asked because bears and lions both pluck and strip hair off. Well, that area had a

lot of wolves. Okay. And he was very accustomed to finding calves that had been killed by wolves. We found it because of birds. The birds were circling. It was like, let's go see what's over there. Yeah, magpies and ravens are my best friends when I'm out looking for kills. Yeah, and then interesting,

that's how you find things. You find the birds. It is. And how do they find it? So there's been stories written, and there's a guy who does a lot of ra Raven studies. Ah, his name escapes me right now They're so smart. Yeah, he's done some really interesting studies of the Ravens And if you ever watch the videos of crows solving puzzles and rants, oh my god incredible, right? Next life

I want to come back as a raven Not only do they solve puzzles, but they figure out how to raise water levels so they can get the food in a jar. Think about that. They drop rocks into the jar until the water level raises so they can get the food that's floating. The raven guy's name is Bernd Heinz. He's German. Bernd as in Bernie with Bernd, Bernd and Heinz. Yeah, anyway, it's cool stuff. I mean, this is, I mean, you and I are both obviously very interested in animals. We hunt our own food, but just when I'm out hunting and I are both obviously very interested in animals. We hunt our own food.

But just when I'm out hunting, I feel a little bit like a predator. Not, not a lot because I got a gun. But I watch the dogs who are basically predators. And I watched animals in the landscape and it just, you see so much when you're out hunting. I'm sure, I mean, what's the coolest animal you've ever seen when you've been out on the landscape, hiking or hunting or anything? That mountain lion that we saw, what's the coolest animal you've ever seen when you've been out on the landscape hiking or hunting or anything? That mountain lion that we saw might have been the coolest that was the coolest but I saw a badger once I got film of that. I actually got out of the truck and got next to him got close to him

Then he started coming towards me and I ran Stupid blonde wolverines, that's really what they are. He looked fucking terrifying and not very big but like ferocious. I've caught a couple in wolf traps. Such a cool looking animal. They're so cool looking. I just couldn't imagine that I was seeing one like it was in Utah. Seeing one in the wild. I've seen I saw one grizzly and it looked at me so much different than any bear I've ever looked at. I've hunted black bear before and I've been around black bear many, many times. And this is the first grizzly and it was so different the way it looked at me. Where was it?

This was in BC. No, excuse me, this was in Alberta. And this one was not a big one. He was about six feet tall. But he looked through me. It looked different. Like a black bear looks at looks like, who are you? What's this? What are you doing over there? Are you food? Are you gonna kill me?

What are we doing? They're a little sketched out because they're not the top of the food chain. The grizzlies are. And so the grizzly looked at me like this, like right at me. We had shotguns, we screamed at him. And you know.

He wasn't scared. Yeah, and my friend Jen, she slammed a stick against a tree like, get out of here bear! And cocked the shotgun, the bear took off. But it was the difference in looking in their face. They just have a totally different look. They look at you like this. Like, am I going to get you right now?

It's just a grizzly has a hard life. It's not like that brown bear that has all those salmon that's sitting by the river. Those grizzlies are out there like trying to survive. Yeah, grizzlies in the Rocky Mountains are quite small compared to the coastal brown bears and the same species. Yeah. But they're very different and they have to make a living. I mean, if you had to make your living picking huckleberries and eating gut piles in the fall, it'd be skinny.

And they have to they have to put on a lot of weight. picking huckleberries and eating gut piles in the fall, it'd be skinny and they have to put on a lot of weight. Well that to me is so fascinating how animals change their behavior based on the amount of resources that are available and whether or not they're safe, like the yellowstone elk that are habitualized that are just around people hanging out with them. And Banff, you ever been to Banff in the fall? No I haven't but I I've seen photos They're bugling and mating on the post office lawn Smart for them though, absolutely no hunters, right and people just pull over to pull their phones out and film them Yeah, I think the wolf I think I've heard of occasionally wolves find out and they sneak into town at night

Well, were you telling a story on Steve Ronell's podcast about a very nice neighborhood of like these nice homes and these wolves that decided to set up shop? Yes, it was a closed gated community between Whitefish and Kalispell and they had their pups in this closed gated community because there's no hunting, it's unlimited green space and undeveloped forest because people have McMansions and they have a huge acreage and it's just quiet time there there's not a safer place and the people there like them because they had don't have livestock they're using on hunters and they there's great except then they grow up and they have to leave the wolf you know so then they get out in the real world and then they get their asses

kicked yeah right that's a problem because then you're like a wolf growing up in a gated community literally right And you've learned that people are okay. You learn that people are okay and there's deer everywhere, right? Because the deer know that people are okay and the deer are not used to wolves being there. Right. It's really interesting. Yeah, that pack didn't make it. I'm not surprised. Right. But it was just so interesting to me how adaptable wolves are. You know, when I first started this business, I come from Minnesota, and the wolves lived only in the northern third

or quarter of the state where it was boundary water, canoe area, and really wild because any place else, they got killed off. So I always thought these wolves were denizens of the wilderness and they would only live where it was incredibly wild. And they've come to show us that's not true. They will live wherever we'll tolerate them.

And that could be, I mean, there were wolves in Texas not that long ago, red wolves. So they were here, but they're just not tolerated. How much of a problem is it where they kill pets? It's a giant mountain lion issue, especially in Northern California. One place outside of San Francisco, they did an analysis of the diet of mountain lions that they had captured, and it was 50% pets.

But of course it's a biased survey because it's by San Francisco. So it's not, yeah. But it's just fascinating that they had actively chosen to hunt pets. If I was a mountain lion living near San Francisco, I'd be eating poodles and chihuahuas and cats. Absolutely, easy prey. There are a lot of them. Nobody's gonna shoot you in California, it's illegal. It's a charmed life until you get run over in the freeway.

Well, it's probably one of the reasons why you don't hear about that in Texas, because in Texas, they're like vermin. You can shoot as many mountain lions as you want. If you see a mountain lion, you shoot them just like a coyote. It's just, that's interesting. I didn't know that in Texas.

So you don't need a tag. You don't need anything. Really? Yep. It's amazing they still hanging on. There's the wolf. Oh, it's yeah. How'd you find it, Jamie? Wow.

I found out that it was on the Adam Green Tree episode. You see the white triangle. Jamie, you're the best. You see the white triangle on the chest. Yes. That indicates to me it's a younger wolf because the pups can be born. Can you wind that back again? Yeah, thanks.

Awesome. So this is my friend Cody filmed this off the highway. Awesome. So he had a scope, you know, like a spotting scope. Yeah, yeah. And he put a phone up. Look at that. That's amazing.

So the white chevron, pups, younger wolves have that and as they get older, like the rest of us, they get gray, and that doesn't stand out so much. So it would probably be a yearling, maybe a two-year-old wolf. Interesting. So what their speculation is, you know, he works on a ranch. Wow. Their speculation is that someone released that. Could be. And they think these rogue wildlife lovers are really like cows right there that these rogue wildlife lovers are releasing wolves to try to force some sort of a reintroduction into Central California I know for fact that there was a wild wolf that was tracked going down through Central and Bakersfield I don't know if it's black or gray but I know there was one. So it's not unprecedented? No. It's not. My friend Kent Loudon does wolf work in California. He's a biologist, used to be in Montana and Idaho. And no, they're making a comeback. I think there's six packs now

and they're doing really well. Mostly Northern California? Northern California. And yeah. And there's lots of conflict because they can't, they can't, I'm pretty darn sure, they cannot kill the wolves that are killing livestock. So it's set up for a conflict, kind of like in California. They're having some management flexibility in California, I mean in Colorado. But so far, I mean they just now, so a pair of wolves that they reintroduced found each other and made a pack and they had the only litter of pups known to be in Colorado this year. I believe both of those wolves came from Oregon and they both had livestock killing

experience before they chose them to release which is really unfortunate. So the dilemma was okay they did okay until people started calving. And now there's little calves on the ground and all the wolves are coming in and they're starting to kill calves and then they might kill a heifer or something. And anyway, they're killing livestock. So what do you do? You've got a male and a female and a litter of pups and they have started a history of killing livestock. What do you do with them when the the the slight majority of people in Colorado, the ballot box initiative stuff, want to see all the wars protected and a slight minority, it's

like 49 and a half to 50 and a half or something, want them removed. And the people in the middle are trying to figure out what to do. So they went and captured them and put them in a holding facility for a while. Then they're going to release them later. Well, you still have a problem. Because they still are habitualized. They will probably likely to continue killing livestock. It's hard to find... Are the ranchers reimbursed? Is there a fund for that? In Montana there is. I presume there is in Colorado. Yeah, they're reimbursed? Like, is there a fund for that? In Montana, there is. I presume, yeah, there is in Colorado. Yeah, they're reimbursed.

But as I've worked with ranchers and they said, I didn't raise my cows for your damn wolves to kill them. I don't care. I don't want the money. I just don't want the wolves here. And sometimes when you're working with a rancher community, that's the only common denominator you have, is you're out there because you don't want their cows killed because then wolves have to get killed. They don't want their cows

killed because they didn't they raised them for all these generations. They have a genetic, a good pool genetically. They are invested. So you have the same, that's the same common goal and you might have different reasons to come to that goal but that's how you work with people. You know how it is. Yeah. There's always a common denominator, always. I was watching a documentary about this guy who lived with wolves, like lived with wolves in some contained environment, and he would like set up a fake kill where he would eat the liver so he could be like the dominant male and he would growl at them.

It was really stupid. Sorry. Yeah, you're right. Thanks. I'm with you. Anyway, this gentleman who was a wolf expert was then recruited to try to help a sheepherder with wolves that had moved in to take over his flock. And one of the strategies they used is giant speakers.

So they took speakers and they played sounds of wolves to scare off these other wolves. And so then he goes back to the pack and tries to be the alpha again and they corner him and snarl at him And he had a whimper and and he had a it's a very weird Documentary because this is some sort of a strange fenced in environment that they've created where these wolves are living. Yeah Sounds a bit like Timothy Treadwell the very same very very very similar Yeah, well that I think that that's from the movie the Warner Werner Herzog, another Werner Herzog film, Grizzly Man. Oh, that was amazing.

Amazing movie. Yeah. An unintentional comedy. Maybe intentional. I think it was a little bit intentional because there's a few cuts in there where you're like, he had to know that was funny. And I think that was Suicide by Bear. Yeah.

That's what I think. And the girlfriend, too. Yeah. I think that guy and by bear. Yeah. That's what I think. And the girlfriend. Yeah. I think that guy and the girlfriend, unfortunately. But I think that guy wanted to die, and I think he wanted to die that way. He had to know. But what I'll say is captive wolf facilities, and I'm going to have many people who love their captive wolves, but captive animal behavior and wild wolf behavior have some parallels,

but they're not the same. And that guy doing this thing would never happen with wild wolves. Right, impossible, no. They would never tolerate that. Yeah, no, it's a weird bastardization of reality. Yeah, and many people, I did part of my career earlier helping to try and keep wolves out of livestock. And we put out sirens and we put out blinking lights and bought raw cow hide patches and

raw hamburger and laced it with lithium chloride, which is a toxin that makes you violently ill right away. It's not going to kill you. The idea being that these wolves would eat this baits wrapped with string and taste all this wonderful beef burger and taste the hide and then associate that bad experience of vomiting your guts out for 24 hours or whatever to the animal on the hoof out there. That's a great idea for how your human brain works. They just ate every bait we put out and there's piles of puke everywhere.

They don't think like we think. Right, of course not. Right. And that one guy Rancho was working with, we were putting out the baits, whatever. They did the sirens and they did what's called fladry. And fladries, they used it in Europe in places like Poland to hunt wolves where you hang streamers down from fences. And you start out with a really wide funnel in the woods and the hunters used to drive the wolves through the forest with people at the end with

guns and they would see the flattery and it would be quite a ways apart like a mile or two or something and they wouldn't cross the flattery because it scared them and they get to the end and it's like shooting pheasants at the end of a cornfield. So people have taken that idea to try and keep wolves out of like calving pens in specific areas where the livestock are confined. It doesn't work well when they're out in free range. And it works pretty well. So I was out working with this pasture guy in northern Minnesota and he had a long, skinny

pasture and I had out got highway blinking lights that came on at night and the fladry and he was so kind. This is a lot of years ago. It's just this young story I think so I stopped in to visit him and I said well I know you had a you had a lot you had a loss he got a calf I said have any the wolves been back and he looked at me he's just well no hun they haven't been back he says I said you think the blinking lights are working on your pasture says well I don't know but I damn near had a plane land here last night. I broke up laughing. He broke up laughing. It was just like, yeah,

this is a tough job. Let's just have some fun here. That's hilarious. But again, he didn't like wolves. I didn't want him killing his cows. And that was a common factor to try and keep them apart. What are the cons when there's pros and cons for reintroduction of wolves? What do you think the cons are? Like the reintroduction in Colorado, the reintroduction in Yellowstone? I believe potentially a decreased human tolerance.

And the wolves don't have a learning curve. They're taken from one place and then boop, they're popped there versus if they kind of migrate, they were down, they run this gauntlet. They kind of have to learn on the way to be successful to get there. They have to learn to avoid livestock pans or whatever they have to learn and stay a little more secretive.

So that's just my belief that when they're making on their own, they've been smart enough to get there. Whereas when you just put them there, you're going to forever have people believing they don't belong there, they're not native. So the problem is in the perceptions of the people that are encountering the wolves or they're impacted by the wolves being there. I believe so, yeah.

And so for example now, we've got wolves in the, they were put into a total of 66 wolves was put into Idaho and Wyoming. And then other 10 were added to Wyoming for Montana, but it's a very small number of wolves. But now wolves have taken over Washington, Oregon, California. They've made a few made it to Colorado. They're trying to get into Utah.

A few have been shot there and all those wolves came from this introduced population, some from Montana, but they'll never be considered native. Which is crazy, because they used to be native. And the wolves that were taken for the sources, like I explained earlier, they're taken from an area that wolves from Glacier Park walk to. They are one population, but there's a belief socially, because they were put there, They're not native. They're Canadian super wolves and I've heard the crazy stories like these wolves weigh 175 pounds and they were selected out of all the wolves captured

They took the ones that were the most aggressive so that when they put them on the ground they would survive everything It's like oh my god. No, no, well that sounds ridiculous But it is kind of crazy to me that if you wanted a wolf reintroduction to be successful, why would you take animals that have a history of predation on cattle and livestock and use those as the reintroduction wolves? I think that kind of mindset or that ignorance, whether it's willful ignorance or whether it's on purpose,

whether it's a fuck you to the ranchers, whatever it is, that is why people have this negative perception I think you're alluding to, right? And I don't think it was an F you to the ranchers. I think what happened was because of the ballot box initiative, the state of Colorado was required by law by December 31st of 2023 to get 10 wolves or so

on the ground. And it took them- But what if they weren't successful? Well, I guess they're required by law to someone go to jail if you're not successful in capturing the wolves to put there. I don't know, but what I'm saying is they had a pretty limited time.

They spent a lot of time trying to prep people and doing committees and working with people to get them prepared. And they, by the time they were able to get everything in place, they were running against a wall. They introduced these wolves very late in the year, I think it was December, and the only place they could get source wolves. They got them from Oregon. And that point Oregon gave them 10 wolves, half of them, roughly half of them happened

to have some livestock experience. So this time right now, they're already gearing up for the next reintroduction, this winter probably. They're working with British Columbia, I believe, and they're going to take wolves, presumably that have not had livestock experience, and let them go, like they did with the original introductions into Yellowstone and Idaho. And I really believe because of the political pressure to squeeze this into a short timeline, that the people who are

really pro-wolf it was forced that they were had to take the wolves that they got. That's what I believe. I don't think it was an FU. I think it was unintentional but it's like these are the wolves these are the wolves you're gonna get and they took them. That sounds so short-sighted. Well I know but I'm not there and I'm not I'm not trying to badmouth their effort they're under a lot of pressure. Half the state wants wolves, half doesn't they're under a short timeline. Oregon was the only state that offered up their wolves. Wyoming said no, Montana said no, everybody said no. Oregon says you can have ten of ours

here's the ten you're gonna get. Yeah I could see why they did it that way but boy that seems like you're just adding to the problems. It really does. In hindsight it does, yeah. So what are the positives about the reintroduction of Wolves? Because it has been successful. In Colorado or in general? In general, because the Colorado one is just this year, right?

It's time frame. See, all this stuff has to do with the time frame, the mistakes and the rewards. So the positive, most positive, pros of reintroductions is you speed up the time frame. So like if we had let wolves slowly wander down from Canada and eventually get to Yellowstone, it may have taken 10 years, it may have taken 50. I mean, it happened in Montana pretty quickly once they hit critical mass, but it took them a few years to get there and then they just started, you know, the curve. But people didn't want the time window and we had presidential administration that was in favor of it.

We had conservative congressmen that were in favor of it. You had the Wolf Groupies in favor of it and it, it's just like all came together in the timeframe and the window of opportunity opened about four inches and they shoved them through. In Colorado, mandated by citizens ballot initiatives, which is not a really great way to, I don't think to do business on any bill. I mean, we have bills in Montana coming up now for voting, but the timeline was short. And I think if they had more options, they would have taken wolves. They would have taken wolves from Wyoming or Montana for sure because they're more wild,

whatever. We do have depredating wolves. But they kind of got down to the wire and everybody denied them, except for Oregon. So that's what happened. Well, the problem with that, of course, is what we're talking about with epidemiology, that like if these animals do have a learned behavior pattern, that's going to be imparted on their offspring as well and the surrounding community they're gonna favor that because it's a very simple way to get food. Pretty simple and on the other hand they can learn new behavior like the wolves that were taken for their introductions to Yellowstone they had never seen a bison most of them and they've learned now in Yellowstone, a lot of the animals that kill are bison.

No kidding. Yeah, yeah, it's really, it's mind-boggling to me to see her surround a bison and eventually wear it down or kill it, or find one that's injured. There's an amazing painting that I'm pretty sure Rinello told me about. He might even have a copy of it of, or was it Remy? Might have been Remy, no, it was Remy,

because Remy actually, he reproduced this on his television show. He had a show called Apex Predator. And the show Apex Predator was all examining the behavior characteristics of apex predators and seeing what they did. And one of the things that some of the Native American tribes used to do, they would take a wolf skin and they would wear it, put it on their head,

and they would crawl on two legs or on four legs you know hands and knees up into bison. Yep. Yeah. So that one. I've used that in my own slideshow studio. Isn't that amazing that painting? Yeah it's a beautiful painting. That's so incredible and so they would wander up towards bison because bison, full-grown bison are not afraid of a couple of wolves. And they would use that as a way to get close enough, like a decoy, and sneak up and arrow these bison and kill them. Yep.

Oh, there's a lot of paintings of that. That's cool. So that must have been a very common thing. Well, so Remy actually reproduced this on his television show. Oh, nice. He actually wore a wolf skin and crawled up to these bison. He did?

Wild bison? Not camp? Yeah wild bison. Where? I don't know. Canada? I'm not sure. See if you can find Remy Warren apex predator bison episode.

There's bison in Utah too. Sure yeah. Wow I didn't know that. How did he do? He shot one. With an arrow? Yeah with an arrow. Really? Yeah.

Wow. Well, do you imagine especially if you have a compound bow? Sure. You know, I was just shooting today very accurate. I just got a new Hoyt bow. It's amazing. So I don't know how they do it, but they keep making these compound bows better every year. Huh. But this new one's incredible and we're shooting, I was shooting super accurate up to 60 yards. So if you're a guy as good as Remy is, who's literally a professional hunter, and you crawl close enough to bison to get him,

so he shot a bison and harvested it. Wow. But I mean, Indians did that all the time. I shouldn't say Indians, Native Americans. Well, there's, yeah, some of them prefer to be called Indians, interestingly enough. I know, Native Americans. Well, there's, yeah. Some of them prefer to be called Indians. I know, in Montana. Yeah, it's tricky.

If, yeah. You gotta kind of like ask them. You have to know. What are your pronouns, sir? Right, right, right, right. So, I know that there's wild bison that live in Mexico. And I know that from Steve. Steve Rinell actually hunted them in Mexico.

And yeah, and this traditional ranch, they have this incredible way of taking care of it because they've never had electricity in this area. And it's like this long history of hundreds of years of hunting them this way. So they do all these different things to dry out the meat. And they make these like thin cuts of meat and hang them from sticks and dry them in the sun and smoke them and do all kinds of different things to the meat.

Really interesting. But this was one of the last when they were all wiped out from or almost wiped out from North America. A few of them survived in Mexico. So here Remy's Bison on the Sonora Desert. Oh, so he did it in Mexico. Oh interesting. Oh, it was a coyote. Okay, so but it was in Mexico. So he put the pelt on and did the whole deal. Making him a costume. Yeah, it is it sewed it into his camo. Huh. Yeah. It's a big coyote. Yeah, it's definitely a coyote. Isn't that interesting though? Oh yeah. Wow. Crazy that it worked. Yeah, well, the Native Americans knew it for...

Well, for sure a buffalo or a bison is not going to be scared of a coyote. No. Yeah, not at all. So if they see that, they're like, oh, I know. And wolves too, for that matter. I mean, there were millions of bison on the prairies with tens of thousands of wolves. And if you were healthy or you protect your calf, you're fine. Yes.

Yeah. Have you ever read Coyote America? No. Dan Flores, who was... Great historian. Yeah. And he was one of Vernell's professors. Oh, wow.

Yeah. That's how he met him. Oh, wow. But Dan has a very interesting theory about the population of bison and why there were so many. And he thinks it's tied into the plague, into when Europeans came across the country and 90% of Native Americans were wiped out because of disease. And he thinks that's why there was millions of bison in the field, this overpopulationulation of bison because the predators had gone away. Really? Yeah, I think the the paper is called bison diplomacy, bison ecology. Is that what it's called? I have to look that up. Dan Flores is awesome.

He is so so interesting. Yes. And the book Coyote America is crazy. I'm gonna have to go. It's so good. Yeah, there it is. Okay, it's bison ecology and bison diplomacy, the southern plains from 1800 to 1850. So his theory, which I think is a very valid one, and it should be researched, it should be at least considered that the reason why the early native settlers, excuse me, the early European settlers, did not see enormous herds of bison is because the bison weren't enormous herds back then because bison have a long gestation period. They're fairly easy to hunt because they're very large animals.

And they're not afraid. And if you have horseback, you can get pretty close to them, shoot them with arrows, and they were very effective at hunting them. And particularly the Comanche lived entirely off of bison, and they were right here. So right here in this area, they're just nothing but bison, eating bison constantly, and so they probably did a really good job of keeping the population in check.

Then along come Europeans and their dirty diseases, and you know, this is what the primary theory is what wiped out the Maya, wiped out the the Aztec wiped out the people that lived in The Amazon jungle it's all European settlers and their dirty diseases And so that when that happened then you have what's similar to no wolves in Montana And you have 20,000 elk in a place that really has a carrying capacity for like what six or like What do you think was like the correct number when there was 20,000 elk there? What's the correct number of elk?

What would be like a healthy population that the food sources could support? I would say right now there's about 6,500 I think elk in the northern herd. We're not talking all of Yellowstone. It's just this herd that's been studied where the wolves are. That's where it's at now. It's stabilized. There's lions and people outside the park and wolves and bears, all these things. And that's where it's at. And that's with everything. And

it hasn't changed because the number of wolves too went from, you know, zero to 35, 31 to 160, 165. In the last 10 years, it's been about a hundred wolves every year because they contain themselves By killing each other and defending the resource so they're stable right now The wolves are not increasing anymore. Is that one of the main reasons how they die or the main ways they die is killing each other Killing each other and trespassing people go. Oh, that's awful. I said not really I mean if you had somebody coming in your home to steal your goods Wouldn't you shoot them if you had the chance? Or wouldn't you defend your home? Like those loggers, you almost had to shoot.

To defend your home, right? Yourself, your family. The wolves do the same thing. It's sort of like what's going on with the wars everywhere in the world. The wolves do the same, and they don't always kill the trespassers. If they can catch them, they beat them up pretty bad. Sometimes they kill them. Sometimes you may have a benevolent pack leader that just kind of has the wolves chase it off. But wolf mortality, the greatest rate, I think

it's like 70 plus percent, 75, is wolves killing other wolves in Yellowstone Park, non-pack members. Is there action dependent upon the amount of resources that are available? Like, would they be more reluctant to kill a wolf if there was plenty of food for everybody? Just get out of here. Whereas if they were struggling, they'd go, this is a real problem having this wolf around. So you'd have to go to the Yellowstone researchers to look at it, but I would say genetic relations, if it's closely related, they're more likely to not kill it. And if there's abundant food, they'd be more likely to probably not kill it.

I think it's a combination of the two. One of the things that Dan Flores talks about in Coyote America is the expansion of coyotes and that the reason this took place is that coyotes were targeted by gray wolves. Yes. So they had developed this ability to recognize when one of the pack had been killed, they would expand their territory, and the females would have more pups. The coyotes or the wolves? The coyotes. Okay, because the wolves, right.

So the wolves are killing the coyotes. Yes. So this is why there's coyotes in literally every state and every city in North America now, where there wasn't a hundred years ago. Is that because they have this history of being persecuted by the wolves, because they don't breed with wolves, but they do breed with red wolves. So where you get your coy wolf is a coyote and a red wolf on the East Coast right? Do they do with Mexican wolves? No the animal up in the northeastern part of the US is called a coy wolf and

it's a coyote mixed with wolf of unknown origin mixed with dogs and there's lots of theories out there and I'm not up on the most current theory the original wolf up there was more like the red wolf. Then you get down here and down in Louisiana, Texas, Florida, there's truly red, there were red wolves and now they're just at the alligator refuge in North Carolina. But those are being bred out of almost out of existence because they're hybridizing with coyotes. Right. So yeah, different story, but it, but the gray wolves do not hybridize with coyotes was his point and that this yeah Not hardly ever

Sometimes they do well up in the Great Lakes if you look at those wolves That's where he started doing wolf stuff They look a little bit like coyote in the mitochondrial DNA shows some traces of coyote But it's very uncommon when a wolf when a wolf encounters a coyote. They kill it. Yeah Was interesting you were talking about Rone's show that they don't kill foxes. So they were, I mean, so you get a fox, it's like 10 pounds. You get a coyote, it's like 30 pounds. You get a wolf, it's 90 to 100 pounds.

It's about three times between each step. And so the ones that are closest, so for coyotes, the foxes are a threat. They kill them. For the wolves, the coyotes are a threat, they kill them. For the wolves, the coyotes are a threat and they kill them. But a hunter-paw wolf and a time-paw fox might be a nuisance and you let it scavenge, but it's not a threat to you. Right. It's not going to compete with you. Exactly. It's not going to take out a bison. Exactly. So when wolves come back on the landscape, it happened up where we are, happened at Yellowstone, where it's just been a coyote economy since the the wolves were taking on coyotes rule, right?

I love coyotes too, but I shouldn't say love, I really respect them. But when you have the wolves coming back and they start displacing and killing and hammering on the coyotes, well surprise, all of a sudden red fox are coming back. Like where I work in the North Fork, all those early winters, we had people out all winter on skis tracking wolves. We never saw fox tracks, never. And I never caught one in a wolf trap. And then as time went on and the wolves took a foothold, so to speak, a toehold in the country, and they started hammering the coyotes, all of a sudden there's fox, I got fox denning on my property now up there. So will coyotes target foxes?

Oh yeah, big time. Interesting. Big time. So they consider them competitors. Sure. Or do they eat them? I don't, you know what, I haven't followed that, I don't track that closely, but I would guess most of the time not, unless they're incredibly hungry.

I would guess it's a strict eliminating a competitor situation. I've seen, I mean you can look at the data in Yellowstone, they have witnessed tons of times of wolves going up to coyote dens and digging out on killing all the pups and trying to kill the parents and I don't think they usually eat them. I could be wrong in that but I don't think so. It's interesting because that's one of the theories about why, it was originally one of the theories why coyotes killed dogs and coyotes kill cats is that they're competitors, but then they started eating them.

So I think maybe originally that was the case because again, the expansion into urban areas is fairly recent. Yeah, and urban coyotes are not real wild. They'll eat whatever they get. They habitualize, right? Totally. Just like we were talking about, their behavior changes. Yeah, and it's really interesting to me how amazingly versatile coyotes are, because I

am starting to see wolves being the same, that they're much more generous than I would have thought, and that they can adapt to situations pretty easily. Like that wolf pack raising its pups in the subdivision. Crazy. It is crazy. That would be so cool though. Imagine if you lived there. I know.

As long as you don't have a poodle. Right. Because they do eat dogs. They do eat dogs. When every time I go up to my little cabin, I am very conscientious about not leaving my dogs outside without me there. Yeah.

I did have a big malamute killed by Mount lion about 35 years ago It's a big dog. Yeah They don't care they can get it pretty easy my line Yeah, you know what's interesting to me is the propensity that foxes have to befriend humans. Yes Very strange. So so this is interesting. I mean, you know you're a vor, obviously. Have you ever heard of the study in Russia? Now this is, I mean, we're gonna... I know what you're going with. The Fox. Yes, yes, yes. Go ahead, explain it. The book title is How to tame a fox and create a dog. One of the most interesting books I've ever read, but this is true. I'm not saying that the 400 Wolves is not

true, but I doubt it, but this is true science. It's supported by photos that in the 50s or so, this Russian scientist was starting a study of foxes, and he wanted to select simply for tameness. And by selecting the tameness male, female from these different fur farms, these are captive fox to start with, that he would see if their morphology or their physical appearance changed. So he went to fur farms and he was picking just for tameness. And eventually, after many years, he'd go to the fur farm and this fox would lunge at him and snarl, he'd leave it. And they'd say, oh, this one over here in the corner, she rubs against the fence. When you go to feed her, he'd take that one.

But over years, they have photographs of these foxes and they start changing. They were silver fox a lot of them instead of red and they're black and white. They kind of look like border collies and they start to have tipped over ears. And they got pictures of the guys in the pens. One person's bent over and there's a fox standing on their back while they're putting out the food bowl and the other. I mean... Crazy. Yes.

And so that was in a very short time that they changed the the behavior the picture Well, you're leaving out a little bit of it Go ahead one of the things that they did was whenever any of the foxes exhibit any kind of aggression They shot him right so they only allowed the very docile Submissive foxes to friendly but then their eyes started getting larger their snouts started getting shorter and the ears started dropping really quick I'm glad you read it cuz I suggest it to your friends because I'm passionate about all canids well all things wild And it was one of the most amazing pieces I read because if you think about Humans domesticating animals we took some kind of a primitive form of a horse and a cow and a sheep and we got our breeds now

For years they had bears in captivity, brown bears in Europe forever, living in King's castles and doing riding the bicycles in the circus and whatever. But in terms of North America, of course we've been here anywhere in the world, nobody's domesticated the African wild hunting dog, nobody's domesticated European lynx. Nobody has successfully taken a wild predator and bred it long enough with heavy artificial pressure by our selection, like shooting them in the head if they aren't friendly, and turned it into a different animal with the exception of wolves.

That is really fascinating. It's really fascinating. Because that's never been done to tigers or mountain lions. Think about how many people have tried to keep mountain lions as pets. I know. Or coyotes. You keep coyotes and after 15 generations they still look like coyotes. And they still behave like coyotes. They do and this little thing with the fur fox it was extraordinary artificial selection pressure to see that. Yes. And they did change a bit. Well the fox has a very strange relationship to humans

where that was part of the Timothy Treadbone movie. Ah. In the movie, he had this fox that was his friend and the fox stole his hat one day and ran into the den with his hat. He's like, give me my hat back. And he's like chasing him. But it's an adorable relationship that this fox has with people, with him, in fact, climbing on his tent and hanging out with him and he could touch it, he could pet its head. I'm sure he probably can, he or somebody before him had probably food conditioned it to be accepting of. Maybe, but you're talking about,

he's up in the grizzly maze in Alaska. Maybe just never seen a human. Maybe, that's more, it seems, but there seems to be some sort of a strange history of comfort where this animal that's a 10 pound animal is comfortable around 150 pound man for no real reason. Like he's not giving it anything like just him being around and it would lie down in front of him and sun itself and and play around him. Right. There was a weird relationship that humans have had with foxes.

Of course, Mr. Treadwell was not really in the bell curve on the big high point in the normal range either of normal behavior. Right, but I've had friends that have had encountered with foxes. They're really unique and they're also, they really adapt well to people. They live in agricultural areas.

I've got them, I mean, we see them all the time now. They're a different animal than a coyote or a wolf. It's just such a strange little fella that like wants to be your friend, you know? Very interesting. You don't see that a lot with wolves. No, you don't. I have a fox that visits my yard because I have chickens and we have to shoo him out every time he comes into the yard, but they make the craziest noise. They do.

Like, I didn't know about the noise until my friend Jim Brewer, who has foxes near his house in New Jersey, they make this crazy scream and I was like, what? What does it sound like? And then this little guy that lives in my neighborhood does it in my yard. I got a video of him in my yard going, wah! Yeah. Crazy. I've heard it. It's kind of interesting to think about the early

relation of people with wolves. I talk about that in A Woman Among Wolves, my book, is there was a couple of paleontologists or sociologists that speculated, and I can't say if their theory is correct or not, but they speculated that when people were still living in caves and having spears and adlattles that they would watch. So people were living in a family group in a pack. The wolves were living in a family group or a pack. They would watch the wolves chasing through a herd of whatever animal they were at that time depending on where they lived.

And eventually getting one tired enough or maybe it was a cripple had a bad leg, and they would surround it and eventually kill it. And then they speculate that the humans would learn that, you know what, we can go up to that killed oryx or whatever they had just killed, the primitive horse, and just drive those wolves away. We got tools, we can kill the wolves if we have to. So then it changed to where maybe those wolves had come around when the animal was cornered, but not dead, and the humans would come in and do the final blows and drive the wolves away and take what meat they wanted and then leave, and the wolves could then come in and get the spoils of all the work that they had done that the humans had taken. And that this is their theory,

that there was this relationship just because it's a brutal world, not synergy and not altruistic and not, oh, aren't this cute? Just like, hey, people, look at those wolves, got an animal, a camel cornered over there, let's go kill it, take what we need, wolves would come in. And that that sort of began potentially the process of wolves and people beginning to interact. I hate to hesitate to use the word collaborate, but this is an idea. It's an interesting idea also and the interesting idea sort of coincides with the idea of the introduction of agriculture. Yes. So you have the introduction of agriculture, so you have resources that are more abundant and you have more animals agriculture, so you have resources that are more abundant, and you have more animals.

And so if these people lived in a resource-rich environment where there was plenty of meat, and they didn't have to worry, you could see how maybe they would throw some scraps at a cute little wolf that's near the fire. There's many ideas about how dogs are... Over time. Right, the ones who were least afraid hung around. Right. No, I... What they did with the foxes over just the course of a few generations. Yes. This took a few thousand years. Yeah and then people would grab one of those

wolves or let them hang around and then you know around they would clean up the awful, awful around the camp and whatever. There's many ideas, of course nobody knows, but what is kind of known is the dates from DNA and carbon dating. The dates at which humans were able to domesticate livestock and the dates at which humans were able to domesticate dogs from wolves and domesticating dogs preceded livestock. Livestock was like 11,000 years ago roughly of all of all species, swine, horses, cows, whatever, sheep. So was it possible that the initial domestication of wolves into dogs took place in a very game-rich

environment where they didn't have fight-over resources? And no livestock. No livestock. Exactly, because it hadn't happened yet. So there would be more opportunity, potentially, for these animals. Again, I'm not saying it was to help each other so much, but they took advantage of each other's strengths and weaknesses. The wolf's strength was being able to run something down until so tired that people

didn't do that. And then people say, oh yeah, that thing's crippled over there, let's go kill it and we'll get our meat and the wolves can have the rest. Was there also a consideration that during these times, this was a hunter-gathering time where they really didn't have a preservation of meat, there was no way to store it, so you had to continue to hunt and gather. So if you had an abundance, you didn't think, oh, I'll stockpile this for the next few months, that was never even an afterthought. Probably not, unless it was in the tundra, it was winter time, they could freeze it.

But the relationship of, I mean, there's many dates it said about when people domesticated dogs and it varies a lot. But I think there's some consensus 30, 35,000 years ago. Wow, was that long ago? Long ago. I didn't know that. And you can Google it, Jamie. Wow, I thought it was like 10,000. No, because it happened significantly before we began domesticating livestock. So what

I'm saying is there wasn't a conflict base. Resources were abundant. There wasn't protection of our livestock. There wasn't this and that. And eventually people took, when livestock became a thing, then eventually people would take a wolf-like canid, a dog that we domesticated, and then I find it interesting to train it to keep the wolves, their wild cousins,

away from the livestock. Talk about, wow. Crazy. Yeah. Humans are so creative with what they can do. And dogs are so plastic. I mean, you take a wolf and you put a lot of pressure on it and eventually you come up with a golden retriever and a griffon and a poodle.

Because they have a lot of plasticity genetically, morphologically, behaviorally that I don't think a lot of the other species have or would show up when we try to domesticate them. That's just my theory. Yeah, well, it seems to be uniquely adaptive. Yeah, totally. Are you aware of the baboons that raise dogs? No.

Yeah, there's baboons that take puppies and they use the puppies as guards so they keep the puppies near them and they keep these dogs near them. They don't kill them and the dogs like allow them to sleep so they could be alerted to any intruders. The dogs bark. It sounds no different than us. It's bizarre to watch. I mean I haven't heard of these these See if you can find it. Yeah With these dogs like drag the dogs are what am I doing the baboons like get over here? They don't kill it No, they use them. I mean, I'm sure they probably kill a few of them So they have killed babies like baboons are great damn ruthless. I've been to Africa and I don't like baboons scary animal because it seems

Like a dog monkey like it's got a face like a dog. It's a weird animal, right? Because unlike any other primate, they have a completely different jaw structure. Their teeth? Oh my gosh. They look like a dog. It's like an extended snout. Very strange animal. Yes. I find colorful and beautiful and creepy and all of these things. I agree. I'm not. So here we go. So these are these are dogs that are being raised. They raise these feral dogs.

Look at who's dragging the dog. Get over here. Oh my god. Poor dog. Like they're not very kind. Where is this from? That's what I was trying to read on what was going on. So some people think that that might not be they might not be being raised that it's some

sort of play but they're in. I think this is taken from a trash pit. Did you see that other larger dog that was over there? It was a parent dog. It looked like a wolf. Oh geez, really wailing on that puppy. He's controlling it. He's trying to control it. So I don't sniffing his butt processing data. Processing data. Just like our dogs. Yeah and they hold on to them by the tail. It's kind of crazy and they drag them around. If you back it up there was a larger dog that was in the background. Yeah like like that one. That dog's barking. So I think the theory that I remember reading was that they had figured out that if

they keep these dogs around the dogs are good watchdogs. Well I'm gonna have to Google that and look up the... See this is my first thing. I'm a researcher. I want to know the source. I want to know where it came from. There's a debate over it. Viral video of baboons in Saudi Arabia garbage dump led to speculation I want to know the source. I want to know where it came from. Yeah. This is a debate over it. Yeah. The debate. Viral video of baboons and Saudi Arabia garbage dump led to speculation baboons kidnapped puppies and keep them as pets. However, some say the baboons were likely just playing with the puppies.

The relationship is not analogous to pet owner relationship. Maybe. They've been a lot. There's a lot of weird studies on garbage dumps and baboons. Yeah. Have you ever read Sapolsky's work? No, I haven't. Robert Sapolsky did this study on a particularly vicious... Prime 8. What was

the book he wrote like 20 years ago? Something Prime 8. Yeah I've read a long ago book I haven't read currently. I don't remember but the study that was fascinating was that they found that there was one contaminated pile of garbage and of course the most vicious alphas were the ones to eat first. So they died and they got sick. That's the one I've read. A primate's memoir. It's old, 2002. They said 20 years ago. Yeah. He's amazing. I've had him on the podcast as well. That was a fascinating book. You have. I'll have to look for it. Super interesting guy. Oh yeah. Especially the toxoplasmosis, Gandhi discussion, like the talk about the

lions and the wolves. Do you know about lions and wolves and toxoplasmosis? What's going on? So in Yellowstone it's basically a dog eat cat world down there for the most part because of packs of wolves and the lions. But they have found that because the dogs are coexisting with the lions and sometimes ingester scatter scatter, their guts, or anyway, they eat some part of it, they get exposed. They have found with now the wolves have toxoplasmosis and what happens is there is something like 11 times, it's a huge amount, I wish I can't, maybe Jamie can Google it, more likely to be extra bold and leaders of a pack than a dog, than a wolf that does not have toxoplasmosis and these these wolves that have the parasite take

extraordinary risks and are more likely to die and lead the pack to death so in the long run it's sort of a cat's revenge on the wolf well one of the things so policy 46 more times likely to become pack leaders incredible isn't that wild they're 11 times more likely to leave their birth packs and do so at a younger age. And when they do that, they're not very well set up to survive. So, Polsky found out when he was doing his residence that there's a disproportionate amount of motorcycle victims that test positive for toxo. So, they test them and they find that this is one of the reasons why these guys are taking these crazy risks. Risk takers because of have toxo. Yeah. See it's and it's

it's really... It's a parasite from cats. You know another book you'd like to read is called A Spillover. Have you read that by David Quammen? No I haven't. So he wrote it I think 2017. It's an older book maybe 2012 and he wrote it's a spillover from wild animals just Q-U-A-M-M-N-I-N, wild animals to human populations. And it starts with a horse disease in Australia that becomes some extremely viral, terrible disease in humans. And he actually traces back the origins of HIV.

And all this happened before COVID. And it just was so set up, because COVID is the same kind of a deal. But it's a fascinating book. And because you got an inquisitive mind, I think you'd really enjoy it. was so set up because COVID is the same kind of a deal. But it's a fascinating book and because you got an inquisitive mind, I think you'd really enjoy it. Well, COVID is not really because COVID was a part of like a lab experiment. Some people don't know.

Yeah, they're 99% sure now at this point that it was all gain of function research that was done. There's the obscuring of the data was done purposely to try to absolve guilt from the people that funded the project, because the project was funded and canceled during the Obama administration. And then when Trump came along, there was a lot of chaos apparently, and they reignited it, and they did it

through another EcoHealth Alliance. It was very sneaky about it, and when grilled, they, Fauci lied about whether or not it was gain-of-function research They were doing in the first place. There's a lot of very scared. There's emails back and forth. That's beside the point Well, I'm not I'm not gonna go there cuz that we have but about natural spillover is clearly real spillover It documents many many species and they actually it's fascinating mad cow disease It's the same thing and mad cow disease is the craziest one, right? CWD?

They forced cows to eat cows. Surprise! You dumbass. And then the prions, the fact that they can exist under thousands of degrees. Thousands of degrees, you can't kill them. So do you have CWD here yet in Texas? I'm sure they do. I'm sure they do. It's not ubiquitous, but I think there have been, see if there's been cases of CWD and I want to get to this before I forget. So the point of the Sapolsky thing was that what Sapolsky observed when these super aggressive baboons ate all of the garbage, that the garbage was contaminated, they died. So all the aggressive ones died and they turned into this utopian society.

So all the aggressive ones died and they turned into this utopian society So yes, and so they're all they started grooming each other more the males weren't aggressive anymore The females didn't suffer the wrath of the males and they were like hippie baboons and it lasted for a long time And I think they eventually reverted back to the same sort of typical Aggressive alpha male behavior as being the primary leaders of the groups, but for a long time they existed in this very strange, atypical environment where kind baboons were like taking care of each other. Well, it'll be really interesting with the resources of the Yellowstone researchers, they do amazing stuff, to see what the long-range outcome is from

this realization that you know they're 46 more times likely more times to be a leader of the pack and what do these risk-taking behaviors entail. I'm really excited to follow this. And how many of them unfortunately get hit by cars because of this and wasn't the first ever released mountain lion or a wolf rather that got killed killed by a car the first one I'm understanding the first one in Yellowstone that released wolf the first mortality of a wolf was getting hit by a UPS truck crazy sport I just feel kind of bad for the driver shouldn't laugh I mean there's a

dead wolf imagine you're that poor. Yeah, it's horrible. Anyway, sorry. But it's just, it's so fascinating that this toxoplasmosis, it could, I mean, it can implode the population. Who knows? They might make terrible decisions. How prevalent is it in humans? I don't know.

Oh, it's hugely prevalent. In France at one point in time, there was 50% of the population had toxo. Really? Yeah. In large populations of people in both Latin America, South America, places where there's a lot of feral cats. It's a huge instance of it. Not only that, there's a disproportionate amount of people that have toxoplasmosis, or in countries that have toxoplasmosis, that have successful soccer teams.

And they don't know if it's just because a lot of poor people, that's the best way out, become really good at soccer, soccer's really common because everybody plays it. They don't know. But it might be that it makes you more aggressive, it makes you more interested in taking risks, and a little reckless.

And if you're a soccer player, I can probably help you to be like, you're like, ah, just go for it and get crazy. Be more aggressive and less tentative. Right, right. No, it's crazy. The whole interface between humans and wildlife is becoming a more and more popular field.

And if I was young and could do my career over, I wouldn't go into that, because it's really crazy, the CWD. So that when wolves encountered, first encountered parvovirus and distemper came from people and dogs going into parks and camping and dogs pooping and the disease came into being in the 80s, we started documenting it in Glacier. And the first year that I was catching wolves and we took blood samples, they're off the chart in their immune response antibodies to that particular disease.

And we had most of our pups all die that year. Wow. Boom, like that. And people don't think about, yeah, I got my little dachshund up at, you know, McDonald Lake and he pooped and you don't pick it up and the wolves get it. But the same thing happened in Yellowstone and they have certain years where they have horrible pup survival, it's called recruitment, and they don't make it into the fall. But the other thing of interest, so they've been learning by studying coat colors of wolves in Yellowstone that genetically the ones who carry the gene

for the black coat color, they have a different disease resistance to those diseases than the gray wolf. And it's certain, maybe Jamie could look that up, at certain times when the disease prevalence is higher, the wolves will select a mate of a certain color because their genetics prove to be an asset to the survival of those pups. It's crazy. Do the ones with the darker coats, do they originate from denser forests? So they've also been looking at that. So when I first came to Montana, many of the wolves

were black, and now it's probably 50-50 or less. In Minnesota, the original Midwestern wolves were gray, and now they've got black-colored genes, and there are changes with the population density but what I learned to my best knowledge it's a it's a K. locust gene and they think that when people domesticated dogs from wolves and we took the wolves into captivity we mutated their mutations that we helped survive that gene for black color coat was from dogs and then dogs got bred a little bit into the wolves occasionally and that coat is from a dog. Interesting. Doesn't mean that the animals out there that are black are hybrids. I'm just saying it goes back thousands of years. So the earliest descriptions of wolves, did they describe

them? Like what is the earliest known like written human history of wolves? Did they describe them in a particular color? Oh boy, you know what I haven't gone that man if you look at Romulus and Remus those are gray wolves in Rome. Right. I don't know you know I'm not an I'm not a paleontologist. The thought would I was just getting to like if you're thinking about a place like the Pacific Northwest for example yeah you have dense rainforest. It would probably be a benefit to be darker. You could hide a little bit better. That's the idea, like having arctic wolves being white. Yes, exactly. But it's the K. locust for the black-collar gene and it depends on if they're homozygous or heterozygous and one is, here you go.

One of the earliest written references to black wolves occurs in the Babylonian epic, oh, it's in Gilgamesh. So that's 6,000 years ago. The titular character rejects the sexual advances of the goddess Ishtar, reminding her that she had transformed a previous lover, a shepherd, into a wolf, thus turning him into the very animal that his flocks must be protected against. Whoa. Heavy. It is heavy. I don't have to know what the root of that his flocks must be protected against. Whoa. Heavy. It is heavy.

I don't have to know what the root of that story is. Huh. Yeah. So that's so fascinating. Here you go. This is the article about the... Yeah. This would be...

Disease outbreak select for mate choice and coat color in wolves. So all dogs come from wolves. So you have wolves. Wolves get domesticated into dogs. Then some dogs reintroduce their genes into interbreeding with wolves and somehow or another this black coat color color comes into play. Yes. Wild. It is literally and I suspect from people living in northern latitudes the Inuits and the Native Americans throughout Russia and across the north

you know, they they kept dogs too and they bred them to You know, they kept dogs, too, and they bred them to wolves and made better sled dogs. But an early reference told me that the dog native to North America was brought over here. The Native Americans didn't have dogs here thousands and thousands of years ago. That's what I've been reading. Nat. Well, one of the things that I learned from... Part by Europeans. Yeah, that's so crazy. That's one of the things that Dan Flores was talking about was that horses came from here, but then they were all, they all died off. Yes. They don't know exactly why, but probably during that mass extinction event where 65% of all the megafauna died. And then the Europeans reintroduced horses and so

the Native Americans initially didn't have horses and then some were really good at it and those are the ones that thrive like the Comanche. The Spaniards brought horses in the 1500s and that's how they got their horses but before that horses came from here originally even the horses in Africa even zebras originated genetically originated in the North American continent. I didn't know that. It was like, what the hell? I didn't know that.

No, it's crazy. Zebras too? Yeah, zebras. How nuts. That is nuts. Well, we also have an animal, the pronghorn antelope, that is a prehistoric animal. It's only here. It should not be here and the only

reason why it's here and the reason why it's so fast. This article says something about the, I don't know, it gets really deep in the genetics. The dark codes? The K-locus and codes has something to do with them having canine distemper virus. That they're immune, more immune to respiratory infections. So anyway, yeah. And then the other thing is... Which they probably got from dogs. Yes, probably. Distemper. Yeah. Well, I don't know how long Distemper goes back.

The other thing with the pronghorn, I mean, I just came from hunting wolves. We were seeing, I mean, hunting birds, we were seeing pronghorn everywhere. Antelope. Yeah. I love them, but they're really pre-star. And do you know... Weird. Do you know why they run at 60 miles an hour?

Because we used to have a North American cheetah. Exactly. Yeah. The cheetahs whittled the limbs of the antelope. That's why they're so fast. That's why they're so much faster than any predator in North America. They got to be 60 miles an hour to run a cheetah. Not wolves, not bears. And they're still here and the cheetahs are gone. But they're one of the very few of those weird animals like the North American lion, like all these different, like there was a North American lion that is way bigger than the African lion. I've read that. I mean, I would love to paleontologist. There's so many things I would like to do again

and do over. There's a lot of interesting things in this world and we're still just learning. We still have to listen to people, experts, and do a lot of reading and think for ourselves. Well, thanks to you, we know a lot more about wolves. And so I really appreciate you being here. The book is A Woman Amongst Wolves, My Journey Through 40 Years of Wolf Recovery. Yep.

Diane Boyd. Can I read you just a 30 second introductory paragraph? Sure. Then it'll give you and your readers a flavor of what it's about. So it's a memoir. It's all real. It's not a forward introduction. There we go. Okay. Let's see if I can see it. Oh. Do you need glasses? I got glasses. Okay. Sorry. Should have had them ready. No worries. No worries. Hang on. Can I ask you before you do that?

Yes, yes. Are you going to read the audiobook? No. No? No, there's a story there too. Diane. We can talk about that after. Okay.

Let's just be 30 seconds. Okay. My pickup banged and rattled along the pothole inside road in the northwest corner of Glacier National Park. Boxes of wolf traps and jars of bait slid across the truck bed. I was in a hurry. My mind focused on the wolf-caught in a trap somewhere ahead in the lodgepole pine forest. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed motion in my rear-view mirror.

I looked up to catch the glassy reflection of vivid yellow eyes framed by a wolf's black face looking over my shoulder from the back seat. How did I get here? Wow. That's the opening for my book. That's a page turner. It's not a tiger. Yeah, but still.

So you asked me about it. What did I ask you about? Oh, the audiobook. So the audiobook. So when I signed my contract, this is my debut book, A Woman Among Wolves. I have not written a book. I published scores of scientific articles, but not a book. I signed my contract. This is my debut book, A Woman Among Wolves. I've not written a book. I published scores of scientific articles, but not a book. I

signed the contract. I love working with Greystone. They're a fantastic publisher. It's just a standard contract. I signed away the rights for movie, audio, etc., etc., but I get a share of the royalties and stuff. So when somebody bought the bid on and bought the media rights for audiobooks months before it was produced and I didn't hear about it for a while and by the time I'd heard about it they just started producing it. And I said well I'd like to read for it. I sent off an audio tape of my voice and looks like they would need to do a bunch of polishing and it was almost September and I would be recording for weeks. It takes like...

What kind of polishing? Annunciation? I don't know. Oh, they have to teach you how to say it differently? I mean, I think I'm a pretty fair speaker, but just anyway, it would take some training and then it would more important, it would take up so much time. It takes like 80 hours to produce an eight-hour audiobook I know but the thing is it's like the authentic version of this book is gonna be in your voice maybe when the rights expire but I

maybe they would just listen to this podcast and just try it I would love it's not that expensive to get you in a booth for a couple of weeks They hired a professional actress the other thing was this happened just before bird hunting season open to Montana. Sorry I get it sorry. I really do. I use Steve Rinella said the same thing like you made a big mistake Dianna's like I kind of didn't have options. Well, okay either way. I'm sure it's awesome. And I really appreciate you here. It was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it. It's been a blast, Joe. Thank you so much for having me as a Gaff. You just treated me royally. This has been wonderful. I'm glad you had fun. Thank you very much. Thank you. All right, bye everybody. Bye.