The Joe Rogan Experience - #942 - Dan Flores

Episode Date: April 5, 2017

Dan Flores is a writer and historian who specializes in cultural and environmental studies of the American West. His recent books "Coyote America: A Natural & Supernatural History" and "American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains" are both available now via Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/American-Serengeti-Animals-Great-Plains/dp/0700622276/ref=pd_sbs_14_img_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=9VRNEM68AF50K4W4WFHJ

three two boom we're live how are you sir I'm very good Joe it's good to meet you man great to meet you and thank you very much for doing this I've learned more about coyotes over the last couple of months reading your book and listening to your podcast with my good friend Steve Rinello which was amazing who. What a crazy animal that is. You know, I have coyotes all around my neighborhood, and it became very close to me when I saw one of my chickens get captured by a coyote. I watched him hop the fence with a chicken in his mouth. I'm like, God damn these motherfuckers.

And just all around us, especially I live in a fairly rural area around here, about 40 minutes outside of L.A., so the nights are quiet and you hear them screaming in the night. I didn't know much about them until I started reading your book, man. Yeah, they're an amazing animal. I mean, I think there's not really another mammal, aside from us, that has a biography like these animals do. And that's kind of one of the reasons I got fascinated with them.

They were doing the same thing around me when I was a kid growing up in Louisiana. I mean, and that's sort of the beginning of my getting captivated by these little small wolves because they were suddenly showing up in the bayous and swamps of Louisiana when I was 12, 13, 14 years old. And as far as I knew, this was an animal that was supposed to be in the deserts of the West. And so that seemed to be something that, you know, commanded one's attention that this critter is appearing in places where you would never expect it. And now, of course, everybody in the country is dealing with them. That is so fascinating that in our lifetime, they have spread from the American Southwest to every single state and literally every single city in the country.

Yeah, that's true. literally every single city in the country. Yeah, that's true. And I just got a, somebody sent me this yesterday, that somewhere in Georgia, they have some sort of a bounty on these wolves, you know, coyotes. That's one thing a lot of people don't realize, that a coyote is a wolf.

Yeah, it's a separate species from gray wolves and red wolves, but it's out of the North American wolf line. I mean, coyotes are distinctively North American animals. They come out of canid evolution that began here 5.3 million years ago. So yeah, they're small wolves. Did I send you this, Jamie? No, you found it? Oh, beautiful. This is the Georgia Coyote Challenge. Apparently, they're offering some sort of bounty for each coyote killed. Now, what's fascinating about this, and one of the things that I learned from your book, is that when a coyote yells, when they're doing their call in the night,

they're essentially making roll call. And when one of them doesn't respond, the female generates more pups. respond, the female generates more pups. Yeah, it's one of the many things that's probably happening when they're howling. I mean, they are taking a census, basically, of coyote populations in the area. And the result of that census can very well be. It produces some sort of chemical or metabolic change in the females, the breeding females, the alpha ones. And they end up oftentimes having larger litters of pups, which is why something like this, you know, I was just in South Carolina two weeks ago, and there was a lot of conversation about this Georgia bounty, because in South Carolina, it's another place where coyotes are fairly new. They've only been

there in the last 20 or 25 years. They were arguing that, you know, and they had some pretty good science, that coyotes are taking, you know, in some areas as many as 60 percent of the white-tailed deer fawns. And so the hunters are screaming long and loud about this because it means it's getting harder to take a white tail. So South Carolina hasn't moved to the step that Georgia has of trying to impose some kind of bounty and encourage people to go out and shoot these animals, to take them in any way they can, but mostly shoot them. But, you know, I think these states in the South and in the East have a lot to learn by the Western or from the Western experience, because the truth is we've been trying to

eradicate, and I mean totally exterminate, coyotes in the American West. We spent the years from about 1915 through about 1972 in an all-out war attempting to exterminate them. as a result of their particular kinds of adaptations and their evolution in North America is that we spread them across the entire country. We not only spread them across the entire country. I mean, they're in every state. They colonized their 49th state, Delaware, in 2010. So the only state they're not in is Hawaii just because they haven't stowed away and made it across the Pacific yet.

Hawaii just because they haven't stowed away and made it across the Pacific yet. And, you know, I mean, if they do, you can imagine those endangered nene's on the big island are totally done for. But they are not only in every single state in the union except for Hawaii, but they are 7000 miles now north and south in North America from above the Arctic Circle all the way down to Central America and beginning to colonize into South America. So the attempts to exterminate them, I mean, and I can explain how this, why this happens, has to do with their evolution and the particular adaptations they have. But the attempts to exterminate them or even to try to control their numbers almost

always produces exactly the opposite effect. So Georgia is going to end up with more coyotes than they've ever had before in their efforts to try to suppress their population. Isn't that fascinating? Yeah, it is. It's so contrary to logic or what you would think would be the solution for something like that. I mean, and when you go back to the American West, before the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone in the 1990s, we had essentially extirpated them from a vast majority of the United States.

There's very, very few left, right? That's true. And the well, if you could please explain the relationship that the gray wolves had to the coyotes, which is one of the reasons that the coyotes became so adaptable. It's true. I mean, they didn't coyotes didn't become so smart. You know, in the Southwest, the Hispanics say the only thing that's smarter than a coyote is God. But they didn't become that smart and that adept at surviving anything almost that happens to them because of us. I mean, we've only been trying to wipe them out or control their populations for a little more than a century now, and that's too short a time for them

to evolve these abilities to adapt and survive. They evolved those abilities because they were the small dog in a big dog's world. And, I mean, gray wolves have this very interesting story, too. Gray wolves come out of North American canid evolution, but they're one of the canid species that ended up leaving North America for a time and evolving for a couple of million years in Asia and in Europe. And they didn't come back. Gray wolves didn't start coming back to North America until about 25,000 or 30,000 years ago during sort of the height of the late Pleistocene. And when they did, coyotes, of course, had been here and had evolved into their present species about 800,000 to a million years ago.

And when gray wolves returned, I mean, they basically just started kicking the crap out of coyotes. And so coyotes evolved their ability to survive being harassed and persecuted as a result of being basically harassed by gray wolves. So this is why when you hear about the coy wolf that you hear on the East Coast, this is a coyote that bred with the red wolf and other Eastern wolves, correct? That's correct. Yeah. And that's, I mean, it's a very interesting story. And it's kind of one of those instances where a modern event that we're all getting to witness, the emergence of the coy wolf, has its origins in the evolution of mammals in North America a million years or more. Because the reason, I mean, if you think about this, the reason coyotes,

red wolves, and other eastern wolves like the Algonquin wolf in eastern Canada and northern New England, the reason those animals can all hybridize and readily do, I mean, there are no behavioral barriers at all to them breeding with one another. And so whenever a coyote shows up and it's in the vicinity of an Algonquin wolf, say a female that comes into heat, I mean, she'll readily pick a coyote as a mate. But the reason they do that is because those animals, red wolves, eastern wolves of various kinds, and coyotes, all seem to have come out of a group of animals that, unlike the gray wolf, never left North America. And they probably didn't separate from one another until 300,000 to a half million years ago. So that separation is recent enough that whenever they encounter one another today, they very readily hybridize.

I mean, it's sort of the result of coyotes spreading across the South has essentially kind of killed our hope that we were going to save the endangered red wolf as an independent species because red wolves so quickly and easily hybridize with coyotes that coyote genes swamp pure red wolf genes. So, I mean, that's something that, you know, is millions of years or hundreds of thousands of years old in evolution, but we're getting to see it play out right around us in our own time. And meanwhile, gray wolves and coyotes in the West aren't hybridizing at all. And so that's the explanation is that gray wolves left and didn't come back until a while. Do we know why they left? Well, they just – they happen to be, in evolutionary terms, one of the groups, and jackals did the same thing, that they ended up leaving North America. And in their absence, while they were in another part of the world, they evolved into the present subspecies.

We've got four subspecies of gray wolves in North America, all of which seem to have come back to North America, by the way, at different times. So they had sort of separate migrations back to North America. So the Mexican gray wolf, the Western gray wolf, the Arctic wolf, these are all gray wolf species, but they're separated at the subspecific level, and they all seem to have come back to North America at different times. But they had left North America like about three and a half million years ago, and so they became different animals in Asia and Europe. By the time they came back then, they were different enough from coyotes that they not only couldn't interbreed with them anymore, but they sort of are mortal enemies of one another. I mean, when we reintroduced gray wolves to Yellowstone in 1995, coyotes had had 75 years in Yellowstone without any wolves. I mean, that served as a wonderful laboratory to study them,

too, because it gave us a sense of what happens with coyotes when nobody is harassing them, when people aren't harassing them, which, of course, we didn't in Yellowstone Park, and when wolves aren't harassing them either. And of course, we didn't in Yellowstone Park, and when wolves aren't harassing them either. And what we realize is that they create these really stable territories. They create very stable packs, and their population rises to a particular point, the carrying capacity of the landscape based on what they eat, which is mostly rodents and rabbits and things and some fruit and berries. and rabbits and things and some fruit and berries.

But it doesn't, they don't, their population sort of levels off and stays at a carrying capacity. And so we got to watch that happen in Yellowstone for like 75 years. And it's become sort of the example of what would happen if we just left them alone. I mean, some people think, well, if we don't try to control them, hell, they're just going to be millions upon millions of them running everywhere. But that's actually, they only do that when you try to persecute them and they go into this colonization mode and generate more and more and more pups and have more and more pups survive.

mode and generate more and more and more pups and have more and more pups survive. So Yellowstone in that period from 1925 to 1995 was this sort of model of what happens when you just leave them the hell alone. And they just kind of rise to a particular population level and are really stable at that level and don't really go beyond it. And they don't expand their territory that way either. No, they don't seem to. I mean, one of the things that has happened, obviously, in the last hundred years or so, last 75 years at least, is that as a result of persecuting them, we've sent them into this kind of colonization strategy where they

have larger litters of pups. When their populations are suppressed, it's easier for them to get the pups that they do have to adulthood. I mean, in Yellowstone, for example, one of the things we saw in that period when they weren't being harassed in the 60s, 70s, 80s is that they would have a litter of five or six pups and they could only get a couple of them to adulthood. But whenever you try to control their populations and momentarily suppress their populations, I mean, the result is that there's more food for coyotes out there, for the coyotes that have survived.

And that makes it possible for them to have a litter of seven or eight pups and get six to seven of them to adulthood. And then they have this marvelous ability. I mean, I talk about it a good bit in the book. It's called fish infusion. They're one of the few species, and we happen to be one of the other mammal species around the world that does this, where they have the ability to exist as a social animal, in the case of coyotes, as a pack animal, of course. But whenever they're pressured, they tend to split apart into singles and pairs, and they scatter across the landscape.

And that's what sends them colonizing across the continent. The fact that they can do that is what separates them really from wolves, right? And that's why they weren't able to wipe them out in the West? Yeah, that's exactly it. If you think about what happened with gray wolves, I mean, we started the sort of decided effort to eliminate gray wolves from the American West. And roughly, I mean, we started, just ordinary people started putting out strychnine bait for them in the 1860s and 1870s. But was it ranchers at first that started that? Was it because of livestock?

Yeah, it was ranchers and just travelers on the Oregon Trail and on the immigrant trails. I mean, people sort of regarded because they came out of Europe with a background with wolves. I mean, that's one of the things that distinguishes us Americans and coyotes is that we didn't have coyotes in Europe. So we didn't arrive with this preloaded preconception about the role that coyotes is that we didn't have coyotes in Europe. So we didn't arrive with this preloaded preconception about the role that coyotes played in the world. But we did with animals like bears and wolves. And so people just from the very beginning, whenever the Atlantic seaboard was

settled, there were wolf drives and wolf roundups and every kind of attempt to wipe out wolves as competitors with us for our stock. So in the West, people just threw strychnine bait out. I mean, strychnine was invented in Pennsylvania in 1848, and it was widely available in places like Missouri when you set out across the West, and people would just buy a bunch of baits. I mean, if they hung around long enough to get the animal, they would skin it and try to sell the pelt. But they just poisoned them like crazy. Then, starting in 1915, this government agency called the Bureau of Biological Survey, which positions itself as the solution to predators, first decides that it's the wolf that we need to take out. And, I mean, they managed to take out the last probably quarter million wolves in the West in the space of a little more than a decade.

And they do it, as you just mentioned, primarily because wolves are such pack animals, so pack-oriented that if you could kill or trap one member of a pack, you could use the scent from that animal and end up catching every single animal in the pack. But coyotes responded to that kind of pressure in a very different way. I mean, when you started pressuring them, their packs tended to break up. They tended to scatter and go into this fishing mode. And so, indeed, as you said a minute ago, that's exactly why we were able to take out wolves by the middle of the 1920s. We pretty much had resolved the wolf issue in the West. But year after year after year, as wolf numbers declined, I mean, I'll offer an example in

Montana, for instance. 1899, the state of Montana bounded 23,000 wolves. That was 1899, the state of Montana bountied 23,000 wolves. That was 1899. Twenty-one years later, by 1920, they only paid bounties on 17 gray wolves because they had basically wiped them out. And then the government agency, the Biological Survey, came in and cleaned up all the rest of them. But every year from 1899 through 1921 and right on into the 1930s in Montana, they were bounding 30,000 coyotes in 1899. In 1910, 30,000 coyotes. In 1918, 33,000 coyotes. I mean, the number of coyotes never dropped while wolf populations just plummeted. That is so fascinating. What a crazy little animal that is. It is, man.

It's so, you know, wonderfully counterintuitive in the whole kind of environmental story of America because what you always expect is that any time we put our mind to taking on some creature and taking it out. I mean, we can do it. I mean, you know, the only time this never really happened was in Moby Dick, where Captain Ahab is driven mad by his inability to control the great white whale and to control nature. And that in a lot of places, that seems to be where we we land when people realize that you can't do anything about coyotes. It kind of drives people out of their minds because this is just not the American way. We can always deal with an animal.

Yeah, it's got to be very frustrating to people in a lot of ways, but it's kind of amazing. I mean, it's really kind of magical in a lot of ways that they're so adaptable. And that all came, you're saying, because of their relationship with the gray wolf. Now, how do we know that the gray wolf left? Well, we know that there are still wolves in America. There's no question about that. And so, I mean, that is a tricky question. I mean, there is, you know, so I would hasten to say, first of all, I'm not a geneticist. I'm not even a biologist. I'm basically an environmental writer and somebody who uses history a lot. Somebody who uses history a lot. And there is unresolved science out there. And by what I mean, what I mean by that is that there are a couple of different camps that have advanced positions about the relationship between all these different wolves that we have in North America and coyotes. So there is a guy at UCLA here in Los Angeles. His name is Robert Wayne, and he has done

genetic work on canids. One of his papers is called, the title includes the phrase, Enigmatic Wolf-Like Canids. And he's done genetic analysis on coyotes, red wolves, gray wolves, and eastern wolves are all actually some version of gray wolves. So, that's a different argument than the one that I made for you just a few minutes ago. I've been following, and I followed in my book because I found it a more compelling argument. One advanced by a group of geneticists from Canada led by a guy named Paul Wilson. And that's the position that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and its endangered species division takes. And their argument is that the gray wolf is a separate animal from the red wolf, the eastern wolf, and the coyote.

They argue that coyotes, red wolves, and eastern wolves all come out of a clade. It's the biological term, C-L-A-D-E. A clade of animals that are purely North American in origin and that had probably a similar ancestor as recently as maybe 300,000 years to 500,000 years ago. So we've got two different arguments about the relationship of coyotes to wolves. And I don't know who's going to win it, but one of the reasons I tend to sort of favor the Paul Wilson line of argument and the one that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is using is because they use evidence beyond just genetics. They also use morphology, and they use fossils.

And Robert Wayne and the group of geneticists who work with him all seem to just rely specifically on genetics, and they don't ever try to verify their findings by looking at the fossil record, for example. So I don't know how it's going to play out between these two groups, but I find the argument, the Canadian geneticist that has informed the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's strategy a little bit more compelling right now. But, I mean, it's something to pay attention to. We'll see how it goes. Well, it seems like you need some sort of a really comprehensive way of looking at it because you're dealing with so many different factors, right? If you're trying to acquire evidence based on 25,000 years ago,

it seems like there's got to be a lot of different, it just, it's very odd to me that we know as much as we do know. I mean, and to try to figure it all out has got to be incredibly frustrating when you're dealing with so little evidence. And you're looking at the fossil record, I mean, a lot of the animals that died 25,000 years ago, there's zero evidence of them, right? Yeah, that's right. I mean, 25,000 years ago, for example, in the late Pleistocene, the evidence from La Brea Tar Pit indicates that coyotes were a slightly different animal than they are now. They were, at the time, we think gray wolves were coming back into North America, returning to their evolutionary homeland. Coyotes were much bigger, more strapping, had larger dentition, stronger jaws. And what looks like happened is when gray wolves arrived

in the West and began competing with these larger, more strapping coyotes, coyotes sort of sought a different path. They sort of stepped back away from outright competition with an even bigger canid and evolved into a smaller, more gracile animal that was not so much just a pure predator and scavenger, but more omnivorous and so became our modern Canis latrans species. But yeah, and I will say, as you mentioned a minute ago, I mean, it's hard to know all this. Much of this information is fairly recent. I mean, we just got a kind of a reappraisal of the taxonomy of the North

American wolves, essentially in the last seven or eight or 10 years. Are other wolves omnivorous, or is it just coyotes? Well, wolves can be omnivorous, but they're pretty much really carnivorous pack predators. I find coyote crap in my yard all the time, and it's got berries in it. Oh, yeah. They eat a lot of these little red berries that grow out here? Yeah, they eat junipers. I mean, the same thing is happening on my place in New Mexico, starting essentially about in August or September.

in August or September, all the coyote droppings that I've found on the place, I mean, and I've got a lot of coyotes on my place in New Mexico, has just been filled with juniper berries. That's what they've been eating. I mean, they still are, you know, running down rabbits and eating rats and mice and things. But, I mean, when they move into cities, they tend to eat, I mean, and they have access to fruit trees. They tend to eat, I mean, and they have access to fruit trees. They tend to eat a lot of fruit. So they'll, I mean, you know, that people have posted photos on the internet or YouTube videos that show them plucking apples and peaches and things off trees in their backyards. I mean,

they really go for that sort of stuff. So bizarre. It's just such a strange animal. And so do we know if wolves do anything like that or is it just a coyote characteristic? It's pretty much a coyote characteristic. I mean, you know, as we've been saying, the coyote in an evolutionary sense is a small wolf. is a small wolf, but it is different, especially from gray wolves. And one of the ways it's different that the biologists, the behavioralists who have watched coyotes interact with one another and watched gray wolves interact with one another is an indication of how much more pack-oriented, hence sort of predatory carnivorous, wolves are. Wolves, because they exist mostly as, despite our cultural motif of the lone wolf,

actually wolves are such pack animals that they have a much wider range of expressions that they convey to one another in their interactions with one another. And they basically will sort of engage with one another in a repertoire of grimaces and grins and showing their teeth or curling their lip. Of course, all sorts of body language where they curl their tails under and they'll drop their heads and drop their ears. Coyotes have a similar repertoire, but it's a much more limited one. And the argument that the behavioralists make is that that's an indication of an animal

that's not so pack oriented. behavioralists make is that that's an indication of an animal that's not so pack oriented. It's not living exclusively in a social group. It can go off on its own or as a pair, and therefore, it doesn't really need all those facial expressions to convey emotion. So how do we know that all these animals, all these canids evolved in North America and then spread out and went to Asia and Africa and all these different places? Yeah. Well, that's out of the fossil record. And I mean, there's a good science in the fossil record of canid evolution. As I said a bit ago, it seems to go back to about 5.3 million years ago, and all the canids all around the world seem to have come out of this singular origin, much the way all the primates of the world came out of an origin in Africa.

And so, you know, and the horses, for instance, same thing. Horses came out of an evolutionary origin in North America and then spread across the land bridges to become zebras in Africa, for instance. And so that's how it happened. And some of these animals, like jackals, for example, the golden jackal seemed to have separated from the small canid, the coyote, the line that led to coyotes about a million years ago. And it crossed the land bridge into Africa, southern Europe, parts of Asia, and became an animal that never returned to North America. And because of its separation from coyotes by a million years, it became a different creature. So crazy that they all did that on foot.

Yeah, they did it on foot. Somehow or another, the animal came from North America and made it all the way to Africa. And I want to bring something up that you talked about just now, that horses evolved in North America and became zebras. Yeah. I mean, all that started here, but then they weren't here anymore. Yeah. And then they were reintroduced to the Native Americans by the Europeans. Yeah, that's right. Now, what happened to the horses that were here? Well, that's one of the great mysteries of North American evolution, actually.

I mean, the frank answer is we don't really know what happened to them. And so this is, you know, maybe somebody out there listening, Joe, you mean, in the case of the horse, their evolutionary origins go back 56 million years in North America. So 10 times greater depth in time than the Canids do. And so they're here in all sorts of forms. Everyone has heard, you know, of the three-toed horse. forms, everyone has heard, you know, of the three-toed horse, Eohippus is what it's called now, that gradually becomes bigger and its hooves fuse together and they become hardened because it's running over rocky ground and so it has to have hard hooves.

And because it begins to, it starts as a browsing animal in the forest and ultimately becomes a grassland animal, and it's eating grasses that are often coated with windblown sand, so it has to evolve very strong and hard enamel on its teeth in order to resist having its teeth being eroded down by sand. It becomes ultimately, by 15,000, 20,000 years ago, an animal that we would not be able to tell would be any different from a modern horse. It would look exactly like a modern horse, same size. I mean, I've seen skeletons of some of the horses that were in North America down to about 11,000 years ago. And even the paleontologists would have a hard time telling which was the skeleton of a North American horse and which was the skeleton of a modern

domestic horse. But these animals had traveled across the land bridges. The Bering land bridge, when it was open, had ended up in Asia and Africa and Europe, where they survived. But for some bizarre reason, sometime between about 10,000 years ago and 8,000 years ago in North America, they disappeared. They completely went extinct in North America. And so when we Europeans returned them to North America 500 years ago. One of the reasons they become such a success and just spread across the western part of the continent and multiply into the millions is because they're already pre-adapted to the landscape. This is where they had evolved. And so they've already got the hooves. They've got the teeth.

They've got the running ability. They've got the ability to buck off predators. hooves, they've got the teeth, they've got the running ability, they've got the ability to buck off predators. And they get back here in North America, and within the space of about, after they get loose from the Pueblo Revolt in 1680, within the space of about 50 to 60 or 70 years, they're all the way up into Canada. And there are, within 100 years, probably as many as 2 million of them spreading across the West, re-inhabiting their old ecological niche. They just fit like a glove. Fit like a glove, man.

And they became, I mean, it's a fascinating thing to kind of imagine because the West 10, 15, 25,000 years ago had been a place where horses had made up in some parts of the West as much of as a third of the biomass of all the grazing animals. And in the 1700s and 1800s, they were doing the same thing again. They were multiplying into the hundreds of thousands, the millions, gradually spreading. New Mexico is where the domestic European horse first got loose and began to spread. reached all the way up into Montana, to Wyoming, into the edges of Canada by 1850, 1860 or so, and had probably were at least two to three million of them at that point. So they were just re-inhabiting their old landscape and fitting themselves into an ecology now that

had been dominated by bison for a long time. And now horses are back in the mix. And horses today are a very controversial animal. Wild horses are. Yeah, they are. And, you know, people trying to think of them as an invasive species. But essentially, they're just a reintroduced species. And because of that, there's a lot of controversy on how they should be dealt with. Like, some people want to deal with them almost like they deal with wild pigs. Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know,

there are plenty of people out there who who argue that the domestic horse, the feral horse in the West, which is the root stock of most of our population of wild horses in the West, you know, is essentially it's a European animal that has become an invader. I mean, I always and I've had, you know, arguments on stage with people who express this position. I always say, well, what you have to say about the horse, first of all, is that it's an American animal with an asterisk. It's gone for about 8,000 or 9,000 years.

That's actually not a huge amount of time in evolutionary terms. And even though we did domesticate them and began to produce some breeds, horses left to their own devices pretty quickly breed back to the wild look and the wild state. I mean, they'll acquire those dorsal stripes down their backs and zebra striping on their legs. And so zebra striping. Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely.

Now, is that there's a lot of controversy as to what the zebra striping is for, right? Is it to distract predators? Is that the idea behind it? It may have been that. You know, I'm not quite sure I can say whether the zebra striping evolved for a specific reason, although, you know, most changes in animals do. But, yeah, they will fairly readily go back to this early wild horse look, which is probably what horses looked like in North America 10,000 years ago. James, see if you can find some pictures of wild horses with zebra stripes. I don't think I've ever seen that before. That's fascinating.

Yeah, look in the Prior Mountains Wild Horse Range in Montana, and you'll see a whole population of animals that come out of that background. They have a very interesting history because it was a group of animals that Lewis and Clark acquired from the Indians, and they were going to take back and trade in the Mandan villages. And a guy named Pryor, who was responsible for the herd, was driving them through today's Pryor Mountains. And the Crow Indians raided his camp and chased off a bunch of those horses. And they're now in those mountains. striped zebra leg look that probably came right from the Spanish horses of New Mexico up into the northern west. So whatever the mass extinction event that took place somewhere in the neighborhood of

10,000 years ago that claimed the woolly mammoth, saber-toothed tiger, all these different animals, the horse was amongst that as well? The horse was one of the ones that disappeared? Yeah. And, you know, so, I mean, we've got some pretty good explanations for what happened to the mammoths. You know, the mammoths probably were taken out by human hunters because this this was a version of the American West that that basically had emerged in the absence of people. You know, and we're just like every other mammal that you mentioned a minute ago. You're amazed at the fact that the wolves were able to spread around the world and the horses were able to spread around the world.

Well, we did the same thing. We started in Africa and we spread around the world, getting to Europe about 45,000 years ago and didn't get to North America, which was one of the last places, except for the islands out in the Pacific, that humans got to until about 15,000 years ago. And so when we arrived, we confronted a landscape that was full of animals like mammoths that had no experience with human hunters at all. And what we think is that these early arrivals from Siberia were probably really accomplished big game hunters.

And I mean, like all elephants, mammoths had really long gestation periods. It took them, once they were impregnated, it took them two years to have a calf. Wow. And so they have a really... They're pregnant for two years. Yeah, they're pregnant for two years. And so they have a really low population recovery ability. Biologists call this K species that have a kind of a low reproductive rate. And so whenever humans arrive and, you know, and we take a look at the situation and, I mean, cow mammoths evidently were a lot easier to deal with in a hunt than the big bulls were. And so these hunters seem to have concentrated on cows. I mean, that's, of course, obviously going to be detrimental to the demographics of the population. detrimental to the demographics of the population. And so probably in the case of mammoths, it was human hunting of an animal that had no prior experience with human hunters and not very many defenses against us that took them out. The other animals, though, a lot of them, I mean,

some of the predators, we think they went because their prey species disappeared. But, I mean, the amazing thing with the horses is just hard to fathom because we haven't found very many sites. There was one recently discovered near Boulder, Colorado, of what appeared to be an early Indian kill of horses. But, you know, if you tried to argue that the same thing happened with horses that happened with the mammoths, you'd think you'd be finding kill sites all over the place. Right. You just haven't really found them.

Have you ever looked into, oh, is this one of the animals? So it's got the front paws, got a little bit of zebra stripes, or front legs rather. But you're saying it's the back legs? Well, it's both. Oh, look at that. Wow, that's fascinating. Yeah, they have the zebra stripes on the legs. Oh, wow, that. Wow, that's fascinating. Yeah, they have the zebra stripes on the legs. Oh, wow, that is wild.

And they have this black stripe down the back. The dorsal stripe is coming, so yeah. Well, I read something about zebras that it makes very hard for predators to differentiate between individual zebras in that they had put an ear collar or clip on one of the zebras and immediately that zebra was taken out. They had singled that zebra out. It was very obvious to the predators that that was an individual and they went right after it. Yeah, yeah. Well, it could be something like that. I mean, it's pretty clear from these North American horses that the zebra striping trait originated here and then ended up being taken by the animals that migrated into Africa and perhaps elaborated on over time where they're dealing with lions and cheetahs and leopards and things like that. And they had a lion in North America at one point in time that was even bigger than the African lion. That's right. Panthera, the step lion, was a lion that was one and a half times the size of

the African lion. And we had a short-faced bear that was probably even more ferocious than modern-day grizzlies. For one thing, it seems to have been this really gracile animal. It looked far more nimble and fast in its ability to run and so forth than grizzlies do. Yeah, we've talked about that thing many times since I heard you talk about it. And we pulled up pictures of it and the size of the things and the length of the legs. Yeah, I know. It looked like it could run. It's a huge animal.

It's a huge animal. I mean, it's bigger than a polar bear, right? There's a Canadian biologist named Valerius Geist who has argued for a long time that he thinks until short-faced bears became extinct, humans were not able to actually colonize North America. That those things were so fearsome that they basically kept Siberian hunters at bay on the other side of the Bering land bridge. And finally, when they began to disappear, then people began trekking across and getting into North America. Wow. Well, they look like a monster. I mean, it doesn't even look like a real animal.

It looks like something in a movie. And then you see the short-faced bear. And what is that? How do you say that? Deodon? Deodon? Yeah, Deodon. That's, what do they call that?

The hell pig? Yeah. That's an animal even bigger than the short-faced bear. So all these animals that existed in North America, when did the short-faced bear go extinct? Look at the size of that thing. Jesus, that's terrifying. Yeah, I think probably about 14,000, 15,000 years ago.

And as I said, at least one biologist argues that it's no coincidence that that's about the time that humans began showing up, is that once this bear is gone, then it makes it possible for people to come into North America. Is there a hypothesis as to why that one extinct? Is that human intervention as well? as a result of the steady progression of ice ages and then what are called the interpluvials in between the ice ages. And the reason we think we have sort of a steady record of ice ages and then a warming period in between and then a return to ice ages and then warming,

and that goes back in the record for a very long time, is that the Earth actually doesn't spin in a true, perfect spin on its axis. It has a wobble in it. And sometimes when it wobbles, this is called... Precession of the equinoxes? Richard Averbeck Well, it's called the Milankovitch cycles. A European – I can't remember if he was a geographer or – probably a geographer was the first to speculate that this is why we have this climate history of a procession between ice ages and pluvials in between, is because the Earth wobbles. And as it wobbles, it will, at certain times, position the northern hemisphere farther away

from the sun for a period of 30,000, 40,000 years. And during that wobble and that position, you get an ice age. And then the wobble will take it back so that the northern hemisphere begins to point more directly at the sun and in between you get what are called pluvials sometimes quite warm episodes i mean we had one about 5 000 years ago that was probably six or seven or eight degrees warmer than today i would love to get you together with a guy named Randall Carlson, who's an expert in astro, uh, asteroidal impacts. And he's got some pretty compelling evidence and some fascinating theories about the end

of the ice age. And at the end of the ice age corresponds to a lot of nuclear glass sites in Asia and Europe. The nuclear glass is essentially the same stuff they find when they do nuclear test sites that also happens when they have meteor impacts. And it's all throughout Asia and Europe, and he believes there was a significant impact in North America, not once but twice, and it directly corresponds to our planet passing through essentially a comet storm.

Really fascinating stuff. I haven't heard of this, actually. I would love to get you together with him because he's got some compelling evidence that he believes that the woolly mammoths and the, what was it, 60-something percent of the large mammals that died off during that very distinct time period,

he says that directly corresponds to physical evidence of this tritonite stuff and all these diamonds that they find, micro diamonds that come from these impacts. Very fascinating. Is it a possibility that you've ever considered? No. Well, I mean, I've read about it.

And I think, you know, as in so many questions out there, you know, we haven't figured out the answers to things in a lot of instances. And so, yeah, this is a possibility. I mean, what I was sort of leading to by tracking that Milankovitch cycle procession through time is that that sort of change tends to produce among animal species and plants, too, really, a lot of speciation. In other words, it generates a lot of new, because you're often isolating populations, and when populations get isolated from their parent populations, they'll evolve some new traits and maybe even become a new species. And so you get a lot, it's a kind

of a cycle where you end up with a lot of different new animals. But when change comes, you often lose a good many of them. And so these extinction scenarios that are associated with the ice ages and the pluvials in between, the interglacials, do tend to produce quite a number of extinctions. And the short-faced bear, I mean, I wish I was more of an expert so I could directly address exactly what happened to it. But all I can tell you from my limited knowledge of it is that it seems to have disappeared in North America around 15,000 years ago. And that's at a time when the Wisconsin Ice Age is beginning to wind down. And so, you know, we still haven't, I mean, there are a lot of scholars out there, a lot of people out there who are arguing climate is the primary explanation for the Pleistocene extinctions.

Most people sort of concede that, okay, in the case of the mammoths, our evidence tends to point more towards human hunting. But we don't know about all these other animals. I mean, the predators, as I said, they seem to disappear because the prey disappears. But, I mean, why do the camels disappear? Why do these giant ground sloths disappear? When the things that they ate, the globe mallows that are still in the West are still out there, but the animal that fed on them isn't there anymore. So it's something, you know, that people have been sort of hammering around over beers and laboratories for actually more than a century now. And we still haven't answered all the questions. It is so fascinating, but it's so amazing that you could even formulate that much information based on something that was 25, 15,000 years ago.

I mean, this whole country that we live in today, as far as Europeans are concerned, we've only been here a few hundred years, which is really kind of amazing. We've only been here for a few hundred years, you know. And I mean, as you know from the other recent book of mine, American Serengeti, one of the animals that you can observe today that gives us maybe our best sense of what the Pleistocene is like is the pronghorn antelope, which is still out on the plains and, of course, across a lot of the West. I mean, they nearly disappeared at the turn of the 20th century. We've managed to bring them back in a

lot of Western states. But that's an animal that is essentially a holdover from the Pleistocene and is kind of still fighting Pleistocene ghosts. I mean, it's an animal, as everybody knows, that can run 65 miles an hour. And yet for the last 10,000 years, the fastest animal that can chase it, the gray wolf, only runs 45 miles an hour. animal that can chase it, the gray wolf, only runs 45 miles an hour. And so that leads to the obvious question, why the overkill in terms of speed? What you would think is all you need to do is run 47 miles an hour and you got it covered. But here are these animals still among us that run 65 miles an hour, that can't jump over fences, that still congregate in what people call the selfish herd, where they'll group up as a herd of adults, and the dominant animals will end up in the middle, so that if there are any predators except as fawns. And so what we think

is happening is that in the pronghorn, we've got an animal that has survived into our own time that preserves how evolution shaped it to deal with the predators of the Pleistocene. When there actually was a cheetah and a running hyena that could run almost 65 miles an hour, and there were predators that went after their herds when they were adults, and all those animals have disappeared. They're all ghosts and have been for 10,000 years. And yet pronghorns still preserve the ability to run away from a cheetah and to group up as a selfish herd

and preserve the dominant animals in the middle against a hyena attack. I had no idea they could run that fast. They can run 65 miles an hour? I only think some of the females, which are a little bit lighter than the males are, some of them may be able to run 70. That's insane. Imagine going on the highway, you're violating the speed limit, and a pronghorn passes you. And a pronghorn passes you, that's right.

That's incredible. I did not know that there was hyenas that lived in North America as well that could run that fast. Yeah, we had a fast, a running hyena that was a major predator of creatures like this. You know, I mean, if you think about it, what, you know, this is why I use the term American Serengeti for the title of this book. You know, this is why I use the term American Serengeti for the title of this book. What we had in North America were these, you know, versions.

Yeah, look at this. We're looking at a video of them right now, and someone's driving in the car, and they are just flying by. Yeah, Meriwether Lewis famously said their running motion more resembles the flight of birds than it does any mammal. Yeah, I've seen them. I saw them in Montana, and boy, do they book. It's kind of crazy to watch in real life. You see them take off when they get spooked, and you're like, whoa. They're our version of, you know, impalas and gazelles in Africa. And so what other, there was this cheetah.

Now, does it resemble the African cheetah? Did it look like an African cheetah? It did resemble it as a result of kind of convergent evolution. I mean, it was an animal that pursued these pronghorns that could run 70 miles an hour. So it had to be able to run that fast. Did it develop independently of the African cheetah? It did, indeed. And in fact, it developed from the cougar, the mountain lion line. So it doesn't come out of, you know, I mean, the cheetah is a cat that famously, many people say it's a dog-like cat. And it's its own independent entity in Africa. And so our version of it came out of the same line that produced mountain lions, except mountain lions 15,000, 20,000 years ago produced this very fast-running version

that was, in effect, an American cheetah. Wow. And did it have the same sort of front paws as a cheetah? Because cheetahs, they're more almost dog-like, right? Yeah, no, this North American animal didn't have dog-like pads like the African cheetah does. At least I'm not, you know, there may be some cheetah or North American cheetah expert out there who would contest that. But I don't think so.

I've not seen any evidence anywhere in anything I've read that it did. So it essentially just developed this ability to run very fast to catch pronghorns. To catch pronghorns and catch, you know, and there were other animals that could run. I mean, horses run pretty fast, too. Yeah. animals that could run. I mean, horses run pretty fast, too. And cats, I mean, the reason horses buck, of course, which we've translated in our own time into rodeo sports. But the reason they buck is because that's their strategy for dislodging a cat attack. They were always a prey of cats. And so, you know, and so, I mean, when we were talking about horses a minute ago, I mean, one of the points I was going to make, and I can make this point, too, is that one of the reasons horses are an issue now and a problem in the West is, A, they're not on the Great Plains anymore, which was the primary horse range during the 1700s and 1800s.

They're in the deserts of places like Nevada. So they're in a much more arid country, not in a lushly grass plain setting, but in a desert setting. And we don't have their predators around anymore. I mean, we've taken out gray wolves, which certainly did prey on colts. We've almost wiped out mountain lions. Their mountain lions are coming back. And that was always one of the major predators of colts. But horses don't have the sort of predators anymore that they had during the Pleistocene or even in the 1700s and 1800s. And so without their predators on the landscape and also being out in a desert setting rather than out in the much lusher Great Plains, they've become

an issue in terms of how they compete with cattle, how they compete with sheep, how they compete with mule deer and wildlife. And that's why we were sort of, you know, endlessly rattling the cage around wild horses now. But in the 19th century, in the 1800s, I mean, where they were, were out on the Great Plains. They were in eastern Montana and eastern Colorado and eastern New Mexico in this much more lushly grassed setting. And there, of course, still were wolves and still were mountain lions to take out the cults and sort of keep their population suppressed. It seems, you know, I mean, I'm incredulous that human beings that didn't even have bows and arrows could kill off the woolly mammoth. But then you stop and think about what people are able to do in the few hundred years that we've been here.

When we arrived in North America, when Europeans arrived in North America and just essentially swept through the country and almost extirpated everything we found, like white-tailed deer, antelopes, buffalo. We almost wiped the whole thing out. Elk. We got it down to just, I mean, at the turn of the 19th century, or the 20th century rather, it was a sad state. Yeah, it was a sad state. And it was a, you know, it's one of those instances in history where, I mean, I think I say this in the introduction of that American Serengeti book, that was the largest destruction of wildlife that I've been able to discover in world history. When Europeans came to the Pacific and essentially wiped out just dozens

of animal species, in most instances, not completely exterminating them, but dropping them to numbers that were so low that, you know, you worried that this animal was going to survive. And, I mean, some animals we did go extinct. The Carolina parakeet, for example, was this beautiful, gaudy, green and yellow, large crow-sized parrot that was in North America all the way up to the Great Lakes. And they became extinct by the 1930s. People hunted them?

They were regarded as agricultural pests, and so farmers basically killed them and enlisted government agents, as had happened with wolves and coyotes, to wipe them out. It's fascinating, and I guess it makes sense, but it's just fascinating that just a few hundred years ago, they lacked the foresight to understand that any sort of intrusion into the ecosystem, any sort of, you know, eliminating one predator or taking out one thing, causes a cascade of events that can be disastrous. No, people didn't know anything about ecology. I mean, you know, we don't have ecology emerge as a science until the 1860s.

It makes sense, but it's amazing. It really is amazing that we knew so little. We knew very little, and we tended to, you know, I mean, with a complete lack of knowledge. I mean, we did the same thing with the coyote attempt at exterminating them. The coyote attempt at exterminating them, we passed a law in Congress in 1931 to provide for the extermination of coyotes and to appropriate the money to do it. And I mean, we spent probably $100 million over the next 40 or 50 years attempting to do it and passed that law at a time when we'd never sent the first scientist out to do any study of coyote natural history. We had no idea what they ate, had no clue about them. But before we even have any science to go on at all, we just go ahead and take the step up. Okay, we're going to, this is enamel, we're going to completely weed out of the North American setting. We're going to, this is an animal, we're going to completely weed out of the North American setting.

We're going to eliminate it. Don't know a damn thing about it, but we're going to make sure that this thing does not survive through the 20th century. It's not fascinating in your book, the accounts of the early explorers who were trying to figure out what the hell a coyote was. They thought maybe it was a jackal. They didn't know what it was. And then they finally decided it was some sort of a small wolf. And then the initial description of it, well, they called it a prairie wolf. Prairie wolf. That's right. Yeah. A lot of people don't know this. For most of the 19th century, I mean, I've seen references to this name as late as like 1915.

Americans call coyotes prairie wolves. That was the name Lewis and Clark gave them, and so that's what everybody called them. And it wasn't until we started getting out into the Southwest in the 1840s and 1850s, especially around Santa Fe, where there were Indian people who had come up with the Spanish colonization of the Southwest who spoke the language of the Aztecs. That language is called Nahuatl. And the word coyote comes from the Aztec language. So when Americans were first getting into New Mexico in the 1840s, really, they began encountering people who were using a different name for the animal. And over the next 30 or 40 years, that name sort of overtook the term prairie wolf and finally completely replaced it. So the original name was an Aztec name?

Yeah, it was an Aztec name. Yeah. And it's pronounced in the Nahuatl language. It's spelled in their language C-O-Y-O-T-L. But the L on the end is silent. And so the way they pronounced it was coyote. And, I mean, the Aztec language, because they, you know, they were an empire and they defeated a lot of peoples and they imposed their language and their customs on a lot of people. There were all sorts of Indians who weren't necessarily Aztec who spoke that language. And there were evidently enough of them in places like Santa Fe and Tucson that when

Anglo-Americans got out there, they were encountering not only native people who were using that word, but the Spanish not being privy to the American use of the term prairie wolf. The Spanish had just adopted the Indian name for the animal, and they had Hispanicized it, and they gave it an extra syllable, so they called the animal a coyote. And that's what these early Americans were hearing. They were largely hearing the Spanish pronunciation, the three-syllable version coyote. And Mark Twain comes along in the 1870s and writes a very famous book about the West, Roughing It. Of course, he's America's most famous writer at the time.

His book is a bestseller. And Mark Twain not only kind of, because we, as you mentioned a minute ago, we don't really know what to make of these animals. Americans have never had any experience with an animal like this, so we don't know what to think about them. Mark Twain is the one who provides us with kind of a take on them as these cowardly, despicable little creatures that have this overgrown wolf skin and this despairing look. And he says, you know, overgrown wolf skin and this despairing look. And he says, you know, they're such scoundrels and such scavengers that a flea would desert one for a velocipede. You know, he's Mark Twain. He's humorous. So he gets on this riff and he goes on for like three pages

in this vein so that by the time you end up reading it, your basic conviction is, okay, this is a despicable little creature that's just breathing up good air, so we should just get rid of it. But he does, in the course of that book, tell Americans what the animal is called and how you pronounce it. And he says, in the West, this animal is called a coyote, and he spells it out phonetically, giving us our modern pronunciation of coyote. So our modern pronunciation comes from Mark Twain. Yeah, well, he's the one who at least popularizes it. And everybody who read his book basically kind of, I think, absorbed that pronunciation of it. Why did these Native Americans have such a great respect for the coyote? Like, what was it about that animal that created so many legends?

Oh, that's a great story. And as I argue in this book, I mean, what I try to do with Coyote America is to tell the biography of the animal from its evolutionary origins through its history up until the present time when, of course, it's in everybody's backyard all over the country. And so we're all dealing with it and having to figure out what it is and how you coexist with it. But it's a real roller coaster ride because, I mean, it goes, you know, for a million years of its evolution, confronting at certain times the return of gray wolves to North America, which clearly don't like coyotes and beat the crap out of them and even probably influenced their evolutionary direction into a smaller, more jackal-like animal. to a smaller, more jackal-like animal.

But then it also, it has this story that's associated with us. When humans arrive in North America, I mean, coyotes get this wonderful period that lasts like 14,500 years or something, where native people look at them and say, that's the most intriguing animal on the continent. It's, for one thing, mammoths, camels, horses, all these big charismatic animals are dying out around us in the Pleistocene extinctions. Somehow, these little guys don't seem to be perturbed by it. They're surviving while all these big creatures, these big impressive creatures are

going away. And I think they also, at least this is what I argue in the book, they had this sense that coyotes live by their wits. And I think that provided them with a model that they thought was valuable. age, including ours right now, could very well follow and find to be an effective way to go about facing your future. So they see this animal as being particularly smart, particularly adaptable, a survivor. And because it was a social animal, it has pups. The pups don't know how to fend for themselves in the world, and coyotes have to teach the pups, just as humans do with their children, how to become full-grown coyotes and how to survive. That it seemed to have a lot of traits that people found familiar. And so at some point in time, and who knows when it was,

I mean, it could have been 10,000 years ago, they converted into Indian people in the West, everywhere coyotes ranged, convert this animal into one of their principal gods, their principal deities, and make it this sacred creature. I mean, they have no reason to kill them or harass them or anything. And so instead, they look at it as this avatar, this stand-in for humans in the world, study it really closely, and they proceed to create this body of literature.

It's our oldest literature from North America in the form of oral stories that have coyote as the central character, but it's not the little coyote that's trotting through your camp. It's a coyote man. He's a character who stands on his hind legs. He has a pointed nose, and he has erect ears, and he has a tail, but he's standing up and he personifies all the traits, both good and bad, of human beings. It's so weird that, you know, the way we look at coyotes today is this nuisance and this pest, and that's directly attributed to agriculture, right? Directly attributed to us having livestock anywhere near them, deciding we want them out. But if you look at the Museum of Natural History in Los Angeles, when I was there, I took a

photo of it because it was so weird. I put it up on my Instagram. The photo, the stuffed coyote that they have there, they have all these different animals. They have African animals. They have gorillas, chimpanzees, all these different stuffed animals. I'll just sort of give you a sense of what they would look like with this mock natural environment. The coyote's natural environment, they show a porch, and the coyote has a cat in its mouth.

I mean, this image right here, that is my photo that I took from the Museum of Natural History. It's like, what? That's the natural environment is a porch with a cat in his mouth? It's so bizarre. But that's how human beings, especially in and around L.A., view them. You know, when I had my situation with the chicken, before I started reading your book, I thought about killing that coyote. I was like, I'm going to kill that fucker.

He killed my chicken. I'm going to kill him. I was like, I'm going to kill that fucker. He killed my chicken. I'm going to kill him. Then I found out, I believe, I'm pretty sure that it was a female because this female kind of honeydicked my dog into jumping the fence and converting with her. And that's how they got the chickens because my dog's huge. I have a mastiff. And he knocked over this.

See, when chickens, when they brood, do you know about chickens brooding? Do you know what happens? Yeah, my dad had chickens in Louisiana. So yeah, I kind of, you know, hanging out with him when I would go back and visit, I came to know a little bit about chickens. Well, people don't know what happens is chickens think that their eggs, the only way chickens have eggs every day, pretty much, or sort of every day, every few days. And when they have an egg, those eggs are non-viable.

That's one of the reasons why vegetarians can eat chicken eggs and get protein from them. You're not hurting anybody. They have the eggs whether or not there's a chicken there or not. They always have the egg and it has to be fertilized by the rooster in order for it to become a chicken. I didn't figure that out until I was almost 40. But my stupid head, I was like, oh, the egg means there's a chicken in there. You just got to cook it before it becomes a chicken. No, stupid.

Anyway, the chickens sometimes are convinced that these non-viable eggs will become chicks. And so they sit on them, and they start plucking their feathers out. viable eggs will become chicks. And so they sit on them and they start plucking their feathers out. Oh, yeah. And it takes the entire cycle that an egg would be viable and become a chick for them to get out of it. The only way to stop them is to put them on a perch and put them in a smaller cage. So we put them in a perch in a smaller cage.

We separate them from the chicken coop. And the coyote had figured this out, that this chicken was by itself and convinced the mastiff to knock the cage over. Because it was too small to knock this coop over. But the mastiff is 140 pounds. He's like, I'll fucking take care of it. Boom! He knocks the coop down.

The coyote says, thanks, grabs the chicken, and then jumps and hops the fence. And I was talking to my neighbor about it. He's like, oh, man, I fucking hate coyotes. I go, do you like rats? Because if you don't like rats rats you should thank the coyotes the reason why we're not infested with rats i mean we're in the hills when you're in the hills out here in california there's rats and rodents everywhere but they're not and the reason why is because these coyotes like we make that mistake so often where we think that we're smart and we're going to eliminate one thing in this system and it's going to be fine now. All we have to do is take out this coyote and everything will be great. But no, you're going to have a rat infestation. Yeah.

And that's one of the things that you talked about in your book about farmers who had chased off the coyotes and they had rabbit infestations. Yeah. And they were praying for coyotes. I mean, this happens, you know, just over and over and over again. And so I think, you know, one of the reasons that we tend to make endlessly make the same mistake with animals like this is because we don't try to spend any effort to understand the ecological world around us and to understand their role in it in particular. And, you know, I mean, I've been going around the country a lot over the last eight months talking about this book because obviously everybody is dealing with them,

and some people are brand new in dealing with them, and they're alarmed, first of all, that there's this small wolf trotting down the street or through their yard. And then, of course, they immediately hear, well, it's going to get your cat. It's going to get your small dog. It's liable to grab your three-year-old. So the horror stories, through kind of urban legend, make the rounds at an accelerated rate. And sort of basic good information about the animal doesn't make the round very effectively at all. It's not fun. No, it's not fun. But what you have to grapple with, first of all, is you've got

to start with a position, which I'll admit, this is not the American position to take. It's the position that in this instance, we have confronted a part of the natural world that we are not able to control. We can't control coyotes. Resistance basically is futile. They're going to be among us no matter what we do. I mean, you can certainly take out, you know, coyotes are individuals. And so if there's a bad actor in the neighborhood, and very few of them, by the way, in the studies of coyotes in urban settings are bad actors, but occasionally there's one that

starts catching cats or starts chasing dogs or something. I mean, you can take that one out and perhaps improve the situation. But just blanket going after any coyote because you're afraid of something like your cat might disappear is going to boomerang in every instance because attempts to persecute them, as I try to point out over and over in Coyote America, result in every case in more coyotes. And it skews the populations so that what you end up with are often youngsters, teenagers that, like human teenagers, get in more trouble than adults do. So the thing that, I mean, I keep trying to do, and of course, there's a group in California and San Francisco called Project Coyote that's been at this, trying to help people understand how to coexist with coyotes for the last seven or eight years. What you have to do is, first of all, accept the fact that, okay, resistance is futile. These animals are here. They know how to live in an urban setting. They know how to live in an urban setting.

They know how to live in the hills around me. Now I've got to figure out how I live with coyotes in my life. And, I mean, the obvious thing is you don't let your cats out in the morning to go hunt songbirds. You don't let your cats out at night. I mean, the coyotes are, in most instances, not attacking cats or small dogs because they want to eat them. They regard them as competitor predators in their territory. And so they're attacking them because that's how they see them. But they do eat them, right? Well, they will eat them in some instances when they're trying to provision a litter of pups. So the times when cats will be snatched by coyotes and will

disappear and you don't see the cat again is often the period from basically about now from April through about July. That's when they have their litters. And I mean, it's sometimes hard to come up with enough protein to raise five or six little coyote pups. And so occasionally, a cat or a small dog will be taken away. But usually what happens with cats and small dogs is that coyotes attack them and they just leave them there. And I've told people for most of this year, I mean, this is from my own experience because I've lived in the urban wildlands interface for almost all my adult life out in the countryside away from town. Whenever you find your cat, that's probably a coyote. And it's attacked the cat because it thinks it's a competitor.

And it attacks, it kills it, and leaves it. If the animal disappears, if your cat disappears and you never see it again, either that's happened in the time when they're provisioning pups, or if it happens in the fall or the winter or the early spring and your cat totally disappears, that probably was a great horned owl that got your cat. I mean, owls pluck cats and take them to their roost and devour them. And so your cat disappears and you never see it again.

But what almost everybody does now that we know we've got coyotes is you hear coyotes howling in the hills. The neighbor had a cat disappear. Of course, it was a coyote. Coyote got it. Yeah, but it might not be. I would say in a pretty sizable percentage of cases, it was actually a great horned owl that got the cat and not a coyote. There's a great video that I found online that I put on my Instagram of an owl snatching

some other raptor right out of its nest. Have you ever seen it? I haven't seen it. It's someone that had like a trail cam video up, a black and white trail cam. And you see the owl flying in the distance. I've heard stories of this. You see the eyes and then you see it. And the other bird in the nest doesn't even know what happened. Watch this.

It happened so fast. So first of all, do you know what kind of animal that is, what that bird is? Can you tell by looking at it? It looks like a hawk of some kind. Yeah, but look at the eyes. It looks like a fledgling. Boom. Boom, that's it.

And look at the other ones. Like, what happened? Yeah. What? What's going on? Yeah, that's a hawk of some kind, maybe a red tail. And the fledgling. Just the eyes in the distance are amazing.

Look at these eyes sneaking up. Look at this. Here it comes. Oh. Yeah. Look at these eyes sneaking up. Look at this. Here it comes. It's so funny that we think of that thing as, oh, the wise old owl, give a hoot, don't pollute. Meanwhile, those motherfuckers are as evil as it gets. I mean, I've got friends who were sitting out at an outdoor bar a couple of years ago with a railing on it. It was a late afternoon and a cat was walking along the railing while they're sitting there with their drinks, shooting the shit. And all of a sudden, an owl comes in and in a flash plucks that cat off the railing. And the next thing they see is the owl flying off to the cottonwood trees over the creek with this cat dangling from its. Yeah. While they're all sitting there with their drinks poised in the air. through the cottonwood trees over the creek with this cat dangling from its pallets.

Yeah. While they're all sitting there with their drinks poised in the air. I was driving home one day and I saw this owl fly right above my head. And I must have, apparently while I was driving, it must have got this rabbit somewhere close to it. And I startled it. So it's flying off and decided to drop the rabbit. So right in front of me in the highway or in the road was this eviscerated rabbit, no big rabbit too.

And I was, and that, that was like one of the first years that I lived here. And I remember thinking, well, I gotta re I gotta recalibrate my idea of what an owl is because it was just torn apart and it was a big rabbit. And I saw this, I mean, it was a big owl, too. So the whole thing was like, whoa, this is a predator. This isn't just a bird. And that's the way they kill, too. That's what they do with cats. They eviscerate them.

They put a talon basically into their ass and just rip it all the way up to their sternum. Boom. Yeah, spill their guts out. Whew, there's a wildlife sanctuary near here, and we visited it a couple of times, and they have owls there. And you get to, like, see them and check them out up close, like animals that have been injured and things like that. And you just see the talons on those suckers and just, whew. Yeah, they're serious. Yeah, it's fascinating how we anthropomorphize some of these animals and turn them into these cutie pies.

how we anthropomorphize some of these animals and turn them into these cutie pies. You know, like polar bears are selling Coca-Cola and Klondike bars and owls are selling Tootsie Roll Pops. Meanwhile, they're out there jacking cats, you know. There's a video in Los Angeles. And one of the reasons why I wanted to ask you about this is because I'd heard you say before, I think on Ranella's podcast, what you just said about cats and dogs. Essentially, the coyotes think of them as competitive predators. Yeah.

But there's a video in Los Angeles, in Hollywood, of a coyote eating a cat on a lawn. And these people are in the car watching, and they're filming it, and they're freaking out like, oh my God, oh my God. Coyote's just sitting there eating that cat. So you think that the reason why it's eating that cat, I mean, is it just hungry maybe? Or is it an occasional meal that they think of them as prey? Or is it primarily because there are a bunch of different factors? Or is it primarily because they're competitive predators? Well, I think it's primarily because of that but i mean they're so you know they're coyotes are so individualistic

look at that sucker oh yeah he's hanging out right in la hi right how are you wild animal walking by the car right in los angeles i mean it's just so bizarre that they're so comfortable around people look at all those streets Look at all those city streets. I mean, it's thinking about walking across the street with all those cars. And they know how to navigate streets like that, too. So strange. How does it figure out how to make it across the street? You know, there's a biologist in Chicago who argues that in rush hour traffic on the interstates of Chicago, nine million people there, that he's seen coyotes

cross four lanes of the interstate and stop in the median and sit there and wait until the traffic lightens up for the other four lanes and then cross that way. So this is the coyote goes and gets this cat that apparently it had already killed before and he starts eating it. So it's got it right there. that thing at his feet that's a cat yeah well what i was going to say about that is that look at that yeah it's all stiff yeah well he's so what a strange animal you know so so two things i would observe about this particular video is, first of all, you know, everybody is making the assumption that the coyote killed the cat. That cat may have been hit by a car and the coyote found it and is scavenging it.

How about that other stupid cat behind him? That's my friend. Right behind it. Hello. Why are you eating my friend? Hello. Why are you eating my friend? The other thing I would say is that they're so individualistic that sometimes cats, they develop, I mean, coyotes develop a yin for cats. Like a taste.

Yes, they develop a taste for them. And so, I mean, there are examples. There was a coyote pack in Seattle and also one in Tucson that basically did this very thing. They decided that cats were, you know, going to be their target. Now, most coyotes, you know, that's not how they react to cats. But cats do kill an unbelievable amount of rodents and birds. Yeah. And people don't want to hear this, of course, but the truth is that in all cities where coyotes have spread, which is literally everywhere now, we have from the ornithologist a decided record of numbers of nesting songbirds going up dramatically as a result of the appearance of coyotes. Yeah, there was a statistic that we quoted on the podcast, and it's something insane. Like, three billion birds a year in North America alone are killed by cats, by house cats. B, with a B. Yeah. When you tell that to people,

they're like, there's no way. But look, these are biologists. These are people that are actually studying this, and it blew them away. I don't know how they study it. Maybe you could enlighten me. Well, I don't either. 3.7 billion years annually. 3.7 birds. In the continental U.S. That is so crazy.

That's U.S. That's not Canada. It's not Mexico. Continental U.S. And I read a similar study in Natural History Magazine a few years ago about Great Britain. Same kind of thing. I don't remember the figures anymore. But yeah, I mean, cats, you know, they devastate bird populations. And so letting your cat roam out through the neighborhood, you know, seems like

this very compassionate thing to do. You know, Fluffy wants to be out. Fluffy needs, you know, some space to roam. But you're releasing an extremely effective predator into the world. And that's the result of it. And when coyotes have shown up in town, it's suddenly getting a lot harder to make a living as a bird-killing cat. And so we're getting a sharp uptick now in songbirds. Yeah, it's interesting how it all just cycles. It all just makes sense. It all figures out. It all seeks its own level. One of the things that I found hilarious is we were talking on Ranella's podcast

about a group that approached you, and they were doing a documentary on saving the coyote. Yes, indeed. It was a couple of women who were pretty fresh into the Southwest in Santa Fe. They hadn't been in town for very long and they were interested in doing a documentary to save the coyote. And, you know, so, I mean, there's a way to approach doing something like that. I mean, you could say, okay, so I want wildlife services to stop killing 80,000 of them a year on behalf of agriculture. But what these women didn't seem to quite have a handle on was that coyotes don't need our help in saving themselves. They're perfectly capable of doing it. And so this is not an animal you

have to worry about, for example, going on the endangered species list. That's not going to happen. As one of the people who blurbed my book, in fact, it was Bill McKibben, the nature writer, now that I think about it, one of the things he said in his blurb was that a biologist once told him that when the last human dies on Earth, the last human dies on Earth, a coyote will be sitting on that human's grave howling at the moon. And I've always loved that thought because, of course, it's an indication of what great survivors they are. Well, you are starting to see a resurgence of wolves in Europe. And there was actually an article recently published in Paris about it, where I guess the mayor of Paris was telling people not to be alarmed because they only look for four-legged prey and people shouldn't be worried about these wolves. But the idea of these animals intermingling with our civilization, we have decided,

we put some hardscape down, put up some houses, and we go, this is our stuff. You got to stay out. And they don't recognize these boundaries. And now you're slowly starting to see these animals creep back in into Paris, France. Into Paris. That's right. Wolves.

Yeah. Well, I think when we moved into cities 5,000 years ago, one of the things we thought we were getting away from by living in cities was predators. Yeah. For the most part, we have. Yeah. For the most part, we have. And we don't have, you know, at least not so far.

We don't have lepers, you know, patrolling intrigued by one of the stories I uncovered in the book, which is an argument that I make is based on the work of a graduate student I knew at the University of Montana. His name is John Hall, and he was doing a dissertation in history on what he was calling the Great Dog War in the 19th century and what it was all about. And the more I dug into it, I realized this was one of the explanations for why you don't see accounts of coyotes in cities much, even in L.A. I mean, the first accounts I've seen of coyotes in L.A., for instance, are in the 1920s. But it's because until about the 1870s, we let dogs, our own pets and packs of feral dogs, roam through American cities at will. And so every city in the United States had a large population of feral and sort of loosely owned dogs roaming around our cityscapes. Feral meaning they were totally wild or people would feed them?

People would feed them. I mean, they were just basically stray dogs that would roam the city. They would find things to scavenge behind restaurants and behind houses, and they would knock over people's garbage. But this happened, I think, in the late 1840s. Boston had an epidemic one year of rabies attacks from these kinds of wild dogs in the city. And so Boston began to institute what became our modern system of dog catchers, dog pounds, leash laws, dog control. And it was at the moment when the Boston model began to spread to Philadelphia, to New York, eventually to New Orleans, eventually to the cities in California. And we sort of instituted this new model of, OK, a dog is properly meant to be in an enclosed yard on a leash when it's with its owner. It's not supposed to be running through the streets with packs of other dogs scavenging garbage and stuff.

garbage and stuff. When we did that, what that in effect did was to open up the niche in American cities for wild canids. And the wild canid that was able to take advantage of it was the coyote. That provided them the opening that hadn't been there before because a coyote wandering into a city in the 1860s or 1830s would end up being, of course, assaulted by dogs. Suddenly all the dogs were put up and that opened up the cities to the arrival of coyotes in our midst. Wow. Just the interface between human beings and the wild and our interaction with the wild and then to start our ability or inability to manipulate it. It's just so fascinating to me. And one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about is what they're trying to do right now in, I guess it's Wyoming and parts of Montana, this American Serengeti project that they're doing. Please explain that. Well, so this other book that we've talked about some of mine that has been out now just about a year.

It came out last March of 2016. That's a book, American Serengeti is a book that's about the story of the Great Plains and the fact that we had, up until about 125 or 130 years ago, in North America, one of the, what was widely regarded around the globe as one of the great wildlife spectacles of the world. And these enormous herds of bison, of reemerging wild horse bands, of pronghorns, maybe 15, 18 million pronghorns, not quite as many as bison, but almost as many. Half a million gray wolves that were their predators. Of course, coyotes playing the role, jackals, grizzly bears that roamed. I mean, the original range of the grizzly bear was actually out on the plains. They were all the way

out into Kansas and into Nebraska. And I mean, everybody saw the movie Revenant, of course, which the filmmaker set in the Rocky Mountains, but that was based on an actual event that happened in history, a guy named Hugh Glass getting mauled by a grizzly. That happened in South Dakota, though, not up in the mountains, because the grizzlies were out on the plains in this version of the Serengeti that prevailed 150 years ago. But we ended up basically wiping all those animals out.

I mean, we wiped out probably as many as 30 million bison through the 19th century. Almost all, we got the pronghorns down from 15 million to about 13,000. We drove the elk off the Great Plains. That was their primary range was the plains. We drove them off and up into the mountains, did the same thing with the grizzlies. So we basically reduced this American Serengeti, which Africa didn't do with its Serengeti or its Maasai Mara or its veld. It preserved all its great animals. But we destroyed ours and ended up not ever successfully creating any kind of wildlife preserve to sort of save at least a part of it. I mean, we got Yellowstone, but of course, Yellowstone is set in the Rocky Mountains.

And so what this American Prairie Reserve is about now, it's based in Bozeman, Montana. It's only about a dozen years old, but it's been pretty wildly successful in trying to do this. It's had the imagination, this group of people has had the imagination to try to recreate this American Serengeti that our government and our statecraft never did preserve for us. And so what they've got in mind in central Montana is taking a couple of large pieces of existing public lands. One is the Missouri River Breaks National Monument that Bill Clinton created along the Missouri River.

And then just downstream of it, still along the Missouri River, is the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge. And together, those two public lands that are along the Missouri River and mostly on the south bank of the Missouri River in central Montana, make up about 1.6, 1.7 million acres. And what American Prairie Reserve is trying to do is to, as they come up for sale, to acquire the private ranches on the north side of the river with the idea of ultimately creating a preserve that's going to be maybe as big as twice the size of Yellowstone. Yellowstone is a little more than two million acres, and American Prairie Reserve is shooting for a preserve that would be something like 4 million acres with the idea of recreating this American Serengeti, of repopulating it with bison, with pronghorns, with elk, with bighorn sheep, with mule deer,

all the animals that were there. And then because they're a private entity and it's not the Fish and Wildlife Service, so they can't, on their own merits, reintroduce wolves or grizzly bears, just sort of sitting back and hoping and letting wolves come out of the nearby Rockies and grizzlies, which every spring now are coming out of the Rocky Mountain front in Montana and getting out sometimes as much as 100 miles out of the plains. What the American Prairie Reserve wants to happen is for these animals to get all the way out to this preserve, find this recreated American Serengeti with all the animals that were there and give us in our own time in the 21st century this chance to not just read about this in history or maybe see some version of it on a late night

old western movie but actually to experience it ourselves now how are they going to reintroduce these animals and where are they going to get them from? Well, I mean, getting the bison is not too difficult because they're surplus bison pretty much around most of the West. I mean, we've got a larger bison population in North America right now than we've had since the 1890s, more than 300,000 of them. So it's fairly easy to come up with bison. Pronghorns are already there. And so all you have to do is just sort of, you know, make conditions beneficial for their herds to grow. Same thing with mule deer, with elk, with bighorns, they're going to, they'll have to reintroduce bighorns, but that was an original range. There were bighorns out on the out in the badlands of the Great Plains.

And then, as I said, they can't deliberately on their own reintroduce gray wolves or grizzly bears. But their idea is that if wolves and grizzlies get there, then they're welcome. And the idea is they probably, once this preserve exists with all these grazing animals, that the wolves and the bears will find it. Wow, that's so fascinating. And do they have a timeline they're trying to accomplish this in? You know, it's, as I said, they've been around for about 10 or 12 years now. I mean, they've raised more than $130 million. They've raised more than $130 million. And they've got major donors on both the coast, along with lots of, you know, just people like you and me who give them $10 and $15 or $25.

I've got lots of friends who, once I sort of alerted them to this, who have joined American Prairie Reserve and are donors, small donors. The timeline is basically whenever they can make it happen. I mean, there's some considerable resistance from the ranching community, not only in Montana, but kind of across the West, because ranchers don't want to see bison, and especially bison and predators, replace cattle herds. So there's kind of an ideological opposition on the part of ranching people. And that's twofold, right? It's one, because of the food that the bison would eat, because of the battle for resources, but also because of brucellosis? Well, brucellosis, of course, is especially in Montana.

And explain to people that's a disease, a cattle disease. It's a disease that bison and elk have and that if cattle get it, their beef cannot be sold in North American markets. All beef that's sold in our supermarkets has to be brucellosis-free. And how do they determine that? Do they have to test each individual animal when they slaughter them? Well, I mean, they would if there was a real threat about it. The truth is there has never been an instance in the wild of either a bison or an elk transferring brucellosis to cattle. How would they transfer it? Do they have to eat the same food?

No. Basically, it comes through largely from after birth. Whenever a bison cow, for example, that has brucellosis gives birth, if cattle come through the area, say within a few days, and graze the same grass where after birth has been dropped from a brucellosis infected bison, then the theory is that a cow could get the disease. It's been made to happen that way in laboratories. We have no record of it ever having happened in the wild. When they made it happen in laboratories, did they force feed the cows? I don't think so.

I mean, but I have to say that I've not read the study, so I'm not quite sure how they pulled it off. But they did make the transfer happen in a laboratory setting. What's been bizarre about the whole brucellosis thing is that elk are infected with brucellosis far more than bison are. But the ranching community doesn't seem to be concerned about elk. It's bison that they don't want. Why is that? Well, I mean, part of it, it seems to me, almost dates back to the 19th century when we destroyed the original American Serengeti and killed all these bison and converted the Great Plains into

largely a ranching country with cattle. I mean, and the idea has been from the ranching community ever since that bison are a direct threat to the existing ranching community. That if you get too many people enamored of bison, you know, and I'm not sure I can track the logic of their arguments, but it somehow seems to lead in that direction. They don't like people introducing bison into the middle of a ranching setting. Particularly what they don't seem to like is someone with an old Montana ranch of 40 or 50,000 acres selling that ranch to somebody like American Prairie Reserve, which clearly is going to introduce wildlife on it and remove it from as an active sort of livestock ranching economic enterprise. It's interesting because it's a superior meat, too.

Bison's a better meat. Yeah, it's a better meat. Better meat for you. Much less fat in it. Yeah. Yeah, it's, yeah, it's. So this is, I think, the most exciting conservation project that's out in the West in our time. This is something that we didn't get, and a lot of people don't know that.

That's kind of why I wrote this American Serengeti book, because I wanted people to understand that only 125, 130 years ago, we had the equivalent of the Maasai Mara in places like Nebraska and South Dakota and eastern Montana. Wow. And we destroyed it. Like that. Just like that. In just a space of a few decades, we completely wiped it out.

And as I said a minute ago, what seems to me to be the largest destruction, wholesale destruction of wildlife discoverable in modern history. And so right now, the American Prairie Reserve is just, they're just taking that land and buying it up, and they haven't started this project yet? No, they have started the project, yeah. It certainly exists, and I've got a map of it in the book, in American Serengeti. And they've reintroduced animals already? They have reintroduced animals. They're trying to come up with 12,000.

So they have an Instagram page. Look at that. Oh, yeah. American Prairie Reserve has an Instagram page. Absolutely. Only 1,700 followers. How dare they? So click on that picture of the bison down there.

Below that. Below that, Jamie. Lower right-hand corner. There you go. Lower right-hand corner. Yeah. Yeah. Look at that. Wow. Interesting. So there's a lot of bison there roaming around and this is land that they

occupy. And so these bison have essentially very few predators and they're just wandering around and they're going to repopulate. They're going to repopulate. And so one of the things that American Prairie Reserve does when they acquire these ranches is that they remove the fencing from them. I mean, they've been fenced, of course, to create pastures for bison, or for cattle, but they remove the fencing in order to let bison roam freely. And, of course, the idea is you ultimately have to have the predators back. You're not going to have a complete ecosystem unless you have the predators there as well. That is really tricky, right? Because you're not allowed to reintroduce grizzly bears. They are not allowed to as a private organization. No, the Fish and Wildlife Service would have to do this.

And the Fish and Wildlife Service doesn't actually, even the public lands that are there, are not managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. And good luck getting cooperation from people in Montana. They're still stinging from the wolves being introduced into Yellowstone and the decimation of the elk population and all the other livestock issues that they've had there. Yeah, so they argue at least. You know, when I was, the last few years i was in montana and this was about 10 years after the wolves uh had been recovered we had about 1700 gray wolves in montana or in the northern rockies actually uh by about 2012 or so and uh so the hunters in montana were in arms, sort of the way these whitetail hunters in South Carolina now are up in arms over coyotes.

The hunters in Montana were up in arms because it wasn't so easy to get an elk anymore, and they blamed it all on wolves. And someone from the University of Montana did a study of a particular herd that had been singled out as one that was just being harassed by wolves, and it was impossible to kill a bull there anymore, and concluded that actually most of the predation that was taking place on that elk herd was from mountain lions and not the wolves that had been reintroduced. But it's become, for the hunting community, the sport hunting community, which has had, of course, a century now of getting to hunt elk and whitetails and mule deer and everything else without competition from predators, this has become kind of the new excuse of why I didn't get my elk this year. Right. That makes sense.

And also, I think it's super important that the hunting community step back and understand that these animals are supposed to be preyed upon by wolves. And that without them, you're going to get to these enormous overpopulation situations. Which we had happen in that 100-year period when we were reintroducing elk with no predators. They developed diseases. Look, Montana has no shortage of elk. I was there this summer, and we drove by this house, and we had to pull over. And luckily, I had binoculars in my car, and I gave them to my kids and the first time they saw elk, there was a hundred elk on this lawn.

A hundred. They were all over the place. And one of the women who lives there was explaining to us that they had wolves come through just a couple nights before and it was really exciting and everybody's looking out the window. And I think if you live there, if you're a person who's an elk hunter, especially if you're a lazy one, I get where you could see that that would be something you would complain about. But I think the elk adapt. You know, they figured it out. They don't call as much.

And people are complaining about that. You don't hear the bugling as much. But that bugling was probably a little unnatural. They got a little too cocky that they could just scream and yell whenever they were breeding. You know, they got preyed upon, right? Well, you know, what we have to remember is that we are newcomers to North America. This is a very old place. Yeah.

Coyotes and mountain lions have been part of the ecological equation here with all of these animals that we like to hunt, with pronghorns, with elk, with mule deer. I mean, they've been co-evolving with one another for hundreds of thousands of years. I mean, pronghorns, I talk about this in the American Serengeti book, pronghorn females always have two fawns. They basically have little litters of two. And the reason they have two is because coyotes prey on pronghorn fawns. And so you basically have an heir and a spare. And the spare is the one that you assume the coyotes are going to get. Wow. And they evolved this ability hundreds of thousands of years ago.

So I think part of it is just coming to terms with the fact that we're brand new here, and it's going to take a while for us to actually truly become Americans in an ecological sense. And one way to do it is to think in terms of these long patterns that extend back through time. I want to talk to you about your paper on bison. It's called Bison Diplomacy and Bison Ecology, or is it the opposite? Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy. Yeah. And what you were saying was, and this I found incredibly fascinating, was that when we came along, when the market, I say we, obviously my grandparents were immigrants, it wasn't me, but when Europeans, when people that we consider Americans now came along a few hundred years ago, and then when

they started doing the market hunting and killing off all the bison, what we had done was something that the Native Americans were already on their way to doing. Well, I mean, so let me sort of offer a revision of that. Native people and bison had coexisted, and that hunt had been going on for eight or nine thousand years with with the the modern bison i mean if you track it back to you know the the large pleistocene bison bison antiquus and bison latifrons the big longhorn bison longhorn bison oh yeah what is that jamie yeah it was bison latifrons it's called lana fronds latifrons yeah yeah wow and so it's a longhorn bison lana franz it's called lana franz lana franz yeah yeah wow and so it's a longhorn bison and then there was a slightly smaller one that existed farther into into our own time

all right the bison that we experienced today are these pure well some herds are wow look at that thing That's amazing. Yeah. So that's bison laterphron. I'm sure you're aware of the scrub bulls, like particularly in Australia where these animals get free and they become feral and then domestic cows change their characteristics. Look at the size of that thing. Good Lord. Yeah. So what that graphic shows is the contemporary, our bison, over on the right side of the graphic. And you can see how much smaller it is than the animals that were here during the Pleistocene.

Bison latifrons is the animal over on the far left. And bison antiquus is one of these in the middle. It's probably the very middle one right there. These animals were hunted by early human hunters here, too, because they arrived before the Pleistocene produced that extinction scenario. So they hunted these large forms of bison. But about 8,000 years ago, bison, the large ones having become extinct, bison sort of evolved into the smaller. I mean, some people actually refer to the modern bison as a dwarf compared to these older ones.

on this in American Serengeti, too, sort of my most recent take on this bison ecology, bison diplomacy piece, which came out in a very fancy journal, academic journal, about 25 years ago now. But what I argue is that that hunt had been going on for 8,000 years. years. And probably the reason that bison never, that Indians never hunted them to extinction is because bison were actually better adapted to the grasslands than people were. So they were more successful as a grassland species than humans were until we get the introduction from the European arrival of a couple of things that changed the equation. One is the reintroduction of the horse to North America, which native people in the West quickly take up and gives them an ability to hunt bison far more efficiently and to become just as well adapted to life on the grasslands as the bison was. But the other thing that changes the equation is the market, the introduction of the market economy.

And so what that article actually argued and what my chapter in American Serengeti argues, too, And American Serengeti argues, too, I haven't changed my mind over the last 25 years about this, is that the market became a force for native people, just as it did for people all around the world in Africa and India and everywhere else, that they found difficult to resist. And one of the primary reasons they found it difficult to resist was because if you were hunting with flint arrowheads, your best arrowhead maker could maybe produce 15 of them through hard labor in a day. But you could get 150 of them for the work of 30 minutes going out and shooting a bison. And of course, your wife had to spend a week working on the pelt. But basically, the European market had so many labor-saving technologies, steel arrowheads, steel knives, steel hatchets, firearms.

That it became almost impossible for Indian people to resist trading for those things. I mean, and if you didn't trade for them and the tribe down the river did, then they suddenly had guns and you didn't. And so you were going to be out-competed by your neighbors. And so in effect, what happened was that the lure of the goods of the industrial world and the market economy drew Indian people into the market hunt. So that by the 1820s, 1830s, 1840s, they were still killing buffalo in order to provide meat for the family and to provide hides to make a teepee and all that. But they were killing an additional percentage of animals to trade to the European market. And so they became actors in the market economy that was basically wiping all these animals out.

So it also was the reintroduction of the horse as well, right? Because before that, they were hunting these animals on foot and they were far less effective. Yeah. And their beast of burden was the dog. And so you couldn't travel nearly as far, And so you couldn't travel nearly as far, obviously, by using dog-propelled locomotion as you could horses. And you couldn't carry the kind of burdens, the kind of goods that you could carry on dogs that you could with horses. And so the transformation from being a dog-propelled people to being a horse-propelled people was a revolution in their lives. I mean, and one of the things that happened as a result of it was that there were people all around the borders of the plains, many of whom were agriculturalists who were farmers, who ended up, especially their young men, ended up abandoning farming because they realized that the potential for rising in status and for creating a better life was much higher if you mounted up on a horse and rode out of the plains and hunted buffalo.

And so, I mean, there were entire groups like the crows had been relatives of the Mandans and the Adatsas and had been agriculturalists. And that entire group of people ended up abandoning farming, mounted up on horses, rode out of the plains, become buffalo hunters. I mean, during the period from basically about 1720, when a lot of the people in the West began to acquire horses. And what spread horses, as I mentioned earlier in our conversation, was basically in 1680, the Pueblo Indians down in New Mexico rose up against the Spanish colonists and drove them out of New Mexico. And in the process, they captured all their herds of livestock. They captured their goats, their sheep, and their horse herds. And some animals, some of the horses got loose. And that's sort of the origin, at least one of the origins of the wild horses that spread across the West. But the Pueblo Indians trade the sheep and the goats to the people who become the Navajos, who become the herders of goats and sheep. And they start trading

the horses, which they have now in great surplus that they've liberated from the Spaniards, up the mountains from one tribe to another, to the Utes, to the Shoshones, to the Nez Peres, to the Blackfeet, the Shoshones, to the Nez Perce, to the Blackfeet, to the Assiniboines, and then on out into the plains. And so from 1680 through about 1720 or 1730, just about everybody in the West ends up getting horses. And you have to have the culture with it, too. I mean, you can't just hand the animal over to somebody. I mean, there's a famous story where the first horse that the Blackfeet see, where the first horse that the blackfeet see, they offer it buffalo meat to eat. And somebody has to say, it's a Kalispell Indian who's riding the horses, no, no, not buffalo meat, it eats grass.

It grazes them, you have to feed it grass. And they have to be shown how to take care of horses and how to gale stallions and how to ride them and how to break them and the whole bit. So there's a culture that goes with it. But once they acquire them and this period that only lasts for about 200 years of the famous horse-mounted buffalo hunting plains Indian emerges, that lifestyle becomes, which is kind of a backward step, really, in anthropological terms. You assume that, you know, you go from hunting to being a farmer and you go from farmer to being a city dweller. This is a step going back the other way, but it proved to be so compelling to so many people. As I said earlier, especially young men who often in these farming communities didn't have much opportunity for upward mobility.

But you could mount up on that horse and ride out and become a buffalo hunter. And, man, you know, the world was your oyster. Wow. So it was essentially the influence of the Europeans coming here and offering up the market and creating this environment where it was really profitable. Yeah, yeah. And it became kind of something that Native people almost couldn't escape. You couldn't get away from it because, I mean, there were some groups that said, okay, we're not going to participate in this, but that immediately disadvantaged them compared to the group right down the river. And so people who

didn't participate were pretty quickly overrun by the people who became fully engaged in the horse hunt and the market hunt. And I mean, there are instances where, I mean, like the Siouan people, you know, in the movies, the Lakotas. I mean, they basically march across the northern west like Pac-Man. Once they acquire horses, they come out of Minnesota and out of the woodlands and march across the west, gobbling up one tribe after another and taking away their buffalo hunting territory. I mean, and they're still doing it down to the time of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. That's why the crows fight on the side of the United States at the Battle of the Little Bighorn

is because the Lakotas are seizing their countryside. The Lakota is what they call themselves, and the other Native Americans call them the Sioux, which means enemy. And the word that we've used in history is the Sioux. But I mean, on the southern plains, the Comanches did basically the same thing. They created this empire that was really on a par and able to compete with the Spanish Empire, with the Republic of Texas, and even for a while against the United States. And they created it around this horse-propelled bison hunt

that provided goods for the market economy. Now, you were talking about steel arrowheads. Did they, or when did they, start using firearms? Well, they started using firearms, I mean, that was an early trade item, and it was usually in the very beginning of contact between Europeans and native people, a firearm was, you know, maybe a couple of them were given to the headman, to the leaders of a particular tribe as a status item. One time I was an editor for an anthropological journal called Ethnohistory. And my task as an editor, I was an assistant editor, associate editor or something,

but my task was to read the incoming manuscripts that were submitted for publication. And one of the ones I read, I've never forgotten this, was an account by a trader in South America who was turning his trading post over to a newly arriving trader. I think they were Portuguese. And so this trader who had experience in the area was queried by the new guy. He said, so how do I get the Indians to trade with me? And the guy who had been on the scene for a while said, nothing to it. Ride out 15 or 20 miles into the wilderness and take a steel axe and suspend it from a rope from

the branch of a tree and then leave. And then two weeks, three weeks later, go back. And this guy, this new trader did exactly that. And he went back two weeks later to the spot that's clearing in the forest, in the Amazonian forest, where he had tied this double-bladed steel axe. And there were hundreds of native people gathered around the spot wanting more of these objects, more of these axes because steel. of Kauai. And the Hawaiian people paddle their outriggers out and climb on board his ships and immediately start pulling all the nails out of the planking on the ship and diving off into the water with the nails because they want metal. They realize this is such an advantage over the technology that they have and so I mean they're willing to trade what what do you want for an axe Wow what do you want for a box of nails so they just let the people know that the axe was a thing yeah hang it from a tree leave them for a while let him play with it. And go back. Wow.

That's a mind blower. So that's how native people kind of all over the world who hadn't progressed to the Iron Revolution, to the Iron Age, were seduced into the market economy, is that they were offered items that were so compelling. And as I've said a couple of times now, if you didn't participate in it, you kind of, within a decade, you were disadvantaged because everybody around you was going to end up doing it. And so you got caught up in it. And so that's how what I was arguing in bison ecology and bison diplomacy, and the argument is slightly revised in American Serengeti, but it's the same argument. And it's become the prevailing argument about what happened to bison in the 19th century. We used to think

that, okay, there were still 100 million of them by the end of the Civil War, and then guys go out with rifles in the space of 20 years, they shoot them all down, and that's the end of it for their tongues and for their hides. But what the story actually is, is a much more believable and real story that it has to do with the introduction of horses, which drink water and graze grass, and so that reduces the carrying capacity for bison. Once there are two or three million horses out on the plains, there can't be as many bison anymore. It happens because there is a climate downturn in the 1840s. For about 15 years, there's a drought, and that reduces the carrying capacity for bison, so climate plays a role. We know that diseases like anthrax and ultimately brucellosis get among the buffalo herds, and those diseases probably got among the buffalo herds because oxen and other animals on the overland trails

took these European exotic diseases out among the bison herds and infected them with disease. And then there's no question that the way the market worked, it was, I mean, and there's, of course, no regulation of it. This is before we ever regulate, you know, we have any environmental regulations. It's just a free-for-all capitalist world. Also, no refrigeration. No refrigeration. So you had to kill it and eat it within a certain time period. Yeah, you can dry the meat in that dry climate. You can dry it and preserve some of it.

But, yeah, there's no refrigeration. So, you know, I mean, the no refrigeration thing really plays a role in the famous buffalo jumps that happened in the West because, you know, you couldn't control how many animals were going to go off those jumps. And so if you wanted to run 10 off in order to provide you with buffalo for the next month and a half, your tribe of 125 with buffalo. When you say buffalo jumps, you mean running them off cliffs? Running them off cliffs running off cliffs yeah and you wanted to run off 10 and instead you got into a herd of you know 1300 1300 and they all went off and it even became this thing i mean we know about these buffalo jumps that people regard indian people regarded this as a stratagem that you don't want to let surviving buffalo go out onto the plains and inform other buffalo that there's this thing called a jump that you want to avoid. Wow. And so they end up wanting to make sure that they get every single animal that you're driving so that you don't have buffalo go off and tell other buffalo

how this works it's gonna sound crazy but it makes you wonder if it was ignorance on their part that the these animals could communicate like that or if they had some sort of an intuition about how instincts and how how certain fears that animals had were developed? Well, I think, you know, and I spent some time talking about this in the Buffalo chapter in American Serengeti. It has to do with what we would call native science, what you mentioned at the last there, that they do understand and they've probably seen examples of, you know, an animal learning very quickly how to avoid a trap. But it also has to do with the cause-effect explanation that they have for how the world works.

for how the world works. And they don't have this kind of, you know, Western explanation for this is a cause and this is an effect. They have a cause-effect relationship, to be sure, but it explains the world in a different way. And Indian people pretty generally believe that bison were a people, that they were a family of animals, and they had families that give themselves up to humans for the good of humanity. And so the idea was that you had this kind of, you know, ethereal tie to these animals. It was a tie that we would explain now looking back on it. We would say, okay, it's a religious thing. This was some sort of spiritual kind of understanding of how people and animals interacted with one another. But it was informed a little bit by kind of native scientific observation too. And I think in particular, this one where the argument was, and it's from what I've read, it was pretty widespread,

that if you did a buffalo jump, you needed to kill all the animals that went off the jump. You couldn't let any of them get away. I think that probably was more in the line of kind of native science because they maybe had observed there being instances where an animal that had gone off a jump and had survived, the next time you encountered that animal, it might be particularly marked with a white patch on a hip or something. And a few months later, you saw that particular animal in another group of bison. And when you try to do a jump, it led that herd off in a different direction. And so I think there was kind of native science in that. But, you know, where we got to in talking about this was no refrigeration.

So if you ran 1,300 of them off and it's August, then all you're going to get to do, and you've got a group of 125 people, all you're going to get to do is to basically take the best pieces off about 25 or 30 animals, and you're going to lose the rest of it because you can't preserve the meat of all those animals. So would they find these sites? Would there just be mass carcasses or mass bones? Oh, yeah. Yeah. There's a site in Texas. It's called the Bonfire Shelter Site. And the reason it's called that, anthropologists gave it, or archaeologists gave it this name, is because there was a bison jump that was so big there, we think about 10,000 years ago during the Folsom period, and so many animals went off that jump, and only a few of them could be harvested by the people who did the jump, that that big mass

of animals sat there and basically, over two or three weeks of time, burst into spontaneous combustion and scorched the cliff that they had gone off of. And so when whites first saw it, they thought somebody has built a giant bonfire at the base of that cliff. Look at that. It's streaked 100 feet up the side of the cliff. And what archaeologists realized about it when they began investigating it was that it had been a huge mass of bison driven off a cliff that had burst in hot weather into spontaneous combustion and probably burned for four or five days. Whoa, how does that happen? How do they burst into flames? Well, I mean, in hot weather with that much decay and fermentation of all the juices that are in

intestines and stomachs, you basically create a condition where you've got flammable chemistry that lights. But what causes the ignition? You know, who knows? I mean, I think the explanation I've read is spontaneous. But, you know, somebody may have walked over with a torch and tossed it onto the pile of animals and burned them. Wow. Thousands of animals. Yeah, thousands of them.

You know, it's interesting what you're talking about with explaining this idea that if one of them survived that they would inform the other ones. There was a study that was done recently on mice, and this is a direct genetic study, so it might not be totally related, but it might be in some ways. They took these mice and they sprayed a citrus smell in their cage. And then when they smelled the citrus smell, they shocked them. They shocked their feet.

They had the bottom floor of the cage was electrically charged. And every time they sprayed that citrus smell they would give them a zap then their ancestors who uh had never experienced this before they did the same thing to them just sprayed the citrus smell and they had a physical reaction a heightened sense of danger fear um you know they they realized that a shock was coming just by the smell of that citrus. They were terrified of it. Yeah. It makes sense that instincts are passed on. families through the generations in Italy that descendants of a particular group of people will preserve evidence in their genes, sometimes four, five, six generations down a timeline,

of an ancestor who went through a famine or a starving time. And so that famine would produce a physiological effect on the body. And that would be passed down so that geneticists could discover effects of it several generations down the timeline. Wow. So it's sort of similar to what you're describing with mice. And I think that's probably, you know, we haven't studied, at least I'm not aware that there have been a lot of studies of this kind of thing. But what it really kind of means is that we're the products, you know, in our modern world of things that happened to our ancestors maybe two or three hundred years ago. And maybe even the fears, like they think that arachnophobia and aphidiophobia

and a lot of the, you know, fears of snakes and bugs and things that people have might be directly attributed to ancestors being bitten or poisoned by those things, or us seeing someone getting bitten or poisoned by them. I mean, speaking of that sort of thing, you know, there's a section I do when I'm talking about the development of poisons to try to eradicate coyotes in the Coyote America book, where the reason during World War II, we decided, or the government, what is now called Wildlife Services, this agency that was trying to solve the predator problem by exterminating coyotes. The reason they used our new chemical insights during World War II to come up with new poisons against coyotes was that they began to realize that strychnine, which had been the poison of preference for the previous 70 or so years, was a poison that killed coyotes too quickly.

And coyotes are really smart about cause and effect. And so a coyote that was in the presence of an animal that ate a bait cube and then suddenly went into convulsions, and strychnine produced these really sort of bizarre and grotesque deaths, that those animals would not take a strychnine bait after they saw that happen to one of their pack members. And so in the 1940s, we came up with three new poisons. One of them was called sodium, let's see, sodium fluoracetate, which is the one we now call 1080. And it was called 1080 and it was used for the next 19, in fact, it's still used in limited application today. But it was a poison that was developed after 1,080 tries by this

laboratory that since 1920 had specialized in developing poisons to kill wolves and coyotes. It's called the Eradication Methods Laboratory. So 1080. Another one, sodium thalmium, was a poison that killed in that week, their pads would fall off, their hair would fall off, the peelage would come off their bodies. There's one story where a farmer in Colorado found during the winter of about 1947 or 48, he found seven or eight coyotes in his barn with no pads on their feet no hair on their bodies all huddled together trying to stay warm and he killed them with a pitchfork oh my god but the reason we introduced these poisons, and there was a third one, too, which was a cyanide,

basically the one that we call M44s now that are little cartridges that fire cyanide mist into their mouths, is because these poisons killed them slowly enough that other coyotes witnessing the victim taking the bite of the poison bait didn't put two and two together. Wow. Yeah. I mean, so we even had these kind of insights about how animals will observe something and preserve a memory of what they've seen and then try to actually come up with a poison that plays against that. Absolutely fascinating. The whole subject, absolutely fascinating. Listen, man, I'm so glad we got together.

I want to get you together with Randall Carlson, though. Would you be interested in coming back and doing another podcast? Oh, sure, man. I'd love to do that. I would love to have you get together with him and compare notes, because he has some really interesting observations about these asteroidal impacts. And I think the two of you together would have a fascinating conversation. So let's do that down the line. But until then, your book, Coyote America, is fantastic.

I loved it. Thank you very much for that. And I haven't started reading it yet, but American Serengeti is your other book. I'm sure it's equally awesome. And I really enjoy this. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having me, man. It's been great. All right, folks. See you next week. Bye.