The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 166: Hunting with Teeth

Episode Date: April 29, 2019

Steven Rinella talks with Diane Boyd and Janis Putelis.Subjects discussed: Cyclone fences; swapping a motorcycle for a first wolf experience; Wolf rendezvous sites and snagging a wolf in a blind set; wolves killing wolves; wolves and border security; the myth of the super-wolf; did the wolf reintroduction need to happen?; how old is an old wolf; what, if anything, should Colorado do about wolves; should we be hunting and trapping wolves; the emotional and monetary value of wolves; would you do anything differently; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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All right, our guest, Diane Boyd, a carnivore and wolf specialist, but kind of mostly wolves, right? That's your thing? 90%, yeah. yeah 95 so let's just let's just dispatch with the other ones real quick what we're like let's say we're not let's say we weren't talking about wolves okay what would you be a subject matter expert on um well wolves but i also end up tagging the lions otters bobcats you know other fur bears that come in bears as do my colleagues but I do a lot of it. But I mostly researched wolves all my life, but I've done a few other things too.

A little bit of game, big game work, but mostly wolves. Do you remember, what was your first, did you have a wolf, an initial wolf experience that became kind of your personal genesis? Do you know what I'm saying? Like people like to, it doesn't even feel like it's happening in real life, right? Yeah. In real time. Oftentimes you later look back and you realize that there was like a moment, right? Did you have a moment?

There were a couple of things i ended up um i was really fascinated by wolves growing up in the twin cities because minnesota was the only place in the 70s that had wolves in the whole lower 48 that was it really yep there were none in michigan or wisconsin the last stronghold and there were none anywhere in the united states anywhere else so is that really that's true yes you can read it look google it i didn't know that i but but uh what about like the isle isle royal had wolves in 1950 to 50 that came in yeah there were wolves in isle royal it's michigan there was a handful starting 1950 but so you're saying that minnesota never ran out they never. No, when I was a kid, I think they got down as low as somewhere like 700 or 800.

And when I left Minnesota in 1979 to come here to start Wolf Work, there were about 1,000 in Minnesota then. And there was just a handful in Wisconsin. And I don't even know if UP had any back yet. Iowa had them because they were stuck there. But actually, I was just in Yellowstone this week with Dick Thiel and his wife and Dave Meach and so forth. I don't know those names. Dick was the first guy. He has been studying, looking for wolves in Wisconsin since he was like 15.

And he told the story over dinner just last night. He found his first confirmed wolf tracks in Wisconsin in 1974. There weren't wolves there before that. He was looking. And then over the years eventually they got critical mass and they had the first pack i think it was like in 77 or 78 the first pack they were just coming back so it's pretty it's recent recovery much like us here in the west i feel as though you can correct me if i'm wrong i feel as though i cut my first wolf track in Michigan in, it would have been October or November of 1994.

Sure, they're there. Yeah, I know. Well, soon they started sending waves out for Minnesota with the Recovery of Endangered Species Act. And that's what allowed them to come back in Wisconsin and Michigan. Shit, there's, you know, they've got hundreds and hundreds now in Wisconsin and Michigan. I'm sure you did see wolf tracks in 94. Yeah. But you wouldn't have in 1970.

So you grew up in the last bastion of lower 48 wolves. Yeah, and as a kid, I was pretty fascinated by them. And Dave Meech was on campus, University of Minnesota. I don't know that name either. He is the guy for wolves. I mean, he is. What's his name? Dave Meech, L. David Meech, University of Minnesota.

He's actually, I think he's employed by the federal government, not the university. But he started doing wolves in the 60s. He was early on Isle Royale. He was the first one to color a wolf in northern Minnesota, I believe, close to it. And he is now, he's the authority for the world. He's an amazing guy. He's 80, and he's still working full time because he loves what he does. He loves, and he's consulted from people all over the world.

And he's very, he's very, he publishes constantly. He's the consummate scientist. And he accepts every viewpoint. He looks at every viewpoint. His brain is like a computer. When you ask him a question, it's like, and off it goes and spins on all these realms. It's delightful. Okay.

So I started, you asked, how did I get involved? So he was on campus where I was a student. I started in school as a pre-veterinary medicine student. There also was a place called Como Park Zoo in St. Paul, which had this, it was a new concept in 1973 to put out pens with wild animals that looked wild. That was, you know, not, everything else was like concrete slabs. That's when zoos started doing that? Right.

Yeah. So they built a wolf exhibit. And I think it was five acres in size, something like that. And I was fascinated. I would go there all the time because it was close to campus, very close to campus. And I would go to look at the wolves. And sometimes you'd see them and sometimes you wouldn't because it was all forested and wooded, much like outside. And one day I brought my folks dog, just a little 25-pound mongrel, really sweet little guy.

And we were looking, and the wolves came up to the fence, and he was sniffing noses with the fence. So I got to show you how naive I was, right? Single chain-link fence, single, no double barrier. They were sniffing noses through the fence. And then my little dog, being a male, he went up to urinate, raised leg mark on the fence because he's a male and that little foot was just smaller than the dimension of the diamond in the cyclone fence yeah and the wolf was there and he went and he got his leg and he drug his leg to the cyclone

fence and they were tearing his leg off this is my first wolf experience you asked and I was screaming and some guys came running over from the parking lot and they threw themselves against the fence. My dog got his leg back, was still attached and we had some pretty major surgeries and stuff. But you asked, that was kind of my first wolf experience really. I was fascinated, much as I was sorry for my dog. But he survived, blah, blah, blah. He did fine. And then I started volunteering on these studies. Meech was over many studies in Minnesota. The graduate student study at a preserve not far out of the Twin Cities. And then in the summer of 1977,

I had an opportunity. Dave Meech offered me his internship up in northern Minnesota by Ely where he had his wild wolf study. And I was like, oh my God, this is it. It's like my dream. And I just, I didn't have,

I thought, how am I going to pay for this? I'm not going to get paid. So I had to sell my God, this is it. It's like my dream. And I just, I didn't, I thought, how am I going to pay for this? I'm not going to get paid. So I had to sell my motorcycle to show you how important this was to me. What kind of motorcycles do you have? I had a Yamaha RD350 bright orange, just a little hot ring ding ding, but sold it. Can I ask you about another thing?

Sure. You mentioned a cyclone fence. I call them cyclone fences and no one knows what the hell I'm talking about. No, I know. I know. I damn sure know what a cyclone fence i call them cyclone fences and no one knows what the hell i'm talking about just no i know i know damn i damn sure know what a cyclone fence is but no one knows what a site no one uses that word anymore how do you know that word did you grow up calling them cyclone fences yeah what i think everybody else just calls them chain link i know when i say something about a cyclone fence people look at me like what do you what kind of fence you talking about go on so you sell your motorcycle yeah no i'm with you and so my next wolf experience was i was so

excited i was so thrilled to go for the summer and study we were going to trap and collar and study wild wolves and i was driving up in the middle of nowhere and at this so this is 77 77 how many wolves are up there at that time, that was probably when there was close to 1,000, 900 to 1,000. So I'm driving on the highway at night. I borrowed my parents' car to get up there because I had sold my motorcycle, their second car. And I'm driving along this windy highway, and I'm really sleepy, and it's totally dark. And all of a sudden, out of the side, no kidding, a wolf shoots out into my headlights. And I nearly ran it over.

I jam on the brakes, and I come to rest, and I feel kind of sick to my stomach. The adrenaline thing is like, oh, my God, my first wild wolf, and I nearly killed it. But that was my next experience. And then from then, then we were out working with wild wolves all summer, and I was thrilled. Right up by the Boundary Water Canoe area, up in northern Minnesota, Ely Babbitt area.

You guys were trapping them, Ely-Babbitt area. You guys were trapping them, putting collars on them? Yeah. How were you guys catching them back then? Foothold traps, modified foothold traps. Like you laminate the jaws so they're thicker? Not back then. We do now.

Yeah. When you say modified, modified how? They had, well, back then and back now, it's not a whole lot different. But the traps, we had springs in the bottom side. We checked them twice a day so they didn't sit there very long um some of them had rubber jaws not back then but now we have a rubber serrated jaws so it's more kind of their foot um so you use it like a serrated like a toothed rubber jaw now it's not tooth i mean that gives an ugly image they're it's kind of square flattened but it's hard rubber like a tire yeah and they yeah that's the thing you put over the jaw no it's part of the jaw okay they're they're i don't know how they make them one piece but you boil the drops and

everything it doesn't come off it's on there permanently and when you say springs underneath you mean like double coil spring traps no or the springs in the chains are double long spring but spring under the pan and a spring going to the tension so if the wool is pulling they're not hitting a hard end and and now we didn't back then but now we have under pan um tension spring devices is that to keep other bycatch down yes so you can set that weight you can we set it with a measured scale and you can set it for two pounds or 20 pounds or whatever what do you set it for wolves 10 10 pounds of pressure so red fox walk right over it red fox coyotes blinks yeah walk right over it well you think about like how much is your average coyote weight 25 30 pounds maybe and it's four feet so

you divide their weight by four for the amount of weight on a paw roughly yeah if you had a huge coyote you'd maybe catch it and then how would you so you'd go into a likely wolf area and would you just make set like dirt hole sets on roads and stuff where they're traveling oh you're asking me secrets in my trade you're really pushing me here steve uh we don't i hardly ever use a dirt hole set because that's what everybody else does. You scent pole sets? Some.

What are the, how do you like to catch, you really don't want to tell how you catch them? Blind set, some. Really? Mm-hmm. With footholds. What's a blind set? I don't know much about trapping.

No bait, no lure, no attracting. Right. You have to know where the animals are. Right, so then you just work in a they're a trail or a path and you don't do it where you're going to get a lot of bite catch so you have to know where the wolves are like a rendezvous site or something where they're using a particular trail a lot you know from like if it's winter you know they use a certain trail system a lot in the spring you can look in the mud and if they're still using it you know you

know where they're dand or you know where the rendezvous site is so you've you've you've snagged wolves no i trap them i don't snag them okay trap you've trapped treble hooks you trap wolves yeah no lure no bait no nothing some just setting up where he wants to put his not not most yeah but you have done that i have and not on actually there was one there was one pack in the Swan Valley that had a lot of trapping pressure for a lot of years. There was a guy who was a really good trapper there, and he'd take his limit every year. And so these wolves were very, very hard to catch. We put out traps. My first year, we trapped and trapped.

We never had any luck. We did every trick i could think of everything i could think of and finally and they were actually avoiding them walking around them digging them up they knew they were there yeah i finally went to doing a blind trail set which i don't like to do because you chance catching deer or anything that comes by but i knew where the rendezvous site was i said okay i'm gonna tiptoe can you explain the rendezvous site was. I said, okay, I'm going to tiptoe. Can you explain a rendezvous site? Oh, I'm sorry. Sure. Then I want to get back to Minnesota and all that.

So when wolves have pups, they have the den. When they den, I like to tell people, oh, when do they den and when do they breed? Breeding, peak of breeding is about Valentine's Day. Peak of denning is about tax day. Okay. So those are just dates to remember. They use the den six, seven weeks, maybe eight, but they start moving them away from the den and they move them to a rendezvous site. And it's generally a more open area, a meadow that has thick cover around it that they can escape to, safe terrain and their water nearby. And so wolves can't hunt with a bunch of goofball pups dangling along. So they leave them at the rendezvous site. The wolves wolves can't hunt with a bunch of goofball pups dangling along. So they leave them

at the rendezvous site. The wolves go out and hunt and they bring food back and they generally leave an adult at the rendezvous site. So it gets to be this, like a pack, it's just a pack down area with toy, wolf toys and bones and chewed up antlers and scats. And, you know, all summer they're there and they move around a few times or not. Some packs move and use different rendezvous sites. Some stay pretty stationary. Most of them change rendezvous site. But there's spokes coming out from these rendezvous sites, like a wheel.

And if you can find that in those summer months, that's the spot. You don't want to catch a pup. Usually you won't because you've got that spring tension set. Yeah. So, to catch this one wolf. And how come the rendezvous site doesn't go into the fall? Because the pups become mobile and they start traveling with the adults. Got it.

Their gestation period is only three months? Two months. It's identical to a dog, 62 days. Okay. Yeah, two months. Yeah, I wasn't doing my math real good. That's okay. It's early. February to Valentine's, the tax day? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, two months. Yeah, I wasn't doing my math real good. That's okay. It's early.

February to Valentine's Day. Yeah. Okay. Give or take a little bit. It's latitude oriented. So, yeah. So anyway, that's how I caught the wolf was finding the Ranivu site and putting a blindsend in. On a trail leading into it.

And I never walked down the trail again, ever. I checked it with binoculars. And it was like a little stick or something that it had to step over so it placed its foot in the right place every time? Yeah. All right, Minnesota, there you are. You almost run over one. And you set the trap in them.

Did you guys have some with collars on them at that time? In Minnesota? Yeah. Yes. Oh, yeah. His study had been going on for years in the Superior National Forest. What were you guys primarily interested in looking at? Everything.

Because at that time, I mean, you got to remember, this is the late 70s. And there was VHF collars and there was airplane flying to see them. But that was it. And it's in the thick, thick Superior National Forest with a lot of water and bogs and forest. You never saw them. Never. It's not like Yellowstone where I just came from. You go down and have your thermos of coffee and your muffins and you sit and watch wolves. It just wasn't that way. So yeah. And so we would learn what we could by following them in the airplane. In the summer, you can't follow tracks. So a lot of what I did for much of my career was tracking wolves on skis in the snow

when you can see every place they step, everything they sniff, every place they mark, scent mark, whatever. So this was a lot of interpretive stuff. And you guys were interested in what? How far they move, what they eat? What they eat, their ecology, where they den, what kind of habitat they use, how many there are, what happens when two packs overlap. Do they kill each other in trespassing issues? I mean, just everything.

You couldn't see behavior. You could interpret a little bit, but you couldn't see it. I read an interesting thing out of it. Go ahead. I was just going to ask what those wolves were eating. Deer. Mostly. Mostly white-tailed deer and a few moose and actually wolves in the midwest eat a lot of beaver that's what i was just gonna bring up i read a good study a thing they were doing a scat analysis and you know how you know beavers disperse after ice out and it would be that you

know something like in May and June, 90-some percent of wolf scats would have beaver remains in them, but then it would taper off. But they would really nail them when they were dispersing. Sure. I mean, if you think about a beaver, a lot of fat in a beaver. Very good. And slow.

If you can get them, not in the water. But you catch them on land. They're pretty vulnerable. I mean, wolves aren't there to swim looking for beaver. They're not bobbing for beaver in the water. But you catch them on land. They're pretty vulnerable. I mean, wolves aren't there to swim and looking for beaver. They're not bobbing for beaver in the ponds. They're catching them on the dams or houses. Remember the track I saw the first wolf track I ever laid eyes on in the wild was skirting the edge of a beaver dam, beaver pond.

And bobcats would hunt those things a lot. Cool. And then they would ice up and the bobcats would hunt the ice. Just going, trying to catch them out where they come out. So, you know, over in my area, we don't have so many beavers. So it's not as much of a diet.

So wolves are strictly opportunists. They'll take whatever they can get. They're not out there selecting, oh, we're going to go look for a nice fat cow elk today. I mean, that's not how they hunt. Whatever they catch is what they catch. You know, people think they can kill it well. They can't.

If they had, I mean, they wouldn't live in packs. What do you mean by people think they can kill it well? Well, I've heard people say, well, wolves kill just for fun, or they can kill whatever they want. And the truth is, if they were that efficient, they wouldn't be living in packs. A moutline is a really efficient, very effective killer because they have all the teeth and they have sets of sabers on every paw and they can hunt alone and they can jump on an

elk's back and kill it. Wolves don't have that advantage. Every time a wolf has to eat, they have to catch a fleeing hoofed mammal with their mouth. Think about it. You wanted to get an elk steak, you had to catch that elk with your teeth. How successful do you think you would be? You'd want a lot of buddies. that's why they're they're cooperative obligatory hunters they're obliged to cooperate to eat and their prey base determines the size

of the pack if they're mostly preying on white-tailed deer the packs may be smaller if they're preying on moose or elk the packs may be larger but it actually just came from millstone and um eric mcintyre showed me this amazing photo that Doug Smith took of Wolf 9-11. It was a clean jaw because the wolf was killed, but he had broken his jaw completely in half, disarticulated, most likely got kicked. They saw this massive fight. This wolf tried to kill an elk, and it nearly got killed, and the wolf was underwater

for a long time and the elk was stomping it. And it finally came up out of the water and crawled away. Four months later, I'll get back to the job. Four months later, this wolf by itself had killed an elk in the river. They had photos of this interaction. And while it was there with this elk, a pack of eight wolves came along and killed the wolf. The wolf stood his ground to defend that elk. And it was killed by this pack. So after they had killed it, they got the skull back. And this jaw from the first elk encounter was broken completely in half.

And it healed and was all gnarly and calcified and completely separate. Completely separate. And they watched it pull down and kill this elk by itself. People don't think that wolves suffer. I just think, I mean, if you had a broken jaw that you could never heal and you had to catch things with your mouth, man, I'd be starved very quickly myself. They have that. And lots of wolves that are fine turn up dead. We had this discussion again over dinner last night. Things, it was a great dinner conversation things you find in dead wolves wow we were talking all these gory stories but they suffer a lot of injuries in a daily life so the eight that killed them they were not affiliated they were different

from a different pack yeah so yeah do they were they cannibalize them when they kill them no oh they don't no i it's very very very rare that you ever hear that they kill them and tear them. I mean, they're not so different from us. They defend their home turf. They defend their territory. And when trespassers come in, if they can catch them, they'll kill them. Most times. Sometimes they drive them out.

It kind of depends on the leadership of the pack that's larger. Might makes right. And it depends on if it's if hormones it tends a breeding season depends on if they're missing an alpha breeder i mean this is how packs form they do allow other wolves in sometimes obviously because they have genetic exchange packs are not inbred but most times when a pack encounters a trespasser they will chase it vigorously and if they catch it they'll kill it most times. Did the, you know, oftentimes I see that people who are, who research and work on the Yellowstone

wolves, they get very upset if a Yellowstone wolf leaves the park and gets killed by a hunter outside of the park. Do they get really upset when one of their wolves gets killed by wolves? Does that bother them? You'd have to ask ask them you never had that conversation with anyone i don't work down there you were just there i went down there as a as a guest oh just recreate i mean i watch and there's a lot of wolves wolves die the biggest cause of mortality in yellowstone park is wolves killing other wolves is that right oh vast majority because there's no there's no hunting or trapping within the park they get killed by ungulates they drown they starve they get uh parvo virus distemper but the biggest cause of mortality inside yellowstone park is wolves killing wolves in these usually these trespass or terror interterritorial strife things oh my

goodness yeah packs come apart packs form all through mortality do they mostly when wolves uh like when wolves commit fratricide is it mostly um does it mostly occur as infanticide like is it mostly killing young or is it mostly killing old or is it just non-discriminate first of all i wouldn't put the term fratricide on i would say they're not friends they're they're simply defending their resources much like we do in war or much like you would defend your home or much like chicago defends its people for the police force or whatever yeah they defend their resources whether it's food or their home or whatever yeah there's no malice it's not done with usually forethought, although there have been incidences.

They're generally not going to dens and digging out each other's pups and killing them because the dens are protected. They generally do not do that. No, because the dens are protected by the resident wolves. Why would you try and go in and take on a pack with its pups? You'd be killed. They do do that with coyotes. They dig out coyotes and kill their pups. That's done with

forethought and yeah that's planned but wolves just wolves like any other carnivore or mottline they dispatch each other as competitors that's all it is that's why they don't generally eat the carcass they just kill them and move on and i think you know people i give so it's non-discriminatory it's not like they they target the young because they're easier to kill or the old because they're easier to kill. It's just like opportunistically, like you have the advantage and you take advantage of the advantage. And I think this is a question you have to ask the folks in Yellowstone

because they study this intimately, and I don't want to be misquoted or lead people astray. Sometimes the alphas are killed because they're out front of the charge. And I don't know the ratio of the percent of animals that are killed, how many are young of the year, yearlings, two-year-olds, alphas. I don't know that. You'd have to ask them. But that's the lead cause inside Yellowstone Park or inside Glacier Park.

Wolves killing other wolves. Yes, they published on that. And outside of Yellowstone, like where I live over in western Montana, the lead cause is human, a variety of human causes. From hunting to vehicles. Everything, yep. Or complaints. Yep.

Do you count livestock complaints as human? Yeah, I guess you would, right? For sure. Yeah, I mean, wildlife services, trains, vehicles, hunting, trapping. Trains? Yeah, they get hit by trains occasionally. And I think in those cases, they're probably feeding on animals that have been hit on the track. Yeah, they get by trains occasionally. And I think in those cases, they're probably feeding on animals

that have been hit on the track. Yeah, I got it. Free me all. There's a cost. So let's back up and pick up your biography again. So you work up in Minnesota. I did. And what happened then?

You were a grad student, right? So it was a pretty interesting point in my life. Yeah, I was a young undergraduate, and I just graduated. I was still a student when I took on, in 1977, working for Dave Meech. And then the summer of 1979, I just finished school, graduated. I was working for Steve Fritz up in northern Minnesota in a very, very tiny, very conservative little small farming community. I was hired as a federal trapper to trap and remove livestock depredating wolves. So federal with wildlife

services? The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would be like wildlife services. Okay. So for me, I mean, growing up a little bit starry-eyed and really interested in research, all of a sudden I was thrust into this world of wolf conflict and management and mitigation and wolves were still they were threatened so the landowners couldn't take it into their own hands like we can here but they had to call in the game warden yeah like when you say threatened they were they were yet they were an esa yes listed as a threatened species and so um i was be called the game warden be called i'd be And we'd go out to the farm. They weren't called ranches, they were called farms.

And it was dairy, cattle, and beef. We would look at the carcass and determine if wolves had killed it or not through tracks, the nature of the bite wounds, we'd scan the cow and whatever. You could tell what had killed it. What was the most, tell me a couple telltale signs that it was wolf. Tracks. Leading to with a chase scene with bites the bite marks i mean you can't just because wolf tracks are there doesn't mean they killed it yeah yeah but you go and you'd skin out the cow and you'd see the bite marks in various places and

if they had hemorrhaging around them the animal was alive when it was bitten gotcha no hemorrhaging they were feeding on a dead cow so you'd look for for that scat full of cow hair, but you have to find the bite wounds. So that was tough because if they took a small calf, there wouldn't be anything there. The flesh would be gone. There'd be nothing. Sometimes they'd take it apart and it'd be gone overnight. What's the window of opportunity? How many hours, days do you have before it becomes too late to tell?

Well, it depends on if it's a thousand pound cow or a eighty pound calf so as soon as you get the call you go out there and because they were smaller operations they generally could see their livestock but we're in the west we have allotments and you don't see your stock sometimes for weeks

so people were pretty on top of it but it was a really interesting turning point for me and my education that, you know, yeah, idiotic Diane wolves do cause problems, and people don't really love them. And just because you had this wonderful research experience, there's a whole other world out there. So it was really important for me growing in my career,

and I had to drop these wolves that were killing stock, and we hauled them down to Grand Rapids where they were euthanized. Really? Yep. Why? Why would you move them to euthanize them? Because at that point in time, we weren't allowed to shoot them.

So how would you transport them? I'd drug them. I'd catch them. I'd sedate them. I'd put them in a crate. I'd haul them to Grand Rapids, which was very close, and then they would euthanize them. Oh, Grand Rapids, Minnesota.

Yeah, yeah. Not Michigan. Okay. All right. That was confusing. Minnesota. Yeah, I got you. When you were doing that work, how many did you catch? That summer? Oh, a few, a handful. I don't know how many. It wasn't a lot, but it was enough that I could do my job. There wasn't a lot of complaints, to be real honest. And Steve Fritz, my boss, had told me, well, when you have times when there aren't complaints, then I want you to go out and radio call her for research. So I was dropping all summer. So I don't know, 10, 15 wolves. I mean, it just wasn't that much problems, to be real

honest. But if you were the particular farmer that was having the problem, it was pretty significant to you. And certain farms chronically had had problems and certain farms never had problems and they could be four miles apart you might not be comfortable answering this but go back to those days okay those days in that place um if you run cattle or have cows they die from all sorts of things they die during they die during birth okay they just get hung up in fences and die they get hit by cars all kinds of poisonous plants poisonous plants there's another one They die during birth. They just get hung up in fences and die. They get hit by cars, all kinds of stuff. Poisonous plants. Poisonous plants.

There's another one. Did you find then that for a farmer or rancher to lose an animal to a wolf seemed to weigh on them more heavily or inspire more rage in them than if they were to lose one to poisonous plants or lose one to getting hit by a car because it jumped the fence or any number of other causes.

Did you feel that there was an imbalance about how people perceived that death? Yeah, and some people there definitely was. And I think a big part of it was because they had no ability to control those wolves legally. Okay. So they couldn't do much about it. So when they had the wolves recovering because they were protected and they couldn't do anything, and they might literally be seeing wolves in their pen tearing some calf or cow apart. And legally, you know, they weren't supposed to be doing anything about it.

So that sense of helplessness made it worse. Now, here in the West, in Montana, I mean, if a rancher's got wolves in their pen or about to chase cows or whatever, they don't even, you know, they can take care of it. They can shoot them legally, and they just call and report it. It's called a Senate Bill 200. They're legally protected. They can't keep the hide or anything, but we go pick it up and it's over. And it helps diffuse animosity.

Yeah. What was your next move from, so you did that one summer? So while I was there, I had just graduated. Like I said, I applied to graduate schools. And while I was working in northern Minnesota on this wildlife services job, I got accepted at the University of Montana for graduate school in the fall. So when I departed Minnesota, I packed up my little car and I drove to Missoula where I had the graduate project. And it was really interesting because I just came from all this whirlwind of two years of intensive wolf research

and university, college, ecology classes, and now this new world of this conflict's going on. And we had this opportunity in Montana in 1979 was there was one wolf outside of Minnesota, west of Mississippi, and we had the university put a collar on it just north of Glacier Park, like six, seven miles. And that wolf tiptoed down occasionally into Glacier Park. And that was the only wolf in the west. Is that right? One? The only one. They tried to come down. Was it a male or female? Female. And Bob Ream named her Kishnina after a creek that was just north of Glacier. And so people don't realize those wolves walked down. And what year was this? They weren't brought there, 79. And so she came down into the

northwest corner of Glacier Park, and a few wolves had been trickling down. I mean, wolves, here and there, you had a wolf shot around Montana occasionally, but they never stuck. They just, they weren't allowed to stay long. And they were the ones walking in on their own from Canada. They absolutely walked. So for me to do a master's project, I had to think of some kind of an interesting project so we can monitor this wolf and still have enough data. So what I did was I decided I'm going to look at, because I was a good trapper, I decided I would look at this wolf and compare her food selection, her prey selection, and habitat use with coyotes within her territory and outside of her

territory so i caught and collared a lot of coyotes in the meantime i kept trying to catch more wolves and there weren't any so that was the core of my master's thesis but it was fascinating how they were interacting on the landscape now when you're doing that you you presumably had like a course load you had to do yes how did you balance that with being in the class like one hand you're in some classroom with a bunch of dingbat students right with being in the class like one hand you're in some classroom with a bunch of dingbat students right and then the next on the other hand you're up trapping wolves i alternated we had queer in the quarter system then so i do a quarter in the field and then a quarter in school and a quarter in the field and go back and forth got you

row around through two and a half years so i had did you dread the classroom part no i didn't actually it was interesting to me. And great professors back then. Oh, yeah, I'm not hacking. I went to graduate school at the University of Montana. Chuck Junkle, Bardo Guerra, Bob Ream, and all these old wonderful guys who were real good mentors. So, no. But I was always jonesing to get back.

Always jonesing to get back up to North Fork. And that collared, the collared female that you had that was coming down, you guys were getting data off that collar. Oh, still a good call oh yeah yeah and um it it it died out in about a year and a half it should have lasted longer but it didn't but we continued to see tracks of a female because you can tell by the urination and the snow through her territory throughout the winter and using the same travel routes i mean i'm sure it was her and then the next she met a mate the next year and they produced the first litter in 1982. she met a mate mate in what country canada of course eh okay so just north of glacier they then just north of the glacier like how many miles outside of how many miles north of the border seven or

eight okay and um so she's flirting with the border she's flirting yeah she crossed occasionally so um her mate died that summer and she was made die from it was captured inadvertently in a bear trap okay died in canada they were researching bears oh and a research trap research gotcha gotcha so this female raised she had seven pups, half were gray, half were black, with no help. We were worried about their survival. And she was really remarkably proficient, apparently, because no one was feeding her. I mean, this was out where there were oil and gas exploration and log trucks and wilderness and wild things and lots of game. And by that winter, we would still see tracks and snow of eight wolves.

So they all made it. And then about two years later, another female came in and the next litter was born in 1985. And then in 1986, they moved more down to the park, 85, a lot. And in 86, the first pack was born in Glacier Park in over 50 years, first litter. So that's the progression. Kind of went from like one to two to seven to 14. And then they just kept expanding. But all of those wolves, all of those wolves, prior to reintroductions in the park in Idaho, 95 through 97, they all walked down and nobody brought them nobody brought those wolves and it's so hard people don't grasp that i was there i know that there were many of us hard you know volunteers and students and starving technicians following these tracks around and we know that they were not

brought there did so i didn't know that i know that people like know that people are up in arms about Yellowstone wolves being brought there, but there are sort of, I guess you'd call them a conspiracy theorist, that people think that those wolves up there were brought in too and they didn't walk in? I don't know what you'd call it because I'm not a believer in it. I mean, I'm the factual fact checker there. I was there, and they were native. And the interesting thing was while we were killing off our wolves down here, there was a big program in southwestern Alberta and southeastern BC to poison off wolves.

So in the 60s, by the late 60s, there basically was kind of a wolf-free zone right around the international border. So when Kishnina arrived, she had to come some distance, maybe Jasper, but at least Banff. She had to run that gauntlet down through all these hazards and she made it yeah well a mountain lion you know about this recently left the black hills of south dakota and got hit by a car in connecticut right it's 1400 miles it's nothing and so when my tracking so i collared this one little wolf 8551 in glacier you know we had her in the area for a year and a half and i caught her again and i replaced her collar she was not very big and she was average small female and like what tell

me this weight 80 pounds what's a big male so the biggest wolf i've ever caught 121 pounds which is almost as much as i weigh so it's pretty amazing when you see so. So the 175, 150 pound wolf is like the 200 pound mountain lion. No. And I'll, yes, I'll get there. But what I want to say about this one wolf is she, she was collared and then she floated around again. She'd been for a year and a half and then she just disappeared and we couldn't find her. And that happens with these VHF collars because they're not GPS collars and you have to physically go out and listen for the signal with airplanes and ground, whatever. She was shot seven months later at Puskupi, which is up very in northern Alberta, BC area, which is north of where some of these wolves from Yellowstone were captured to bring down.

So the moral of the story is that wolf was connected with wolves further north than these wolves were taken for reintroduction they are one species they are one population they are not different okay okay you're getting that's great but you're getting ahead of me a little bit i'm just sorry i want to back up hit a couple points real quick okay no i want to get to that i want to get to the super wolf thing but i want to we got to like set the table for that one a little bit uh the urination pattern females pee between their legs males piss off to the side dominant female like a spade female dog will raise her leg but it doesn't go up high on a tree you know what i mean they mark a little snowbank or something okay spade female dog so you can tell from the

urine pattern from the tracks relative to the where the piss lands yeah you can tell somewhat age of the female not age you can tell if she's dominant or not dominant meaning within her social structure yes okay and an old female doesn't necessarily the dominant one so what does the dominant one do to pee raise leg urination but it's just you know they squat and raise their little leg up because they don't have it off to more of an angle just a little to the side it's just, you know, they squat and raise their little leg up. Because they don't have a penis. And shoots it off to more of an angle. Just a little to the side. It's not quite between their legs. Is she, there's no way to know, but is it that she's mimicking a male?

Like, what is that? Like, why does a dominant female raise her leg a little bit? Do you ever seen a spayed female dog do that? I've had spayed female dogs that do that. I had a spayed female dog, but I feel like she would just squat. Okay, well, she probably wasn't a very dominant dog. No, I was dominant, man. See?

As should be with dogs. So the dominance thing, it's a higher mark, higher in the landscape, more visible, more detectable. They may have a higher androgen level in their body. It's like a female dog doesn't have much estrogen. They tend to start raising their leg. It's just that way. It's just behaviorally.

But the more dominant the mark, the more dominant the animal. Okay. I know this isn't of utmost importance. Have you ever seen where a female was dominant and then lost dominance and stopped raising her leg? Or once they start, do they never stop i'd never i didn't get to see the wolves in the north fork of the flathead like minnesota because it's so forested that's a question for yellowstone where they can actually see them out in the open watch and do their thing all i'm sure they publish

papers they're probably documented i don't know the male of course uh raise leg urinates and a dominant male will make a very high mark and tail flag and just be like, oh, I'm just the boss. So they like to urinate on a poster tree. Yeah, and a real subordinate male might actually squat urinate when he's younger, especially. But yeah, the higher the mark, the higher the status. Nice. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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The super wolf conspiracy theory. I don're gonna get there the the super wolf conspiracy theory if that i don't know that that's a conspiracy theory right oh yeah yeah okay so we're gonna get into that see you know what's funny is you might learn from us yeah you might learn um besides us just learning everything from you you might learn from us about what sorts of things creep around in the ether among hunting and fishing type folks. So you've probably heard it all, though. I am a hunting and fishing type folk, and I work with hunting and fishing types, but I have not heard it all. But do you ever spend time undercover?

Do you ever just sit in a bar and act like you're not who you are, just absorb what people say? What you see is what you get. I am who I am. Okay. So you never just like get into a wolf conversation and bait the person along to try to get, to try to find out what they're thinking. I'm not saying I didn't do that when I was younger, but I don't do it now. Where you just sit there and go, you don't say, you don't say. So what's the big, okay. Tell me in your career, the biggest wolf you've ever weighed on, we're talking certified scales, right?

Like you do it where you're getting the actual real weight. So the biggest wolf I've ever caught was 121 pounds. He was the breeding male of the Headwaters pack. What's the biggest weight that you've, like, do you know the highest acceptable weight? Because I know they've gotten some bigger weights in Alaska, for instance. A little bit. We were asking this of the Yellowstone folks. So the biggest wolves they've ever weighed there.

And those are very, you know, they're doing pretty well. I think it was close to like 147 pounds or something like that, which is more than I weigh. That's a really big animal. It's a big critter. Yeah. And I've also heard that when you get those high-end weights, it's typically something with 20 pounds of meat in its belly. Yeah, typically. Which can really tip it to the high end.

So in my career, considering starting with Minnesota, and I've worked in the Canadian national parks. I've collared wolves in British Columbia, Alberta, Montana, Iowa Royal, Romania. I mean, I've had a huge— You've done wolf work in Romania? Romania, yeah. And Minnesota. So the wolves on average in the west where we are, because your audience is a western audience.

No, we've got them all over the place. Do you? Okay. So Minnesota wolves are on average 20 maybe 25 percent smaller far more people will listen to this who aren't in the west than who are in the west thanks i didn't know that okay so they're smaller the midwestern wolves it's a smaller it's called the the eastern wolf it's slightly different our wolves in the west are slightly larger again it's prey based the wolves in the mid Midwest live on deer and beaver, and occasionally on moose. Iowa wolves live predominantly on moose. The wolves out here

live primarily deer and elk, occasionally moose. But they have a larger prey that they go. And the ones that came from Canada, they may have preyed on caribou, which again are larger and more moose. So they are what they eat, just like us. And if you're taking down a 140-pound deer, that's your diet, it does not behoove you to weigh 140 pounds because there's a lot of you that are going to eat. So just being smaller, that just works out. If you need to take down a really big 1,000-pound animal, you need a lot of real big, beefy animals.

Okay, super wolves. Well... Are you ready? I'm ready to dive in. Giannis, be honest layout i don't even want to do it i'm not even gonna do it yeah just lay out what lay out the super wolf lay out the super wolf it's been a while since i've had to do this or even think about it but i think that the theory goes that i don't know i don't know the reason why or the the proposed reason why but the theory goes that, I don't know the reason why or the proposed reason why, but the theory is that for some reason, they trapped a bunch of wolves. And we even talked to a trapper who told us that he had anecdotal evidence

that this was true because he knew the trapper that trapped these wolves in canada it's it's okay go ahead but there's there's two there's two competing wisdoms about the super wolf okay well either way that they they they picked out and they uh they picked out the biggest baddest nastiest meanest wolves and those were the ones that they brought down and put into yellowstone national park i but again i don't know why or well okay and there's that and we were told that by a fella yeah and there's another one that they took the wrong wolves the wrong species of wolf right yeah sub or the wrong variety yeah sorry that's from way too far north and the ones that were here the native wolves here were these little rinky dinky right plat very you know like mild mannered polite little wolves and they went and got these big northern savages that are 250 pounds yeah and

they cut those loose down here what substantiates it is that as soon as they got here they just rained holy hell on the uh north yellowstone elk herd northern herd yeah and the herd went from 20 some plus thousand all the way down to four because i don't know where to start with all this because i got lots of damn biologists can you remember two within this i'm just gonna let you run okay i'm gonna let you run be careful how much time do we have i'm gonna let you run but but i'm gonna we're gonna see how good you are um as you run on this however you see fit can you also touch on the idea and i think this comes from you the idea that the reintroduction maybe was not necessary. You just gave me four hours worth of material to cover.

So I will start. Let's do it in 30. Let's start with the super wolf first. Okay. So the wolves that they captured up in Hinton and Fort St. John's are within dispersal distance of our wolves here. Where are those places? Tell people where those places are.

So one is in Alberta and one is in BC. They're close to the Alberta-BC line. One is about 300 miles north or so. One is about 500 miles north or so of here, of Glacier Park, the border, give or take. And so the crew went up there and they just had guys who were trapping bring in, you know, call and they went out and put a radio collar on them to have a Judas wolf so then they could go out and fly and catch more wolves and dart them, whatever. They just took the whatever wolves they could get. There

was not a selection for bigger, meaner, badder, uglier, beautiful, whatever wolves. Just a random sample. Do you know why they chose those locations? I don't. You'd have to ask somebody from Yellowstone. I think it's because the Canadian government says, we're really glad to give you all the wolves you want. They're free.

Come and get them in those areas. Right, because up there they still aerial gun them, don't they? In certain places. I don't think so. Not anymore? I don't think so. I'm not sure but I don't think so. But maybe back then they were. Maybe.

They were killing them. I mean they were economically valuable to have. So they kept them in the wolves that they could catch as a family group were the wolves that they put into Yellowstone in the holding pens with the hopes that they would stay together as a pack. And the young, teenage kind of age wolves that would be potentially good dispersers or unassociated with other wolves,

they caught those and they put them in Yellowstone because the idea was in Idaho. They caught those and they put them in Yellowstone because the idea was in, I mean, in Idaho. They caught those and put them in Idaho. The idea was they wanted family groups to stay in the park, but when they dropped them off at the wilderness boundary in Idaho, they wanted them to just blow like dandelion fluff in the wind and disperse and find each other and pair and form new packs. Really?

Oh, yeah. So the ones that they put in in yellowstone was called the soft release so the ones by like frank church they wanted them to split they didn't put packs in there they put in individuals they wanted them they dropped what 31 35 wolves there over two years and they wanted them to just go go high and wide and find each other like a hot no hot release hard hard release hard release and was that to sort so they could monitor sort of two different versions of releases and research two different yes because you've got to realize prior to the yellowstone wolf introduction this had

never been done anywhere in the world ever and so they didn't know how it turned out this was like this is our best guess so we'll build these pens with cyclone fences, we will hold them for, through breeding season. And just before they're going to whelp, we're going to cut them loose. And those pregnant females aren't going to probably go very far. And they've got their pack mates now, they've mated, and we're going to hope they stick together and stay in the park. In Idaho, it's like, you guys better run your tails off and get the heck away from people and go find each other and disappear in the wilderness and mate. So it was a totally different strategy.

And they were literally, the doors are opened up, the wolves are kicked out, and they're gone in Idaho. It's totally different. So both worked. And both worked. Yeah, they both worked. Interestingly, I had a wolf that I caught in 1991 in Glacier Park. And he hung around for a while. And then he ended up going over to the Kelly Creek area in Idaho, a wild area. And he hung around for a while. And then he ended up going over to the Kelly Creek area

in Idaho, a wild area. And he stayed there. And the fish and game would keep track of him. And we'd see him occasionally. And he was there with a radio caller. And he just bided his time by himself up in the Great Burn country. And I mean, it's a big wolf by himself. He was 111 pounds when I caught him. Pretty big male. He lived by himself, killing whatever he could do. And when they let those wolves, kicked him loose in 1995, 96, 96, 97, at the edge of the wilderness, this little black young female found her way up to Cali Creek and paired with that collared male from Glacier Park, and they formed the Cali Creek cat.

No, really? And he lived to be 11. He lived a long, long time. That's an old wolf very very very old average life expectancy of a wolf they've calculated it in yellowstone 4.6 years i believe and in minnesota 4.1 average life expectancy in years in 11's top end you make it to five you're doing really well 11 is very old so you've only seen a handful over 10 years

yeah I can count them on one hand they just don't live very long I had one brought in for checking this fall that a trapper caught over by Libby it was really interesting because it had been trapped in 2012 as an adult already and he was brought in so we think he was about 9 and that's a really old wolf

a trapper brought him in dead yeah he harvested him I didn't know if you meant like wolf. A trapper brought him in dead. Yeah, he harvested him. I didn't know if you meant like trapper, like you were a trapper. No, no, no, no. Harvested him for fur. And yeah, he lived on that landscape all that time and avoided, oh my goodness, I can't tell you how many times he probably had experiences with humans that he should have died and he didn't.

So actually, he had a bullet, a small.22 caliber lodged in the base of the skull that healed over. Really? I'm telling you, these wolves. No, he did. He sent me the photo. They don't have it easy. So back to the super wolves. Yeah.

We're digressing. So the, should I repeat about the glacier wolf? What about it? The one that I caught that dispersed? You could remind people. Okay. Because now I think the connection will have more potency. So all these people are concerned about these wolves not being the same wolves.

So this little female that I trapped in Glacier Park at about age two. In what year? She dispersed in 1987. Okay. So this is one of the ones that walked in. Oh, original. Yeah, she was born in Glacier Park. I know because we caught her as a pup.

I know she was born in Glacier Park. I know because we caught her as a pup. I know she was born there. Anyway, she went up and dispersed and disappeared, and she ended up being killed by a farmer, and she was traveling with other wolves in July and called it in because they had the radio call or a phone number, and Gay Morton called me, and this is where she was shot, and it was north of where most of the Yellowstone wolf

were taken from. It was equally far north as the furthest north Yellowstone wolves were taken from. So clearly that range that she traveled, it's all one set of genes. It's one wolf population. And I can tell that to people time and time again. And she's not the only one. She was the first one that we documented. She dispersed 540 miles, straight line. Now line no i don't know she may have gone further past that when they do that i'm really interested in the anomalies what is it that made her do that because she's a wolf i mean this is she's not unusual it's just that it's really hard to document it now that we have gps collars oh my god they're all over the place. We had wolves from Yellowstone go to Colorado and Utah.

I mean, this is not unusual now that we know. We just didn't have the tools to detect it. Average wolf dispersal density is probably average, including all habitats, probably around 50 miles. But there are those that go 500 miles. And in Canada, where they're following migratory herds, oh my God, they'll go a thousand miles easily. Remember that we're on, remember what you're supposed to be talking about, but let me sidetrack you for a minute. Have we yet had, I'm sure we have introduced wolves intermingle with wolves that came in on their own yes so originally we had the native wolves that walked down from Canada that colonized northwest Montana and started spilling into Idaho a little bit the introductions were winters of 95 96 and 96 97

and those populations in Idaho Yellowstonestone and northwest montana were separate for quite a long time genetically and they didn't begin to successfully not just disperse but disperse land and breed that's a sign of success when they're all intermingling and now we have shown through genetics and radio callers they're one population now idaho montana oregon washington you know wyoming it's one popular what about the ones in northern california just came from oregon which came from yellowstone yeah i mean nobody put them there and you could say well they were put into yellowstone yeah or seven the why did they not come out of the frank church area they may have okay i'm trying to think i'm pretty sure that or7 i'm pretty sure it came from millstone but i sorry i don't actually remember

yeah okay so now maybe it came from i'm feeling good on the super maybe it can't it probably came from idaho you're right not the one that wound up yeah or7 is the number um i'm feeling good on super wolves are you feeling good on super wolves yeah okay now what about the idea well the other thing is i've heard that wolves have eight canines these super wolves weigh 175 pounds and they have double canines so there's eight canines you laugh i hear it you really have heard that public meetings and you can't laugh at a public meeting someone told you that at a meeting oh yeah that they're super heavy and got extra teeth. I've heard that a lot. When you point out, what are you getting at? I'm right that you observed that we would have eventually landed in the same place

had we not done the Yellowstone in Idaho reintroductions. We would have gotten there anyways. Yep. Do you just point that out as an interesting idea or do you point that out because you feel there's a lesson there or did you feel that there was a mistake made this is a very complex question sure so i'm going to start with complex show i'm going to start with data because i'm a scientist so i believe it was 1993, 92, there were two wolves that showed up, one inside Yellowstone Park and one south of Yellowstone Park, two years at least, two to three, before the reintroductions.

Might have been 91. There was a filmmaker here from Bozeman, Ray Ponovich. He was in Hayden Valley filming for Bush Productions, filming, and he was out monitoring a bison kill, and he was filming the grizzlies and the coyotes interacting, and just as it was getting too dark to film, he's packing up his camera, this form comes out of the dark, and he's going, oh my god, I think it's a wolf, and it steps up to the kill with the grizzlies and the wolves like it belonged there. And they're all tearing at this, feeding on it. It was too dark to film. So he got up like three o'clock the next morning and makes his way back out. I believe it was August. It was a summer month. And he goes right at sun before the sun is there and he's

there waiting. And as the sun comes up, there's this wolf feeding on this kill. Four years before the introduction, he was so excited about it. All the biologists saw the video. I know him. It was a real thing. That wolf was around. It disappeared. Never seen again.

And then it was black and silver. Kind of your classic wolf that we see here in this ecosystem now. It's like an older middle-aged animal. Unlike the rest of us. They get gray hair as they get older. What was the word you just said? You said we see here in the… Like we see here now.

In this ecosystem. In this ecosystem. I got you. Okay. Sorry. Too much caffeine. And then in September, in that fall, that same fall, a black 95-pound wolf was shot at Fox Creek, just south of Yellowstone Park.

And it was shot by somebody who claimed they thought it was a coyote. It was 95 pounds and black, but who knows? Yeah, but it wouldn't be, in that case, it wouldn't be in their mind that it would be anything other. I don't know. But it was not the one that was filmed because this was black. Yeah. So I was doing my PhD. We got the genetic sample. I worked with the fish and wildlife service we the genetics were done on all of those

introduced wolves and then about 100 wolves that i had samples from collected over the years from road killed collared animals wolves from canada we had many collaborators contributing samples that wolf that was shot south of wyoming genetic lab in aspen organ said it was most closely related to wolves from nine mile montana it walked down there it wasn't native wolf too so there were two animals that got down there prior to reintroduction so they were getting there but they both disappeared or were dead and it's kind of where we were at in 79 in the North Fork of Montana. We had one wolf that made it for a couple of years and finally found one other. And it was just at that threshold. So in the early years when this reintroduction was

being planned, Bob Rehm and I, I keep mentioning Bob, he was the father of the wolf research here in Montana, fabulous man. Neither of us supported reintroduction because we'd seen the natural recolonization work so well. They were making it on their own. And when they run or trot the gauntlet down the Rocky Mountains, those wolves that are too bold or bother somebody, shoot shovel and shut up, they're gone. So it kind of selects for wolves that are a little more shy. And it's more accepted by the local people if the wolves aren't put there. Because I'm in the controversy here. Most of it's because these wolves aren't native. So we were against reintroduction for those reasons.

And then the reintroduction moved forward. And it truly has been like, I cannot think of a more successful recovery story anywhere in any endangered species. It's phenomenal because they took over it and they've gone everywhere. And I just came from Yellowstone watching wolves. I mean, I love to watch them, but I still think that socially it would have been more acceptable if our wolves from Northwest Montana could continue spreading and they weren't reintroduced. However, would it take five years, 50, 500? That was the factor, time. And the window of opportunity opened through the administrations in charge, Senator McClure from Idaho, Owens from Utah, Simpson from Wyoming. They introduced bills to reintroduce wolves because they wanted them reintroduced

as non-essential experimental under the Endangered Species Act instead of fully endangered. And that's how of fully endangered. And that's how it moved forward. And it's been really successful. Because you feel that they did that because they knew, they, like you, knew that it was going to happen anyway. And it would be better for management if it happened experimentally, because it'd give you greater latitude and lethal control. That's what the reasoning would lead one to conclude. I don't know what's in their brain, but I would think so. You'd have to ask them, but I would assume so because it would make sense as a person in charge of conservative states that you would want to

have some control, especially for your livestock constituents, to be able to manage these wolves. And if they were fully endangered, you couldn't do anything. So they're thinking of the constituents, wolves reproduce rapidly, have great resilience. They can take it. And they have. I mean, there's wolves. We in the West have almost 2,000 wolves scattered across all of the West now. From one. I mean, I was there with the first one. People don't realize that there's so many more in the upper Midwest, in the upper Great Lakes. And the Great Lakes has another. So we have almost 2,000 here, not quite. In the Great Lakes, there's 4,000 more. We have like 6,000 wolves now in the lower 48 states, connected to one population with Canada. It's a vast metapopulation. There's no more isolated, worried they're going to go extinct. That is not even a concern anymore. around the idea when when they were building a plan to do the reintroduction and you felt that it was not necessary were you coming from the perspective of someone who wanted to see wolves

return or were you coming from some the perspective of someone who was ambivalent about whether or not it happened in terms of like who you were cheering for I was coming to the perspective of coming from Minnesota where they successfully dealt with conflict issues to resolve them where they're still protected, but only threatened, not fully endangered. To here where there was one wolf, and now we're seeing this wave of wolves coming out that were not bothering a lot of people

and the ones that were being bothered, wildlife services going to remove. So I saw a good window of opportunity for wolves to be on the landscape and resolve the conflicts. It wasn't so much of a concern with the hunting community at that time. It was more livestock at that time because there were so few wolves. I saw it as a great opportunity and I wanted them to succeed where they could be welcome, where there weren't conflicts of livestock, there weren't conflicts with hunting. There's so much game on the landscape. They had plenty of food. They had plenty of refugia to live in, landscapes where they could be unbothered.

They don't need wilderness. Wolves would live in Bozeman if they could. They don't need a wilderness area. They just need to have some place where they can raise pups, find wild ungulates to eat, and live long enough to reproduce. They can live anywhere. I mean, the wolf lives from the Arctic Circle down. There's wolves in the Gaza Strip. They can live in any biome. They can live in the desert. They can live in a temperate forest. They can live in the Arctic. They are really adaptable. So it's just a matter of where we will tolerate their presence. And I knew all that. And I could see him successfully making it. That's why I thought we would be better off holding off on reintroduction, allowing the social landscape to evolve as wolves slowly made their way down the landscape. Because it's a social issue. It is not an ecological issue. It never has been with wolves.

So at that time, when there was this very controversial plan to do a reintroduction, did you sort of feel that were you ostracized by the super pro-wolf community for not advocating or condoning the reintroduction? Or was it that you all felt like you were kind of striving for the same thing? You just had different approaches to get there? I don't know that I really would care because I hear both sides all the time. I mean, I'm always, I like the wolves, I'm middle of the road. We have to live in the middle. We can't live out on either end. And I've worked a lot with hunting groups and ranchers and wolf conservationists and wolf protectionists. I'm a scientist, and I'm driven by science. And all science says that there is place on this landscape for wolves.

And it's not going to be Nebraska, probably. It's not going to be Boulder, Colorado. But there are places where they can be. And as long as we can handle and manage the conflicts, they'll be anywhere we want them to be. And as a scientist, I was seeing it happen. So that's why I was against reintroduction. And I imagine there were people that would slap me upside the head if they could, saying, well, you should love wolves and have them everywhere. Or what the hell is it? What are you thinking?

They're going to wipe out all the deer and elk. I don't listen to that. I'm doing what the science shows me they can do. But here's where you're not, here's, it's not where you're wrong, but it's a little bit where you're like misleading. Because it's not, science isn't telling you, science isn't telling you that we need wolves or that we need grizzly bears, right? You could make these, people make these claims. Did I say need? No. You said need. I said need.

But here's the thing. It's a decision that society makes. It's totally a social fabric thing. Yes. Yes. So I'm not even wanting to push you to, I'm not trying to push you into a thing. Because I feel that you, no, I'm not. Because I feel that you and me are very much aligned.

I like them around. Okay? You haven't said this, but I'm that you and me are very much aligned. I like them around. You haven't said this, but I'm assuming you do. I enjoy them being around. It just comes with, I have certain requests that come with them being around about conflict. Yep. How we control conflict and how we weigh out and value the interests of different stakeholders. Yes. And I feel that the ranch value the interests of different stakeholders. Yes. And I feel that the ranching perspective is valid and important.

Yes. And I think the perspective of big game hunters is valid and important. And I don't think that these people are being hysterical when they point out that there are some things that need to be resolved in order for them to get comfortable with this. I didn't say they were hysterical. No, I know. I know. I feel like we're on the same team.

We are on the same team on this. But what I'm saying, like, when you talk about whether or not wolves would have recolonized the lower 48 on their own, or whether we needed to do a reintroduction to bring them back, I don't accept that you had no sense of what you hoped would happen. You had to have hoped hoped would happen. You had to have hoped something would happen. I can tell you when I came out here in 79 and there was one wolf, I thought of it as an interesting and novel idea and experimental to see if it would make it or not.

If you would have asked me in 1979 if we'd be harvesting 300 wolves a year in 2018, I'd have said, are you out of your mind? I mean, I never would have believed we'd have been this far along. So I mean, I think wolves are pretty amazing creatures. I think that elk are pretty amazing creatures. I think cougars are amazing creatures. I mean, I like all wildlife. I'm trying to think there's an exception. I'm maybe not quite so fond of skunks, but I could have a bird dog. But I mean, I like to see all the full complement of all the predators and all the prey in the landscape. And the thing that I always think back, you've read Lewis and Clark journals on Daunted Courage. They came out here. There were uncountable hundreds of thousands of game animals,

right? It was like the Serengeti. And there was prey animals, and there were predator animals everywhere. And nobody was shooting or controlling any of them. And they were just fine. And when people really push me on an issue about we have to manage this or that, yeah, we're doing pretty well managing wolves in Montana. We harvest a lot of them. There's still adequate wolves here. There's a lot of them.

They're very resilient. We can go on like this. But if you want to say you have to manage predators or they'll eat all the game, There's still adequate wolves here. There's a lot of them. They're very resilient. We can go on like this. But if you want to say you have to manage predators or they'll eat all the game, if they ate all the game, they'd be dead, right? There'd be no more wolves. There'd be no more game. So what I'm just saying, before when Lewis and Clark came out, nobody managed anything. We barely had firearms at that time, right?

Yeah. I mean, there was hunting, but it was limited in scope. Yes. Animals manage themselves. The wolves in Yellowstone, they kill each other off, and the population took off rapidly. When they were first introduced, it went up to a peak of about 150, 160 animals in 2011.

It dropped down after that to be about 100, and it's been about that level for a long time. This year, there's less. I heard there was about 75, 80 wolves. Now, nobody's shooting those wolves. They are regulating themselves based on the prey. Prey populations go up and down. The predator population goes up and down. It's a lag time, just slightly. That is the normal, and we as humans, and I'm a hunter, we like to see something always at a level that we're used to. And when it drops below that, we panic. If it goes above that, it's like, oh, good, it's getting back to the good old days. The good old days is the average, but we don't look at that.

And I'm just saying that if we didn't manage elk or deer or wolves, and my department may have an issue with differences of opinions, but animals manage themselves in the landscape. And if there's too few, after the big winter of 96, 97, there's a huge record amount of snowfall in northwest Montana and Yellowstone when the elk die not. And 40% of our whitetail died in Montana that winter, 40% in northwest Montana. That spring, the wolves were doing pretty well feeding on carcasses until they had these pups, and then there weren't any fawns in June or July because most of the does died. We had a huge pup mortality. That's how wolves respond.

They don't have enough food. The pups don't make it. Meantime, the next winter, you know, it was milder, and the prey populations build up, and then the wolves build up. It's just this lag cycle we always want it right here on the average

in the middle two things yeah a thing that I've always laughed about I have a lot of friends who are just like rabidly anti-wolf

hate wolves and it's the end of hunting yeah but they all want to hunt in Alaska I was like dude it must be great to hunt in Alaska

I'm always like you wouldn't like it, bro. There's wolves running around. There's grizzlies running around. Why would you want to go up there? But it's like people view it as they don't, I don't know. Because people like things to be static. And on that point, my wife's reading this book right now by a Buddhist buddhist monk and he talked about one of the

greatest challenges for people is to accept that there there is no static line that every year you intercept everything in life you intercept everything in life amidst radical change. And there's something that makes you want to hit something, a relationship, whatever, a place you like to go on vacation, that you want to act like you hit it in stasis and that that's normal. And then you watch as everything changes, and it's disappointing to you. But you hit everything mid-change. There's no place to feel comfortable. Or you have to be comfortable with the idea that there's no place to be comfortable.

That the only constant is change. Yeah. And I see in the literature now, I mean, the term equilibrium is going away. Nothing is ever in equilibrium. Things are always changing. Are you comfortable doing a, we like to play a little game called looking through the crystal ball. I don't know. Not looking through it, into it. What should Colorado, what should Colorado do right now? Do you think it's inevitable?

Will you ask, okay, a minute ago, you asked me about my, how I felt about the change in the lower 48, because Colorado may be affected by that. Okay, go ahead. So we'll start there. So this change of the taking away and protection of wolves in the lower 48, it will have no impact on the western states, essentially, because we're already harvesting them and managing them. It may have a little impact in the Midwest because the states there haven't had their hands on the management for a couple of years. Yeah, what's your perspective on that? They'll harvest and drop like we do at some level.

They did for a little bit a couple of years ago. It's been like real herky-jerky over there. Yeah, it's litigation stuff. But in the West, we're, you know, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, harvesting wolves. It's hard to say exactly where we're at because it's really hard to count wolves. It's very hard. Is it? Very hard. Yeah. You never see them. They're secretive. They're elusive. Is it harder to count wolves than grizzlies? With grizzlies, they've been doing DNA work, hair work. Bears are large. They don't disperse as far. I would say yes, it's harder to count wolves. And we aren't doing DNA work and sampling everyone. We just know that there's this range of this many wolves out there. And there still

seem to be a lot. And 300 wolves sounds like a lot. We don't know how many illegal morts are, how many natural morts, but there's still quite a few wolves out there. Morts being mortalities. Sorry, mortalities. Yeah. But I would say if we start pushing the wolves too hard, people are going to be less able to harvest them because they'll be that much smarter and they're hard to see anyway. And the harvest level will go down. We'll have to see. This is kind of new. Wolves coming back in the West with a big harvest. We'll just see how it works out. Then your question again? Sorry. What's going to happen in Colorado? Colorado. colorado colorado because colorado is where colorado right now is in other states too um i

think the writing's on the wall oregon washington is sort of like you're now very friendly you are in a wolf state and you're going to see more wolves um and there because the political leanings of those states it's less likely that you're going to see in any time in the near future it's less likely you're going to see the kind of control that I think the hunting and ranching communities would like to see. California, you're never going to see any control probably. Yeah.

And then, but Colorado, kind of on the fence, politically on the fence state, used to be. Maybe that changed in recent years. And they're going to have wolves, there's documented wolves showing up there. Used to be. Maybe that changed in recent years. And they're going to have wolves. There's documented wolves showing up there. And there's also a movement, like a social movement, of people wanting to move a little faster and put wolves on the ground. seen that we've learned from the experience in the Northern Great Lakes, the experience in the Northern Rockies, what do you think will end up happening in Colorado? And what would be your advice to managers in Colorado? Is that a fair question? It's a fair question. I don't have the

answer. I would say if they want wolves in the landscape, so there's a talk of reintroducing Mexican wolves up to southern Colorado, and there's talk of wolves, allowing wolves to migrate and remain on the landscape from Yellowstone. Those are different gene pools. The Mexican wolf is distinctly different genetically, behaviorally, morphologically from all the rest of the wolves in North America. So it's a little different animal, which I don't care to get into. But the gray wolves will get there. And the best advice I could give about Colorado would be don't panic.

They're going to come in. You've got plenty of time to set up a management plan, a system, get wildlife services in place, get input from hunters. Get all your public input. Get people as aligned as you can. It'll never be perfect because people are just very controversial on either side. But be prepared. And look at other states.

I mean, in Montana, I don't have figures on other western states. But in our Montana, I hear a lot, oh, the wolves have killed all the deer and elk. And I hear that a lot from some segments. Is that true? No. That's where I'm going to go. the wolves have killed all the deer and elk. And I hear that a lot from some segments. Is that true? No, that's where I'm going to go. So we have our harvest data, fish, wildlife, and parks. And we can show through the harvest, the check stations every fall, and the spring green-up counts where we count recruitment,

number of fawns or calves per female, be it deer, elk, or sheep, or whatever. And our numbers, the wolves have been on the landscape for quite a while now. It's not like they've changed greatly in 10 years, except that we had one show up at buildings. But otherwise, they're kind of full. The landscape is full of wolves. And deer and elk numbers at present are in the long-term average. They're slightly to the high end.

The last two winters, they're slightly down because we've had pretty long winters. And we haven't had the recruitment. But they're not off the scale in the black hole. So when people say, I've hunted this area for 38 years and I used to be able to go up there and get an elk and the wolves, since the wolves have come back, they've killed all the elk. And I'm thinking about that and our numbers don't support that.

The game stations and the spring count show the animals are in the region, but maybe the habitat has grown up there. Maybe there's more road access. Maybe there's more competition for people going after those animals. There's a variety of things. There's wildfire. And I just say, well, if you're hunting the same area for 38 years and the animals aren't there anymore, maybe move 10 miles or 15 miles.

So you don't accept, like take, for instance, the Idaho Panhandle or the Northern Yellowstone Herd. You don't accept that those elk populations were reduced by two-thirds. I don't know about the Idaho Panhandle situation. I don't follow it. Okay. I can only tell you from Montana. Sorry. That's just my limited scope of my job.

Yeah. So I do know, I'm just seeing the harvest data shows the animals are still out there, but they may be using the landscape differently. They may be moving during hunting season differently. We do have climate change. Things are changing differently. I don have climate change. Things are changing differently. I don't have an answer at all for it. I'm just seeing numbers show that the animals are still out there. And if people aren't seeing them, maybe the animals are becoming more nocturnal.

I don't know. I don't know. And I hunt deer and elk too. And I'm able to get deer and elk, and I live where there's a lot of wolves. So I have in the past. I don't have an answer, except to say that wolves can drive populations really low. They can keep them there. If that happens, the wolf numbers decrease. They've got to have food. Yeah. How long does that cycle play out?

Depends on the habitat. I mean, you brought up earlier about the northern herd. I think, honest, you brought it up. Was it 20,000 or so? And then wolves came back and they went down to 4,000. I think this year, I just heard the number this week when I was down there, it's up like 6,000 now. There's a lot of bison. Yeah, I'm reading right now about the northern uh herd and it's uh the last count in 2017 was uh 5349 so it has been so that's 2017 yeah and it's been stable like that we're increasing for four years it so northern herd so the wolves went in the winter 95 96 96 97 i think they put 31 wolves in half each of those years. We had that enormous winter.

I don't know if you guys were here in 96, 97. The snow at my outhouse was five feet deep. Yeah, it was brutal. Yeah. That's what killed the elk in one winter. I mean, you had 15, 31 wolves over two years. Do you think they ate 18,000 elk or 15,000 elk in two years? Think about it.

I mean, the numbers dropped off really fast, and then they've been kept low. And I can't say if the wolves kept them low or not. Probably has something to do with it. There's wolves, there's grizzly bears, there's lions. And the wolves, it's interesting, they have switched. There was primarily an elk grocery store when they first got there, and now they're switching to bison because there's more biomass of bison. It's a lot harder to kill a bison.

There's less wolves. But I don't want to dwell on it too long. Why do you have a shirt written on your hand? Reminder. Something I have to do later today. There are, okay, they eat seven pounds of meat a day they can eat more yeah maintenance is like eight pounds per day so you have several hundred of something yep eating pounds of stuff a day there's has to be there has to be an effect i thought we had this conversation with one of

your colleagues who works with mountain lions yeah jim where i find that um i find that you have these two extreme views you have the perspective of people who again feel that they annihilate the prey base and eliminate ungulates from the landscape which as you pointed out is counterintuitive because then you would also lose, the wolves would die and maybe gone. And then you have the perspective of the ardent apologists who want to tell you that there is no population level impact from wolves, mountain lions, coyotes, what have you, and that they somehow subsist on nuts and berries.

Yeah, right. You hear from these different views. And when someone tries to sell me on one of these two perspectives, I get frustrated. There is, I feel like you're tiptoeing around, not tiptoeing around it. I feel like you're suggesting that there's not a population level impact from having hundreds of wolves on the landscape.

I didn't say that. No, but you kind of are. That's what I'm trying to get you. I want you to say it. I want you to say what you think is. So what I'm telling you is that fish, wildlife, and parks harvest data and the spring count data are still within the norm range and a little on the high end except the last two years where the winter has been bad and there are hundreds of wolves in the landscape

that's harvest data for deer and elk for deer no yeah do you feel that winter do you feel that winter is more is more of a driver of ongoing absolutely is more of a driver one winter like this 96 97 it came in and killed 40 ofitetails. You could have a thousand wolves in landscape. They're not going to kill 40% of the whitetails. Winter is the ultimate driver. And when wolves, the look where wolves are going to live, they say, oh, where are they going to live? They're going to live in a place where there's winter ranges. They're not going to live up in the snow and rocks in the wilderness areas like some people think they do. It's like, what the hell are they going to eat in December? There's nothing up there. They come down in the valleys. They come down to the winter ranges. They come down to where people are in

cabs because it's the valley bottom and they're as lousy with deer and elk who are starving along with the cabs that are being born this time of year. It's, you know, there's conflict set up potentially. Some wolves have conflict, some don't. You know, it't. And back to this 96, 97 thing. So I'm not saying it was all winter. I'm just saying there was a really... So if you saw Yellowstone in the 60s, there were paid people to go out to kill mule deer and elk because the landscape was so devastated by the overgrazing because there was no predators. That's a fact. You can look it up. Gunners were paid to shoot deer and elk on the landscape. So now we're up to 20,000.

It has never historically wasn't that high. I mean, if you look at, you could go down to the Yellowstone now and still see major impacts on the browse. You can look at the exclosures, the fences. You know the story down there. It's not new to us and maybe new to your listeners. Wolves came on the landscape. We had this massive hard winter.

They died like flies. Additionally, there were a lot of what has been termed naive elk that had never seen a wolf. And the wolves come running up to them and they just kind of stand and look at it because they don't know what it is. Boom, they're dead. They had fat city, those wolves, the first few years. And they definitely helped take the numbers down. There's no doubt about it. So is 5,000 sustainable?

Yeah. Is it socially acceptable? Some circles, no. Is 20,000 elk socially acceptable? You bet. Is it ecologically sustainable? No. So you kind of have to think about what is realistic to be on the landscape.

Yeah, that we weren't going to hold that as a norm. Correct's what i'm saying i'm not saying they're not that's a really good point because nobody ever everybody always loves that 20 000 number nobody ever says what it was five years prior that's when we that's when we came into the country man me and my bro started hunting that herd in 96 and how many what was there oh yeah when they were at their house i remember where i was standing i remember where i was standing and i could fit i could sit and figure it out by year i remember where i was staying when i heard the first wolf howl down there yeah and you know we thought it was i heard it rip out i thought it was a bugle oh sure because it was it's just like you didn't know what it was. Well, yeah. I thought it was some kind of crazy bugle.

Right. And then we're like, holy shit, that's wolves, man. And all this extreme viewpoint on the Yellowstone herd, all I can say is just kind of let the rhetoric go and the BS drop and kind of think about sustainability. And maybe you want to see the herd at 10,000. Well, that would maybe happen, but it probably won't. It's probably going to stay about where it is unless there's some huge

campaign to kill off lions and wolves and bears. And then you know what's going to happen? You're going to have your herd jump up and they're going to all starve again like they were doing. What's going on with Isle royal national park so isle royal the two wolves came out in about 1950 or so oh back up back up because i got to say something first okay it's an island in lake superior belongs to michigan right yeah yeah oh yeah it's his own little freestanding national park yeah and, and it's not very big. I think it's, oh my gosh, I think it's only 200 square miles or something. Okay, go ahead.

In our country, wolf territories are bigger than that for one pack. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. Okay, so take it away. I just wanted people to know what we're talking about. Okay. Midwestern wolves, smaller groups, smaller wolves, they have smaller territories. So anyway, Isle Royale has never been colonized initially in the 50s. They've had a couple other wolves that have shown up when the lake is frozen, but it's a rare thing.

The lake freezes about once every decade, allowing genetic exchange potentially, but they've determined through genetics, the wolves have not had outbreeding and they're all very closely related. And so by now they've been inbreeding for 70 years so the ones that the the original ones that showed up the kind of made isle royal like a wolf place yeah walked across the ice in canada correct they were not put there either they walked on frozen when they documented it and they showed up and just had and had the run of the place because there's a bunch of there's a bunch of moose oh heck yeah and there was nothing to eat the most except ticks the biggest predator tick is on royal moose is a winter tick. It kills more wolves than wolves, I think.

So anyway, so the wolves make it out there, and they are all inbred now. And the last surviving two wolves is a father and a daughter. They were down to two? Two. They're an interbreed. Wolves don't do well when there's not a lot of exchange, huh? No. They're just so inbred.

They've got, through the poor genetics, they're like siblings. All of them are like siblings now. And, of course, they've been inbreeding for too long. And they've got deficiencies, physical deficiencies. They're not resilient to disease. They've got screwed up tails. They've got screwed up spines. Anyway, they're kind of a mess.

They're done. So then this reintroduction effort just happened. And as of this morning, hot off the press, they brought 13 new wolves to Isle Royale to add to the two they call legacy wolves, the two that are remaining. Legacy wolves. That aren't going to be breeding. Unless they could mix it up with some of the new ones, which is the hope. Are they bringing in super wolves? No.

No? They're bringing in those little tiny midget Great Lakes wolves. Oh, so where are they pulling them from? So they got some from a little island called Michipokot'in, which is in Lake Superior, but it's in the Michigan portion. They've gotten some from the mainland, Ontario, there, and they've taken some from Minnesota close by. And they may now try and get a few more out of Michigan

to keep the genetic stock variability. They added 13. That's the number as of this morning. They just brought some more in this week to mingle with the two that are there. So they have a total of 15 now. It's about half male and half female. How can 200 square miles support 15 wolves? Because there's so dang many moose there.

They can't possibly, can't eat them all. I find it, so this is this question about, we were just talking about this last night again at dinner, but so the wolves on Isle Royale can eat beaver, and they can eat moose, and there's a few fox. And that's, that's it. That's their food source. But there are so many moose, and because wolves are territorial, the population of the island, I think at its highest point, I'm trying to remember the number because you're really pushing me on this, it might have been about 55 or so. Oh, that many wolves around that time. Multiple packs, and then it dropped back down. And then it's been lower, and now we're down to two. And they're going to go to extinction, driven to extinction, clearly. But it's not due to lack of

food. They didn't ever kill the moose up they never i got you they never did it but that is different from what we have most of that wouldn't be called extinction that just be the extirpation well extirpation indicates to me human cause i don't know anyway a regional okay like regional like very specific regional extinction the island island would be free of wolves once again and my thoughts on that are probably over eons of time and glacial periods and whatever, Isle Royale has had multiple colonizations and disappearances of wolves over time. And interestingly, I was talking to a biologist, Dave Meech, who worked on there early, and he said the people who were there around 1900, 1910, they were out there early and they were miners and trappers.

Around the turn of the century, 1900, the island had caribou and lynx. No. And there were no wolves. Caribou, lynx. Came across the ice. And a few moose. But I'm trying to remember the ratio of moose to caribou. But the caribou went extinct. And Dave said he saw what was probably the last lynx track on the island when he arrived there about 1960, sometime in the 60s. And now there's not. So things constantly

change just so we want our window to be the right window. So if you look at Isle Royale in 1900, there were no wolves and nuts and moose and there's tons of caribou and lynx and coyotes. There was coyotes and there was no fox. It's a totally different ecosystem now. And that's not because we've changed it or the wolves have changed it, but moose got out there and the caribou went away. I mean, there is a brain worm that goes from moose to caribou. I'm not sure why the caribou went away, if they were overhunted or died from brain worm or whatever. But it's a completely different ecosystem in a very short lifetime that we can document. That happens all over. Are you going to blame somebody or a species or a fire or whatever?

Everything is so complex. You ask me these black and white answers. I want to know this. I did that? You have. And it's like, no. It's kind of like the change in big game. If you aren't seeing elk or you've been seeing them for 38 years,

go someplace a little different. There's places in Montana where they're so bloody overrun with elk they're giving away two permits and they're having shoulder seasons either end. It's like if you live in some place and you want to get an elk in Montana, go to one of those areas. I mean, you don't have to go 500 miles, but the animals are out there. They may be using the landscape differently. They may be more nocturnal. There are some areas where there's more hunting pressure

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y'all we were hunting one time and met a guy i didn't actually talk to him do you remember who actually talked to him we were hunting with remy i was there yeah the guy who got out of his truck and uh pat yeah tell me and uh i think yeah he was hunting deer and he was on his way out and he had been hunting following tracks and ran into wolf tracks and just said that that was the norm now there that always his deer tracks always end in wolf tracks and therefore there's no deer around he's not killing any deer and he left in the huff but he's seeing deer tracks oh he went and saw a deer. And saw a deer. Parked at the same place.

So I have to tell you the most incredible, I thought I'd kind of heard all the wolf stories, but this is kind of a fun one. I just heard from a friend who had talked to somebody about wolves a few years ago. I said, you know who was really pushing the wolf reintroduction, don't you? She's a government employee.

She said, know who? She says, the insurance companies. Why is that? Because the rate of white-tailed deer and car collisions is so high in Northwest Montana that they want to have the wolves there to take down the number of deer so they pay out less insurance. I thought, I've never heard that one before. That was a new and unique story for me.

Can I one-up you? Yeah, please. Okay. I heard that it was the Clintons. The Clintons. And let me tell you why. Okay. Because if the Clintons could bring in wolves,

the wolves would kill all the game. And then people in the Rockies wouldn't own guns anymore because there's nothing to hunt. And there would be less resistance when it came time to seize everyone's gun. Wow. That's why we have wolves. Wow, you did one up me on that one. I must admit you won.

That's crazy. Anyway. Okay, what did we miss? I've got a couple just follow-up questions. I think that are pretty black and white, I hope. She just said she doesn't like those. I said I don't like them. They're challenging to answer because it's not black and white.

Do wolves kill more bulls versus cows? Do they care one way or another? Do they tend to prey more on them? There's a lot of literature out there, and then it depends on species and geographic area. But wolves will take whatever is most vulnerable. And what I can tell you is that is the young of the year. I don't care if it's an elk or a fawn.

Wolves go into winter. You mean elk or a deer? Yeah, they could be a fawn or a calf. I mean, when you're going into winter, they're the smallest, they're the weakest, they're the slowest. Most of the animals you take are young of the year. Then beyond that, a big fat cow is not very vulnerable if she's middle-aged or, you know, a good age. But if snow conditions are right, so what I say when people say they take the old, the sick, and the weak, I said, you know, that's kind of the outcome, but that's not really the selection factor.

They take what's vulnerable. So you could take a seven-year-old prime fat cow elk, and you put her in this crusty four-foot deep snow out there, and she's breaking through and the wolves aren't. There's nothing wrong with that elk. She's just vulnerable. In most situations, she's not. She's the strongest one. She might be the major cow, you know? So it's vulnerable. And it's generally, the old's the sick and the week, but they're not out there selecting for them. They're selecting for what they can catch. A great big, huge buck or bull, elk, that goes into the rut and ruts his brains out. They can lose like 20% of their body weight. They go into the winter in really terrible shape. They don't

eat while they're breeding. In a couple of months, they hardly eat anything. They're skinny as a rail. They're punched up. They might have puncture skewers that are bleeding from the other bulls. They're pretty vulnerable. We think those are great trophies because they've got big racks. But the reality is, maybe it's even at the end of its life, it's done a lot of breeding, but it makes people really angry when they see wolves kill a big bull out. But they aren't kill a big bull elk. But they aren't selecting for the bulls. It's just that they're vulnerable. What I find really interesting is these elk still have their antlers now, too.

You will rarely ever, I'm trying to think if I've ever seen in video, as Bob Landis has taken the most amazing footage, rarely ever, if ever, see a bull elk with antlers swing as antlers as a defense tool. They're strictly ornaments. It's sexual. So why do they hang on to all that weight all winter? Because they're done breeding in October. Why do they pack 40 or 50 pounds on their head that slows them down if they aren't able to use them for either sexual selection because breeding's done

or predator defense? Why do they do that? I can't tell you. You're honored. I'm just asking. I mean, me as an ecologist, I try to think about this. Why would they do that? Anyway, I'm just saying there's stuff out there we don't know.

Maybe somebody's answered that question. I haven't read on it. I read not long ago that a deer biologist was saying that if you can take deer in and manipulate them through photo periods you could create super great do you know deer that would throw two racks a year huh why would you want to do that you wouldn't you just we're just talking about when you take a deer from let's say you take a deer from the northern hemisphere yeah or take an elk from deals you take a deer from the northern hemisphere and put it in the southern hemisphere huh How long does it take that deer to adjust to start, right, to flip-flop when it drops and grows antlers?

And he was saying they had to do it very quickly. And he said not only that, not only that this has been done or he suggested that he thinks it could be done he says not only that i think you could put a deer in a an artificial situation and do photo periods and you could make it you could trigger it to produce two racks a year mother nature doesn't do that because it'd be really hard on the animal yeah but he would but you could point being yeah his point being that it's it's linked to photo period sure and not not art not the gregorian calendar right whatever whatever we live under here right uh what you you put a lot of miles on in the winter yeah in the snow what do you wear for boots uh these days i'm not doing it so much anymore but i did for most of my other research work i i wear uh i've had schnee boots i've had sorrels

uh i'm mostly yeah mostly just ski boots i mean i'm when i'm talking wolves i'm mostly in skis I wear, I've had Schnee boots. I've had Sorals. Packed boots. Yeah, I mostly do ski boots. I mean, when I'm talking wolves, I'm mostly in skis. Gotcha. Big, heavy backcountry, three-pin boots. I don't, like I said, I don't, that's not part of what I do now. It's not part of my job to do that winter work anymore, which is.

But back when you were hard at it, you did mostly ski boots. Yeah, yeah. Hard, hard plastic ski boots. Leather, old Merrells. Okay. And yeah, Asolos, or Asolos, depending on how you pronounce it. I got a pair of their sneakers on right now. They're good shoes.

Got that question for you. Then I got another question for you. Let's say you're emperor of the world. Okay, you control the world. Or empress. Empress of the world, sorry. You didn't want to be, but you are. now you have to make all of the humanity's decisions um do you do you feel that would you allow wolf hunting and trapping to continue um in areas that have sustainable populations of wolves.

Empress of the world. Empress of the world? Yeah. So we're outside of profession right now, and now we're talking about king of the world, queen of the world. I don't live outside of my profession. Come on, you do too. There's no way you don't.

I have the same problem. My brothers, who are both ecologists, I'll be like, what do you hope happens? They don't like it. They don't like it. They don't like it. But come on, you're Empress of the World. And someone says, oh, first thing, first quick issue we have to take care of is do we let the hunting and trapping seasons continue for wolves? And you have to make a quick decision.

Well, you got to decide. Here you are, Empress of the World. You're not going to let the people down through lack of leadership. Don't know. Ha! Come on. Really? Really? Wolves can't live anywhere that we tolerate them. In order to tolerate them,

we have to have some kind of a management plan. In a perfect world, wolves would never kill a cow or a sheep, and ungulate populations would never go up and down. There wouldn't be any controversies, right? Yeah, sure. If that was a perfect world, wolves would never kill a cow or a sheep, and ungulate populations would never go up and down. There wouldn't be any controversies, right? Yeah, sure. If that was a perfect world, then you wouldn't need to remove them. But there's not a perfect world.

Ungulate populations go up and down. People get livestock taken. They're horrible on sheep. Not going to happen. So in order for social tolerance to create possibilities for wolves to be, you have to do that stuff. Let me hit you with another personal one. Well, I just want to add that the perfect world

is just perception. We might be living in the perfect world right now. I'd say not. Look what's going on across our country. And in the world. And in the world, but it's been crazier it is crazy in the past too oh yeah we used to have this thing called the civil war right yeah um but kind of on that note you hear a lot from the people that think that they could uh just survive

well i don't know if those are the people that think they can just survive on nuts and berries but anyways that when some of these packs have a member of their pack that's killed by a hunter, that you have a dog, a wolf that leaves the park and gets shot, and that it really disrupts the pack and it's going to be the end of the pack. How true or false is that? Have you been able to document and research that and see, like, what it does or doesn't do? You'd have to ask Yellowstone people specifically because that's the concern down there. I know when wolves like 926 or whatever, when they leave the pack and they get killed at Cook City or around Tominer Basin's it's very painful for some people very painful

they come unglued that's tragedy beyond belief they're very attached to these animals as an ecologist looking at the population level it's a loss of an animal and it was a breeder it's it's more of an impact on the pack the might split up, the pack might get a new breeder, the pack might fade away, they might have two breeders the following year. There's this dynamic that goes on all the time and death is part of it. Issues that we as social people put judgments on the animals taken. And I know early in my career, when there was only three packs of wolves in Montana, I knew those animals not by name or anything, but we followed them enough in the snow on the trail.

I flew once a week. It was very intensive, kind of like here, except you didn't get to see them. And it was a hardship early on because every one of those animals was critical to them coming back at all. See, if you lost, if you had 20 animals and four were killed or something, you kind of felt it and you saw the adjustment, but it's like, oh, well, there's an adjustment.

And that wolf's gone. And gee, where did this one come from? And no, next year they got pups. That one is gone. They move on. They don't think about it. They're wolves. And we put those values on it.

And it is hard for those people. I know their friends. Some of them are friends of mine from Yellowstone. And it's difficult. And that system has the bonus. I tell these people, my friends in Yellowstone, you guys have a bonus. You live in a research bubble here. It's amazing.

You can see these animals. You sit on the, I just came from there. You sit on the side of the road with your thermos and your apple pie or something, and you can watch these wolves. That is not the real world wolves live in. They live where I live, and they're shot and hunted and trapped and run over by cars and trains and whatever. That's the world wolves have to live in.

And when one gets killed, it is not a tragedy. We don't, you know, it's just different. Yellowstone does so much good. I know, it's wonderful. And it does so much harm. Well, I would venture to say that, I mean, like I said, when I first was out there, I was against their introduction for all those reasons.

We talked about most of the social fabric and the natural selection of wolves coming down, blah, blah, blah. But now that they're there, I go there a couple times a year. I so enjoy seeing them because they're not removed. They're pretty visible. And it's a different energy down there. Everybody who goes watches those wolves is very in love with seeing them and the experience, and it opens a lot of people's eyes. But that is not where the wolves live in 99% of the world. But they lay, the problem is, is it, yeah, it's like ecologically it's done so much good

for recovering species. It's done a lot of good. But the psychology of the place and its advocates is that they lay claim and take ownership of anything that touches it so that a herd of elk, say,

that spend the bulk of their year not there become the Yellowstone elk. A grizzly that passes through becomes a Yellowstone grizzly. And if something occurs outside of the park within some number of miles, it's a travesty because it was only a mile, only a five miles out of the park as though its footprint is inadequate and it needs to sort of extend this psychological energy that reaches out like the tentacles,

tentacles of an octopus to grab in anything around it. And I think that out of that, that mentality drives a lot of, it creates a lot of like contentiousness in people who are competing over management of things. So when I say it causes harm, I think in that way where people become, that wildlife politics in America, like wildlife in America is very complicated. And there are a lot of factors at play and a lot of people who need to be heard. And I think that when people are introduced to American wildlife through the lens of Yellowstone, they get a very distorted perception of what actually happens

and the way people's lives are impacted and the different concerns going on. And I think that there's certain agencies, National Geographic is a big driver of this. The Smithsonian is a big driver of this. There's people that push this thing that wildlife just lives in this little protected place. It's only there. It's surrounded by horrible people who want to do horrible things.

And it's just by the grace of God that we have this little gem in which wildlife can exist. And they push that narrative. And it's frustrating. It's like, it's difficult to watch that happen. It is difficult. And then people got to realize, say there's 80 wolves now. And this spring, there will be several litters of five to six born. Who knows how many litters? Ten. And there will be that many more wolves. The population will at least double or triple based on reproduction.

Is that right, really? And every year, this happens every year. And then by this time next year, it'll be back down to 80 to 100. Every year. So a certain number of wolves, and I don't have percentage, but twice as many as are there, will disperse, get killed, die of disease, drown, get killed by an elk, get killed by other wolves. It happens all the time. But when it's a wolf that is seen often and has a number and a radio collar, and then

it's killed by a human, that is viewed as a very large tragedy. And I wish people would be more concerned about connectivity and linkages out on the landscape. I wish people would be more worried instead of Scarface being killed illegal, the big grizzly bear that was killed supposedly illegally, and it was seen for 25 years in Yellowstone. I saw him, and he was very identifiable. People identified with this bear for a long time, and he goes outside the park,

and I believe he was illegally killed or killed. Anyway, but it was outside the park. If people put all the energy and money into thinking about, well, let's work on the connectivity linkage between Yellowstone and Montana, those landscapes between McDonald Pass and the Gallatin Valley, so that bears are more free to maintain viability so that it doesn't become this still pretty isolated. That's a bigger concern than

Scarface being shot much bigger in my mind no especially putting all this emotional energy into these single wolves as you just said for them to live to be five is a big deal it's a big deal and I mean I'm I love seeing them and I'm taking in and I love to listen to stories about who begat who and the I have I have ultimate respect for these people out there every day like five in the morning they're out there all day and they know these animals and they dedicate their life to it and I you and I I mean benefit I can pull up in my car and get out and ask what's going on they tell me I'm very appreciative but I don't have that attachment to those animals to the singles you're interested in the populations. I'm not down there.

But I can understand the passion, and they're very passionate about it. It's like maybe me and my bird dog. I mean, I'm very passionate about bird hunting and training dogs, and when dogs die, it's a tragedy. But the wolves are not my dogs. I don't know how to answer that. It's just challenging. Is there a time in, like, scientist education where someone sits you down and says, you don't call animals by names, we do numbers and this is why?

Is that like a very strict point thing or does that just naturally come along? That's a really good question, Giannis, because when we started the wolves, you know, and started studying, the first one was Kishnina. And then we had Phyllis and we had these wolves because there were so few. And yes, we were going down the same path, and we saw them a lot. And the park service says, you can't name those wolves, and the Fish and Wildlife Service says, you can't name them because what happens when Phyllis goes and kills a cow,

and we've got to take Phyllis out? Okay, every wolf had a number anyway. Some of them had names early on, some had numbers. And people, it would be funny because you'd be talking to somebody in the park service about wolf 8550, and they'd say that well that's phyllis okay or 86 53 who's that that's mojave okay but they knew the name so it was kind of a charade we played but and i know within fish wildlife and parks they don't want us to name wolves but all of the grizzly bears that they tag, every one of them is named, every one of them. What's the difference?

And I don't feel like if, I know you by your social security number. You can give that to me later. I'll follow up. But if you were my social security number, I wouldn't feel any different if you were like 1407 versus Giannis. I mean, you could. The other thing, I mean, I'm trained as a scientist. Our papers are very technical and factual and models and statistics and all that.

And I think one of the things that we need to do better as scientists, biologists, and I'd love to hear your input, but I think that we don't do a very good job in reaching out to the general public who has concerns and thinks about being outside and enjoys all aspects of wildlife but maybe doesn't really know how to predators and prey relay when do they kill or not kill everything and we don't put it out in a format that's very user-friendly people just see these papers with this latin and figures and numbers and it just gone i think it's there for people that want it it's hard i mean i go do a lot of public presentations of different groups different people grasp different things but i find a lot of groups as soon as you start talking data

this light goes out and i have to ask you because how do how can i be a better communicator to the public about these very important issues? Like when some of these meetings and people say, oh, that's not right. Those numbers are wrong. You know, blah, blah, blah. Well, they are what we have. But I don't think that you're asking something that can't be answered. Okay.

Because I think that people have, but that same problem exists. Everything. With every subject. True. It exists with every subject. It exists with every subject. I don't care if you're talking about, if you're trying to explain social services, if you're trying to explain climate,

if you're trying to explain wildlife populations, if you're trying to explain the budget for the military, whatever. You're going to always run up against people who cannot conceptual conceptualize can't make sense of data there's people that can't look at them that can't understand a landscape um from having lived on it and traveled across it and occupied it for their entire life then you represent that landscape to them in an aerial image or you represent that landscape to them as a map and they cannot they can't make that jump so i think that to say like how because i hear this from wildlife professionals all the time who wring their hands about their perceived inability to articulate

complex ideas to the public and they're like well how do we fix it there's probably some things you can do but i think that you would say well we're going to have to tackle it through our public education system at the elementary school level because i don't know when you see someone take something that's complicated and beautiful. And then you see attempts to strip it down and dumb it down. It gets really ugly, and it becomes not satisfying anymore. And you almost feel embarrassed for the person that stripped it down. I'm not going to say what it was, but I recently read an attempt to take something counterintuitive,

to take this counterintuitive idea and demonstrate it to the public. And it happens to be a point that I desperately want to see demonstrated to the public. But when I saw it stripped down to its barest, most easily digestible form, I looked at it and all of the wonder and beauty was gone and it was just stupid. So I don't really know that you're going to get there. I think that it's just from the ground up trying to invite people to like being surprised. My father was very resistant to any discussion about human evolution. Okay. His resistance to discussions about human evolution is that they change the story too much. It used to be this. Now you're telling me it's this so what he wanted to see was he wanted

to see an explanation that was the end-all be-all final answer that this is what happened if someone failed to give him that the absolute thing that in 20 years will not change, he wanted to discard the whole thing because he didn't want to take the energy, the mental energy, to follow a constantly evolving narrative that had new inputs and that upset old understandings. It was frustrating to him. So the minute you changed it too many times, he became suspicious of the entire body of knowledge. How do you change that? He was a smart dude, very smart. But some things, he wasn't like there's certain aspects of learning that he didn't enjoy the journey. You had to give it to him.

And if next year you came and told him that, you know what? We were kind of thinking this, but now it looks like this. He's like, I'm going to forget everything you've ever said to me. So, and that's maybe what's hard about wildlife issues because it's always in flux. Yeah. And you learn more. I mean, the tools they're using now with the remote cameras and genetics. Oh, my God. The tools are non-invasive monitoring.

We're learning things, amazing things that you can't see even with a radio caller. We had a dear biologist just last week tell us that now the amount of data he can pick up in one day, it might have taken him years, 20 years ago. Right. And I don't know that it's necessarily better, but it sure is helpful in trying to look at some things. But it opens up a lot more questions. Looking at, yeah, genetics is an especially powerful tool. I'm very amazed with what can be learned now by picking up a scat sample or a urine sample, even from an ungulate and looking, whatever it is. But usually it's hair or scat and learning you can glean

enormous amounts of information about where this animal came from how it lived how it died whatever who it's related to i it's just an amazing tool yeah people people really some people really like uh we keep talking about change some people like things that don't change. We're just down, we just had our little family vacation down in Baja and we bought a really small bananas. Like those little dinky finger bananas. My daughter who doesn't like bananas liked these bananas. My son is upset by this for some reason. And he's saying to her,

I thought you didn't like bananas. And I said to him, it was like any sentence that you begin with the words, I thought you didn't, is a not necessary sentence. Where you're calling someone out for having changed something, but he didn't like it. He likes his sister to not like bananas because she doesn't like bananas. And I think a big part of the whole wolf thing is in our memory of our parents and grandparents, there were not wolves on the landscape. And now they're back.

And it's changed. But if they went back 200 years ago, the landscape was crawling with wolves. And that was the normal. So we are selective in our memory about what we want to think about or how we analyze things. And hunting and fishing dudes are generally in love with the Lewis and Clark era. Yeah. They're like, man, if I could do one thing, it would have been out with those boys. All them wolves running up and down, chasing everything, killing all the game.

Except for the 10 million bison, whatever. Yeah, no, it's an interesting concept. So I always ask people to just, instead of thinking of just how things are today or in your mind, try and think on a bigger scale. And the future, I mean, the future is there's going to be less and less landscape available for wildlife. And that frightens me. And I would like to see people, instead of hating this or that or wanting to kill all the wolves or whatever, I would be more concerned about protecting and preserving our wildlife heritage on the landscape. And I think

ranching community and hunting communities are absolutely key to that. I mean, I work, do you look at where the big game winners? Think about these ranchers, man. You drive between Livingston and Gardner. Holy crap, there's thousands of animals out there eating up. There's nothing. The grassland looks like this table. And they got to raise cattle on it next year.

It's private land. They support all that wildlife year-round. People want to get rid of their cattle because wolves get killed. You know what? They provide a huge amount of wildlife resource. I want to see them there. I want to see them stay in the landscape. I know a guy down in Utah, and they had some unusual snowfall patterns this year in Utah.

And he lost $40,000 worth of hay to a group of elk. And he texted me that he's trying to be cool about it. They need a shoulder season. So it's really complicated. It just is. Do you have any final things you wanted to wedge in there that we didn't get to? I don't think so. No, we've covered a lot.

I like your point that space for wildlife. That might be one of the reasons I become frustrated with aspects of the animal rights community or people who oppose any kind of wolf hunting or wolf trapping for the hides would be that when I look in the future, like I see a problem that needs to be addressed and it's maintaining habitat, maintaining space for wildlife. And then like, how are you so like, how do you, when you look into the future, how do you see, why do you, why are you not worried about that? Why are you putting so much energy into this thing when the real problem is that? The real problem is habitat. Yeah, and two things.

One is that habitat for wildlife is not necessarily or at all exclusive to human presence. Like I just pointed out, the ranching, the ranch lands are the winter range for the most part. And I think people get hung up on wildlife has to have wilderness. No. I have to have it. Yes. We all do. Yeah.

I mean, that's part of the deal. I do have one more point that I want to talk about. Oh, yeah, great. This is called a concluder. A concluder. So the thing that I think about a lot, here in the West especially, but it's true anywhere, is how do we create a value for wolves? Because the only way they can be tolerated on the landscape

is if they have a value. That value can be in terms of cultural. It can be in terms of hide value, selling hides. What's a wolf hide worth right now? I think I was told $175. So like up in Alaska, some of the biggest opponents of aerial gunning were the trappers because it's their culture, subsistence, and income. And they didn't want to see those wolves gunned off because they count on trapping them and catching them. So that's a value. Another value would be the aesthetic. Maybe you live in Des Moines, Iowa, and you'll never see one, but you

like to know they're just out there. Maybe you come to Yellowstone Park and your value is seeing them in that environment or potentially hearing them howl. I mean, I don't care what the value is. And those values are on opposites in the scale, and they may be conflicting values, but they have a value. Because if something lives in our world and it doesn't have a value, it's gone pretty quickly. Or it's innocuous. Or it's innocuous. Well, maybe. I don't know. Well, anyway, I'm just saying, I think it's really important that, you know, we, they have a value to survive. And I know in this particular, in Montana, for example, the- What I mean by that is, what I mean by that, I should clarify the point.

Please. What I mean is things that require some level of sacrifice have to have a corresponding value. You could have something like, you know, people might not put a lot of cultural or economic value on opossums, but we'll continue to have opossums because they're not, you know, we're not, we're not making a decision about their fate. Generally, you provide certain things and they just continue to exist. They're not controversial. We don't need to have meetings and public comment periods about what we're going to do. I don't know. I don't live in possum country. I grew up possum country. Okay. Okay. we don't talk about possums okay damn sure talk

about everything else right steelhead deer turkeys we talk about it possums nope yeah what's kind of like mott lions so you had jim here i didn't hear jim's podcast but there's three times as many mountain lions on the landscape in montana as there are wolves people aren't angry about mott lions in the landscape they aren't pissed off they don't want to see them eliminated. They aren't introducing 12 bills into the legislature this year to kill more mountain lions. And it's like, you know, if there's three times as many

mountain lions, it's two and a half to three times as many. As there are wolves, you can presume that they're killing three times as much, two and a half to three times as much game as wolves. Why aren't people concerned? I heard an explanation. Please tell tell me this is out of a thing that this is out of a research piece in idaho and they kill people this is not a research

piece in idaho where you let's say annually you lose 16 17 percent of your elk calves, or no, it was like you lose 25% of your elk calves every year to mountain lions. And it's been that way for a long time. And people are used to a certain cow-calf ratio. But then you come in with this additive, this new additive thing, and all of a sudden it adds a 5% mortality rate. That, you feel that 5%. You can observe that 5% in your lifetime because static, your idea of static was the mountain lion presence. So people see a shift. The new thing to point to are wolves.

It's the change. And so that's where the animosity grows. When all along you've been losing this very high percentage to mountain lions, but you're used to that. When you're out and you see cows and calves, you're used to a certain ratio. The ratio switches and people perceive that new thing as being the problem. This was articulated through something that a buddy sent me. But still, the majority of them are being killed by lions.

That's shown over and over, and people don't worry about it. No, because that's what they've... And I also think, in addition to that, that's a good point, but in addition to that, mullet lions have a value. How much does an outfitter charge for a mottlion hunt? Probably four or five grand. I don't really know. And how many does he do a year?

Many. So it has a value to him. The houndsmen are very well organized. They're very vocal proponents of keeping lions in the landscape. They're also pretty vocal about getting rid of wolves, from what I've seen. Because the wolves kill their dogs, or there's a potential. Kill the dogs and kill mottlions and compete with them. But my point is, you know, houndism and her are amazing.

They're amazing to learn from. When they bring in mottlions to be tagged, I work with a lot of them and tagging their lions, and I learn a lot from them. They're really good information sources about where they're seeing wolves and how many lions are out there. But they have that value. And nobody goes, drives and spends $35 million annually to go to look at mountain lions in Yellowstone Park.

Well, good luck. Yeah. I mean, I'm just saying, they're sneaky. They're quiet. You don't know they're there. And there's a lot more of them. And people don't, I mean, they kill a few people every so often, mall people. It's like, oh, whatever.

I can tell you when it happens sometime in the future, who knows. If wolves kill a person, oh, my God, it's going to be really all over the front page for weeks on end. It's happening all the time with lions and bears. Well, I mean, there hasn't been a mountain lion. I mean, yeah, there was a couple. Yeah, there was two I can think of. Yeah, this year. there was a couple. Yeah, there was two I can think of. Yeah, this year.

There was a couple a year. Yeah. One in Oregon, one in Washington. This year. Yeah. Yeah, I'm just saying. There's a different value system on these different animals. Economic, cultural, ecological, visual.

It's something can be interesting to think about. So my point is we need to create value on wolves. Could guided wolf hunts be the salvation of wolves? I don't think it's hard, but you know what? Some people are taking people out to kill wolves because they've learned how to get them. And they're

good at it. And I know some of them. And they're pretty efficient. They understand wolf ecology. They understand behavior. They know how to find them. Are they mostly calling? Yeah. They know how to find them. Are they mostly calling? Yeah, they know how to call them. What sounds are they using? You don't have to ask them.

Do you know? I don't know. Oh. You never got curious and asked? Do you think they're using wolf vocalizations, or do you think they're using prey vocalizations? All I'm saying is there could be a business for it. There could be a business for it. There could be a business for it.

And there is business for wolf. I mean, look at the number of wolf safaris. I mean, there's a huge economic value to seeing wolves. But if you wanted to do them for hunting, and right now with the move to pay bounties on wolves, that will incentivize a few people. It's a monetary. It does put a value on them. It may not be your value or my value. It might be. I don's a monitor it does put a value on them this may not be your value or my value or might be I don't know but it puts a value on them they get a thousand

bucks a wolf they can it's not called a bounty it's a compensation program and at least got a value right I don't know it may not I mean it sit well with everybody no it won't. Right. All right, Diane Boyd. Jan, you got any final concluders? I don't. My mind's

satiated. We can go on forever. Like you said, there's hours and hours, but if you'll come back, we'd love to have you again. One last yes or no question. No! If you had to go back to 1977 all over again, We'd love to have you again. One last yes or no question. No. Is that? Okay.

If you had to go back to 1977 all over again, would you have sold your motorcycle and drove up to work on wolves up in Ely, Minnesota? Wouldn't think twice about it. Absolutely. That's good to know. Thank you very much for coming on the show. Thank you. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. On-axe hunt is now in Canada.

It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now, the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.