The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 243: Boggeying in the Brushworld

Episode Date: October 19, 2020

Steven Rinella talks with Michael Tewes, Neal Wilkins, Ryan Callaghan, and Janis Putelis.Topics discussed: the ocelot as an animal that's unknown to most folks; how it hurts like hell to get bitten by a cat; chicken-ocelot bonding; the ocelot population in the US being less than 100 individuals; how mammalogists have more fun than ornithologists; a mad obsession with cats; reproduction and the minimum birth rate to maintain a population; the effect of declines in genetic variation; all the different ways of losing an ocelot; how conservation is dependent on private landowners; maintaining the ocelot population on the East Foundation's Texas ranch holdings; is the ESA antiquated what it means to be pro-ESA reform; sex, hunger, and fear; the insane number of birds killed by feral and domestic cats; a hope that ocelots will stick around; how to incentivize conservation when you can't ever go to the place in need of conserving; 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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Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google Play Store. Know where you stand with OnX. All right, guys, we're going to start right out with introductions. Right off the bat. Okay. Michael Tuas, professor at Texas A&M University at Kingsville. So that's how you say that, Tuas. Tuas, yeah. Got it. Yeah. My computer keeps calling me 2E's. Yep.

And I serve as a Cesar Clayburgh Wildlife Research Institute. And I've been there since 1981 as a professor doing cat biology and cat research. Cats worldwide? We've done some work in Southeast Asia on some cats, clouded leopards, marbled cats, golden cats, cats you've probably never heard of. Yeah. And leopard cats, some other cats. Okay. And your compatriot here?

I'm Neil Wilkins. I'm the CEO of the East Foundation. And we're an outfit that's about 217,000 acres of private lands in Texas that has been set aside to serve as an area for research, education, and outreach, mainly for wildlife conservation. And how close, because we first connected, I feel, around the fact, I can't remember how it lined up, or maybe it was coincidence, that we were going down to the Eturia Ranch. I think so. Yeah, you were headed to the Eturia Ranch. And it just happened to be that you guys were located around there. Yeah, we've got one of our ranches, the El Sals Ranch, backs up real close to the Eturia Ranch. Okay.

Yeah. We tried to, I was hoping to arrange some kind of visit. We were down there, but it never worked out. Yeah. Now – oh, and also Cal's here on a computer screen. He's going to have an entirely diminished role. As – Yes.

It's just you know how it goes, Cal. Yes. So, I've got to send some bad news to one of the ladies that I work with. She wanted me to get Cal's autograph. So I'm going to have to go back and tell her that she's not going to get it. I think you just provide an address and he'll send it. Okay. We'll use that e-signature thing.

Will that work? Michael, we also have a common oh sorry we also have a common um jim heffelfinger yeah what a loser that guy is i agree yeah he was one of our he barely got out graduated from our university about 25 years ago yeah no he's stellar we're really proud of him uh we used to do a thing we used to do live shows back when people did things with each other and we would have these trivia contests. Like we had these pre-shows, we'd do like these VIP pre-shows and we'd have trivia.

And one of our favorite trivia questions, cause it always like really stumped people is we would hit them with, I can't remember if it was, I can't remember the numbers now but it was like name five of the six or name the six wild cat species of the United States of America and guess which two

in descending order were most likely to stump everybody of the cat? yeah guess which two like no one ever got if they got one of those two it was order were most likely to stump everybody. Oh, the cats? Yeah. Guess which two like no one ever got. If they got one of those two, it was. Are you talking about North of Rio Grande or North America? In the present day US.

So we would hit people with like name. I can't remember how we would phrase it. Let me just think in my head real quick. I'd say Jaguarini and Ocelot. Yes. Yeah. Well, yeah, we would do North America. Yeah. Yeah. If you do North America, that includes Mexico. You got to add. Yes. Yeah. Well, yeah, we would do North America. Yeah. Yeah.

If you do North America, that includes Mexico, you got to add Jaguar and Marguerite. Yeah, but you have to have Jaguar even if it's the U.S. And Marguerite? Mark? Yeah, Marguerite. And there was only one record of a Marguerite in Texas, and that was in the 1850s. Oh, see, we were screwing the, I feel like we gave people stuff that they didn't deserve. Do they include the house cat? No, we would

point out that. So, let me just walk it through. Tell how we asked the question. Let's walk it through. Sure. Lynx, everybody knows that. Not everybody, but a lot of people know. There's like one wild cat in Alaska. Though,

I think it's rumored and maybe substantiated that a mountain lion or two has finagled its way into Southeast Alaska. One was found all the way on the McKenzie Delta with its ears frozen off or something like that. So they get around. But you have lynx, mountain lion, bobcat. Yes. Jaguar. Jagarundi.

Ocelot. But you're telling me there's another one I don't even know about? I haven't even heard of this damn cat. What's it called? It's a baby ocelot. It's like half the size of an ocelot, but it looks almost the same. And we did, I guess, one of the first studies on them in Mexico and published an article about five years ago. The Ceratomolipus, there was a population of Marques there that we studied. So it's like a little 10-pound wildcat.

Yeah, 8 to 10 pounds. Bigger eyes than ocelots, but everything else is very similar. Talk, walk us through like what's up with an ocelot. Okay. And why is it no one knows about? Why does no one know you have ocelots running around? Do you think most people know what an ocelot okay and why is it no one knows about no why does no one know you have ocelots running do you think most people understand know what an ocelot is because i'm surprised that i've been working at this 35 years i feel like i'm still failing getting the message

out no what an ocelot is i didn't know i remember when i was young reading uh how to trap books all the time old how to trap books and i remember, old how to trap books. And I remember I would always be like, what in the hell? Because you would see they'd have a section now and then on catching, and it would mention like an ocelot. Well, we may have looked at the same trapping book. I had this one book in the early 1980s, and it had a chapter on trapping ocelots,

and it's the only one I've ever seen. And I mentioned they're easy to trap. And sure enough, they turned out to be pretty easy to trap for me. You just, the problem is you have to find out where they are. Once you find out where they are, they're easy to trap. Yeah.

So talk people through like what it is and where it lives. Yeah. Where it used to live and where it lives. Okay. The ocelots of the 40 species of cats, the most beautiful. It's just a fact.

That's an objective reality. Objective reality. It's about a 20-pound cat, about two feet tall. At least the cats in Texas, United States, the females are 18 to 22 pounds and the males are 22 to 25 pounds. And they're beautifully striped and spots and rosettes. It's really an interesting tangle of markings that provide the ultimate camouflage, I think, for a cat. Yeah. It's like, I mean, is its coat different than the Jaguar's besides just being a smaller version?

Yeah. I think it's much more complex than a jaguar jaguar has the rosettes with a dot in the center of it ocelots have have spots uh rosettes all kinds of and then and some of the rosettes form chains to where it looks like chains going down the shoulder and down the back it's and it's such a a very difficult animal to try to describe. You can't do it. And from one side of the ocelot to the other has a different spotting pattern,

and each one's like a fingerprint. They're very unique. So it helps us when we use cameras to sense the population. We can identify individual ocelots that way. How would you describe the general color scheme? Yellow, yellowish background with a little bit

of whitish underneath. And then, like many of the cats, they have two very distinct facial stripes. And then, and then these very distinct black.

And then the tail is about an 18-inch tail with black rings around it. And that's all very similar to a margay as well, but except a smaller version for a margay. Yeah, so they're an incredible cat. Their distribution goes all the way from northern Argentina to southern United States.

They used to occur, and there have been a couple of males identified in Arizona, never a breeding population in Arizona, but there's always been a breeding population in Texas. And the range, one of my hobbies is collecting reports of leopard cats is what they were called in the 1800s. So from 1830 to 1880, you have leopard cats identified in almost every river in Texas up to East Texas. And so they really liked the dense brush cover that would be along a riparian area. So I can imagine distinct populations of ocelots on every major river, Brazos, Trinity, Colorado River, into East Texas. And so they did occur in Louisiana and Arkansas, at least a record or two there. Oh, is that right?

Yeah. Now, do they show up in the oral traditions, in Native American oral traditions? Well, the Mayans and Aztecs, they do. Okay. Yeah. You know, the Mayans and Aztecs worshiped jaguars, very important in their religion. But the Aztecs, they kind of recognized the ocelot as a smaller godlike symbol, or it was smaller in the symbolism back then. The jaguars, if you're ever eaten by a jaguar, you went into the portal to hell. So you don't want to be eaten by a jaguar.

I didn't know that. Yeah, it's a really rich tradition all the way down to, I think the Incas even had some of that jaguar worshiping. That's a weird deal where cause of death that's not self-inflicted is rewarded with hell. Yeah, I don't think anyone likes to get. No, that doesn't pop up very often, man. Yeah. Those, it hurts to be bitten by a cat. Yeah.

When you say that they bumped into Arkansas, perhaps, or bumped into Louisiana, perhaps, those come from just very like small, small, like, single references or whatever. That's right. The type specimen for the subspecies albessens comes from Louisiana. Oh, it does? Yeah. And sometimes I get a little mixed up.

It may have been Arkansas, but back when it was Louisiana, shortly after being Louisiana purchased, so they called it maybe Louisiana. But the type specimen specimens from there. And then how many at once upon a time, how many were running around? It's anyone's guess. No, really the records that you, you have from the 1800s is one instance, one anecdote. I shot a leopard cat. I found a leopard cat. I found a leopard cat. With a couple exceptions, there's one trapper who

reports several leopard cats in his catch at the mouth of the San Bernardino River. So- Where does that sit? South of Houston, about 30, 40 miles. And so that's kind of, it's really believable to- Like he was logging his season's catch. Uh, at least that, yeah, I don't know if a whole season, but it was very, probably

a very large population in that area at that time. Uh, so yeah, it's, uh, and, and the spelling, it was really funny how the anecdote there and the, or the narrative was, he misspelled everything you could misspell, but he got leopard cats and bears there and then another one was um oh the the hunter that led the roosevelt hunts uh and he came out of louisiana went to texas and then um uh lily ben ben lily is he the guy that ran the um is he the guy that was tangled up in the whole teddy bear thing? No.

Oh, that wasn't that one. No, no, no. No, Ben Lilly is a character. He would never sleep indoors. He always slept outdoors. He was a tremendous cat dog person. He went from Bears, Louisiana, spent 1906, collected a few ocelots south of of uh hughes houston they went on made became famous in in arizona leading a hunt with teddy roosevelt but interestingly a

couple of samples that he collected south of houston and sent off to the smithsonian we we got dna from the bones of of the skull from those cats. So we analyzed it 100 years later. It's kind of interesting. Yeah. But Ben Lilly, if anyone ever, I mean, that's an interesting read just there. If you can't get a good sense, like, how many ocelots were ever running around in what's now the U.S.? Well, we do now.

We have a good idea for the U.S. What was running around? Oh, no, no, not previously. No, it was probably many hundreds at least, maybe a few thousand. But can't you guys, when you're doing genetic work, can't you guys find, like if you got an old bone from 100 years ago, isn't there some process by which you get the mitochondrial DNA from that and you can tell the effective breeding population size by like how many contributing mothers are in a population? is now a professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, but he published four really good Oslo genetic papers, and one of them was looking at effective population size, and another one was just where he documented the genetic erosion

that's been going on from 1985 to 1995 and then 2005. And we've had a very steep decline in genetic variability in the Oslo populations, the two populations that occur in Texas. They've lost something that's called private alleles. It's where very few alleles are very specific to that population. We would find only one or two in the Texas populations and compared them with our research in Mexico where we'd find 30 private alleles. So it's just, we've lost genetic heterozygosity. And then the effective population size is very few down to, well, we've only really sampled a subset of the population, but it was very few. And then I

had another student, Jennifer Korn, look at inbreeding and we found four or five inbreeding events in both of the populations. So they've got, they've got problems. Can you walk through real quick? I imagine because you've been in the cat business so long, you probably know this story better than anybody, or at least as well as anybody. What happened with different cat, but it has like the inbreeding. Wasn't the Florida Panther like severely inbred and that led to taking lions out of Texas and

putting them in Florida? Yes. That's, that's the, the nut of the case. Yeah. And is that, I want to at some point get to like, why we can't, why can't just dump a bunch of them in Texas now from Mexico and have the problem taken care of. Yeah, that's a good story to have in a second. But one of my former students, David Schindel, is now the Florida Panther lead for Fish and Wildlife Service.

And so, yeah, the Panthers I think at one time were estimated 35 or 50 individuals. And then there's a discussion about bringing Texas and ended up moving, uh, eight or more lines from West Texas into, to Florida to help with the genetic erosion and increased genetic variability. And, uh, that, that has been very successful, my understanding, is they've really – the demography, the population has really expanded. And I think it's been helpful by most assessments. Yeah, it was kind of a deal with the devil a little bit because –

Yeah, there was one argument. One side would say we want to keep the pure Florida panthers, the korei, the subspecies. And then the other said we don't care we just want florida panthers to exist in florida and those were the two basic arguments there uh i didn't realize that that you saw that ocelot populations were still collapsing or continued to collapse like from as recently as 1985 to present but walk through what happened to this cat to get into trouble in the first place. Well, I think the first settlers came and settled on the rivers where the Ocelot populations

were. And since we've already said Ocelots are easy to trap, they are, and to kill, right off the bat, you had that conflict between humans and people. And so over the years, there was pretty extensive poisoning going on in the 1950s, 40s, 50s, for predator control to help benefit game species. Why were they pissed at ocelots? It was just universal. Everything, strychnine, it killed just about everything.

Because ocelots, they probably kill chickens and stuff, but they're not going to take down cattle or anything. That's the worst thing about an ocelot is it kills chickens. And so if you're not a chicken aficionado, who cares? I'd rather have ocelots. They're a very peaceful cat. I mean, that's probably one reason they're easy to catch. And a lot of people had them as pets. But they don't hurt livestock.

They don't hurt game species. Uh, they're, they're, and I think their gentle demeanor, they're a very popular pet in the 1960s. Um, I know some of your audience is probably too young to remember who Don Meredith was. Yep. But he was, he was one of the, the first, uh,

commentator on, on, on, uh, Monday night football. And he was one of the first commentator on Monday Night Football, and he was the quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys from 1961 to 68, I believe. He had a pet ocelot. His name was Pepe. And so he really enjoyed that cat, and he came home after losing to the Washington Redskins for a weekend, and he got a concussion during that game and only to find out that the housekeeper had let the cat out and it got ran over. So it was kind of a double loss that weekend for Don Meredith. But a lot of people had him as

pets in the 50s and 60s and thought it was a glamorous thing to do. If you kept them indoors, though, you regretted it because they would spray urine on everything. And they have a very distinctive smell in the urine. And you don't want to live there for too long after that happens. Was that still legal in our country in the 60s, that you could just take an animal like that out of the wild and turn them into a pet? Yes, in the 60s, yeah. They didn't become endangered internationally until 1973 and nationally until 1982. There was an overlook. They missed adding it to the list in 73.

But yeah, and people have had them pets even in the 80s and 90s. And you may still be able to do it if you have all the different permits that's required. It's very difficult to do it now. Where do they sit on the Endangered Species Act list now? Are they listed as threatened or listed as endangered?

They're listed as endangered. Okay. Yeah, fewer than 100 left in the United States. At what year did you take notice of them? In that little film you guys put together, it mentions how when you first got interested and people told you that you wouldn't be able to catch one because there weren't any to be caught.

Yeah. Yeah. A professor that Neil and I share in common was Dr. Jack Inglis. He was one of my wildlife professors, and he bet me a bottle of Jack Daniels that I'd never catch an ocelot. And so luckily I did on March 2nd, 1982, which was Ocelot Day.

Happens to be Texas Independence Day, by the way. So I caught the ocelot on that day, and a year later, Jack English bought me the bottle of Jack Daniels. Why did it take him a whole year to do it? Well, we only met at a conference a year later, and we drove around Austin, and he bought that bottle of Jack Daniels. Why did it take them a whole year to do it? Well, we'd only met at a conference a year later, and we drove around Austin, and they bought that bottle of Jack Daniels. And every time my students and I caught a new species of cat for research, we'd take a shot out of that bottle. So we've had over-trail shots.

We've studied over-trail different kinds of cats, and I hope to have a few more shots coming out of it. Walk through sort of, you know, like a career path of someone, like your interest in career or whatever, to where you got to be like, I'm going to try to catch an ocelot. I'm going to try to trap an ocelot, which supposedly aren't here anymore. Yeah. If you want to do it as a student, you know, is that what you mean? How did you get in the situation to even care? Yeah, I think serendipity and luck had to play a lot with it.

But I think also hard work puts you in that position to be at least noticed by the next level, the professors that were willing to take a chance on me. But I've been very lucky throughout my career, I think very fortunate to do what I'm able to do. But I was in the right place. My master's, I did okay on my master's project. So they offered a PhD, which involved ocelots. And then I got with the old trappers the first few months and the people that have trapped ocelots for 40 years and kind of learned a lot of techniques from them. And then I hit the right place. And that's what I came down to is just finding the right place.

Did you grow up hunting and trapping? I did. I hunted and, yeah, I can think of a little trapping opossums and things when I was younger and did some limited hunting when I was a kid. I did some bird hunting, dove hunting, duck. But I've gotten where I'm so obsessed now with cats. I don't do any, I can't fish. I can't hunt. I can't do anything except read or study about cats.

And that's a, I probably need some psychoanalysis for that. But I, so that was, a, I probably need some psychoanalysis for that. But, but, but I, so that was, yeah, I was in the outdoors. I was a bird watcher. I don't tell, I consider myself a mammologist. And I learned early on that people, well, that ornithologists didn't have as much fun as mammologists had. And so I ended up becoming a mammologist instead of a ornithologist, at least in my opinion. They may argue that with you. Back in the – so you caught your first one in 82.

Mm-hmm. And what was the reason that you needed to go out and catch an ocelot? We got a contract from the Fish and Wildlife Service to study ocelots since they were putting them on the endangered species list that year. They wanted to have a little bit of information. And to find out even if they existed in the state. I had several gray hairs and professors tell me they no longer occurred in Texas, that

they've been extirpated. But people weren't just hitting them with cars and stuff? No, not. Well, if they were, they weren't being reported back then. Because that's the weird thing about with Florida Panthers, right? It'd be like, oh, there's only 30 left. But then every year, three of them get hit by cars. Yeah, that's right.

That's why it's so hard to picture that you could hide. It's parallel with all slots there. But the refuge, Laguna Escocia Refuge, where I began some of that work, the refuge staff didn't know they had them there. They knew they had them in the mid-60s when they did some printer trapping, they found some. But they'd gone 10 years and didn't even realize they had them. And they probably have always had about 7 to 14-hour slots even now. Are they just super secretive?

They're secretive, the nocturnal, and they enjoy really dense brush, brush that no one wants to walk into. So those three factors alone make some – a lot of ranchers will – a few ranchers have all sorts, but they didn't know it because of those three factors. I would just think that with – I mean, I guess it's testament to how few there maybe were. I would think that with guys out predator calling and coyote and bobcat trappers, that if there was one left, someone would have it. Well, again, you're right. I consider roads a very effective sampling technique. Yeah.

You know, if a population is somewhere, they're going to get ran over. That's why Harry and the Hendersons would happen for real if there were Bigfoot. Now, I've used that same example. Like, if they were there, someone would run over them. And it wouldn't be like a secret-y thing. No, and then I started— There would just be a big dead one in the road. And then when I expressed my doubt about that, I started getting hate mail from Michigan, Wisconsin.

So I don't talk about Bigfoot anymore. You had to quit. No. Yeah. You don't want to talk about Bigfoot. There's some serious people out there still convinced. Would that be in your, like as a mammologist, that'd be right in your wheelhouse, right? Yeah.

Yeah. But I'm going a different direction. Okay. You don't even want to be implicated in this conversation. I'm kind of figuring out how to get out of it, actually. So, anyways, I was saying, with all these ways in which they could, that ocelots, I guess the point of what I'm saying is this. I always struggle with Lazarus, I don't know if you guys use the term Lazarus species. Species that rise from the dead.

So like black-footed ferret. It's gone. And it's like, holy shit, it's not gone. A guy's dog just dragged one in in Matiti, Wyoming. And then the Tasmanian devil. What's that animal called, Cal?

I'm trying to engage with Cal. I'm throwing him an easy one. What is the animal that is most similar to a Tasmanian devil? No, they have a better name than Tasmanian devil. Like the tiger? The Tasmanian tiger. That's what I'm trying to say. Tasmanian tiger

therese or something like that right yeah that thing yeah that is that's like the saddest picture of all is like the this cool looking striped dog cat combo that is in a jail and it's like the last one but people have been every year feeling like they saw one yes you know well that that's the equivalent of jaguarundis in texas in the united states throughout the south i i to this day i have biologists and i you know we were just talking about i've had five or six what i consider famous biologists argue with me about jaguarundis occurring throughout the South, Florida, Texas. In my opinion, jaguarundis don't exist, haven't existed in Texas since the last road killed in 1986.

But do you have a look? In 86, someone ran over a jaguarundi in Texas? Well, yeah, April of 1986. Really? Two miles east of Brownsville. Oh, so very close to not being in Texas. Yeah. There you go.

Yeah. Well, they were never located north of the Rio Grande Valley anyway, although people think they occur throughout the South. So there you are. It's the early 80s. Some people say they're maybe gone. I would have been, they're definitely gone. If someone thinks they're maybe gone, I'd say they're gone. Oh, you know what?

Here's another one everybody's still looking for. What? The ivory-billed woodpecker. Yeah. Well, I saw one when I was a, back when I was a birdwatcher, by the way. What year?

It would be early seventies. Oh. Yeah. I thought I saw one anyway. But I'm sure it was a pileated woodpecker. But no one's laid eyes on one since, I don't know, but every year people go looking for them. Yeah, yeah.

And they see what we call, where I'm from, pileated woodpeckers. Yeah, pileated woodpeckers. And it's the same phenomena, I think. The Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. Here's another thing. To have a viable population of any species, you need 50 or more individuals

to live for 100 years. Hold on. Okay, but who gets to make that? Who gets to say that that's the truth? That came out, Michael Soule, 1980. It was like the beginning of MVPs, minimum viable populations of discussions, and it has since became much more complicated since then. So he's like, here ye, here ye. Yeah. If you have 50 of something. Well, and that's a computer modeling will show that for a lot of species.

And now it's called population viability analyses. We've done two different PhD projects on that. You put in all these life parameters and you can estimate how long a population of a certain size will persist over time. I guess I'm incredulous of it because I could see if you said for large mammals, for instance, it would take a population of X, right? For large marine mammals, it would require, but if we're talking about a plant, do you know what I'm saying? Generation time is an important part of it. Mouse versus an elephant. Yeah.

And it's part of this modeling. There are a lot of variables that go into this modeling. But there's been much research done on that. But the gist of it is, is if you have a very small population, it's very unlikely to survive a long period of time. So I kind of call it a variable population of a Bigfoot or Loch Ness Monster. You probably need at least 50 of them. If you're going to have 50 Loch Ness Monsters, you probably need several lochs to have a population.

I went to that loch one time and looked out upon it. Didn't see anything. I wish you were more – I wish you liked to talk about Bigfoot because I could, here's the thing, in talking to you, I could get better at arguing with Bigfoot people. Yeah, yeah, no. I'll just call you sometime. I sent those letters. You could give me a crash course on what one might say in an argument with Bigfoot people to make you seem more right. I'll forward you those threatening letters that I got.

So viable population question, uh, is like, so right now, you know, like when you're looking at wolf reintroduction, like the lowest folks are willing to go is a hundred animals. That's like the bare minimum. And there's a lot of folks that are, it'd be like pulling teeth to get them to go below 250 animals. And that's a pretty fast reproducing animal. You know, I was just doing a lot of research on, uh, Australian, uh, lyrebirds, which are pretty darn cool. That's a songbird, um, big songbird that doesn't even get around to thinking about reproduction on the male or female side till they're between five and seven years old. And it's like, think at all the stuff you got to survive to get to five or seven years old when you're a ground dwelling songbird. In a country with six million feral cats or whatever yeah mongooses

feral cats yeah uh kids with slingshots bb guns um and so like how does that i understand like the the model was set up to be manipulated but it is something that seems like it is kind of an arbitrary number. Well, that's another variable that goes into the model is age to first reproduction. And what it turned out for ocelots and many of the cats is how many, how long does a breeding female produce young and how many young do they produce? And ocelots typically only have one to two young compared to bobcats of two to four. And then, so, and ocelots reproduce well into the years. Bill Swanson, who is an expert on ocelot reproduction at Cincinnati Zoo, will have reproductively active males well beyond 10 years.

And same thing for females. They last reproductively active males well beyond 10 years. And same thing for females. They last reproductives. So all these variables kind of go under these models. And I'm by no mean an expert on them. That's why we have other people do them. And you really have to take it with a lot of grains of salt. It just kind of really gives you an ideal of, of say, I'd rather put in 250 wolves than 100 wolves because of these factors. And for us, it helped us identify what kind of information do we need most and what it turned out to be was how

many young does a female produce for how many years. And so it really kind of guides you into what kind of information to collect to get more refined estimates and things to worry about and not worry about. I want to keep moving with the chronology of the story of the ocelot. But if at some point there's a way to weave this in, I'd like to understand this. We will often say that if a female of whatever species, let's say we're talking about ocelots, like if she can successfully produce two, if she can have two offspring that make it to breeding age, she was successful and you would hold the population. Like the population remains static. Is that like an acceptable thing to say to somebody? Well,

what is it? The humans, you have to have at least 2.3 humans to maintain. Okay. Well, I learned that 20 years ago, maybe. But I think about that with salmon and stuff,

right? Is they're dropping, I don't know, thousands of eggs. And it'd be like, if two of those eggs makes it, the fish was successful. Yeah. Yeah.

Two of the eggs out of, or with sturgeon, they're putting in, producing in a lifetime millions of eggs. Yeah. If two of those make it, that's a successful fish. Yeah. And their, you know, their, their strategies just produce eggs and there's no parental care. And then you have the reverse where elephants may put in years for making sure their young survive to breeding age. So you have everything in between.

But yeah, 2.3 humans, I guess, to replace. And that seems logical, I guess. Can you real quick explain those strategies where you have, there's like, they have letters applied to them, right? Like the rabbit strategy or whatever. Oh, K selected species and R selected species. Yeah. That's right.

Where you have a ton of them and don't pay any attention to them. Yeah. That's R selected species. And help me know if I'm wrong. K selected species is where they invest a lot of energy and time in raising the young and making sure they reach breeding age. Yeah, like a black bear, right? She's going to spend two years tutoring her offspring, caring for and tutoring her offspring. Yeah, yeah.

And a rabbit's like, see ya. Yeah, I want to live. You get out of here. No, I know a lot of prey are like that, you know, the rodents and everything else. What was it that you actually wanted the ocelot for when you went out to catch one? When you said, I'm going to study ocelots, people were like, yeah, there's probably not any to study or whatever. But like, what really were you wanting one for?

We had everything you could list at the time. We wanted to learn about its home range size, how many there were, what kind of social organization do they have, what are their activities, just the basic natural history. Like enough to fill out an Audubon guidebook. Yeah, and we probably did. We probably did at the time. That was the very first ocelot study,

and another one started in Venezuela a few months later, but nothing was known at that time about ocelots. It was the first ocelot study. Yeah, yeah. When you had to go ask around about how to go get one, lay out what kind of sets you were making and how you were catching them. Because it's kind of weird. It's like a thing I haven't seen, a strategy that I don't know why it's not more widely used.

Well, we've used box traps. Like using live birds. Yeah, we use box traps. Well, and they stay alive, by the way. I just want to make that point. We use box traps. Yeah, I mean, okay, sure. Tomahawk box traps. But imagine the night that pigeon spends separated by some quarter-inch mesh from an ocelot.

We started off with chickens for the first 20 or 30 years. And it's amazing. It's not what you would think. I would walk up in the morning with the check traps, and the ocelot would be sound asleep, and the chicken was trying to pick fleas off the ears of the ocelot. Are you serious? I've borne that multiple times. That happened several times. They attained a relationship during the night.

So it doesn't destroy the chicken's psyche. Well, it's hard to tell a chicken's psyche, but I didn't detect that. No, I'm not condemning it. I mean, it's like – plus, you have every justification when you're trying to, like, find out what's going on with something that's going to be, like, wiped off the face of the earth. If it gives a chicken a little bit of a heartburn for a night. Well, Ted was my favorite rooster. And he did – he lost one eye in a battle with a raccoon and things, but this was in 1982, 83. But he persisted, and he caught several ocelots, big white rooster.

I would place the roosters a certain distance apart so in the early morning they'd be crowing to each other. Oh. And it was like a natural predator call. Those, I'm sure, had helped ocelots. That's a great idea. Yeah. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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Describe the trap now the like it's kind of like where you go to set it and how you figured out where to go set it can we fit i want to know why we don't use chickens anymore it's pigeons now well they crap too much and eat too much food it's a basic reason there's pigeons it's cheaper or they do less of both. They have less defecation problem and less food. And they're very happy. And the birds, we take very good care. I mean, you wouldn't believe the care we take care of the pigeons. And the aviary, they're treated very well.

But it's very effective. And so I use white pigeons to try to increase the light during the night. And we'll catch as many bobcats and ocelots. Typically 100 trap nights, 150 trap nights to catch one ocelot or one bobcat. That's 10 traps out for 15 nights to get 150 trap nights. One trap per one night is one trap night. Yeah, I'm tracking you. So they're pretty easy. But jaguarundis in Mexico, there's over 1,000 trap nights to catch one one trap per one night is one trap night. Yeah, I'm tracking you. So they're pretty easy.

But jaggerundies in Mexico, there's over a thousand trap nights to catch one jaggerundie. They're very, very difficult to catch. And that's why no one's published on them, I guess, so far. All right. Explain the set, like the set for an ocelot. And I want to get back into the bait thing too.

Okay. Well, first you find out where there's a local roadkill, if you can. So there's probably a population nearby. Then you look for the densest brush near that roadkill. Just one roadkill? Pretty much, yeah. They're not all, but probably 80% of them will reflect where a population is.

Yeah, it's really pretty effective. Well, you can't be telling me that every time you drive down the southern Texas highway and you see a roadkill that there's a population of ocelots nearby. Well, there have been very few locations of roadkills. They've only been near the two populations with the exception. Oh, roadkill of an ocelot. Yeah. Sorry, sorry. Yeah, no, I was. Oh, I got it.

You thought he meant any old roadkill. Yeah, I'm thinking, oh, there's a dead Nile guy. Let's set up an ocelot trap. I know, I know. No, so you find the recent ocelot roadkill dead and then go from there. Yeah. That makes sense. Okay, but in 82, there weren't any dead ocelots on the road.

There weren't. And I understand now. The refuge only had 7 to 14, and no one had reported a recent ocelot road kill there. The other larger population, 80% of the ocelots occur on five to seven ranches, large ranches. And you were probably on one of them, the Hacienda Eteria Ranch, just recently. We believe there's probably some nearby there. But these are large ranches away from the two roads that are there. There are only two highways. And so the big population is away from roads.

That explains part of it. So when you went out to catch one, you just went to the last place. You know what I mean? How did you decide, like, well, here's a place to try? It was the last place known to have seen one or something? A couple of old trappers told me where they trapped them in the past.

Oh, okay. And sure enough, it's really the same place they've been trapping them since 1940s and 50s. And they're still there in those few places. Okay, and talk about the set now. The box trap, so we find the densest brush and the largest patch of that densest brush that we can. Thorn shrub is their habitat.

There'll be 35 different species of thorny shrub species there. It's an amazingly, beautifully complex shrub community. Any place we can find a trail in that that we can get to easily or where a trail intersects another trail. It increases your odds. So we'd look for that. And so a history of cats, good habitat, and then looking for trail sites that place the trout. And then a pretty good chance you'll catch a cat if there's one there in a short period of time.

You know, we didn't talk about that. I meant to ask you about what were the hell people doing with them when they were trapping? Like in the, whatever, in the 40s, 50s, 60s, when they were getting knocked. Oh, yeah, yeah. Were they selling them in the fur markets? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Were they selling them in the fur markets? Yeah, yeah, they were. There's a record I just sent Neil from the 1940s of these two ocelots that were trapped in Starr County, which is right adjacent to Rio Grande. And he sold them for $2.50 per pelt.

So they would sell them in the old days. And like a lot of the pelts, they'd sell them. So you could go down and get, like yourself, yourself an ocelot jacket or something back then. Yeah, yeah. If you go back for enough time, there was a very popular trading thing on the frontier. People didn't have cash. They couldn't spend money. So if you wanted to get some milk or some eggs, you'd trade something. And often a ocelot pelt was very valuable in trading.

And the Comanches would use them for saddles. They would just throw an ocelot pelt on the horse and then ride on that. It's kind of a prestigious thing. Riding style. Yeah, right. And the quivers for the arrows would be ocelot quivers, ocelot pelts. It was really interesting how it was important in the frontier. Just because they were so cool looking, probably.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So when you caught the first one, what did you catch down? A chicken or a pigeon? The very first one of all the cats we've caught, 250, we technically caught it on a padded leg hold trap, a two and a half padded leg. Oh, you did? That was pre-live trap.

Yes. Before you were using live traps. Yeah. And we, in our federal permit, we had in there the fact that we could use leg hole traps, box traps, or even hounds. Okay. And John, my buddy who's out of Maine, helped

me catch that first ocelot on the Guadalupe Ranch. And he was working on, so he had the padded leg holds. And so, so that all the other cats since then, since nine, that very first cat had been with box traps. Five days later, we caught another, I caught another ocelot with a box trap. Uh, so, so yeah, it's, it's, and, and the chicken thing has worked around the world. Again, we've, we've trapped 12 different

species of cats all on chickens. So it's kind of amazing how that's universal. Well, you got a box trap and in the back of the, where you put the bait, there's a separate little cage. Exactly. And the bird hangs out in there. And they're protected and, and they're food

and water all they want to eat, but cats like chickens. And he comes in there and triggers a thing and, uh, kicks the treetle or whatever and the door shuts. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. We used to put lures sometimes or we'd hang some

flagging, hang a feather so it blows in the wind or some fur. We found we don't even need to use lure. If you just have the bird there, that works as good as anything. They'll find that thing. Yeah. Yeah.

No lure. Well, yeah. I like that crowing trick, putting them out so they crow They'll find that thing. Yeah. No lure. I like that crowing trick, putting them out so they crow back and forth. Yeah, it made me feel good. It made me think that I actually had it figured out and stuff. But I don't know. I think it helped a little. Go ahead, John. I was going to say your PhD student in that video, though, was doing a little like covering the floor of that trap.

They are sensitive a little bit to the floor of that trap so they are sensitive a little bit to the to the metal well i i try to teach that to make sure them i i teach the perfect set and then setting dirt along the metal and the treadle and and encase it in brush so there's only one entrance from the front and i give them the perfect scenario but but i've put traps where they're even sitting almost in the air and sometimes. And so I start off with the ideal trap, but you can, at least for all slots, you can catch them other ways. Not a perfect trap.

So did it make the news when you caught one or was there like, was there media around the fact that you started catching them? No, I, I always, for the first two years, I thought that it was, I would catch them and work them up all by myself. And I always thought this was a very, I felt like it should have more attention than it was getting. I was just there by myself and doing the cat research. And a couple of years later, there started to be some media things. Yeah, well, after a while, there was a ton of media things. Yeah, there've been a variety of, there have been a lot of things over the years.

And then when you came into it, I would have thought that at that point, they get ESA protection in what, 82? 82 for the U.S., yeah. Why did that not lead to – why was that insufficient to like – why were the numbers still going down? Like in 85, they're still going down. Well, the numbers were probably very similar, but the genetic erosion of the same population, we were monitoring decline of heterozygosity or the genetic variation. So that's why it was going down. The numbers were probably about the same. I think for the last, since we started 38 years ago, the numbers have always been about the same, but they increase in wet years and you have high prey. But when the droughts hit,

you get a two, three-year drought. It affects the ocelot survival. We've documented that through our research that you get a severe drought six months into it. The vegetation is really pretty much gone. The rodents and rabbits that decline from that vegetation. And then you see failure of ocelot reproduction about 12, 18 months later. And that can only go for so long when you have so few cats. And the ocelots disperse. A lot of the subordinate or subdominant individuals will disperse. And we found that the home ranges of the residents will expand.

So the residents will survive because they've got it figured out. They know what the home range is. They know where to hide, where to find food. Every night, they really intensively explore their home range. And they have an understanding of real-time understanding of where the prey is, where the dangers are, where the coyotes' risks are and things. And so they know when the prey starts to decline, the residents probably push off the dispersers, and the dispersers are the ones that die. They have much lower survival.

They die from road kills. Yeah, hit by cars. Yeah, that's the number one form of mortality now is road kills. What else? You were mentioning coyotes. Coyotes will kill them? We've never documented that. I'm sure it would happen for kittens at least.

But the fact that they use really dense brush, most of the time coyotes won't go into that brush. But if a pack of coyotes found one in the open, it probably would be a problem. But there's enough other things that would kill them. We've had them die from rattlesnake bites, ingesting a grasper into the lungs. Oh, yeah. Mange. Do you lose them too just from people being like, what the hell is that, and then shoot it?

Which seems to be a real thing. Well, it happened only once that I can think of, in the late 1990s. You did it, Neil? No, not me. I wasn't identifying myself. I was just saying I haven't once. Oh, that was a not me. That was a one time. Exactly, yeah.

That's how he got interested in the subject. The story I heard was it was a hunter out of Houston, shot one with a bow and arrow. Yeah. Because he thought it was a bobcat. Oh, okay. And about one out of 10 bobcats have spots just like an ocelot. So it's really hard to distinguish. Well, but you've got the whole tail problem.

Yeah. You know, and a bobcat has sometimes surprisingly long tails, six inches, you know? So, so someone who's not out there hunting all the time can fall into that. Yeah. That happens all the time, even with people that know what they're looking at. I was a young biologist. I was, it was about 1984, 1985.

And I was working on a piece of ground and called Mike Tuis out in 1985 and told him that he, that a buddy of mine and myself had seen an ocelot. And it was close by in Jim Wells County. And sure enough, an ocelot population hadn't been found there since. It was Bobcat. Yeah, it was Bobcat. We didn't know what we were talking about uh what if someone were to say if the population just doesn't seem to have changed since 1982 that maybe in fact they're not endangered maybe there just aren't

that many of them never Never were and aren't. How do you handle that question? Yeah, it's a good question. There are definitely many more in the range of Mexico, Central and South America. There are thousands there. So we're really talking about the U.S. population, which is fewer than 100. And so probably the hardest question and the answer is, why should we care? Why should we spend a lot of money?

I don't struggle with that one, but go on. Okay. Some people do. And I just, for me, it's just that the people that are involved with ocelot conservation have already gone past that question. Regardless of what kind of argument you want to use, they're determined they want to keep them for whatever reason. And there are a variety of reasons. Well, I want you to get into that.

Sell me on wanting to keep them. I mean, I'm on board because I don't like us playing God and deciding that we're going to eliminate species from the planet. But sell me on that idea. But also talk about the one I'm talking about where if since the moment, the first time someone ever studied them, they found like, okay, it looks basically like this. And then that remains static for 30, 40 years. How do you demonstrate that there's a problem because there's no baseline there's no real baseline idea right like if you were going in in 82 to do like baseline data gathering and not like what are things supposed to look like but what do they look like and it looked looked like that, and it still looks like

that. How do you convince people that we're facing a problem? Well, I think that just the fact when that one, what we call the refugee population only has seven to 14 individuals. If you're lucky, you have half of that that's female, seven. And there's a saying called demographic stochasticity. Sooner or later, you're going to have 14 males and no females. Just by chance, over time, that's what happened with the seaside dusky sparrow, came down to six individuals. They all turned out to be males and that was extinction of the species. There's some real practical reasons why we should think that they were more widely spread. Right now, if you were to look on the coast in the center of the population for ocelots,

we had Hurricane Hannah come through. What was it? Maybe five, six weeks ago, maybe a little bit longer. Hurricane Hannah, it was category one hurricane. The eye of that hurricane came right over top dead center, the center of the universe for ocelots in Texas. If in fact that would have been say a category four hurricane like Hurricane Laura that hit the southwest coast of Louisiana, we probably would have lost that population of ocelots. So if you've got them geographically confined in an area right there, and they all exist. You know, 80% of them got to be below 20 foot in elevation. And you get a storm surge, you get the, you know, you get everything that comes along with a major hurricane.

There's no way that they will last and will last for very much longer just with that one particular source of potential catastrophe to them. Yeah, I got you. That's an interesting point. And also that idea that if you have carrying capacity for such a small number, I never thought about the fact that you could wind up in a situation where they're all the same gender. Yeah, that's the demographic stochasticity. You've got the environmental stochasticity. You get a five-year or ten-year drought, that might do it.

Every hundred years, we get a five- or ten-year drought. And we've got habitat elsewhere. Not right next to it, but habitat elsewhere that's perfectly good ocelot habitat, not occupied. What is not – what is like not worked? Why has ESA protection not been – I guess if you look at esa protection as being keep it from going extinct we're here to keep it from going extinct um that i mean that's not what it is but if you look at that being success you could argue like okay it was successful because they're not extinct but if you look at esa protection as being a vehicle that would lead to

recovery and it's not a one-way road and the expectation would be you know i think it only happens two percent of the time um i'm not saying that's the fault of the esa but has a very low success rate in terms of something going on the esa list uh and getting off is two percent of things i think a variety of things happens. It goes on and then they realize that it shouldn't have gone on because they find other populations. It goes on and it's already gone. Or it goes on and becomes gone. Yeah.

So not many things make it off. But what is preventing since 1982 to now, what has made it that now we're not like the same way we are about bald eagles, where you almost get sick of looking at bald eagles? Yeah. In Texas, it's 97% private land. Probably unlike any other state, Texas retained its private lands. So any management of conservation wildlife is dependent on private landowners. And Neil can probably address this as good as anyone.

The disincentives that are built into the Endangered Species Act and the fear that many landowners have that they'll lose their ability to manage the lands they wanted in the way that they want to gives them no incentive to even identify that they have an endangered species on the property. In their view, for many of them, it's a disincentive. Neil, you think? Yeah. So, I mean, if you look at ocelots, for example, 100 ocelots, probably greater than 70% of those ocelots are on private lands in Texas. And these are large ranches. There's against the tide desire by those private landowners to somehow conserve ocelots for reasons of their own.

Some of those are stewardship reasons that it would be a shame, given that treasure that exists on those lands to let that species go extinct. Now, if you look over at the Endangered Species Act, and let's say it's a ream of paper, you know, they just print the whole act out and everything that has to do with it, about a ream of paper. About two sheets of those papers say something about private lands. And basically it says, thou shalt not kill an endangered species intentionally, absolute, except for some cases and some nuanced exceptions with wolves and other things. And thou shalt not take an endangered species incidental to any other land use practice. That's it. Want to say that last part again?

Thou shalt not take an endangered species as it being incidental to an otherwise legal land use practice. Give me an example of that. An example of that, an example of an ocelot is if you've got a fence line that runs through ocelot habitat, and you were to disturb the habitat by clearing out that fence line, that might be considered by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to be an action that alters the behavior or the breeding probabilities of ocelots, and therefore, it's a prohibited act under the Act. I follow you. I thought you meant that it would lead to like the direct death of, not that it could lead to... That's what it originally was meant for in the Act itself. But it's interpreted now as deteriorating habitat type or whatever.

Sure. Affecting the behavior. Take just affecting the behavior. Sure, yeah. And, of course, we came up with that in, what, 1972, right? And so we're driving a 1972 Ford Galaxy 500 policy trying to work with 2020 conditions, trying to work with things like groups of landowners that are trying to work with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to figure out how to recover an endangered species. And the Fish and Wildlife Service sometimes, through no

fault of their own, can't figure out how to get out of the way and to let it happen. And, you know, it's been called at least once vigilante conservation. You know, when that was first laid out there that way, I thought, well, that's kind of a pejorative term. But then when you really think about it, vigilante is a group of citizens that have taken up a cause because the officials that are supposed to be doing it have abandoned the cause. And so – What would be an example of vigilante conservationism? Vigilante conservation would be, we have landowners that know they have ocelots

that would like to do three or four things. One is to survey for those ocelots to know where they are, where they are, and how many of them there are. Well, if you do that, then there's some confidentiality standards that those landowners would like. They'd like for that information not to be leaked to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service simply because the Fish and Wildlife Service would then have to make that available to a lot of these organizations that would file lawsuits and force the Fish and Wildlife Service to do the two things that landowners don't like to hear, and that's enforce and have the authority over. So if they don't, okay.

If you want, like a rancher wants to know or a landowner wants to know, do I have them? I think they're totally cool. I wish I had more. I'd like to know if I have one, but I don't want the feds to know. Who are they trusting to sort of like keep track? That's the problem. And part of the problem is you're inclined to not allow people like Mike Tuis to put his graduate students and researchers on the ground to survey for ocelots. Because it's going to lead to trouble.

Yeah. You know, we think there's somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 ocelots in Texas. There could be more. It's an unknown. So that's an extrapolation, right? We don't know how many there are. We don't know exactly where they are. We've got some known populations.

One known population is on the East Foundation's El Sals Ranch. So we've got the largest population known. And we're not afraid of the Endangered Species Act or the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, perhaps foolishly. But nevertheless, we're not afraid. We're going to continue to work the research, management, recovery system, and we feel like it's a stewardship responsibility, as do other ranchers, to recover that species. There's, for whatever reason, and it can be a religious reason. It can be a reason that, look, we don't want this to go out on my watch, whatever that is. But you've got to take into account in that, at least in that part of the state, in a state that has 142 million acres of private lands, those private landowners are by and large the best conservationists there are. I mean, they care about that land. They've got a stake in it. And they've got a stake in the

future reputation for themselves as ranchers and caretakers of that ground. That's the scenario we're finding with ocelots is we just simply are trying to figure out how to get rid of the disincentives and be able to assure private landowners in and around that ocelot population that they can allow monitoring, research, and then proactive measures for, say, translocation. We're doing things like collecting semen from male ocelots so that we can perhaps impregnate zoo ocelots and have offspring that we might be able to, either from a wild population or from that crossbred zoo population, create another translocated population elsewhere so that we don't have to worry about that next hurricane that comes through turning into a Category 4. I mean, the clock is ticking on that type of catastrophe when you get a population confined to that small of a geographic area and they're that small.

If you had to characterize the sort of anti-fed sentiment around, let's say someone is, they know, their family knows they have ocelots on their property. They don't want to be rolled up into any kind of activities with the scientific community at a federal level for fear that someone's going to come in and go like, oh my gosh, you do have ocelots. I'm shutting this place down. Because you're not going to be allowed to do X, Y, and Z. Maybe you're not going to be able to do the very things that made it that it was good ocelot habitat anyways, like sort of

having economic viability on your property, which makes it that you don't need to develop it, for instance. Exactly. But do you find that like the average sentiment that's like the anti-fed sentiment is educated and precise, meaning they're like, oh, I would love to tell them, but if I tell them, then this could happen to me and it would look like this? Or is it just generally, I hate the feds? I think it's across the board, obviously, because I mean, you got, I mean, in our state, we've got 350,000 decision makers, 350,000 landowners. So it's going to be across the board there. And there's experiences that they've seen with other species. So you take something like the golden cheek warbler that may have been used in some cases to halt development in and around the Austin area. You take something like the dunes sagebrush lizard that in some cases was used to halt oil and gas development in the Permian Basin.

Like was used opportunistically. Sure. Yeah. Like someone wanted a thing to happen and that was the way to make it. Or something wanted something to not happen and that bird or that lizard was a way to make it not happen. That gave you legal grounds to get your way. Now, we've got the flip side of the coin with the ocelot, real interestingly. There's organizations that use it as a mascot for fundraising that then don't do much for the ocelot.

We've got, I think this is a good thing, our Texas Department of Transportation, you can get an ocelot license plate. There's more ocelot license plates in Texas than there are ocelots in Texas. In fact, you can see more driving between San Antonio and Austin. You can see more ocelot license plates than there are ocelots in deep south Texas. So people love them. You'll see ranchers with ocelot license plates. So you know ranch people love them. You'll see ranchers with ocelot license plates. So you know ranchers love them. They want to figure out how to recover ocelots without putting large

ownerships that depend on economic viability at stake. And so they need I think it's – I think it boils down to just raw trust in economics. And it's not just the – and it's not that there's bad people at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. There's good people. They're caught managing an act that in some cases is antiquated and there's sophisticated organizations that have figured out how to sue them and they know in every conversation you'll have with the fish and wildlife service over anything it'll all come down to you know okay what happens when you know group x group y or group z uh sues us because we've worked out a deal with you as a private landowner. So, okay, here's how we're going to make sure that we're fully solid on our conservation measures.

We're legal on maintaining confidentiality. All of these hoops that you've got to jump through. And for some landowners that just look i'm suspicious when i have to apply for permits when you're telling me you have enforcement authority over me and those types of things so well i think in the spirit of uh antiquated and sophisticated uh we should probably uh take a quick crack at defining vigilante again. I think that was, if I may, a slightly romanticized Texan definition of vigilante. Okay. Uh, where, uh, oftentimes, especially if we look back through history at our vigilante groups, uh, some would characterize the Texas Rangers as one of them that they aren't just folks stepping in and taking care of things that aren't getting done. uh like it's implied that it's like justice being done but oftentimes that's um some self-serving

justice as well right so yeah if you top it with the word conservation then you're sort of qualifying it from vigilante uh assholeism yeah yeah i'm fine with that. That's a fair comment. Because if I said vigilante charity, right, vigilante charity, you'd be like, I don't know what it is, but it sounds like a good thing. Yeah, it sounds like somebody throwing

money out the window. That's great. So I was letting it ride because it's vigilante conservation, not vigilante destruction. Take a push at it because I use that one all the time. No, I think just revisiting that point is all that was needed. So the computer is spoken. ESA reform, like Endangered Species Act reform,

is one of those things I'm like, you hear it all the time, and I'm leery about it because I support it, but I probably don't support it in the way that other people support it. It's one of those things that's become to mean, it's become, it's happened to the word conservation. Like, I could say, oh, I'm pro-conservation. You know, like, different politicians say I'm pro-conservation. Different politicians can say I'm pro-conservation. You're like, what exactly do you mean? And you realize that they're talking about something that you're not talking about. And a lot of people that talk about Endangered Species Act reform,

a significant amount are saying, what I mean by that is I would like the damn thing to go away. And a significant amount are saying, I mean that it could be more effective if we change it and make it more flexible to account for what you're talking about in the situation of the ocelot. So for me to now say, if someone asks, do you support Endangered Species Act reform?

I'd have to say, I'll have to ask you a series of questions before I answer because I don't know what you're getting at. Yeah, I agree with you. When I say that, and I don't say reform often, I just say changes to the Endangered Species Act or how it's administered, and I don't care which, I'm looking for better performance on private lands. Why that? What's the big deal there? When you look at more than one-third of endangered species that are currently listed entirely depend on private lands, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 75% have a large portion of their range across private lands. So if we've got an Endangered Species Act that's not performing as well as it could perform on private lands, then maybe it needs some reform. But I get it about being worried about cracking the act open.

If we're driving that 1972 Galaxy 500, we crack it open and we want to reupholster the seats and put a new, more efficient engine in it so it's not getting three miles to the gallon. Somebody else might want to put some whole bunch of other stuff in there that, you know, and oftentimes you'll hear people just lay out, you know, the-liner, well, the act needs more teeth. Well, that's one of those things that means a different thing to different people. like policemen and enforcement officers, rather than doing whatever it takes by any means possible to result in the recovery of endangered species across all lands, whether it's public lands or private lands. I think it would be phenomenal if we could find ways to better work with private landowners on ESA issues in a way that still allowed the ultimate goal to move forward. But I do think that the way we do it now and the way that we handle private

interest leads to a thing where it's kind of like the spotted owl syndrome, where a spotted owl, after the whole debacle with logging and spotted owl a spotted owl didn't mean that word didn't mean a bird anymore right like when you hear the word spotted owl you don't think like oh it's a little owl that lives in old girl forest you think like spotted owl is federal overreach right because there are things that we do that really there are things that we do in the service of prolonging or saving species that makes them have like this entirely negative connotation in people's heads who have to suffer with it most and i think in around here in this neck of the woods the most egregious examples are what's been done to people around esa listing for wolves andSA listings for grizzlies which they've been recovered by definition for

decades yet you continue to make it hard on private landowners to go about their business because we like sure move the move the goalposts yeah move the goalposts all along and then that creates this sort of like this anti-wolf sentiment, this anti-grizzly sentiment that I don't think it's necessary to create the anti-wolf, anti-grizzly sentiment. Like, I don't think that you have to make that in order to save those things. There has to be a way to like reduce the friction and still hit the ultimate outcome. And it would probably come around from some form of reform. And I know what you're talking about.

I was a wildlife biologist for a timber company in the Pacific Northwest in the early 1990s. And so I was hated from both sides, right? Because I was inside the timber company, so I was hated by our loggers. But then you were a biologist. Yeah, I was a biologist, so I was hated by the others. But learn to work. Put habitat conservation plans together so that we could live with the spotted owl. There were huge financial reasons to do that. And so in the Pacific Northwest around spotted owls, marble murrelets, Pacific salmon, there's huge financial interests at being able to put together some

type of collaborative deal, a habitat conservation plan that worked for private lands and worked for endangered species. We don't necessarily have that with all species in all places. You know, when you've got a small salamander that shuts down what you think is a housing development that ought to go forward, you're likely to just shake your fist if you're the housing developer at that salamander. Figure out how you can hide the fact that it's there. You know, we don't want it on our property. It in and of itself becomes the enemy, right? We've got to figure out how to remove the disincentives, and this is the canned comment, right? Remove the disincentives and create incentives. That's easy to say. It's hard to do. It's a really hard thing to do,

to create those out-of-the-box incentives that always work with private landowners but it is doable hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the canadians whenever we do a raffle orstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season.

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. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service.

That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. What's the thing that landowners are primarily worried about if people know they have ocelots? Is it that they're worried about being able to drill? Like oil extraction?

Like what's the thing that they're mostly worried about losing? They're mostly worried about losing their ability to make spot decisions on land use. So, for example, the fence line situation I was telling you about, I've been worried on our own lands about road clearing and habitat that we might lose when we need to come in and clear an area so that we can increase the forage production capacity for the land. Those types of decisions, ranchers need to be able to make. Creating pasture for cattle or cattle.

Exactly. Exactly. Need to make sure that, you know, we're in a situation where we've got on staff scientists, biologists, and managers that know and understand that so we can craft a solution. We've got our friend right next door with Mike Tuas, who's the preeminent ocelot ecologist. But not every landowner feels that comfortable. And they tend, if you're a large ranch, you might have a family that you're responsible to and a board of directors that you're responsible to. And you've got a fiduciary responsibility to make sure that you don't lose your ability to manage that land. You don't lose your ability to graze a 10,000-acre pasture, let's say.

We've got to figure out how to make sure that people don't lose that. They gain the incentive or remove the disincentive for at least raising their hand and saying, you know, I've got ocelots, here they are working with, you know, Caesar Clayburgh group over here. But the first way to do that is to make sure that there's some confidentiality. So as they're stepping into the game, so to speak, they can do it with some safety. They can do it with a... Is it legal? I guess it's got to be.

Is it legal for someone to know that they have something, right? Okay, let's say there's an endangered species, right? And you got a ranch and you know it's on there. It's not like illegal for you to keep that secret. Nothing wrong with keeping it secret and managing for it and increasing their numbers. But how many of these ranchers, all right, how many of these ranchers are actually, let's say you know they're there. I just want to poke at the motives here.

You know they're there. You enjoy them being there. If you could shake a magic wand and have there be more, you would do it and there'd be more. You don't want to have anybody come in and tell you you can't do X, Y, and Z to keep your place solvent and viable, to keep your property in your family, functioning, cattle ranch, whatever you got. What are they doing in exchange? What are they proposing that they would do to help ocelots if they could somehow let the cat out of the bag? That was a good pun. Yeah, that was good.

Like, what would they do to make more of them? Or like, what would they do to contribute rather than just that they're just looking for a way to not be interfered with? Right. Like, what gift are they giving to the people? Or what gift are they giving to the cat? So I'm going to pitch some of that to Mike, but just to comment straight out, they can be an example to other landowners where we might translocate a population so that those landowners would agree.

Oh, I hadn't thought about the translocation. You know, we've got to have another population. I'm with you now. I think you mentioned that and I missed it. You know what? Look what's happening to those guys. Like hell am I going to let you let the cat loose here. I got you.

So that's the ask. That is one. There are some things that you can do. An ask would be, man, your place has none, could have some. Why don't you get on board? He's like, hell with that. The minute they let them go here, I'm screwed. And plus, we need to know from those landowners just – I mean, there's some real conservation benefit just knowing exactly how many ocelots there are, where they are.

There's some long-term habitat development that can be done. And ranchers know better than anybody how to develop habitat. And so that – I don't know. Mike, any? Yeah, yeah. Frank Eteria, he established one of the first conservation easements in 1987-88, where he set aside two different tracks. Each one was only about 200 acres each of the best ocelot habitat that is left in Texas, and created a conservation easement with Fish and Wildlife Service.

We've had 11 different territorial ocelots at the same time on these very small core habitats. And we consider that to be a source population, a source habitat, which I really believe that kind of serves like the heartbeat for that population in the ranch country. We've had several instances, I think at least eight different ocelots that moved from those very small patches onto the East Ranch there. So it's a very source.

And over the years, he added two more conservation easements with the Nature Conservancy in 2007 and 2009. And just about four or five years ago, put the remaining 10,000 acres into some kind of an agreement, mostly rangeland, but some kind of agreement to protect the ocelot into the future. So over time, although it's mostly grass and very little habitat in the rest of that ranch, it will eventually provide for all sluts. And that little pocket of habitat. Well, and that rest of the 10,000 acres, that's rangeland. When that starts to grow back, we have more carbon in the atmosphere,

and that's great for brush. Ultimately, the carbon in the atmosphere will help the brush. Hold on, explain that. Well, Neil, you're more of a rangeland. You threw that one out there. Now we're going to rabbit trail on this. I won't make you do it for long,

but you mean like carbon in the atmosphere decreases grassland and increases brush? Increases the opportunity for brush growth. Yeah. So it leads to grassland loss.

Right. Huh. Right. In what capacity? Because the precipitation changes? No, it's actually the, now, I'm not an expert on this. The biochemical changes that result in the better competitive ability for woody species versus grass to actually capture the resources on a site. No kidding.

Yeah. Water. So when you hear about like juniper encroachment and stuff, there's some factor there that could be linked to like more carbon or less carbon in the atmosphere that could lead to juniper encroachment on grasslands. Yeah, Neil, did you throw out that carbon thing? You shouldn't have thrown that carbon thing. No, we don't need to hang on it. I just really, I never heard that, man.

That's interesting. I got to slip one in. What's still, I'm confused at why, what's preventing if we have these core populations and you know that they are breeding, right? And we're not trapping them and shooting them legally as much as we were a hundred years ago. And so how come we just don't have like a, just a general increase in population and dispersal? Excellent question. Excellent question. A couple of things. One is the ocelot is a habitat specialist. It seeks the densest brush that you could find. 95% horizontal cover is ideal for that.

Can you explain that? The shrub layer is 15 feet or shorter. That's where the shrub layer occurs. And ocelots throughout the range will use different vegetation communities, but a common factor is extremely dense cover near the ground where the ocelot operates. But what's the percentage mean? Horizontal coverage. If you did a measuring line or a transect over the brush, it's called line intercept,

95% or more of that would be solid brush. It'd be just a wall of brush. And so they're very selective on that. And twice, once in the 80s and the 90s, we flew transects over the lower 13 counties of Texas. Can you hold on? I'm so confused. Picture like a very nice lawn. Okay? Uh-huh. That would be

0%. Well, no, no. And picture you're an ant going through a very thick lawn. Okay. Would that ant say this is 100% brush coverage as he finagles his way through thick grass?

Well, it depends on your grass, I guess. If you have a solid stand of grass, yeah, if it's spotty, maybe not. Okay. So if you measure, that's what I'm saying, if you measure 100 centimeters,

so I take a thing that has 100 centimeters, a stick, and I hold that stick up, 9.5 of those centimeter marks are going to have a piece of vegetation touching it. There are a few different ways to measure, but the. Okay. And then you identify what's called the drip line of each shrub, individual shrub, where the foliage, canopy, and then you consider that continuous. Now, I got you. And so if you measured over that, that's what – I got you. Because I was saying, that's a thick-ass brush at 95. Well, yeah. And what's interesting is those two small tracts that remain is what's left of the – they called it the El Jardin back in the early 1900s before the Rio Grande Valley was cleared. There was a lot of the El Jardin, the garden, Spanish, just solid brush.

And that was one of the last vestiges there are a lot of accounts of South Texas being a grassland or primarily a grassland. So that probably wasn't really good ocelot habitat except along the rivers where you had the really dense brush. Over time, because of stopping the fire and overgrazing, we've had more encroachment of brush over time and that's benefited the ocelots. So we've, we've actually helped the ocelot in some places in some ways. And there's some, some places like the ocelot population on the Etertias, there's a, there's a ranch there called the Punta Del Monte, and that's just the point of brush, the point of the woodland there.

Oh, is that right? Yeah. Yeah. And so that, that was the old Spanish name. So even as thick as we've seen it on the multiple South Texas ranches that we've gotten to hunt on, it's still not thick enough. Probably not. Because a rancher, if he has to ride a horse through that, says it's thick.

But it's a very special kind of thick. And we've done surveys, and we've found that less than 1%, really less than one-half of 1% of South Texas has that very special cover type. Less than one-half of 1%. Wow. And that's why they're rare. And that's what presents. They call it the brush country.

Yeah. Wow. It used to be the wild horse desert. It's like an asterisk. They need to have an asterisk after it. Kind of. Yeah. They're brushy.

Kind of brushy country. Yeah. So you've been on that ranch. That answers his question. Why are they not, if we're not just out shooting them willy-nilly and trapping them? Well, that's part of it. They don't have anywhere to go. But another important part is they're very poor dispersers because that spotting pattern that they have, they stick out like a sore thumb in the open.

So they need that dense brush to move from one area to the other. Those two populations are separated by less than 30 miles. And over 35 years, we've never documented one ocelot moving to the other. That's it. Even that just, that's all the questions I wanted to ask is, when you're throwing a collar on one of them, what's the farthest you've ever seen one of them go wearing a collar? 26 miles. And that went from the ranch population down to what we call the Port of Harlingen.

Typically, it's about 10 miles. And that usually ends the ranch population down to what we call the Port of Harlingen. Typically, it's about 10 miles. And that usually ends unsuccessfully being killed on the road. What happened to him? Well, he was killed on the road, too. The longest one. That's how we find him, the kill on the road. So this ideal of the disconnection. So the one you had that went the farthest.

Went farther than they normally fall. It went farther than they normally make it, but succumbed to the same thing. Yeah. And the problem is they go into the highly developed Rio Grande Valley, and there's a tense road network there. So it's just a gauntlet. Once they leave the population, they're going through a gauntlet that often is demolished along the road. Do they head, when you got a collar on one, do they head in a direction that makes sense? You know, I've always thought about that.

The outside doesn't have a map. Yeah, yeah. He has no clue where he's going. We don't really understand this stuff, though, because, like, you look at, I don't know, all kinds of stuff, man, like humpback whales, bowhead whales, these various sea turtle species that do insane stuff. My brother had a bunch of pigeons that were born in his yard. One day he drove the pigeons an hour and a half away, and they beat him home. Yeah. They never left his yard.

We use homing pigeons. So I don't know. He had it in his head. Well, those examples are different. A lot of those birds may use magnetic fields or the stars. Not cats. But my only point being, there could be some thing

we don't yet understand. That when a cat boogies, he boogies in a way that at least kind of makes sense. Sure. Yeah, I'm always, we by no means know everything. And I always, as a scientist,

you have to be open that you don't know everything. But I think about it a lot. And the ocelot's world is in the dark, and it can only see two feet above the ground. And its immediate world is surrounded by brush. It's in a very enclosed world. So when it boogies somewhere, you kind of wonder what kind of cues it's homing into. Some natural drainages, I think, may be a rough factor. And or maybe at a distance.

They can't see that far in the distance because of those factors. It's really – and so they don't have a map and they usually get in trouble. One more. I'm going to ask the same question a different way. Okay. Do the ones that take off take off in the same direction or is it willy-nilly? I think there may be some generality for that. And again, it probably is related to the

drainages, whatever cues that they see in the, I don't, I don't, if there's a big open grass stand, most of them won't go that way, but if there's some cover, some level of cover, even if it's 50% brush or something else, they'd prefer that over an agricultural field. Got it. So there may be some roughness, if it's 50% brush or something else, they prefer that over agricultural field. Got it. So there may be some roughness, but it's, I think for a lot of the cats, it's almost a random thing.

I'll tell you why I ask. I had one time in my mom's storage shed, I had 10 live snapping turtles in there. She'd have the door open. And they all went the right direction. And I later thought it has to be... Downhill? Yeah, it has to be the pitch. I would guess that.

I was like, they had to have gotten the yard because I followed a bunch up and down the beach. It had to have been that they just followed the contour. I guess that one. Snapping turtles are like, I need to get to the water. They were all going. It had to be that they just followed the contour. See, I'm a mammologist. I guess that one. Yeah. Why would a snap turtle is like, I need to get to the water.

I'm not going to go uphill. Yeah. I bet there are some cues like that, that different taxons respond different ways. That's interesting. Anytime I've headed to the water, it's always been downhill. If you're playing crashes in the mountains, you follow the creeks down. Yeah. Uh,

yeah. It, when we were laying out some, when you were working with Corinda, put down some, some things that we wanted to discuss, you had three motivations that drive ocelots. And then parenthetically,

it says, and most small cats is, uh, sex, hunger, and fear. Uh, I've learned that from my two outdoor cats

that are pretty walled. And I just sit around and watch them. You better watch out because Cal will hunt them down and kill them. Cal's not an anti-cat crusade. Well, he is. Feral cats. Well, no, I appreciate him more than most of them. He's a soft man with a dog and a hard man with a cat.

Yeah, I like dogs more, Cal. I like dogs more than cats, but I keep a few around for behavioral observations. Any animal helps you out tremendously. There's so many cues that help hunters and well worth your time to have an animal in your life. And being an anti-cat isn't entirely correct. I am shocked at the duality of people's morals when it comes to domestic cat ownership. Yeah, that you don't like the guy that hunts two pheasants a year,

but meanwhile your cat, that feral and free-wandering house cats kill more birds than there are americans every year yes yeah um and i i did on this subject uh like what what is the is there overlap between a domestic cat population and is there a concern for disease transmission? That toxoplasmosis, I believe, is what it is. Good question. Yeah, there's right near the El Salas Ranch is a small community of 100 people called Port Mansfield. And there have been some studies that have shown feline leukemia or some disease. 100 people, 2,000 cats. Go ahead.

Well, you probably, yeah. And what I worry about them is the bobcats probably coming into town or the edge of town, which they frequently do, getting that disease to bobcat and then into the ocelot population only about four or five miles away. And that's one thing we worry about. Mange is another thing. Coyotes will get mange. Usually a different kind of mange.

Cats will get notoidric mange, and they get sarcoptic mange. But we worry about house cats. But usually cats won't live too long. Coyotes will kill them. Great horned owls will kill them in the wild. Although surprisingly, some places you can find some house cats, but most of the time they won't live kill them in the wild. Although surprisingly, some places you can find some house cats, but most of the time they won't live too long in the wild.

How do they arrange themselves? Like when you have a little population, you have to imagine that they're structured somehow, right? I mean, they're interacting with each other. You're talking about ocelots or house cats? No, ocelots. Okay. Yeah. I mean, they're interacting with each other. You're talking about ocelots or house cats? No, ocelots. Okay, yeah.

Ocelots, yeah, it's kind of the typical system, social relationship for the 33 species of small cats. Most people don't realize that. But I'm just amazed. There are 33 species of small cats, and many of them show the same system where the strategy of the female is to breed and find a home range that's big enough that will support her young, raising her young over a year or two, even with variations of drought and wet periods. But the male's strategy is to try to, and so the female wants to make sure her young survive to breeding age. And the male strategy does not take part of caretaking for the young, but it wants to breed with as many females as it can. So that male is monitoring the territory of one female, two females, or sometimes three.

And that means it spends a lot of its time traveling and checking to find out when the female is inestrus or reproductively active. And if it wants to overlap two home ranges, two females, it's moving a lot. Getting hit by cars. Well, yeah, if there are roads in between, there will be. But on the ranches where there aren't roads, they're moving a lot. So they're optimizing their ability to spread the genes that way. The female, once she knows that the males aren't going to help with raising the young any.

So it's a really interesting strategy. And the males, I think, for many small cats, they'll monitor the females and probably they'll fight with other males. And they definitely defend the territories. We've had three instances of one male killing another male. All cats will kill other cats, different species, same species. Um, and the bigger cats kill the smaller cats pretty easy. Uh, but, um, I, I've got a photo of this one ocelot and a jaguar in Mexico, and you can tell as it's out of watering hole. And the jaguar is about to kill that ocelot. So cats.

Oh, really? And you caught him in a photo at that moment? Well, another person in Mexico. It's one photo. And they're both responding to the flash of the camera. But that ocelot, that first, there are two photos. In that first photo, all the hair standing out on the tail of that ocelot. And it's one hind leg is already, looks unusual, like it's already broken.

I think they already had a bite before that. And three seconds later, the next camera, they're both looking back intensely at each other. And I bet if it had another three seconds, that ocelot would be dead. Yeah. So that's a problem. But they display a lot, and they try not to fight. They scent mark their home ranges and territories. So that's a problem, but they display a lot and they try not to fight. They scent mark their home ranges and territories.

They don't want to fight because if you break a canine or you lose one eye, your chances of surviving much longer is not good. If you had to crystal ball it, right? How long have you been messing with ocelots for? 38 years. Okay. So what year will it be in 38 years? It'll be 2058. No.

The hell? I'm a wildlife scientist. I didn't take math. You did the math right. What year is it? Nailed it. 2058. 2058. In 2058, our ocelots is gone.

In Texas, they're still around. You think so? Yes. Yeah. 2058. Yeah. Yes, I do. Because you have the East Foundation

who's going to work with some other landowners and do what it takes to maintain those into the future. I'm convinced. And hopefully get the translocation. All I ever do anymore is read about bad stuff, man. I'm glad to hear this. Well, you know, I probably changed my attitude five or ten years. I spent the first 30 years pretty pessimistic and giving presentations that people come up with at the end and say, I wish you weren't so pessimistic.

Are you just being strategic by being optimistic? No, I really believe that. Really? Yeah. You're not trying to play the long game a little bit with me? No. No, I really believe that. I think it's a dumb and dumber approach.

I mean, there's a chance that ocelots are going to make it. Well, if we do the things we need to do, and I think we will. Really? Yeah. Tell people, give people a little rundown of what they can do to find out more about ocelots and more about the work to save ocelots, how people might be involved. Yeah. Well, one is check out our website, the Cesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute and the East Foundation. I'm sure that you can get some information from both of those.

Yeah, eastfoundation.net. Also, we've got a feature film coming out that you've seen produced by Ben Masters and Finn Fur and Feather and Cesar Kleberg and East Foundation collaborated on that along with Fish and Wildlife Service. It's a 30-minute feature on the plight of ocelots in South Texas. That's part of a bigger set of productions that Texan by Nature, a nonprofit that was formed by Laura Bush, is helping sponsor through Finn Fur and Feather Films. Yeah, he did the – that's the dude that did the – Border and the Wall. Yeah, he did that.

And they did that Wild Horse film. Yeah. Unbranded. Unbranded. Unbranded. Ben Masters. In fact, he spends some time here in Bozeman every year. But that is coming out, and that will be out in December.

And that's a good just basic synopsis of the issue from both a biological – well, you've seen it from both a biological perspective. And it lays out the two sides of the issue in a little bit of an abbreviated form, but it does. He got some incredible footage for that as well. And real quick, I want to mention Karen Hickson also was one of the founders of that film. But he got incredible five hours worth of film on the ocelots, a lot of it based on this one mother and her two young. And the two young are only seen together in the very first image. The male dies shortly thereafter, but from there on. Dies what?

Total guess, but I could easily see a dozen things it's stumbling into. A big five-foot rattlesnake on that ranch. Okay. Could easily do it. A coyote stumble, a bobcat. There that ranch. Okay. Could easily do it. A coyote, stumble a bobcat. There are a variety of things that could do it. And I think he has one segment of also drinking water for six minutes. He has another of it regurgitating.

It takes like two minutes for the sauce to regurgitate. Fascinating film. Yeah. It's a little quirky. And it's really good. It's a piece. And throughout that film, you see the mother training her young. It's constantly calling it, getting it to follow,

making small vocalizations. It's nursing it while coyotes are howling off in the distance. It's almost like a calming effect on that kitten, nursing, and they're both sitting there calming and calming behavior. It's leading it from one cover patch to another cover. So the sex, hunger, and fear, I think, are pure. And I get that from my backyard cats. You know, the males from the neighboring houses come in for the sex.

They're constantly hunting the birds. And then the fear is if I just make a noise, they're running for cover. And that's throughout the cat king, the small cats at least. Let me drop something hopeful on you. So we've worked hard with the Fish and Wildlife Service over the last four or five years just to basically help them understand the rancher's side of the situation. And we have some strong and influential people within the Fish and Wildlife Service that have got it. They've got it figured out. And they are working on the inside to try to figure out how we can do this, separate and aside from any reforming the Endangered Species Act or anything like that.

It's just what can we do with what we have and how can we make this work? And we've got some really dedicated people in there that share the same objectives that we share, understand that we are serious about it. We sink more funding into research on that species than anyone else, and we're there for the long run. And this is not just a flash in the pan. And at least for me, I don't want that cat blinking out on my watch. Yeah. Well, I mean, I wish you best luck in that move because I think if someone's out there and they would be willing to have some and willing to take some steps but don't want to get steamrolled, I sure hope that there's a – it sure seems to me

that we would collectively find a path forward for that individual, man. I mean, you know, and not have a difficult to navigate bureaucratic entanglement laid out in front of them. It's supposed to be part of how the North American model works, too. I mean, it really does come back and apply to, look, this is how we are supposed to handle our our public trust yeah that we've that we have in this country it's supposed to work that way we've got a lot of things working that way that are run through the state game and fish agencies of course they have commissions where they can turn on a dime many Many of them do. Fish and Wildlife Service, the responsibilities that they have over endangered species, a little bit different. But we've got to make it work within that public trust doctrine of the North American model.

We've got to figure it out. Cal, you got any final wrap-ups? Cal's going to go vigilante on them cats. Wildlife management is hard you know i mean it's i'm sure there are a lot of folks trying to manage species on the public land side of the fence that are staring into the private land saying how easy it would be if only and i think one of the you you know, I mean, as far as like land specifically managed for wildlife in the U S that is privately held, I think you're still a larger amount of land and privately held acres than all the national parks in the lower 48 combined. Um, I mean, land owned for wildlife owned yet with, yeah, with the stated purpose of wildlife. Most of that's for hunting, right?

And, you know, the thing that those pieces of land miss that are on the public land side of things, in a lot of cases, not all cases, is the public has a voice like as, as a nation sometimes in how invested we're going to be in a species. And that kind of lacks on, um, the ocelot side of things, right? It's like, oh, that's a good point. You're going to be doing advocacy work on ocelots every, every day.

Yeah. I know. And you're like, yeah. And're like, yeah, and with the public perspective is, and I'll never see the damn thing because I can't go there. Cal made me think of something I think that's fundamental is that these vast ranches and even small ranches, they'll generate often

more income from their hunting operation of deer and quail than they do from the cattle operation. So they have incentives to hire a lot of our students, undergraduate graduates, come and work on their ranches of biologists to keep the habitat there. And that fundamental incentive is also providing indirectly habitat for ocelots. So the hunting that's there is really indirectly also benefiting ocelots. Yeah, good quail habitat.

And if you're a Rinella type of fella, it's good cottontail habitat is good ocelot habitat from the sounds of it. All right, guys. Thank you for coming. Enjoyed it. Thank you. Thank you. It was great. Yeah, and tell people one more time how to find you.

Eastfoundation at eastfoundation.net. You guys are based out of? Based out of San Antonio, Texas, but spend our time driving throughout South Texas. And then? Cesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute, and it's based in Kingsville, Texas, Texas A&M University of Kingsville. All right. Thank you very much, guys. Thank you.

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