The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 340: People Getting Confused By Animals

Episode Date: June 13, 2022

Steven Rinella talks with Jon Mooallem, Janis Putelis, Ryan Callaghan, Brody Henderson,  Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider. Topics discussed: Reminding you that MeatEater Trivia is weekly; MeatEater Cooks is back; cute as a button; when the locals are the problem; the creep of eliminating non-resident sheep tags; a $1 million fine for illegally catching dungeness crabs; Pedals, the bear; misleading article headlines; get Jon’s brilliant new book, Serious Face; “assassinations” and CSI: Monk Seal in Hawaii; SPZs; feudal relationships; flying helicopters in straight lines to save gas; seals and eels; how to properly pronounce ‘macaque’; a street-wise monkey; picking out darts and evading capture; losing your tortoises in a divorce; Werner Herzog and his cave painting movie; and more.   Connect with Steve and MeatEater Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop MeatEater MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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First Light. Go farther, stay longer. I spent five hours teaching my nephew how to play cribbage. You'd have to spend five hours teaching me. He's six years old. That is not pleasant. He was just like, I want to learn this. Everybody else is playing it because it was dumping rain the whole

time. Okay, ten and five. Ten and five. What's ten and I want to learn this. Everybody else is playing it because it was dumping rain the whole time. And man. Okay, 10 and 5. 10 and 5. What's 10 and 5? Why did cribbage become the we're in a cabin, we have nothing to do past time?

It's the best two-person card game out there. My old man, you might as well run it. Turn the machine on, Bill. Machine's on, Steve. In my old man's old age, him and his friends were very into taking any kind of oddball item and drilling whatever hundreds of holes you need to drill into it. 120.

To make a cribbage scorecard. So if someone found an antler, you'd do that with it. If someone's like, look at this old bowling pin at a yard sale, they would bandsaw the bowling pin in half, and then one would take it home, and my dad would take his home, and they'd go up and drill 120 holes in it. Yeah. 120 holes in it, and they'd have a bowling pin.

Cribbage board. Yeah. Didn't matter what. I like that. Anything that would accommodate 120 holes. I know you're not a card game enthusiast, and if your brothers aren't either. Oh, no.

We played cards like a madman growing up. Yeah, but I've offered to play with you since we've known each other. I grew out of it. You grew out of it. I just want to say that if there's one of those laying around, I'd be honored to take it and keep it alive. When I go home to visit my mom soon here, I will bring you back. I'll probably bring you a bowling ball one, bowling pin one,

which I feel is still laying around. I'll definitely find some antler ones, and I'll bring them to you. Nice. We used to throw craps on an Army blanket, because that's how my dad did it in the Army. He'd lay the blanket on the ground and pin it up the wall as the backboard she said when you're throwing craps in the army it needs to be quiet so you it wouldn't make any noise you threw the dice and it hit a wall a wool blanket hanging on

the wall and it'd be like silent craps um we played a lot We played a lot of poker. A lot of poker. And everybody had like a sock full of change. Go get your sock. Dude, I could tell you like a very great story about one of those socks full of change. But I couldn't do it on this show. Does it involve violence? I was just going to ask that, Brody.

No, if it was a violent story, I would absolutely tell a violent story. It's not a violent story. It's a sexy story. But, yeah. Joined today by John Muellen, who's been on the show how many times? Once? Twice? Twice at least. Twice.

Yeah. He has a brand spickety new book out, Serious Face, Essays by John M muellem several of which pertain to the stuff we like to talk about that's right because you um you you have a few things you write about one of the things you write about i don't know if you'd describe it this way but you write a lot about human relationships with nature especially when they get a little they go a little haywire i think that's like how do you put it i like to think of it as i like to write about people who are getting really confused by animals you know because the there's lots of stories where a bunch of people are doing very confusing

nutty things trying to accomplish something and there's an animal right in the center of the story, and the animal can't tell its side of the story, so you just get to deal with all the people acting crazy. And something about that really scratches an itch for me. Yeah, like if you could go up to a monk seal and say, what do you think about all this?

You know what I think he'd say? I think he wouldn't know that it's going on. Absolutely not. He'd be like, about what? I always say that the animals always have no comment, you know?

And that, in some ways, I think that that brings the craziness of people into higher relief. Oh, because they get to speak for it. Yeah,

because if you have- They get to speak for it and it turns out that it says many different things to them. To many different people. And if you have a story where there's some kind

of controversy among people, then you have to go around as's some kind of controversy among people, then you have to go around as a journalist and talk to all of those people and align their accounts and somehow make sense of all their different stories. But if one, the main character in the story is an animal and they're not talking, then you can just show the nuttiness of people. It's a very pure way, I think, to show how dysfunctional we are as a species. It's to show us kind of colliding up against some other species.

I can't tell if I'm going to beat your ass in trivia. Are you staying for trivia? You're definitely going to beat my ass in trivia without a doubt. I don't know. I think you're going to be a strong player. I think you're going to be a very strong player. I think you've already gotten in my head where I'm feeling like you're going to beat my ass in trivia. He likes to do that i started out strong my game my game is collapse okay well we'll see

we'll see my game is collapse i started out strong um we'll have already talked about this but our trivia show is gone weekly um it's a weekly release hosted by spencer newhart i think you'll do good but i think i'll beat you because here's the deal you'll do good on all the geography like history stuff you'll do good on but there's gonna be some like technical there's gonna be some technical archery question or something so that i might be like oh i remember what that is and you're just not gonna know i mean am i the only guest you've ever had on the show who's never hunted? No. Okay. No. So I'm already at a disadvantage

I feel. You're of a very small few. No, that's not really true. Okay. As a casual listener to the show, I definitely feel like I'm not qualified to be here. But that's going to come out in the trivia. But I'll point out

people that I know for a fact that you almost hunted. That's right. Because you got real curious about the deer in your yard. Well, you got me real curious. I did go hunting once. We may have talked about this once. I did go hunting once, but we did not see an elk the whole time I was out there. And that sharpened my appreciation for hunting for sure.

Where are you at with the deer in your yard right now? You haven't eaten one. Well, no. Where I'm at with the deer in my yard right now? You haven't eaten one. Well, no. Where I'm at with the deer in my yard is I spent a lot of the pandemic building a deer fence and it became like, you know, my, my, uh, what's the, what, it was like my Vietnam, you know, it was like me just in an intractable situation, you know, biting off more than I could chew. Trying to protect your garden?

Trying to protect my garden. I mean, mostly, okay, so it mostly started as I was really- Started as a police action. Yes. No, I mean, I was like- There was mission creep. So I had the last book I had come out, came out on March 20th, 2020, I think. So I had all this time blocked.

I was going to go on a big book tour. You know, it was going to be like a big deal. And then it all got crushed. And I was home doing Zoom second grade with my daughter, just hating life. And I got real mad one day and I went out and I live on Bainbridge Island. There's not much to do there. So I drove out of my driveway in a huff and I went and I bought, I went to the garden center because that was like the only place you could go to blow off some steam. And I impulse bought four little fruit trees.

And then I got home and I realized the deer are going to tear these things apart. So I decided I would just build a fence around the little fruit trees. And then I was like, well, why don't I just build a fence around everything? And that really spiraled out of control. So I built like, it's something like 600 feet

of fence. And, um, it took me, I mean, many ups and downs, psychological as well as logistical. I think I did all right. For someone who had never done it before. Like what you put in a wooden post and. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then deer netting through some of the woods and stuff. Wow.

So I finally finished in July of 2021 and I had an opening ceremony to, for all the people who had helped me, I invited them. I gave some, some remarks. I gave some remarks. I gave a little speech in front of the fence. We had like red, white, and blue bunting on the fence. We had a cake. We had a fence cake. And since then, I'm happy to report there's only been like one or two occasions when I've seen a deer inside the fence. And I think it's because my fence butts against my neighbor's fence and they're jumping over that fence.

So that'll be next summer's project. Could be. That's your Cambodia. That's right that's right that's the detente cow's like real vietnamese yeah it's the right thing um so that's the situation with the deer is that there we've sort of reached an understanding i think um that is becoming uh it's zeitgeisty in a way because that's becoming a thing um where i grew up is they are taking orchards um and i mean hundreds of acres of orchard and building exclosures oh really which was just not a thing as a kid and i think this is going to have we're talking about major reductions in habit deer habitat in that instead of trying to protect individual saplings these orchards of around my buddy matt's place there are a bunch of them now and they're doing it with state funding like

state offsets because it's just piss and match but it's the state's deer, right? They're building these deer-proof fence around like several hundred acre farms and being like, there are no deer on this chunk of land anymore. Yeah, that's what I did with my not several hundred acres. Yeah, that bums me out that you did that. Well, I left half the property. You should write an article about that. I left half the property. The deer can go there.

They just, you know. That bums you out. Why does it bum you out? You did the same thing with your garden. No, I didn't do my yard. I did my garden. He didn't do his. He did his yard.

I did about, it's probably like two and a half acres. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. That's a sizable fence. That's different. And what do you think the deer would say? Do you let birds come in there?

No, as soon as I see a bird, I go. No, but the, you know but the coyotes still come through. They still come in because the wooden panels of the fence, the openings are fairly large. Actually, we built the fence, then we got a dog. The dog goes right through the fence. That was dumb. Get the dog first, then build the fence.

But yeah, the deer, there's plenty of room for the deer on Bainbridge. I'm not worried about them. John joined us on episode 98 and 266. Okay. Third time's a charm. Corinne calls you a brilliant writer. Thank you, Corinne. I love this book.

Okay, we're going to get into all that. Oh, we just reminded everybody that the podcast is now weekly. Is there anything you need to say about that? Wherever you listen to podcasts, Apple, Spotify, etc. But you don't have to subscribe to another show. No, no, no. It serves on this feed. You don't need to do shit. Right. So stay,

if you have not subscribed to the Meat Eater podcast feed on the various platforms that you listen on, please subscribe. And trivia will just slide in. On my phone, I have a little thing. just slide in on my phone i have a little thing in my notes on my phone i have a thing called podcast and i just write down things that i feel like i should talk about on the show i was in the fort myer florida airport and there was two

i was like by two girls that sort of like ran it knew each other and ran into each other unexpectedly love when that happens one of them, and this is a quote, where you headed? End quote. Quote, to Durango, to stay in a yurt. I had pointed out that like yurts. Hipsters, were they very hipster-ish? Like the yurts are like, I feel that yurts are very left wing.

And it's like staying in a yurt has become like a thing in and of itself. You would never say I'm going to Durango to stay in a tent. Do you know what I'm saying? You'd be like, I'm going to Durango to stay in a camper. It's like a mark. No, it's like I'm going camping. It's like a mark of... No, but it's like a mark of... It's like you're defining yourself. You're attaching yourself to that type of person who goes around and

stays in yurts. Another thing I might know is I gotta hit a couple of these things. And does this person even know that yurt is a ubiquitous term that encloses a lot of different structures? Yeah, I didn't interview her lot of different structures like um yeah I didn't I didn't interview her that John would have been in there interviewing but no I didn't even know that

uh my buddy Ronnie's telling me about his pet crow as a kid like Seth had a crow and Ronnie had a crow and he when he was little he got it out of the cemetery him and his buddies each took one out climbed up and got him out of a nest and he raised it up and the crow would like to go out with him hunting other birds he was little he had a pellet gun and he'd shoot a bird okay and the crow would peck its eyes out and then the crow would eat the bird's liver. And I knew that much, but I didn't know this. One day Ronnie and this crow were out and Ronnie dropped a pellet while he was loading his pellet gun.

The crow ate it and died right in front of him. Oh man. That's some live by the sword, die by the sword shit right there. Last one. Cal, I had a dream in which you said, and this is the greatest line you've ever said,

you said that you were... Hold on, in your dream? Cal said this to me in a dream. This is in a dream state. The only good thing Cal has said Is something that you From your version of Cal It's you using Cal as like a ventriloquist dummy

In your sleep He said he's so tired That his nose hairs are hanging straight down That's very Cal appropriate That tired So tired Your nose hairs lost their curl You know That's very Calipers. Like that tired. Like that so tired your nose hairs lost their curl. You know, that type of

that type of tired. That's great. That should be on his shirt. Oh, tune in right now because tomorrow tune into the Meat Eater YouTube channel. Go on YouTube, subscribe to Meat Eater. And you'll see our very own

Yanis B Putelis and Kevin Gillespie preparing a dish with Yanni's special bighorn ram. Mm-hmm. Yanni can't remember what it was. It was delicious. I have all the ingredients to make more of it. I'm trying to remember.

Masala? Yeah. No, it wasn't masala. I feel like I heard like vindaloo like something that's spicy we're losing a lot of this pakora they're not listening to this uh we just had uh dustin huff shooter of the huff buck so he was on the show if you were listening. Dustin Huff from Indiana killed a giant buck. Realized pretty quickly that it must be the biggest buck ever killed in Indiana. Turns out it was the biggest typical whitetail ever killed in the USA. As a joke, kind of as a joke,

he was giving away so much information about where the buck was that kind of as a joke, we were bleeping out names of surrounding landowners. Doug wrote in, Doug Duren, our beloved Doug Duren, bubbly Doug, wrote in, The bleeping of the names of the landowners near where this guy killed that big giant buck is funny and adds to the story in a great and humorous way but it makes me think of two things one that buck is dead the odds of another like him being around is unlikely so that's chasing a ghost this from a man that killed the standard which remains he was shocked when he found it, killed it, and never another one. Right?

But a lot of nice bucks in the exact same spot. Yeah, that's true. Maybe not the freak, but nice bucks. Right. His second comment, this is Doug talking again. It reminds me of what the wise and beautiful Pat Durkin said to me when I brought up my concerns about drawing hunters from out of the area to the Cazenovia and northeast Richland County

by saying where I killed the standard. In an article he was writing for the national publication, Quality Whitetails. He goes on to say, I'm paraphrasing Pat. In my experience, so this is him paraphrasing Pat. Durkin says, in my experience, people from outside the area don't become a problem. It's the locals that were and are the problem. And they already know all about the big deer on your place and the area.

Doug then goes on to say, my experience is that Pat was spot on with that assessment. Dustin Huff pointed out in the podcast episode, this is me talking, not Pat or Doug. Dustin Huff pointed out in the podcast episode that since he killed this big giant buck, they have found a few bucks dead with their heads cut off. Decapitated.

And he was talking about that and he was attributing it to people coming to that area now with big buck fever. Doug says, I guarantee you the bucks found dead with the heads cut off after this fella killed that big giant buck was the work of locals, not some poachers drawn to the area about hearing about this BGB. And three,

if you got kids around, plug their ears. And three, this is Doug talking, when I heard he killed it with a crossbow, I said, fuck yeah uh yanni do this he's also he's also really happy that a mostly casual hunter killed that deer yeah yeah i was too i was happy about that yeah it's kind of like the i don't want to say it was the, it was the focus of the interview.

Yanni, give everybody the story about bighorn sheep tags in New Mexico. This is interesting. This is a trend that I don't think is going away. I'm not prepared for this, but I'll give it a go. What the hell were you doing?

She sent you the stuff? You don't study this all and do all ancillary research and. Yeah, I do what i can i do what i can yeah yeah so i just pictured you up all night like reading like uh-huh prior findings i i see how it goes so that way when steve doesn't do what he just suggested i do he can just throw it i'm me. I've seen this for the first time. It sounds like there's some folks that want to, locals in New Mexico want to have more opportunities to hunt bighorn sheep in their own state. And one of the options they're throwing around to figure that out is to take

away all of the bighorn sheep tags that are available to non-residents. There's only seven permits available for non-residents in New Mexico. But that's an idea getting thrown around and it's going to be heard by I don't know, some New Mexican Game and Fish the commission and whatnot.

A person wrote in Well, I was going to hit this part. Oh, okay. Go ahead. We're going to tag team the story steve read up as i was giving you that intro so here's a perspective on it residents of new mexico would be like it doesn't make sense that i have to try to get a sheep tag my whole life and never get one and it's state-owned wildlife and i'm here in state and and then when they give a ram take out at some hoser from wherever.

Some hoser from Minnesota. From Meat Eater. Yeah, some hoser from Minnesota draws the sheep tag. And this, you know, Yanni's a non-resident bighorn hunter because he used to live in Colorado, moved away, drew a tag, so now here's an example of, you know, he should have, like by some people's perspective um he should have when he moved away that should have been the end of him trying to get a tag there because he doesn't live

there this guy points this out this is a fellow writes in from texas um never hunted bighorns as a texas resident he has we'll just say he has zero chance because they give out a tag i think texas does one like don't they do one general draw tag a year in Texas? I think it's something like that. It's one or two. Yeah, it's like, there's like a tag in Texas. So this is never going to happen for me. Yet, he's a supporter of the Wild Sheep Foundation

because he dreams of someday hunting a ram. If this trend were to catch on and continue um he doesn't see in his view residents uh you know aspiring sheep hunters from outside of new mexico are gonna have zero incentive to give two shits about what's going on with sheep or sheep in New Mexico. If this were to become a trend, the guy in Florida who's a big wild sheep supporter, but the Western states all say like no non-residents. What is that? What are the implications for that?

His relationship to sheep and sheep conservation? Good question. Yeah. The sheep thing is an amazing deal, right? You go to Wild Sheep Foundation, which raises an unbelievable amount of cash at their annual banquet sheep show. And if you really want to do the math, it is the tiniest majority or tiniest minority of people in that room have killed the greatest majority of sheep oh and the vast majority of people there at this point will likely never draw a sheep tag but they're coughing up cash too yeah what's that what's that sort of like club they have the less than one is the so there's multiple clubs in there but there's the less than club, which is if you have never drawn a sheep tag, or I'm sorry, you've never successfully harvested a sheep, then you can pay some cash to ideally up your odds for a series of drawings that you must be present to win, which is pretty cool.

I drew a sheep tag. I i remember it was in the wrong continent did you ever go no no the outfitter was like oh god you're not 70 and and he kind of like refused to call me back and what i got a hold of sheep wild sheep and i was like hey you guys paid a lot of money for this hunt. This isn't working out. And it just kind of died from there. Yeah. And they're like, well, you know, you could sell that, uh, hunt.

I said, so this outfitter that I'm having all sorts of good luck with, you want me to sell the hunt to somebody else? I'm like, I don't want to go on it why would i sell it to somebody i think you're right though steve that states are going to continue to clamp down on the number of like once in a lifetime tags available to non-residents i'm pretty sure wyoming's yeah working something i know wyoming is working hard on behalf of its residents when we were talking about the like recent around the conversation around lead, non-lead. And all I said, I said one day on this same digital radio program, I said, that conversation ain't going away. And that got people mad.

To observe that a conversation ain't going away. This conversation ain't going away. One thing that's confusing to me is from the Wild Sheep Foundation's website, even though they seemed, well, I don't know what their position is, but at the end of their note, it says, bottom line, this discussion over New Mexico bighorn sheep would be dramatically different if it were not for the decades of support brought by non-resident hunters that have significantly contributed to successfully growing the state's sheep population. The discussion would be, why don't we have more sheep? Real conservation work is growing the pie for everyone not fighting over the slices.

And to point out, this is a proposal too. This is not in law. So then I, so that kind of seems to be in the spirit of what the listener is. For sure. And how they're thinking about things. But you have this argument of like, well, they're paying more money. You guys should like that. And then you get into this whole other world of auction tags and governor's tags and

it's like oh well these people are paying the most money right okay so should we give them more tags got it sure and then you got residents that are like what the hell yeah and you know it's like when it used to be able what did prior in the 90s here in Montana, what were your special draw applications? What was the cost prior to the big bump up to 200 and some dollars? I know that for non-residents, it was 600 bucks a pop. And I think for residents, it was like 20 bucks a pop or sub 20. Wow. Not more than 20.

17, something like that. Yeah, it sticks in my head. I keep thinking like 14, 20. I don't know what it was, but it was. Not more than 20. 17, something like that. Yeah, it sticks in my head. I keep thinking like 14, 20. I don't know what it was. It was, it was. That's so low. Oh, no, no, no. I'm wrong.

I'm wrong. I think it was 75 bucks. No, I don't know what I'm talking about. Anyway, when that jump. How about not a shitload? Not a shitload would be great. To what most people would consider a shitload, when that jump occurred

here, I can't tell you how many people were like, well that prices me out of the game. Which is weird because it's a once in a lifetime tag. Like in Colorado, residents kick in like $250, $300 for once in a lifetime tags and it's 10 times that for

a non-resident, but it's still like Montana is cheap for sheep, moose. It is, but it's, it's, you know, we, we talk about it all the time. It's like that, what are you getting for that cost at the pump? It's like, well, I do burn a lot of gas, but I go here and I do all this stuff and it makes me super happy.

But a lot of people are i go here and i do all this stuff and it makes me super happy but a lot of people are like i'm not driving here's a little tidbit some people might appreciate uh different states that do like non-resident tag draws they run different programs where in some states you have to pre-pay i don't know what it is now but it used to be in Montana. You had to prepay for any tag that you applied for. So if you applied for moose, sheep, and goat as a non-resident, you had to send a cashier's check. I think it was $800 a piece because you had to send a cashier's check, I think, for $2,400 if you were going to do all three. Oh, I see. So they really had to.

And then because the problem they would run into is people would apply for stuff they had no way of paying for. And then you do the draw, and then you got all these people that then they can wait all these months before they buy the tag. They never come up with the money. So then they're like, okay, you got to pay up front. Some states do it where you submit a credit card number.

And they're like, you need to make up front some states do it where you submit a credit card number and they're like you need to make sure that credit card is active and that your credit card company is aware that there could be a ding because if that credit card is rejected we go to the next name and so they do their draw it spits out names they run the credit card if that credit card has any problem it's on to the next name and i've heard from people over the years who, like, for whatever reason, didn't pay, overdrawn, and missed their chance because their credit card got. No second chance. It's like when that thing goes, it goes.

And I remember when Chris Denham used to do from Western Hunter, when he used to do tag draw stuff, he said, I keep a credit card only for this purpose and i know that there's no problem with that credit card there's nothing on it does he make like ten dollar charges like you know so to pop at the gas to make sure like everything's cool early and on time so it's uh and i heard someone once say that um the reason states made you prepay is they're making all this money on interest. And so they like to have this two months where they're holding hundreds or millions of dollars.

And someone said, man, when you, someone said the interest, if you think about the time, the interest wouldn't pay for the return postage to send that person's check back, not counting the banking fees and all that, for how long they're actually holding this pile of money. Yeah, that's why they all went digital now, is because they were losing money for what it costs to deal with the processing of the checks and then mailing back refunds, et cetera. Very costly. watch this transition you ready i'm ready speaking of money nice one a guy um tam van tron is a licensed commercial

fisherman in the region of san francisco california He goes out into a protected marine preserve at the Farallon Islands, sets 92 traps in the marine preserve, the Farallon Island Marine Preserve, where he's not, he doesn't set your traps there. Sets 92 traps. Catches nearly 300 dungies. Closer to 250, 260.

260 Dungeness crabs in those traps. Dungeness crab right now is going for a dead middle price. So we're assuming it's a varied price. We're saying it's about $11.95 a pound. Okay. A middle of the road Dungeness crab weight is two pounds. Is this all your math, Corinne? No, this was a podcast listener. But I think I bought Dungeness crab for like $12.99 before.

I spent some time in San Jose and you know what's funny what oh no we were eating shrimp last night but i gave away a bag of dungeon s crab last night and i realized i gave away probably 22 bucks for the dungeons last night but um uh no i know last night i gave away 24 dollars for the dungeon s crab uh so i remember buying it when it would come in, and I remember buying it that you could buy a Dungeness crab for $7. Oh, huh. In California. That's like live crab probably coming right off the boat. I used to buy it because I liked it.

So this guy has $7,000 worth of illegally caught crab. More or less, yeah. More or less. This is rounding off figures. The fine for doing such. The fine. Million bucks. Fair?

Excessive? I think that the rub is that he was in, not that he over-capped in an area he was supposed to be in. It's like intentionally went to a marine preserve. Oh, he's claiming that he didn't know the waters were closed. Come on. According to the article.

Right. And then they also said, don't touch your traps. Don't retrieve anything. Don't move them. Nothing. Leave them alone. And after he was told this by the authorities, the authorities did find that some traps were.

Yeah, they were pulling traps and letting crabs go and they knew where they all were. And while they're pulling them, they realized that two dozen were missing. I wonder why they were doing that, just to kind of estimate how many crabs could have been caught. That wasn't really explained in the article. They probably wanted to seize them all, I would imagine.

Can we get that broken down to a- The traps. Well, yeah, man. No, but they were leaving them, like pulling traps, throwing the crabs back, and then leaving them in the water. Leaving what in the water? The traps.

Let's say you get pulled over by the cops for a DUI, right? Then I go, okay, this is the thing. Yeah, okay, now go park your vehicle and we'll take you to jail. That's what's happening here, right? They're like, you stay away from all this stuff because you can no longer fish. That's the situation that you're in. And then they got to go deal with it.

I don't think there's much accounting. Yeah, like they come out here's all those traps they say you're in restrictive waters don't mess with the traps we're gonna pull up traps count how many crabs you caught and then they're not putting the traps back down the area is closed because of whale migrations it's not closed as like a crabbing protection area uh anyways in 2020 cal California, the Dungeness crab industry drove $30 million in revenue.

$1 million fine? How much is that? Can we break that down per crab? What is fine? $1 million per how many tons of crabs? Let's see. Calculators. $1 million divided by $2.60. That's going to be more than like caviar.

Hey, anything we talked about, strike your fancy. Can you see any big features about anything we've talked about? $3,846. Per pound? Yeah. No, no, no. Per crab. Per crab. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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Now, I'm going to titillate folks with something. They, in big game poaching a lot of states i think this is more and more common all the time in big game poaching a lot of states uh they do a thing where they have to value the wildlife are you familiar with this and then if you like for instance if you kill like a doe whail, they're going to assign a value to that doe whitetail, and it's going to be a modest value. If you were to kill the huff buck, the biggest typical whitetail ever killed in Indiana, and you poach that, they're going to assign a very different value to that deer. They're going to look at what its market value would be.

What would some 200 inch they have a formula they have a math formula for it what would some 200 inch whitetail cost someone to go shoot it in a high fence operation and be like your deer that whitetail doe is worth 100 bucks 200 bucks the deer you's worth, we're going to say that's worth $55,000. But this is. This is. This is crabs.

Per crab. I mean, I've got to transition, but then I also wanted to ask John something before we transition, but. He's not interested in any of this. He just told me. I tell you that. He doesn't care what the crabs think.

But I mean, if we transition to his monk seal story, there are all kinds of numbers listed for like rewards given to people who have information on a killed animal. You have a whole list. I forget, yeah. Yeah, but I think too you're dealing with two separate things, right? Because you're dealing with the value of the wildlife, but also it's penalizing, right? It's a deterrent, right? To say this guy went out there, he's going to spend a million dollars now

for his mistake. That's a deterrent. That's not because they can claim he did a million dollars worth of damage, right? And the rewards to my knowledge are often put up not by the government but by like humane society these are like for killings you know like um not not hunting assassinations assassinations i like to call them assassinations we're not talking about hunting violations we're talking about you know someone you know wrenching the head off a pelican. You're pretty sure

over in Idaho, there's a group that pays bounties to trappers and to wolf hunters. Yeah, a private org that kicks in money. Yeah, I think that's pretty cool. But you gotta be a member. You gotta sign up ahead of time. It's like joining a turkey derby.

I think so yeah i i do like to see a fine though that seems like more than less because i always feel like when i hear about wildlife uh fines given out for you know wildlife crimes or public lands sort of infractions or whatever you're often blown away by like really well if that's all it costs let's all go and do it and when we get caught we'll just pay the fine and keep on doing it you know i sometimes feel that when you're reading about a poaching thing and then you you know it's like this elaborate premeditated deal and you know and uh it winds up being like like even more like people are

selling stuff you know and it winds up being not commensurate. Well, this was also a commercial fishing violation, which I'm sure factored into that fine, too. It's not like some recreational fisherman went out and was over the limit for crabs. Should be a higher standard of regulation. If you want to talk about monk seals, last summer. Well, we're going to talk about them big time. Well, I'm going to start it right now, then. Last summer, you had a woman. You got to set the whole thing up, man.

Can I give you this little anecdote? Is this like a teaser? This is right on topic. Okay, go ahead. Last summer, this sounds like a natural transition. Last summer, you had a woman, I think from Louisiana,

who was in Hawaii and there's a monk seal hauled out on the beach, and she filmed herself going and touching the monk seal, $50,000 fine for that. No. The video went viral, and I think that's all deterrence. She sounds like a cat lady. She did not cause $50,000. Did she ever actually pay it?

That I do not know. You never hear these things after the fact, right? But that was the fine they leveled on her last year. Did her lawyer get it way down? You don't know what happened? I have no idea what happened. It was levied against her. I mean, that's an Endangered Species Act violation, right?

That's harassment, quote unquote. It's defined by the law, yeah. And that's why they have seal exclusion zones where they have volunteers in Hawaii. You're getting way ahead of yourself. Here's what I want you to say. Back me up, Steve. Back me up.

Take me where you want to go. Because this is fascinating. Okay. But I want to get to this. In your new book, Serious Face, is a, what's that one called about the monk seals? I Can't Believe This Is Happening. Yeah. Can You Even Believe This Is Happening.

Can You Even Believe This Is Happening. And it tells the story of the, it's kind of an endangered species story. It's like a, like a CSI endangered species. Of targeted, intentional targeted killings of an endangered species. That's right. I call them assassinations. You call them assassinations? You call them assassinations? You want to fight about that?

Well, I want to fight about it because when a hunter shot, peddles the bear. So just, there was a bear in New Jersey. You're just itching to get right back to that.

There's a recap. Right where we left off in 2020. There was a bear in New Jersey that had some deformity at birth. People debate whether it had a deformity at birth or it had been injured, but its front feet weren't very functional, and it would spend a lot of time walking around on its back feet.

Some guy during the bear season, I don't know if anyone's, we should try to get him on the show, but he's probably not talking. He's never been identified. But is he talking? Is he doing interviews? No, the hunter's never been identified. There was a lot of,

everyone thought it was just one guy and he started receiving death threats. But I think it's pretty clear it wasn't actually him. Well, here's the deal. Yeah. He would get a sympathetic audience with us.

I'm sure he would. So if he's out there. I don't have anything have anything i would want i would i would like the first question i would be like did you see it coming walking on its back feet and if so did you wonder what it was doing did you know there was a bear hereabouts that walks on his back feet and has the name petals or would he say i had no idea dude it was on it's all four feet when i saw it i had no idea about any of this it was just right but when pet when pedals was killed it was billed that he had been assassinated was it now yes dude and i could we could find the article all right i did not say that when I wrote my obituary for Petals.

You were doing a recap of important deaths throughout the year, and you did a thing about, because you're interested in when wildlife makes people nuts, you recapped the Petals story. I don't remember you using assassinated in it, but then in talking about the killing of monk seals by hawaiians you said i you you say i struggle to find the right word for what it is and you say it's like an assassination and i wanted to take i wanted to be like oh come on but i'm like no because it is a political

yes right like assassination is like a it's a political killing it's a statement yeah golden to achieve a it's to achieve a goal i would say i mean i haven't looked at it and it's a statement yeah it's meant to be perceived in political terms you know i think that you guys are really good because i just looked it up on merriam-webster and it says murder by sudden or secret attack often for political reasons so in that way in the story you're going to tell, I think it's, does it say people? Or does it even specify who's doing it? Well, it was comma, the act or an instance of assassinating someone,

such as a prominent political leader but that's why i'm an innovative writer i mean that's the beauty of what i'm doing in that piece is i'm applying that you know i'm i'm seeing it for what it is is that we have built up such a political controversy over this species other species that we can only really understand it's killing in political terms and this is crazy right it's crazy to say that i'm not that's what i'm acknowledging is it's crazy to think that a marine mammal can be assassinated but when you see the facts that's exactly what's been going on in a way i decided where i want you to start there's a tinge of anthropomorphization there

too oh there's more than a tinge okay i'm just going to back up for a hot second. A lot of the headlines that I'm seeing just say killed from like Washington Post etc. just says killed. In regard to pedals? In regard to pedals. But I see the Newsweek Oh God, Newsweek is infamous for their like beheaded elk

headline. Oh, can I tell John real quick? Yeah, please. In Rocky Mountain National Park, there's a huge bull and it died. I think it got killed by, what did it get killed by? Mountain lion.

It got killed by a mountain lion. And so some guy took its head and the headline was, that it was, they don't say like the divers or anything else. Like famous elk. Famous elk decapitated.

No, beheaded. No, famous elk beheaded in Rocky Mountain National roll national park you're like oh that's weird like someone walked out with a broadsword like a jihadist it's like oh no it died and then someone like took the head home yeah yeah oh but the newsweek headline says the shameful slaughter of petals the bear corin, if you want to make a cash bet, that word was used.

It was used in the post, not the post. It was used in one of those digital huff posts. You go ahead and follow that up on that. Okay. Here's where I want you to start the monk seal story. I want you to start the monk seal story 1,500 years ago. Sure.

1,500 years ago. Look. 1,500 years ago. Look how good this guy is. He's like, no problem. It was a Wednesday. No, I mean, that's when, so that's when Polynesians reach Hawaii, right? And everything ecologically starts to change. And so you had monk seals, which are,

we all know what monk seals are. They're giant ass seals. I wouldn't say we all know. Come on. How big? I think they're about 800, 900 pounds. That's what blows my mind. When we get to the part about the kid that killed

one of the rock. Yeah. 800 pounds. Yeah. Oh, they're so cute. But they're, you know, they're sort of defenseless, right? They're not meant to.

So they spend a lot of time. We'll get back to 1500 years ago. But well, 1500 years ago, they also spent a lot of time. You know, they swim around, they're eating octopus, they're eating stuff, turning over rocks. And then they come out on the beach and they lay there for hours, just digesting. Hauled out. Hauled out, fully out of the water on the beach.

And they'll spend hours and hours like that. And they're native to the islands. They're native to the islands. Wow. And so, no, they are. They are. You'll get to that. Yeah.

But so once the Polynesians come, it's pretty fast, it seems, that the monk seals disappear, at least from the main Hawaiian islands. They probably have retreated up into the Leeward Islands, the frigate shoals, all the ones that we don't really talk about when we talk about hawaii the little archipelago that's off to the west toward fiji and that's where they stay right so then you fast forward uh to you know what i think a thing that people do that annoys me a little bit and you just did it what bring it steve bring it we show up to this podcast there's this there's this thing there's this thing people say or they're like you know there used to be a lot of elk in the great plains uh-huh okay there's this idea that that they

retreated from the great plains and went into the mountains okay what i think happened is they were in the mountains they were on the great plains and now they're gone from the great plains that's absolutely true so i don't think that these monk seals moved there. I think they were eliminated from parts of their range and remained in other parts. So you're saying the word retreat implies that there was a conscious group decision?

Like a movement rather than they were like killed off here, but not here. You're absolutely right. I mean, that's the monk seal story. I mean, think that's we know that and thank you for i didn't mean i don't want to come in hot no you're you know you're very particular about language i appreciate it so thank you so they remained in the leeward islands which i didn't know were a thing till yeah i didn't know either i've got to be honest i mean i knew they were there i knew they were there i didn't know that we call them hawaii i didn't know that. I mean, I knew they were there. Well, I learned from you. I knew they were there. I didn't know that we call them Hawaii.

I didn't know that they were quote unquote Hawaii. Yeah, I had no idea that that was like part of it. And then what started happening was, so basically then in 1976, so that's three years after, you know, fast forward a thousand years and change. And the three years after the Endangered Species Act is passed in 1976, the federal government protects the monk seals. They are at that time, I believe, the most endangered marine mammal in terms of their numbers. What was the sub a thousand? Like, well, absolutely.

Like I think in the, like the low hundreds, like maybe 200 or so. I don't know at that moment how many there were. And they launched this project that even at this point, I think is still projected to take 45 years and close to $400 million to recover the species according to the government's plan. And at first nothing's happening. And then slowly, like starting in the, you know, 90s, mid 90s or so, the monk seals start to appear in the main Hawaiian islands, mostly in Kauai, because that's the, you know, the Western most island. And people who have grown up in Hawaii, whose families have been there for generations,

have never seen monk seals start to see monk seals. You know, they're out fishing or whatever. They see monk seals taking their fish, scaring away their fish. And, uh. 800, an 800 pound fish eater. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. But the tiny cherubic little face with whiskers very beautiful little face just adorable cute as a button most biologists would describe very cute face really kind of disgusting blubbery body you know just with that cute little button face attached to it it's like a pillow with the face. Yeah. Not only had they, not only had native wines not seen them, but the animals must have disappeared so quickly upon colonization that they point out that they don't have a word for them. But you could also, I don't know if you taught with this in your book, but you could also argue that there was, but in the 800 years or whatever of non-use it hasn't needed to be carried on yeah i don't know yeah and the federal government so i mean a lot of what i'm writing about in that in that piece is that just the complete breakdown like the the bungling breakdown

of communication between the government and the people because you right you have you have native hawaiian saying what is this thing you know this thing? And it's getting in our way. You're giving it all this money. Meanwhile, you're the same government that stole our land, right? And we don't get anything from you, right? So there's a lot of resentment toward this animal. And they say, and we don't even have a word for it. It's not in any chance.

There's no carvings of it, anything. And the government does some research and they say, well, we think it's this word, which I think translates to something like dog running in water. Let us tell you. And that doesn't go over too well, you know. Dog running on water? I think that's the translation. Yeah. And so that goes on.

You know, there's about a decade of that kind of intractable conflict by the time I show up in Hawaii. Tell about the protector, the protector people. Yeah. So these are, you know, like a lot of endangered species, they have, um, gathered a constituency around them, right? A fan club. Yeah.

Fan, you know, people, people who want to do right by this vulnerable animal, you know, for whatever reason, because they love the animal because they see it as a symbol, you know, the way to help in the larger mess of human society, whatever you want to say. And the government has mobilized these people, um, to create, uh, seal protection zones or exclusion zones so that when a seal hauls out on the beach, you know, a call goes out and you immediately get, you know, a half a dozen,

mostly white people, uh, putting, you know, yellow tape around them and stakes and protecting the seal. So you can understand that that also doesn't look so good to the people who do not like the seals, do not want the seals around is, um, all the hubbub. Yeah, they'd be like, where is one of those around this island? Right. Right. Yeah. To have kept everybody out here. Yeah, and the title of the piece,

can you even believe this is happening, actually comes from a native Hawaiian guy who I spent a couple hours with where he was basically just shouting his side of the story at me, increasingly frustrated by the whole situation. And I say in the piece, that was kind of the look in his eyes the whole time was like, can you even believe this has happened? You know, just like complete disbelief that this government would do this. So, you know, I'm simplifying a little bit. I don't

mean to generalize that like all native Hawaiians don't like whatever, but that was the general. Let me come in and point out that this is a very long piece of investigative reporting collected in the book Serious Face. And we are doing a abbreviated. Yes. It's not as bad as coming on NPR and having to do it in four minutes. No, I appreciate this version. And then they pull some shit out. You can't even remember saying and make it like the main thing you said.

That's right. Yeah. So anyway, so that's the situation when i go to kawaii in 2012 early 2013 and exacerbated by the fact that the previous year in about the six months prior there have been four assassinations of seals. A string of assassinations that started with one on Molokai, which is the least populated of the islands, and then also on Kauai.

Can I do a quick favor too? Yeah. There's a piece, there's a part of your story that you probably don't think is that important, but what were the birds that were showing up with the broken wings? Oh yeah. Newell's shearwaters. So this is another. People were just like, it seems like fishermen when these birds are coming down on their

boat. Oh, sorry. Those are pelicans. Okay. Yeah. So they were, so in the piece, I kind of do a roundup of. Assassinations. Well, I would not say those are all assassinations.

I'd be careful about qualifying them all. Some of those I think are just, you know, people losing their shit momentarily and hurting an animal, you know, but because there isn't necessarily the political, you know, discourse around those animals. But yeah, I mean, kind of the point of the piece in my mind, what was interested in me is,

you know, we talk a lot about conservation. We talk a lot about bringing species back to levels approaching what they maybe once were, but we, because conservation doesn't have a lot of, you know, it's mostly failures. You know, when you look at the whole of the Endangered Species Act, I mean, I wouldn't say failure because it's not done, but it's not like, you know, it's very hard work. And so there's only a handful of cases where we really have these animals introduced back to levels where now they're starting to be in people's way again. I think it's sub 2%.

Yeah. That go on the Endangered Species Act come off due to recovery. I think you're more likely to come off because they realize that they find another population they didn't know about. Right. Or you come off because you're extinct.

Right. Or another little interesting wrinkle is that is you're more likely to go extinct, I believe, before you even get on the list. Cause you're, you're held in this kind of like holding area called the warranted, but precluded. Oh, and you lose them then.

Yeah. Where the government says like, yeah, you're at, you know, this, this species deserves protection, but we just, we just can't right now. We're going to, you know, this species deserves protection, but we just can't right now. We're going to put you on this category called warranted but precluded and species have gone extinct. We can't because we can't afford it? We can't, you know, I don't know if they would say that. Whatever.

You know, just saying like, we recognize this is worthy and we're going to get to it, but we just have to hold off on giving you the protection that it deserves right now. But anyway, but yeah, so the, the upshot for me of this whole story, I think I'd be interested in is what happens, you know, the monk seal is not a success story, but it's the fact that they're now appearing in places that they haven't appeared has been enough to raise this problem of, you know, some of these animals disappeared because we didn't want them there. Right. Like people, people got mad at them. It was intentional. Yeah, it was intentional. And now they're coming back.

And so we've never really, you know, there's a, there's an environmental lawyer in the piece who says, you know, we put all this energy into saving wildlife and wildness, but we never really talk about how much wildness we want and how much we're willing to live with. And that's what was happening with the monk seals. So you had this clash, right? Between the government and the people who wanted them to rebound. And then the people whose lived experience was being upset by their rebounding. I still want to hit the thing.

I'll just do it myself. Okay, go. It was just like kind of a horrific detail. Oh, the birds. Yeah. There was a bird. They would mess with fishermen. Yeah.

They'd land on the boats. Pelicans. And it seems as though they were just reaching up and snapping their wing bones. Yeah. That was being speculated. So you're finding dead pelicans with two broken wings. Like someone's just going, snap. Yeah.

Yeah. Which is like worse than just cutting its head off. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. Do you know what I mean? It's like so, like to do that, to snap its wing bones and then be like, so long, buddy.

Yeah. It's just like. The casualness of it is. It's like. It's disgusting. Yeah. It's just, keep a little sharp machete on, but like, I don't know.

Yeah. There's all kinds of examples of like people that are like fishing for a living, treating other stuff really badly. Like, I mean, in Southeast Alaska, they hate those sea otters, right? Mm-hmm. Sea lions too.

Yeah. I've heard, I've heard. And now in, uh, is it in Washington? Like they're allowing the killing of a certain number of sea lions to protect salmon well they've been doing that in the columbia for a while yeah yeah yeah go on well so yeah so i show up and i think i'm gonna write you know csi monk seal right they've got four assassinations they've got investigators looking at the evidence quote unquote and they've got investigators looking at the evidence, quote unquote, and they've got rewards, $10,000 reward for each SEAL, information about each SEAL killing.

Describe how they're killed or what they know about the killings. Well, when I arrived, all I knew was one had been shot and I believe three were what they were calling blunt head trauma. And one had a spear fishing spear stuck. That happened while I was there. But survived. But survived. Yeah. And,

um, that's a Hail Mary. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. You can imagine that person cut the line. Yeah. Rather than reeling it in. I think that's right.

Yeah. Um, that one was a juvenile though. So it was even more adorable, you know, when they put it on the evening news. Um, but yeah, so I show up and the first thing I realize is this is not, there's no police work when it comes to dead seals, you know, like they've got, Noah has its investigators and they're, they're trying their best, but what do you do? You know, as the, one of the cops says, it's like, you can't talk to the seals friends.

Right. And you don't even know, you know, if it washes up somewhere, has it been killed in that spot? Was it killed somewhere else? Did the, did the head trauma happen just from bouncing around on rocks after it's been, you know, killed in some other way or died of natural causes? So I immediately realized like, this is a mess, you know, this is not a police procedural for me to, for me to follow. And I start reporting on the, the clash itself. Right. And yeah, but you got to get like, how hard could the police work have been? Because you ended up talking to the guy that did it.

Well, I solved the crime. I solved the crime. I solved the crime. So that's what's so funny about it. Like you're not there that long and here you are having coffee with a guy who's got a $10,000 reward on his head. Did you collect the money? I did not collect the money. And it was funny because after the piece published, I got a call from the same NOAA cops, you know, the investigators.

Who is it? Yeah. No, I mean, he knew. His whole tone of voice was, listen, I got to make this call. I know you're not going to tell me anything, but any chance you're going to tell me, I'm sorry. I can't tell you. But, uh, but yeah, basically I had met a guy named Walter Ritty. I've hung out with him.

You have? Yeah. Yeah. He's a phenomenal guy. And, um, I met him sort of by chance when I was in, you know, when I first arrived in Hawaii on that trip. And he had told me that he knew the person, he called him the kid, who had killed the first monk seal,

the one that had set off this, you know, quote unquote, set off this string of killings. And that he was, you know, very remorseful about it, yada, yada. And I kind of kept after him. And eventually I was invited to meet this guy. And by that-

This Walt, like, I met him, I should say. I hung out with him. But anyway, he's a, not a spiritual leader, but- I mean, he's an organizer, I'd say. He's done a lot of activism against military testing in Molokai, against development. He was counseling the killers. He's very revered in the community.

So that when he found out that he was, he was not one of the people who was anti monk seal, you know, he understood that the monk seals were supposed to be there, that there should be this kind of coexistence and, and actual affinity between native Hawaiians and a native Hawaiian species. And so when he found out who this, this kid was,

he just went and knocked on his door and he said, I want to talk to you about the seal. And, you know, for the kid, that was a big deal for uncle, uncle Walter to show up at his house. And, you know, I had spent a week just talking to both sides of this debate and everyone on both sides, you know, you just get the impression that anyone who kills a seal is going to be this kind of burly, angry native Hawaiian fishermen who, you know, lost his shit at a seal and finally, you know, snapped and killed it. And, um, and that was uncle Walter's assumption too. And when I met the kid, what I found out was that essentially it was, was an accident. Um, I mean, that's generous way of putting it. And not a fisherman. Not a fisherman at all. That was the only time he'd been fishing that whole, that whole season,

but he was with some friends and it was a peer pressure situation because they were looking for a spot to fish. Every, every place they went, there was a monk seal there and they'd been hiking and hiking and hiking. Finally, they got to this one spot and there was a big male seal there and he was kind of goaded by his friends to, you know, he thought he'd scare it away by throwing a rock at it. And of course his story, which was, you know, I ran past'd scare it away by throwing a rock at it. And his story, which was, you know, I ran past the NOAA investigators. They said it sounded credible based on injuries, was that he hit this thing square in the head with a rock. It went unconscious and was dead. So that was, he was broken up about it. This kid was broken up about it. And he was more broken up

about it when the next seal was killed and the seal after that and the seal after that, because he felt, oh, I started this whole chain reaction. You know, I uncorked all this frustration that's been going on and I sort of showed a way to deal with it, right? A way to take it out on the seals. And it was not, I mean, that was one of those moments. I mean, there's a lot of moments like this in the book, but that was one of those moments where I just could not believe. I mean, that to me is like the privilege of doing this work is if you can spend enough time and attention on these stories and you just keep kind of scratching layer after layer of understanding away from it until you actually get to what

happened, you find the most surprising things. And that's the, this was the epitome of that for me is that I could not have invented this situation one of the one of the early things that happened to me as i was like training to be a writer that made me appreciate the work of good journalism was after the murder of matthew shepherd in laramie wyoming that it was immediately it was that some cowboys found a gay kid and out of just pure unbridled hatred, dragged him out of a bar and killed him. And that story ran and ran and ran. And then a journalist from Harper's went and just hung out in the town and met everyone involved. And when she wrote her piece about it, it was like, that is not at all what happened at all. No one had gotten it right.

Like the relationship between all the individuals involved, the lack of cowboyness, the, it not being motivated by that it being like financial entanglements yeah i mean i don't know i was like thank god for people that were going to spend three weeks somewhere yeah and be like so what happened now that night i mean i don't know that story in particular but that's the phenomenon that i've encountered again and again it's weird because i think that we it's interesting because I was having this conversation with someone the other day. And I think it's like, we're wired to kind of just snap everything into like a tidy story so that we can make sense of it. You know, otherwise we'd just be walking around in this like incoherent cloud of facts all the time. Having to use our brains all the time.

Yeah. Yeah. You need things that you can just take for granted. Right. And I think that's how we kind of walk through the world, just metabolizing everything that's happening. You know the writer Joan Didion? Of course, yeah. In her book, I think it's in Slouching Towards Bethlehem,

she talks about, and this is pre-internet when she wrote this, she's like, there's so much information, right? That you get people where there's so much information they can't deal with it all and they're thirsty for just something very simple and all the better if they're the only one that knows it well i was gonna say it's nice right when you can repackage it and and and tell it farther right yeah i mean i think that's people like that yeah that's i think what the realization i was having talking this other person was like i guess that's sort of what i see myself as doing

now is like it's like jujitsu-ing the storytelling instinct you know to unravel the stories you know that we that we lock on to and then kind of see all of the parts laid out and put them back together into something a little more real right um and it's it's when they click back into place like with this kid on malachi that that i just i mean it like it almost feels like a spiritual experience like to see like oh my god like the world is very very complicated and it's so much more than we understand and what else do i walk around not appreciating the complexity of you know that's the thing i appreciate in all the stuff you've written. And then again, in this story is that, um, like I know you're a wildlife advocate, a

conservation advocate, right? Like you, you like to see intact, healthy habitat and like a clean planet. And that means a lot to you. Yeah. Um, boy boy you're able to go into a thing like this and not be like i'm gonna root these assholes out and it's horrible but you give like a very fair and i'm not i'm not native hawaiian i don't know but you give what seems to me like a very fair recounting of how we got here yeah thank you

isn't like isn't like the whole point isn't to like make people bleed. Yeah. And it's also not to make people have some kind of simplistic sense of hope, you know? I think both those things are pretty boring,

right? And, and I think that's why I'd never really read a lot of, you know, quote unquote nature writing about conservation before I started doing it myself, is it, it seemed like it was very easy to just, you get the sense of what's happening in these stories pretty quick in, in a lot of tellings

of them, right? That were, you know, thank God for the people who are protecting the seal or, you know, against the nasty, you know, whoever it is, hunters, landowners, whatever, you know, um, I just feel like that's really a case where you see stories snapping into those, those outlines pretty quick. You know, where you wouldn't do well as a writer? Where? Writing animated children's movies.

No, because you're absolutely right. The bad guy, let me guess. It's the evil logging or mining consortium. Yeah, I would not. With a sadistic tinge. Yeah, I just don't really do morals either. I think the morals of the story always escape me. John, what happened after?

Like how long ago did you do this? Well, so that was about 10 years ago that i was there and and the story since then it's kind of just been more of the same honestly the the monk seal numbers are up um modestly but are they still getting assassinated there were four killings last year i believe you're kidding me and there were two this year on Molokai. And there was a study recently that, as I read it this morning, after you phoned me to tell me I better have some contemporary monksial facts, Steve. As I read this study, it was showing that what I would call assassinations, intentional killings, are the leading cause of monk seal deaths by anthropogenic monk seal deaths.

So more than tanglings, more than getting hit by... Prop strikes. Yeah, exactly. That there are now more seals have died because they've been intentionally killed. Rather than other human causes. Yeah.

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Tell quick about that island I had never heard of and the brothers that own the island. Oh yeah, Nihao. I'd never heard of that either. Have you heard of that island, Kel? That was an interesting place. I have, yeah. Sounds like a good fishing spot. Yeah, if you can put up with an old man yelling at you from the shore. Despite all the monk seals.

Yeah. So Nihao, which I had never heard of, is a, it's an island. I mean, it's big. It's, you know, I think it's about 70 square miles and it's right across from Kauai. And in 1864, King Kamehameha sold the island to a ranching family, a white ranching family. Was it 10,000 bucks or something? I don't know how much it was. Yeah, it was cheap, I'm sure.

And that descendants of that family still own it. It's now under the control of two brothers, Keith and Bruce Robinson. They're both getting up there in years. And it's known as the Forbidden Island because the Robinsons do not like to have people on there. They've taken a limited number of tourists there. I guess you can hunt there. Hot tip.

But, you know, it's very expensive to get there. And they control the helicopter company that takes you in and out. And it's very, very difficult to access. Very, very difficult to know what's going on there. There are some native Niihauans or Niihau people who live on the island and have lived there for generations. There's been like-

And they've been entangled with that family for a couple hundred years. I mean, as Keith Robinson put it to me, they are a feudal landlord. Those people are their tenants. The Heen's brother are a feudal landlord. Yes. It's a very bizarre situation to exist in the 21st century.

Yeah. But it exists. You point out that they use it for training downed pilots in evasion. They have in the past. Yeah. And then the native Nihauans are the ones that run you down in the training. And they said that they get them pretty easy. That's their only extramural sport.

Um, so yeah, so they, you know, the Robinsons have just had to find ways like that to make money. They do a lot of military, you know, they have a radar station there, I believe on, on the mountain side. And I was able for some reason, uh, you know, which wasn't clear, which only became clear to me later, I was able to talk my way on to Nihao, flew over with Keith Robinson because Nihao happens to be one of the best places for monk seals right now.

The Robinsons out of a kind of like very right-wing, anti-government, wanting to stick it to the government, instead of killing the seals, they've saved the seals. So their conservation program. That's great. It's great. The rub being they won't let the government come look at them. No, not at program. It's great. The rub being, they won't let the government come look at them. No, not at all.

Not at all. It's like, oh, you're interested in these seals, are you? This plethora of endangered seals that we have here? You can't count them. You can't count them. I don't want you counting them. And the reason, according to Keith, is because they don't have to put

up with any fussy community meetings and hearings and stuff like that. They just tell the people living there who are their tenants, again, their feudal tenants and employees, we're going to protect the seals. And that's the plan. And then they do it. And so, yeah, the government's been, you know, really, I mean, I think they may have made a little more progress. But at the time I was there, they were, they were definitely just like really, I mean, they were like fascinated.

What, what did you see there? You know, like I was, I was, but, uh, but when I got there,

it also became apparent that, um, the Robinsons that were really upset that fishermen from Kauai were coming too close to Nihao. And they, I think as I interpreted it and I'm, you know, Keith Robinson was not very happy with me after this, this story, because he didn't, I don't think he liked this interpretation, but he was trying to broker some deal with Noah to set up a marine preserve around his island so that the fishermen could not come anymore.

And this was like an arrow in his quiver. me how there weren't actually that many seals and they were suffering and it was all because of these intruding fishermen from kawaii and to to you know create this atmosphere where it's like now and even knee house seals are are in trouble yeah that's what he john's explaining like in this navigation of this the the owner is like where'd they all go this is a disaster but his driver's like seems like there's about as many as we always see. And then he just stormed off. Keith just stormed off. You know, I was like, yeah. So yeah, it was a wild day. It was a wild day.

I mean, Keith is a very interesting character. And, you know, when I met him, he was wearing, you know, work clothes and a green hard hat. And he handed me a self-published book about the apocalypse, which had a painting of mushroom clouds and fires and then a little figure in the corner wearing the same work clothes and a green hard hat and um so that was

like some reading material for the helicopter flight over see I don't want this to be taken because I I would not like nothing more than to Foster a friendship with this individual yeah so I don't want if he's listening I don't want to take listen's listening, I don't want to take, listen, I want to be friends. Okay. I want to hang out on the island. You want to read his apocalypse? I want to hunt. I'll interview him about the book. Anything mean John's saying, I want to be really tight. Yeah.

And I was- Very tight. I would say, I mean, he's in a very untenable position, you know, so I don't think there's any right way to be Keith Robinson right now. You know, it's a- John, when you sat down in the helicopter and he thumbed open the first page of the book, did it say something along the lines of, so you're in my helicopter. Things to know about me.

No, I do remember though, he was like nagging the pilot to fly in a perfectly straight line to save money on gas. You know, he's very cash poor. He owns this island, but he's really having some cash flow problems, it seems. But in all fairness, do you feel that he's legitimately interested in the ecology of the island? Oh, absolutely. He's like one of the most successful conservationists in America right now. I mean, he's done, he's bred a lot of endangered native plants.

Oh, and I forgot he had that tree. Yeah, he had a, he had a one, was it the last one of the, of the native, a particular native Hawaiian hardwood tree? This was in the nineties. That he kept from a seed. That he kept from a seed. And, and as I understand, this was, this was something I could not definitively get to the bottom of, but as I understand it, and this is a little bit speculative, but it seems like he had misread a Fish and Wildlife Service document about this species. About his tree. That made it seem to him that they were going the tree rather than let the government take it because it was against his principles.

And that he told them that if they were going to come take his tree, there'd be like another Ruby Ridge on Nihao. Because the headline to the thing or somewhere in it said something about like the containment and. I believe it was like support and protect the tree. And then in the bottom, it was like, we protect yeah tree and then in the bottom it was like we really need to work with this guy yeah to keep his tree happy yeah and he would not be very specific about the story although he wanted to tell me that story many times he told you three days later the tree was dead yeah yeah so that was his that's why I said strongly implied strongly implied

that he he killed that tree rather than let the government take it. I'd love to get this guy on the show, Corinne. Don't tell him you know me. That helicopter pilot better find out a straight-ass way to fly all the way over to here, man. Yeah, I was going to say, tell him we'll find a very efficient means of travel. Okay. You ready to move on to the macaques? Oh, hold on.

You got to cover just because the macaques? Oh hold on you gotta cover Just because it is the cutest thing Monk seals With eels coming out of their noses It's so sad That's not in the article Oh look We just found this in the Guardian

This is like big slimy booger You didn't see this hat? This is a frequent thing But if it's like That's what Jabba. You didn't see this hat? This is a frequent thing. But if it's like stuck up. Oh, man, that's what Jabba the Hutt was created off of, man. Wow. So the theory is they're eating the seals. And then like a spaghetti noodle, when your kid tells one of those funny jokes. The seal's eating the eel.

Yeah. And then like a loogie, you know, they'd hack up the seal or the eel through their little seal. Hard to tell stories about seals and eels. Seals and eels, yeah. It is. That's your first kid's book, John. Seals and eels. Which ones are the bad guys?

Exactly. And then at the end, you can be like, you tell me. They both kind of have a point. Yeah, you're like, I don't want to pass judgment. Pixar is not going to pick that one up. Anyways, is it alive when it comes out? No. Oh, so he's got a dead eel hanging out of his nose.

Yeah, and people, these folks that protect the seals get very concerned over the wellbeing of the seal. And, uh, I think maybe one of, one has died from some blockage and stuff, I think. Yeah. It's been a few years since I researched that one, but. Yeah.

There's a lot of, there's a lot of, um, I mean, it's not just killing, you know, like we were talking before, they've got a toxoplasmosis threat from feral cat species that they think are affecting the seals now. We've covered that very heavily on this show. Affecting the seals? Yeah, yeah.

How does that? Because all he's got to do is get out there and that, when he's, because cats like shit in the sand and areas out in the sand. But I think it's a great point to bring up, right?

It's like, we always protect animals on our terms. Then they're living this entire other life in this case in the ocean, which is a giant place that is full of dangers that they have to conquer on their own. And it's, you know, then they show up and they got an eel dangling out of their nose. And people are like, well, that's not part of the plan.

He's like, listen, but you know what my main problem is? This eel hanging out of my nose. Yeah. If you want to help me, let me tell you. Yanked this son of a bitch out of my nose. Kills me. You ready for macaques? Sure. Which, what was I calling him this morning? Macaws? And I had youills me. You ready for macaques? Sure.

Which, what was I calling them this morning? Macaws, and I had you all confused? Yeah, I thought you were talking about birds.

Did you guys know that little monkey is called a macaque? No, I thought it was a macaw. That's a bird. That's a macaque. Yeah,

and it's also apparently a tribe. Yeah. Is it macaque or macaque? Macaque. As opposed to V.S. Chester? Yeah. Yeah, macaque or macaque? Macaque. As opposed to V.S. Chester? Yeah.

Yeah, macaque. It sounds wrong, right? It sounds like macaque would be a little more civilized, but no, it's M-A, who's looking at it? C-A-Q-U-E. Macaco. All right, tell us. Where do you want to start? You don't need to go back 1,500 years.

1,500 years ago, a monk. They were not in Florida. They were not in Florida. I mean, we can go back 100 years. That's a good starting point. 1930, yeah. Okay, go ahead. Picture it.

Florida. 1930. I see a Ferris wheel. Well, a lot more fish. It was a land of amusements. A vacation land already. And a New Yorker named Colonel Toohey, Colonel being his first name, not a rank,

started a tourist attraction. That's an audacious name. It is. It's pretty badass. Colonel. Should name my dog Colonel. Why not name your kid General? He's got to earn it. Admiral. He starts at Colonel. It's pretty badass. Colonel. Should name my dog Colonel. Why not name your kid General? He's got to earn it. Admiral.

He starts at Colonel. See how he does. Yeah, how does he get advancement? Maybe he started as private. He was born private. It was spelled C-O-L, not K-E-R, right? Yeah, like Popcorn Colonel.

Yeah, sorry. Not like the Popcorn Colonel, like the Military Popcorn kernel. Yeah. Yeah, sorry. Not like the popcorn kernel, like the military kernel. Yeah. So Mr. Colonel Toohey had some kind of tourist attraction going in the middle of Florida in a town called Ocala on the Silver River.

And he decided he wanted to up his game a notch and he brought over six macaques from somewhere, I don't know where, and decided he was going to put them on a little Island in the river and you'd get to be able to see monkeys when you came to visit his place. He did not realize that macaques are tremendous swimmers.

This is my favorite detail in the story. Within minutes apparently, by some accounts, they were off the Island. Um, uh, so that was, that was in the thirties. That's great. You turn them loose and all of a sudden they just walk like swimming. There they go. so that was that was in the 30s that was great you turn him loose and all of a sudden they just

they just walk like swimming there they go you'd like to imagine him kind of standing there you know feeling very proud just gazing out at his little monkey island

and then sort of dawning on him tell some kid okay now go feed the monkeys and they're like which ones yeah yeah

I just imagine he's still standing there they're just splashing toward him it's like Normandy, you know? But yeah. And then, but so then you've got wild monkeys in Florida and by the eighties, there were about 400 of them.

On each side of the river. In separate troops. Yeah. On separate troops. I mean, I'm going to preface all this by saying the census, the monkey censuses in Florida are very fuzzy. Several recounts. We never have, right, a lot of hanging chads.

We never really have very good information, it seems, about how many monkeys there are in Florida at any given time. But, you know, there's wild monkeys living in Florida, something I did not know. So pause that story. In 2012, the summer of 2012, I went to Tampa to look for the mystery monkey of Tampa Bay, which was a macaque that had first appeared behind a Bennigan's in 2009, I believe. A hundred miles away from the source. Very far away. Yeah. Yeah. This is way out, you know, Tampa. It's like way out on the coast. So it's crossed the whole interior from the source. Very far away. Yeah. Yeah. This is way out, you know, Tampa.

It's like way out on the coast. So it's crossed the whole interior of the state. And the theory was when they called out a gentleman named Vernon Yates, who's a renowned freelance animal trapper in Florida, to come corral this monkey behind the Benningens, he was floored. He could not believe that this thing was, as he put it, very streetwise. Because when a pet macaque, of which there apparently are many licensed pet macaques in Florida, when they escape, they tend to just fry themselves

immediately on a power line or get hit in traffic or something. But this thing, this thing could boogie. This thing could get through. It could read your mind. Yeah. It was, it had a kind of a ninja-like nimbleness that was evading both Vernon and

the Fish and Wildlife Commission officers who were sent out to trap him. He darted it multiple times. Get away before it fell asleep. He's like, look at you and pull out the dart. Exactly. The line where he looks him in the eye and pulls the dart out.

Five of them fell out yeah that detail we we work with we used to work a lot with a guy named mo and he was a cameraman and he described being in the jungle in south america and he's with some guys this wasn't working with us but working with someone else he's with some guys that were blowgun hunters they were in columbia and they're blowgun hunters and he said one of these guys was this monkey up in a tree he said it's kind of the most but working with someone else. He's with some guys that were blowgun hunters. They were in Columbia, and they're blowgun hunters. And he said one of these guys was this monkey up in a tree. He said it's kind of the most disturbing thing you've ever seen in his life. One of these guys is like with that blowgun, and that dart hits that monkey in the back.

He said that monkey reaches around behind his back and pulls the dart out. Yeah. He said just not what you expect like a game animal to do. Right, right. Because they don't have opposable thumbs. No, he said it just seemed what you expect like a game animal to do. Right. Right. They don't have opposable thumbs. No, he said, it just seemed like at that moment, he's like, everything was wrong. Yeah. My other favorite detail was apparently there was a moment, because this was, this Bennigan's

pursuit was just the first of many, right? So I think Vernon, by the time I saw Vernon in 2012, and this has been going on for three and a half years, and he said he had more than a hundred occasions he had gone out after this monkey. On one of them, there was a fish and wildlife officer. The same monkey. The same monkey. He hadn't caught it in three years. He hadn't caught it in three and a half years.

And he was, you know, I went to his house and he took a map of Florida out to show me kind of where the monkey's travels had taken him. And he just kept having to flip the map over, like bring out a different map at a bigger scale. He just kept getting more and more elaborate, you know. And he was sure that it was the same monkey. Like it was marked somehow.

Well, they were very sure it was the same monkey just by its behavior, I think. And I guess that's an open question but there did seem to be consensus.

It crossed a very long causeway probably in the back of a truck. Yeah. Yeah. And it started, it was in different neighborhoods. It was eating fruit off people's roofs.

Um, it was getting around and, uh, and what happened again in a, in a similar and yet extremely different way. Oh, he's about 25 pounds. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's, he's a little guy. He's pretty adorable. I think he, uh, and he became known as the mystery monkey of Tampa Bay.

And then the same way as this monk seal story unfolded, but in a very different version of it, a, there was a political dynamic around the mystery monkey in that here you had, um, Vernon Yates, who was sort of caricatured as this, you know, dopey small town sheriff, animal trapper guy out to, you know, trap this innocent creature and the state, you know, the power of the state clamping down on the, the animal. It's Bonnie and Clyde. Yeah. And the populace wanted the monkey to be free. You know, they were, they were t-shirts, stay free mystery monkey. There were billboards, um, you know, social media accounts. And it became again, another intractable kind of,

um, you know, disagreement about what this monkey was all about and what we, what we should do with it. Right. You know, you had the state saying it's a danger to people. It's probably, um, suffering itself because they're communal animal, they're social animals. And this one's been, you know, outside of its troop. And they have hepatitis. Is that what they have? They all have herpes. Okay. Not all. A lot of them have herpes B, I believe, which was used as a kind of scare tactic, as I see it, by the state to say, this is another reason we have to get this monkey.

Although, when you kind of dig into the science. Because everybody will make love with the monkey and wind up. Yeah. Yeah. People love it. And the monkeys with herpes are definitely telling the monkeys without herpes that,

hey, everybody's got it. Yeah. You know, it's tangled. Yeah. So, yeah. So, so, so I was, and I was there right before the Republican convention, you know, in 2012. This was the Romney. So freedom was in the air.

Freedom was in the air. The Tea Party was ascendant. There was a lot of, you know, in a way the monkey debate really mirrored the American debate of like, you know, what is the line between tyranny and lawlessness? And, you know, what is the government for? And, you know, shouldn't we all just be free? And it was fascinating. It was fascinating. I mean, the characters involved were fascinating. This guy Vernon, you know, he had like 17 tigers at his house and a big pile of alligators in a concrete pool. And again, just as I solved that monk seal crime, I managed to find the monkey living very happily in someone's backyard. They had sort of reached a kind of

detente with the monkey and were letting it hang around their property. It was actually through a reporter from the Tampa Bay Times had found this out. And I knew another source who had been working with the family to kind of take care of the monkey and keep the monkey, you know, close and, and well cared for, but also not bring it too close. You know, they weren't bringing it to their house or anything like that. It seemed to be working out in a weird way. It was a weird kind of compromise happening between the monkey's rights and the humans, uh, need to keep the monkey a monkey. Did you ever get Vernon's like personal opinion on whether or not the monkey should be caught? Like aside from the fact that it's his job. He absolutely thought the monkey should be caught.

He thought, I mean, like the wildlife officers, imagine your job is to keep wildlife healthy and keep people safe from wildlife. And now you've got a monkey running around and everyone's more concerned about the monkey's rights. So Vernon was, was adamant that, um, you know, he was doing this for the monkey, that the monkey needed to be captured and we can jump ahead because the, you know, some stuff happened after I, I did this story, but that it was in the monkey's best interest to be brought into captivity where it could be with other monkeys of its kind and live out its life there. It was safer for the monkey and it was safer for people.

Was there any talk about putting the monkey back on the river? No, because that's a, I don't know that this is why, but the monkeys on the river themselves have been a huge source of controversy and aggravation because at different times the state has tried to trap that population and extinguish that population. Which doesn't go over well. Which does not go over well with people who like adorable anthropomorphized monkeys. So there was, I don't think there was any sense that they were going to like relocate the mystery monkey. Everyone knows about the non-native situation in Florida, but very few people know about the non-native monkeys in Florida. Yeah, I had no idea.

And there's other, there's another monkey population. Apparently there's a vervet monkey population by the Fort Lauderdale airport. But I only just recently heard that. Yeah, that's been there for as long as I was interested in monkeys in Florida. Popular, popular uprisings around monkeys in Florida. Did they ever get them? Oh, sorry, Cal. Oh, I guess I was just wondering about Vernon's opinion too, because in his role, right? He's got a pool full of alligators.

He's got tigers. He knows that so much of that exists in the state of Florida. It just crossed my mind that he could possibly have an opinion of like, I'm glad I'm getting paid to go try to capture the monkey, but does it matter? No. He, it doesn't matter because there's already so many messed up situations.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, I mean, he, the reason why he has those animals is that those are animals that have, that he has offered to rehome from licensed or unlicensed owners in the state of Florida who did not, you know, who were not keeping their animals humanely.

He complained to John about losing a hundred thousand dollars worth of tortoises in a divorce settlement. That's right. Came after my turtles. Yeah. He loves tortoises was his sweet spot i think he had a special special place in his heart for tortoises um yeah one of his five divorces he got cleaned out of his tortoises so so the mystery monkey settled down and found a wife lived his life, that was where my story, that was where my story ended. And then a few months later,

the monkey was, you know, everything was still peaceable at the house. And then the monkey jumped on the woman, the homeowner's back and startled her. Classic monkey on your back. Yep. Absolutely. And that, you know, startled her. She reacted on your back. Yep. Absolutely. That, you know, startled her.

She reacted. That freaked out the monkey. And the monkey bit her on the shoulder. And then it was game over. So at that point, the monkey had to be caught to be, I guess, tested in the same way, you know, you get bit by a stray dog or something. I don't know the ins and outs of it. It involves decapitation often. Well, this monkey was not decapitated.

We're beheaded. So Vernon came back in with the statewide. Vernon's back on the scene now? Vernon was probably the first call. I mean, you're not going to, at the time he had sunk into this, you think they're going to give it to someone else? And this time they were able to get him. They trapped the monkey who was then named Cornelius

after the monkey in Planet of the Apes, which I think I could take a little bit of credit for because there's a part in the piece where I sort of have this delusional fever dream while I'm reading Planet of the Apes at a La Quinta Inn in Ocala. But they named him Cornelius. They brought him to a kind of like

a roadside attraction type zoo thing where he was paired with another monkey named Cora, settled down. He had children, seemed to be living a happy life until a few years ago. No. He developed a nasty habit. They had given him a cyanide pill to keep in his cheek. No, until a few years ago, I guess that facility where he was had come under fire from PETA and some other organizations. And they started,

they had a dozen or more tigers at this place. And there were some complaints and they started offloading their tigers, driving them out to Oklahoma to the guy in that Netflix show. Whoa. Yeah.

And somehow- Cornelius got tangled up with a tiger king? Well, that's where the story- so there was a follow-up report in the Tampa Bay Times last year- Throw that monkey in too. Trying to figure this out. And it seems like in the confusion over all of this, Cornelius, the trail on Cornelius went cold. We don't know where

he is, where he wound up, and there's really no paper trail or anything. No. Yeah. Are you going back down? I mean, I think it's been covered to death, but I'm curious. I'd like to know where he is. But if the trail's cold, then it's obviously just right for

John Well. Yeah, I don't know if I can crack that one. CSI. It took you out. You found the monk seal assassin in days. You'll find that monkey. I feel like it's like a lethal weapon. I'm getting too old for this. One last time.

I think it's hilarious how you're staying at a La Quinta too, because their claim to fame is they're always pet friendly. There's no chance you have that monkey. I'm not going to say it. Then we're getting into Netflix documentary territory if it turns out that you have the monkey. That'd be pretty wild. Yeah, there's a whole dome over his

fence too. Steve, would you turn your friend in or not? No. For a reward? No, I'd turn him in for a good story. Well, but that's actually the weird thing is that the monkey is not, the reason why we don't know where the monkey is, is because there's really no regulation that would require them to say where the monkey is. There is a quote in this Tampa Bay Times follow up where someone from the state was basically like, it's just like a TV. You don't have to tell us when you sell your TV to someone. Right? Someone from the state was basically like, it's just like a TV. You don't have to tell us when you sell your TV to someone. Right. So that person who has the monkey should theoretically have papers for the monkey, but there's no database where you can look up who has what monkey.

So they're just property. Mm-hmm. In my Buffalo book, I wrote about, you know, the buffalo from the Buffalo Head Nickel. Not long after the artist did his sculpture, which became the Buffalo Head Nickel. That buffalo's name is Black Diamond. He was sold in the meatpacking district in Manhattan and butchered and yielded an incredible 1100 pounds of boneless meat. The guy that owned the meat pack was a guy named Sills. I think it was his last name. S-I-L-Z got stuffed.

So he, for years, had black diamonds head stuff from the Buffalo Head Nickel. He sold it right now someone uh it's speculated that someone has that stuffed head and doesn't know what it is because no one's ever come forward to be like oh i have I have black diamond's head. So unless it like got lost in the house fire or whatever, it like, like someone's like, oh, I don't know where it's just the thing I got from my grandpa. Yeah. There should be some way, like you could get

an alert on your phone, like an Amber alert. And it would just be like, do you have a buffalo head? Can you send a picture of it to this account? You know, we just did it. In extraordinary large buffalo head that looks like the buffalo head nickel. Yeah. Yeah.

We could crack this in 30 seconds if we had a will to do it. So working on next, I know you can't really say, not that you're working on like a murder mystery, but you don't want to talk about it because you're waiting on some permissions. Yeah. But what can you tell us?

Can you say what it involves without saying where it involves it? Because this is my favorite subject. Yeah. Well well we've talked about neanderthals before right so yeah so i got really after i did a story about neanderthals i got you know just kind of reawakened to how cool deep time is right that there were there were people so long ago so yes i've been really interested in writing about uh paleolithic cave art and I've been trying to find a way to do it. Um, what I didn't understand is that these caves are like, um, the people who study these caves, it's very proprietary. So like it's, you know, this person will, they're the person for that cave, you know, and then

yeah, kind of, if you're a up and coming researcher, you have to wait until that person retires or. To get your hands on a cave. Yeah. Yeah. They're sort of like Supreme court appointments or something. So, yeah. So I've been talking to a lot of people, you know, all spring about trying to, trying to talk my way into a, into a cave because I think it's, I think there was this feeling in the past that the, the cave art were trying to over-interpret what they were seeing. So everything had to have the biggest, meatiest possible explanation.

Like, we see X on a cave wall and therefore it means this about society. Yeah, like the testament to the extinctions. Yeah, they revered the elk because here's a you know and i think that that's that's kind of that approach is in my mind from what i've learned is it's kind of being deflated a little bit okay and people are studying more like the material culture of it like how was this actually made what do we know about the moment that it was made and things like that there was a a lot of comments that kind of down like the religious, spiritual side of things too.

Like the people who painted were very special. Right. And then. Because. Yeah. Because they had to be. There's no way it was, there's no way it was like 14, 15 year old kids dicking around in a cave.

And it was predominantly male also, but they did some, I think, fingerprint analysis, something, something pretty cool. And there's a lot of, surprisingly, a lot of small children, females too. It wasn't just shamans. Get out of my way and go paint on the wall. You're telling me kids drew stuff on walls?

Well, yeah. And that one thing that I didn't realize either is like so many of these sites, because, you know, you see, I've never been in any of these caves, but you see, you know, photographs of the walls. What I didn't realize is that a lot of these places where the biggest, they call them galleries, where the biggest galleries are actually like really deep inside caves. So that you like, you know, or they're through narrow passages, like they're very purposeful places that you had to try to get to, you know, they didn't just walk in the cave and start drawing. And so that suggests.

Like little crawls, like crawl spaces and you could climb and under stuff and around it and. Exactly. So they were very specific about where they wanted to do this. I don't know what that means, but that just seemed like an interesting fact. I mean, I think that once you.

That points to little people like children going in there and doing it yeah that's actually an interesting thought i hadn't thought about that yeah you know uh you've no doubt seen herzog's movie about cave paintings yeah so i'm a big herzog fan you're in a herzog i was deeply disappointed with that movie i wanted to see that movie with another writer um who's been on this podcast i would almost regard you guys as peers and contemporaries ben wallace oh yeah um i went to see it with him and we left and i said i don't know how you could make a bad movie about cave paintings and he said i was just wondering myself the exact opposite what didn't you what didn't you like about it?

I love that movie. It was too, it was too, it was too like, it made it all ethereal. It was too like, what were they dreaming? This must be their dreams.

And you're kind of like, just what was it? Like, what was it made out of? What do we think it was? Like, stop, stop this nonsense about

that these are like shamans capturing their dreams. Yeah. I can see that. I mean, they did have that whole thing about that. It was just so overblown. You got guys like dressed up like they're from a long time ago. You got like role players. What do they call them, people?

LARPs. Yeah. LARPs. LARPs. There's like LARPers in it. Yeah. Live action role players of like cave people. That's your favorite word now, too.

Your favorite acronym. I love that. I don't think you want to alienate the LARPing audience. No, they're alienating. No, he already has. He's done that a long time ago. Listen, I'm a huge Herzog fan. That and the-

That Little Dieter Needs to Fly. He's got some masterpieces. Grizzly Man. He's got a novel out now. I didn't know that. Yeah. Really? Yeah, it just came out.

And then he made, what's that one? Little Dieter Needs a Fly. Then he made a fictionalized version with Christian Bale. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I met him once. Rescue Dawn. I met him once at a, in the, we were trapped in the green room of an ideas festival in Mexico together. They wouldn't let us out for a few hours.

Oh, that's cool. And there were a bunch of us. And I slowly kind of made my way over to Werner Herzog to, did you guys shoot the shit? A little bit. He was telling me this was right before he was making that documentary about volcanoes and he kept,

he just wanted to talk about volcanoes all the time. And that felt like the perfect way to meet Werner Herzog. He's like a method actor, but a documentary artist. Yeah. Um, he, uh, you know, he wrote wrote he made that crazy ass when he

used to do fictional films not used to but focused on he did fitzcarraldo yeah and it's about like a deranged robber rubber baron who the movie is that a guy does the impossible he like built he moves his boat from one drainage in the amazon to the other which involves like hoisting it up and over a ridge and down in another valley so you'd think like today you'd be like oh we'll just make a thing look like cgi whatever but he did the insane thing he like did exactly that they took a boat and moved it people like died on the production and They made a movie about the movie called Burden of Dreams. In Burden of Dreams, Herzog's losing his mind over that he can't get his movie finished, which he did eventually finish.

He's going off about how much he hates the jungle. Herzog says, birds don't sing. They scream in agony. I love that guy. I love that. birds don't sing, they scream in agony. All right, man. Thanks for coming on the show. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having me.

Tell everybody your other books. Did we do a show about This Is Chance? I think so. Like we focused on that specifically? Yeah. Okay, so John Moolam, like moo, like a cow alum not like alan john m-o-o-a-l-l-e-m no h in the john new book is serious face author of this is

chance author of what was the candid not the creatures wild ones wild ones yeah more about all about animals all about animals well All about animals. Well, people. All about people going wacky about animals. That's exactly right. Am I missing books? That's it. This is Chance was about the biggest earthquake to ever strike. 64.

In America. Alaska earthquake. Yep. Good Friday earthquake. Yep. Focuses on, narrows in on a woman who became very influential in the chaos. Yeah. And translating and providing news as the catastrophe unfolded.

That's right. A radio reporter named Jeannie Chance, who kind of was in the right place at the right time and spent all of that weekend on the air pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. As just chaos. As just being one source of concrete information in a situation

that did not seem to have much certainty at all. And stay tuned for his thing on cave paintings, which I promise you will be good. Thank you. Alright. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, John. Thanks. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada.

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