The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 466: Direwolves and Ancient Hunting Dogs

Episode Date: August 7, 2023

Steven Rinella talks with Angela Perri, Brent Reaves, Ronny Boehme, Janis Putelis, Spencer Neuharth, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider. Topics include: Brass knuckle daggers and TSA confiscating stuff; who had the very first pet dog?; how Steve thinks The North Wall in “Games of Thrones” is in Alaska; a very special bobcat burial; Steve’s 12 signs of astrology; hunting the wooly rhino; when wolves turn into dogs; from hunting to scavenging in a few generations; being the first human to ever run into a critter; culled and “kinlin”; how the tar pits are still taking victims; hunting boars with dogs in Japan; breeding wolves with dogs and getting the DNA all muddled up; how most folks don’t know that dire wolves were real; body farms and clipping cadaver fingernails; when your dog hunts behind you; how Brent spoils his hound in a temperature controlled dog house; watch Ronny’s new training dog series; dogs stars; 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.

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. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light.

Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlight.com. F-I-R-S-T-t-l-i-t-e.com phil's back everybody he's got a tall chair oh wrong camera here i am yanni now yanni's head is in the way of the camera i'm here steve can see me that's all that matters all that matters uh i'm gonna get to introductions in a minute but first i gotta so you know when you see airlines, airports being like voted America's favorite airport,

all that's a lie. Like the best airport in the world is the Ketchikan Airport, Ketchikan, Alaska. Small, you can get all the food you want to eat. It's got everything you need. The main thing that I liked about it was that and ronnie's seen this in the confiscation display the tsa confiscation display since the since 9-11 they have had and they started doing that sort of thing they have had a brass knuckles dagger as the centerpiece of the confiscation display like a genuine like a trench knife brass knuckles pointed in a dagger so i

always like to imagine the guy that was like the guy that was bringing that on the plane who do you imagine him but he's like oh you know one thing i should probably grab is my brass knuckles dagger so they had it and then now it's gone and i asked him i said why is that gone he says well now and then they go and donate all of this stuff and they'll donate it to the boy scouts and i said there's no way that that the Boy Scouts is going to give out or sell that brass knuckles dagger. So it's just missing now. Someone somewhere now holds that brass knuckles dagger, and it's not going to the Boy Scouts. But they'll take it and sell buckets of that stuff.

All your leather mans. The other day, my kid lost a lost a bench made folder and he introduced the ID to me over the phone he was flying with his mom and he tells me you know that knife that I don't use much anymore was his way of introing to me that it had been confiscated by TSA anyhow we're going through the catch can line and

Seth we're coming from our fish shack. And as we've talked about a bunch, Seth bought the moldy, falling-down fish shack next to our not-falling-down moldy fish shack. And my little boy, my 8-year-old, was overhanging out at Seth's place, and they gave him a slingshot. The old-school kind with the wooden handle and surgical rubber. So we're in, we're leaving Ketchikan and he's all bent out of shape because he's worried about how he's got the slingshot in his bag. And we're conversing with the TSA guys about what exactly happened to the, where the brass knuckle dagger is. And that I'm not buying that the boy Scouts are auctioning it off.

And my kid says, listen, I have this slingshot. And the guy, he gets it out and the guy holds it and stretches it and says, you're okay. Next time, put it in your bag. We're going to let it fly. We fly from Ketchikan to Seattle. In Seattle, like we got to go toinal D, and we're way far away. And they're doing some construction.

So we get off the train, and normally, it seems to me normally it doesn't matter what escalator you go up, you wind up where you're trying to get to. But I'm not paying any attention. I'm talking to my kids. And we wind up at baggage claim, which means we have to go back through security. And I'm telling my kids, I don't understand what I did, but we got to go back to security. Two of them had already thrown out their boarding passes. So anyhow, we get we had we get in line and here's the backpack again. And my kids like, man, I'm super worried about my slingshot.

And I'm watched all the bags go through and that bag stops and somehow that TSA guy is so sharp, there'm super worried about my slingshot. And I watched all the bags go through, and that bag stops. And somehow that TSA guy is so sharp, there's no metal on this slingshot. It's a wooden handle and surgical tubing. And he snatches that bag out and says, is there a slingshot in this bag? And I said, yeah, it belongs to my eight-year-old. They said it's fine. They know how I felt. They said it's fine in Ketchikan, not fine in Seattle.

Confiscated it. So now there's going to be some Boy Scout running around with my kids slingshotting that brass knuckles dagger when I find them. TSA's website addresses this. It says slingshots, carry-on bags, no. Checked bags, yes. Well, the thing I was pointing out to him when we were hashing this out as i was saying it's not like it's it's not a wrist rocket it's an old schooler he spent

two weeks shooting that slingshot off the deck of art thing and he was barely clearing the water line slingshots by tsa categorization are the same as yo-yos. Not allowed in your carry-on, but they are allowed in checked bags. Because you're going to Garrett someone with a yo-yo? What does Garrett mean? You know when you're watching mobster movies and you're in the back? The guy in the back seat kills the guy in the front seat by strangling him? I never heard it called Garrett. That's a term?

Yeah. Oh, I like that. How do you not know that i just don't that's gonna help you in a future trivia episode one more thing before we do our intros um this is a this is highly unlikely one of my absolute favorite bands of all time the brian jonestown Massacre is coming to town October 2nd. I already hold my tickets for me and my wife. I'm thinking you guys fish. There's probably no way you guys fish, but if you fish or anything, let me know. I will take you fishing while you're in town. Joy today.

Bye. Where do we start? Giannis, do them all up because I got to look at some stuff. Oh, geez. I'm not going to do a good job. I'm not prepped up for this episode that well. You're going to have to do the intros, big boy. Okay.

Brent Reeves is here today. Yeah. You're just here because you like dogs and you're in town. It was just a happy coincidence. His wife, Alexis, how long have you guys been married? I think 12 years. She thinks 12 years. I knew you was going to ask this question.

We're waiting on the lift at the hotel, and she was getting ready, and she walked into where I was sitting. I said, now we've been married how long? No, you asked me what year we were married. Okay, whatever it was. From now on, just direct all the questions to my attorney. Giannis Petelis, of course,encer newhart ronnie bame many time guest ronnie bame are uh living are our expert on dogs that are living today and what they have going on

and then we have a dire wolf an ancient dog expert how do you like to classify yourself i mean that sounds good really i'll take it sure you know the first question i'm going to ask you i don't want you to answer it yet but i want you know the first question I'm going to ask you, I don't want you to answer it yet, but I want you to know the first question I'm going to ask you. Let's have it. I want you to think about this, because you guys are going to nitpick this question. How long ago did someone have the first pet dog? And I'll define pet.

Like a dog where the owner could at any given time account for where that dog was. I mean. I want you to mull that over do you got a good one lined up no oh really like it's not known it's not well known to science it's no it's more in my category no it's not your category you're not gonna tell me right you're not gonna tell me in a way that satisfies me on what continent and in what is today's country and in what year and they sent the basenjis up to no the pharaohs they put big old bells on their the pharaohs no someone had a dog pet a pet dog way before that that's the earliest one i could do you agree right uh don't answer yeah steve you also didn't mention her name oh i'm sorry don't angela parry what are you tell me

who are you affiliated with uh i'm a professor at texas a&m university and i work in uh commercial cultural resource management commercial archaeology as well helping people manage their heritage aka archaeology. Oh, I got it. Yeah. Do you interface with a frequent guest we have, David Meltzer? He's at a different school, but do you guys interface ever on ancient old stuff? I mean, Texas A&M and SMU, what we do.

Yeah. But you guys hate each other too? No, neither one of us are from Texas, so we don't care. Oh, so you're not bought into it. You're not bought into it. I feel like I've seen your names in the same journals oh yeah we've written papers together yeah we wrote a paper about dogs coming to the americas with people oh yeah uh how long you been at texas a&m one year where were you at before then um the united kingdom uk doing what archaeology did you did you spend time at the um did you spend time at the ancient dna place in oxford yeah i work really closely with grigger larson and the ancient dna group

at oxford do you work with beth shapiro yep she's been on the show yeah yeah um beth and i best on the dire wolf paper with us we worked together to to try to get DNA out of dire wolves. Took a long time. We did it. Such a little click. Oh, yeah. I got one you can't answer. Small club.

I got one you can't answer right now. And it won't detract because we won't get into it too much later. Okay. We had a big argument. Do you remember the Spencer? No. We had a big argument about

whether Alaska, which was a big argument. Spencer wasn't in it. Were there ever dire wolves? No, he wasn't. Oh, yeah. No, I was the one who brought it up. Oh, you know, I got such a bone to pick with you, dude.

Oh, okay. Were there ever dire wolves in Alaska? North of the wall, you mean? There we go. Game of Thrones. I got that one. What is that? Game of Thrones. That takes place in Alaska?

Well, you know, Arctic. Good question. The real answer is we aren't sure. So there are a couple possible direwolves. We have this issue, though, that we have this issue though that we have dire wolves we have gray wolves we also have something called the beringian wolf now extinct wolf um all of them look very very similar um morphologically their bones look very similar so we have um people like me zoo archaeologists um go through a lot of bones

trying to figure out oh someone, someone called this XYZ. I mean, not that long ago, I was in the Illinois State Museum where I work a lot and digging through some boxes, read about a puppy burial, digging, digging. Let me find this puppy burial they found in the 70s. Dig it out. Bobcat. Really? Puppy burial is Bobcat. So you ought to go digging around behind. You ought to go digging around behind you ought to go digging

around behind ronnie's house that's not funny my kids think they all went to farms it's like a puppy mass grave back here was that the bobcat that they put like shell necklaces on had a necklace on it and everything. Yeah. Really? Yeah, yeah. It had a cool necklace. It had marine and freshwater pearls on it. And then it had, they were carved like two bear canines, but they were like deer longbones,

but they'd been carved to look like bear canines. Really? And they were strung up. We found it buried. The photos from the excavation in the 70s, like have it laying out in a burial with the necklace clearly wrapped. So they thought like, oh, must be a dog,

must be a puppy. They took, so someone had taken deer long bones and carved them to look like bear canines. Yes. And you were the first one to recognize it was a bobcat? It's like the earliest fake diamond. I mean, it's pretty, I mean, it's pretty cool.

I mean, they pulled it out. Listen, what we do for zooarchaeology, identifying, you know, animal remains at archaeological sites. This is not, this is a fairly new kind of category of archaeology. Before that, you'd take your bones that you found and you send them to a biologist or zoologist or something like that. Or you just kind of rough it in the field. I'm an archaeologist. I don't know. It looks like it could be a dog, probably a dog.

Put it in a box. Put it, right? Puppy burial on the field. I'm an archaeologist. I don't know. It looks like it could be a dog. Probably a dog. Put it in a box. Put it right. Puppy burial on the box. Put it away. In 40 years, someone will come along and tell me what it is. Bobcat. Bobcat, yeah. So it was in a mound in Illinois.

Is it possible it was a domesticated bobcat? I mean. Yeah, I think so. Little pet. I don't know. You tell me. Can you domesticate a bobcat? Well, no, you can't. You can domesticate a bobcat. A bobcat. But you can't domesticate bobcats.

You can tame a bobcat. Yeah, you can tame a bobcat. Not domesticate. Yeah. What is the definition of domestication? Well, let's go tight for a minute. Okay. Can we talk about it?

We already got too deep. Die Wolves in Alaska real quick. Wasn't there a declaration made? I thought you wanted to hear the bone I have to pick with you. Well, a second. Wasn't there a declaration made in 2020 that there were direwolves found in Asia? Wouldn't that imply that they had to get there via Alaska? There was a declaration made.

Okay. But it's not accepted? Not yet. Okay. No, no, no. I mean, there are a lot of things that look like a direwolf. The media jumps the gun. I'm sorry.

Go ahead. No, you're right. the media jumps the gun i'm sorry go ahead no you're right the media jumps the gun someone will come out with a paper to be to say hey here's a thing that like a thing that would be warrant exploration and they and then they come up with a headline humans in new world way before previously thought and then you read it and you go like i mean they got like a date off a thing that probably isn't valid and they don't include all that in the headline yeah we're in the world of like sexy archaeology right so dogs dna peopling of the americas all these things get like hot topic headlines that's why you're here you know right exactly that's why i'm here let's just be clear.

Direwolves in Alaska, who knows? Direwolves don't seem to like cold weather. They were hanging out a lot in lower latitudes, near water. They're into Florida. They're into Texas. They're into Southern California. Like retirees. Like they're retirees.

Exactly. They're snowbirds. They're not, they don't seem to like the cold weather too much. So it's been hard to believe. You might have had some that wandered aimlessly into somewhere north, but they're not really hanging out there. It's not their place. Got it.

Yeah. So in Corinne's words, Angela Perry, am I pronouncing that correct? Yeah. Well, Corinne messed up. It'd be an archaeologist, Corinne. Angela Perry is, in Corinne's'd be an archaeologist crin angela perry is in crin's word oh archaeologist oh she corrected it is an archaeologist and professor at texas a&m her areas of expertise include environmental archaeology got it zooarchaeology got itasitology. First time I ever heard that word, but I got it. Paleo ecology. Got it.

Hunter-gatherers, domestication, adaptation, and canids. Also, Ronnie Boehm hosts the Hunting Dog Podcast. Brent Reeves hosts This Country Life on the Meat Eater Network and often hunts with dogs. We're going to come back to all that in a minute um another invitation i own a dog too yeah right yeah i'm an aspiring dog owner really um this is a no doubt and i'm gonna hit you up on instagram too the butcher of Hoy Lake, a golfer. That's so Barron's. Here's a headline from Barron's. The butcher of Hoy Lake stays patient as he hunts British open crown.

So there's a, there's a golfer real good at golfing. Um, I see that he, uh, in all of his interviews about golf and he always talks about hunting. I want to have, so I'd like to have you come on the podcast. because I feel that golf is the antithesis of hunting.

Like you can't get, if I looked at a person golfing, a person sitting on a chair reading, and a person hunting, and I had to rate them like who's closest to hunting, I would pick the person on the chair. Because maybe they're reading about hunting. I would love to have Brian Harmon on. There's the invite. Please come on the show.

We're going to dog on you about playing golf and you can defend yourself. Just killed the biggest deer of his life two years ago. Only hunts mature bucks, butchers his own deer. Nice. And won a golfing contest. Real big

golfing contest, too. Like a big golfing tournament. Big, big. There are four majors, Steve. He won the wrong one because this is the only one held outside of the United States. Thus, the European media didn't take a liking to his very American hunting

culture. Oh, that's how this whole thing all kind of came. Yeah. But they're like the, you know, their King, uh, their King guys used to go hunting for sure. The current ones, the one, I think the one that app, the one that like the one that absconded to America, I think he used to hunt. And I think the one that stayed put used to do it.

Yeah. And if you'd go to Brian's Instagram, you wouldn't even know he was golfer. He looks like a plain old hunter. Oh, really? God, please come on the show.

Do you think he'll come on the show? Corinne? Yep. You're going to reach out to him. You're going to reach out to him. I can't wait to have him on the show. Um, gonna reach out to him i can't wait to have him on the show um what else is in here that's interesting that's not interesting nothing's not interesting super it's all interesting cringe just i'm just trying to be cognizant of time um and to be honest with you, I didn't look at everything that was interesting

in the right frame of reference. Oh, why did you scratch out why astrology is stupid? Because I didn't think that... That was the most interesting thing. I didn't think that the explanation was like... No, it's a great explanation. Go ahead, hit it. So, Guy writes writes in he knows that

i hate astrology um and i think i've talked about making my own 12 signs have i told you about that like instead of looking up your sign i'll make up 12 to be like your dad was a drunk and beat you so you look it up and you'll be like you'll have um you'll have trust issues you'll have trust issues today like you're extraordinarily wealthy but you inherited all the money and you can look it up and be like be an easy day today but you might feel existential crises and then it'd be a much more accurate way to to find out what's going to happen today than it would be to look at astrology. But this guy was saying, this guy wrote in why it's all wrong. Everyone thinks there's something other than they are. And he explains the earth currently revolves around the sun and spins on its axis with

a 23.5 degree tilt. That in conjunction with earth's rotation around the sun gives us the seasons. Got it. This tilt changes wobbles in a formal process called precession this also affects climate this matters because thousands of years ago when astrological signs were defined the night sky was positionally different than it is now so when someone says they are aquarius or virgo or whatever, they're actually off by a month in that night sky they're referring to via the zodiac sign. So it's not even accurate anyway.

So you follow me? So I always run around liking to tell people that I'm Aquarius, I believe, but I'm not. That was interesting. And you made up 12 of those no i only i'm just still working on the concept okay because i got to find 12 to capture everybody and then you'll be able to look every morning and i'll tell you a little bit about how the day is going to go perfect yeah you can help me with that on it i'm on it yeah because you can help me with that on it. I'm on it. Yeah. Because you can help me with the one about criminals. You got it. Like you're a criminal.

And then we can look up and they'll give you some ideas under the sign of handcuffs. Yeah. Oh, we got to do signs too. Yeah. Like the handcuffs sign. Yeah, the bar shadows from the window. A money sign. The bar shadows from the window are your first clue that you're a criminal. All right. getting on.

Now, Corinne, when do you imagine that we plug Ronnie's project? I was going to say a little bit later on. Okay, so we're going to dig right in. Can we save all that stuff though? Yeah. Normally this would all happen behind the scenes, but Phil's so cranky about his video

that we can't be behind the scenes anymore. Nope. Sausage is getting made. We're seeing it. Okay. All right. Let's dig in now. Have you thought about what my question?

Which one? Okay. That's a question that's going to require you to define a bunch of points. Dig deep. Mm-hmm. We, lately, when I say lately,

I mean, in recent years. Yeah. You see headline after headline after headline. As dogs become more popular and more treat, people treat dogs more like people, people are infatuated with dogs. You see more and more headlines sort of speculating on when the what is the genesis of dog ownership?

Yeah. What is the genesis of the pet dog who first domesticated the dog? When did they domesticate the dog? How was the dog domesticated so i'm trying to put in a clean question that would let you explore some of these definitions to say who had the first dog when and where generous of you yeah set those questions up for us yeah um okay well good questions i think that where we're at in people who are into ancient dogs is probably that we are we're moving away from just like neanderthals you probably had like metin and and dave talking about this when they were on before are we previously

thought like oh neanderthals are these like kind of brutish people who can't figure anything out and we're learning that they're doing all these amazing things. And I think around dogs, we've always had this idea that probably it's only recently that we've been doing like training and breeding and very specific stuff. And up until this point, dogs have just been kind of wandering in their own, left to their own devices. That's probably not the case so some of the work we're starting to do now is trying to figure out the genetic lineages of working dogs you know um when do people really start breeding dogs to be working

dogs birding dogs or hunting dogs or sled dogs or any of these kinds of things um breeding meaning i'm going to take this one, which is great. Yeah. And I'm going to put it with this one, which is great. Yeah. And hopefully continue this, this. Yeah. Continue this like set of behaviors or whatever.

Right. So breeding is tricky, right? Because it not only means you have to put things together, but you have to keep things apart. Right. So you have some dogs that you're like, nope, don't want them. Not, those aren't the good ones. We don't want them breeding with the ones who are good at this.

So it takes some forethought, takes some planning, takes some ways to keep them apart from each other. So we did a paper a couple years ago now on some rock art we found in Saudi Arabia showing people hunting with dogs at several sites. These dogs had leashes on them, very clearly leashed dogs. Some of them were a couple dogs. Some of them, like, huge groups of dogs. Some of the dogs were leashed.

Some of the dogs weren't leashed. And this is on rock art. It's rock art, right. And so what's interesting as well, if you're interested in hunting and how people are using dogs, is that these are two different locations as well. So you have one site that's kind of an oasis area where you clearly are going to have animals that are coming up to drink and eat and they're going to be trying to ambush prey at a watering hole. And then you have another location where you also have dog hunting rock art that's this kind of narrow escarpment valley where you're clearly going to be using dogs like, chase hunt animals into a location where then you're going to kill them. And the depictions of how they're using dogs in these two locations are very different.

Your hand gesture for kill. Very violent. Spear. She stabbed with both hands at once. Yeah, yeah. Two brass knucklebaggers. She had brass knucklebaggers. This is what we're doing, right?

She's the first criminal astrological. So what's interesting about that rocker is that, yeah, we have leashes, so they're clearly controlling dogs. But you're going to get to when the rock art was made. Yes. Okay, cool, cool. So rock art, hard to date, but pre-Neolithic, so before the arrival of agriculture, so probably 9,000 to 10,000 years ago, 9,000 to 8,000 years ago. They were leashed dogs.

Leashed dogs, leashed dogs. And what's interesting about this that we noticed is that they're depicting in some places tons of like 20, 30, 40 dogs, like groups of dogs with very specific patterning and very specific like morphotypes of the dogs. So it almost appears as if they're depicting individual dogs that are like known to them. You know, they're not just drawing dog, dog, dog. That, oh, this one has spots here. This one has a pattern on its chest here. This one has this. So you start to get this impression that very, very early on people are thinking of dogs as like individuals.

Yeah. And that they're thinking of dogs as members of the group, members of the hunting party. And that they're, it's not this idea of like, just take the dogs. We're blindly going out for a hunt. Whatever happens, happens. Right? That there's planning involved. That there's some kind of method involved, and that the dogs are individuals known to them and are in many ways probably equal members of the hunting group.

You read a lot into this. It was my PhD, so maybe I am reading a lot into it. But, I mean, they're depicting dogs very specifically, right, in some interesting way. So I would say probably by that time, there's some effort to, you know, control dogs, train dogs, breed dogs, do some kind of like, and does that lead to a pet? Is that a pet? No. Dogs are interesting because they're kind of like a Swiss army knife of tools, right? So my interest in dogs is dogs as technology, right? They're the first biotechnology. If we think about all the things that we do with animals these days in terms of technology,

dogs are where all of that started. Before dogs, we did everything ourselves. We had to figure out how to hunt. We had to figure out how to track things. We had to figure out how to do all this ourselves. Dogs are the first time that we went, oh, wait a minute, like something else can do this for us. Oh, yeah. That's better than we went, oh, wait a minute, like something else can do this for us. Oh, yeah. That's better.

That's better than we are. Right. Right. So you can use a dog to hunt. You can use a dog to pull a sled, but you can also use dog as a bed warmer. You could also use a dog as emergency food, fur source, alarm system, sanitation around your campsite. Dog does a lot of things.

Dog is technology right are you hip to the eye um to the theory i'm sure you've heard it that dogs perhaps self self-domesticated meaning here you have these these roving bands of hunters or these migratory bands of hunters and they leave a lot of waste gut piles carcasses and dogs are just kind of glued to them yeah right yeah and over time like that as a possible explanation for how it came to be and it wasn't bad to have them around yeah they would alert the the you know you to the presence of things and maybe that helps explain how it came to be and it wasn't bad to have them around yeah they would alert the the you know you to the presence of things and maybe that helps explain how it came to be that these two species yeah develop some sort of symbiosis i mean i think this is probably the the kind of

going theory at the moment it used to be probably we thought oh taking cute wolf pups or something like that was probably how it happened. But this is unlikely. It's hard for us to think through the process of domestication with dogs. They're the first domesticated anything. First domesticated animal, plant, anything. First concept of domestication is dogs so prior to dog domestication we have no concept of what kind of a domestic sphere plant or animal would look like right so the idea that people intentionally domesticate a dog without any concept of what domestication would mean is unlikely and i think that's that's a that's a

cool point i never thought about that They had no plants yet No So yeah, they weren't like, I'm going to do with this raccoon Like we did with our dog But it's a domino effect after that, right? After the first thing's domesticated Then they're like, oh Shit

Look at all these things out here Horses, cows, goats Sheep, donkey. I mean, then they just go for it, right? Then after that, it's just a slew of animals that are domesticated one after the other,

mostly livestock animals. But also domesticating a dangerous carnivore, like that's not intentional, right? Why are you going to go out? That'd have to take some time. I mean, why are you going to go out and be like,

you know what, I'm going to domesticate, I don't know what domestication is, but this is what we're going to be like, you know what, I'm going to domesticate, I don't know what domestication is, but this is what we're going to do. And you know what, do you know where we're starting? We're not starting with the juicy horses. We are starting with the wolf. This is, you know, our dangerous predator competition.

Yeah. What you're saying is more likely. Is it a wolf? Yeah, it is. It's a wolf. We, you know, you said you had Beth on the show before. We cannot find, have not found, the wolf population from which it comes. It's not our gray wolves. It's a gray wolf ancestor. But whatever lineage dogs come from, that gray wolf ancestor is most likely not with us anymore, extinct but very closely related to to our modern gray wolves they are wolves though well how okay how many how many um i was gonna say how many canines or do we have globally but that's not very helpful because then you get into like kit foxes and right how many if you look so there there's African wild dog, right?

And you have, what's that one in Australia? A dingo. Those are domesticated, right? They are. Those aren't wild. But they can live without people. Yeah. Yeah.

So dingoes are domesticated dogs that arrive with the first peoples in Australia and then. Oh, okay. So they arrive with people. They arrive and then they're like we're out of here they head off to the outback or wherever in australia so they are feral dogs in many ways but this is debate but they're they're a wolf yeah i mean i mean sorry they they okay they're originally from a wolf right yeah weirdly dingoes are classified as like vulnerable or threatened. Yeah. Which strikes me as strange. It's an interesting debate in Australia right now about dingoes that, you know, some people would like to classify them as a pest species.

They're just a dog that's gone feral. They're feral dogs. They're destroying everything. But others say like maybe they are a dog, a domesticated dog, but they've been in many ways rewilded. They've been alone for thousands and thousands of years and they, they effectively act as a wild animal. Yeah. Because the, the, the ancestral Australians arrived there 40,000 years ago. Right.

They would have not arrived 40,000 years ago. They would have been there, I think 5,000 years ago. Oh, the dog. Yeah. The dog. So that was later wave, later waves.. Oh, the dog. Yeah, the dog. So that was later waves of people. A later wave of people. But, you know, 5,000 years kind of hanging out on their own.

Also the New Guinea singing dog, very closely related to dingoes in New Guinea. Totally, totally isolated, domesticated dog, but has been isolated alone for thousands and thousands of years. Functions as a wild animal. Is a domesticated dog. Functions as a wild animal is a domesticated dog functions as a wild animal um when you did anyone i'm trying to go back real deep here for a minute and then i'm gonna jump way into the future when you what in in the in the during the african diaspora

was anybody packing dogs no no no no we don't have so the paper that i wrote with dave melzer um proposed that domestication of dogs probably happened in siberia around 23 000 years ago um what we're always missing when i'm like laying in bed at night as an archaeologist thinking about dogs what i think about is like why right we're always missing when I'm like laying in bed at night as an archaeologist thinking about dogs what I think about is like why right we're hanging out with wolves for tens of thousands of years on the landscape hunting alongside them predators just like us daylight hunters who form packs to take down animals larger than ourselves very very similar you're calling us daylight hunters.

I mean, you could be a nighttime hunter if you want. No, no, but that's what, okay. I just got, I didn't know if you're talking about dog. You're talking about, so humans being like daylight pack hunters. Right. Very similar to wolves, right? And we have a similar social structure. We take care of each other as young. We're very similar to wolves in lots of ways.

And we would have seen and known wolves on the landscape for tens of thousands of years prior to domestication so the question is why now yeah what what what drives domestication to occur um so going back to your idea of was it an accident that they domesticate themselves around that time and lots of parts of the world we had pretty um crap climate stuff happening right right? The Elgia and the Las Galatial Maximum, not a nice time to hang out in a lot of parts of Eurasia. So we have populations of hunter-gatherers who are essentially kind of isolated in Siberia. So they kind of get stuck there. There's a refugia of some decent kind of climate and locations up there. But moving between that and the rest of Eurasia would have been kind of nasty

time. So they kind of isolate up there. We don't know how long they've been up there for thousands of years, though, two to 9,000 years. They're hanging up. Can I, can I point out that,

that I'm quite envious of those people? They got, they got to hunt the woolly rhinoceros. Exactly. So they're up there, which is just, if you're going to do something cool, that's about the epitome of coolness. So they're up there. Which is just, if you're going to do something cool, that's about the epitome of coolness.

So they're up there with these populations of animals who are also up there in this kind of refugium, but also wolves. Wolves are kind of isolated up there with them as well. So they become less mobile in this kind of smaller area than they're used to. And something like that has to be the driver. There has to be some reason that dogs become domesticated. And probably as you were saying, they're hunting, they're leaving scraps around. And some group of wolves somewhere decided, you know what, today's the day. I'm not going to risk everything and go out and hunt this deer or woolly rind or something like that on my own.

Why would I do that when it's much easier to get off the scraps, right? They would have been competitors too, wouldn't they? Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's much easier. Until one of them scavenged off the other and figured it out. Yeah.

Right. And so, you know, people in Alaska right now, lots of parts of the world, Russia, deal with this all the time, right? So there are dangerous predators who hang out. Bears are around, lots of village sites. People don't run them off anymore. They just learn to live alongside. They're going through the trash.

They're not really bothering anyone. They're just doing their thing. Humans, as long as they don't bother us, we won't bother them. This kind of symbiotic relationship of they eat our trash and don't bother us, that's fine. We can see that happening with wolves where you butcher some kind of mammoth or something like that. You take what you want. You go back to your campsite. You don't really care if the wolves are scavenging off the leftovers.

As long as they don't bother you and they're kind of at an arm's distance, why bother them? And so what ends up happening is that you know wolves have have culture wolves learn to hunt from their parents and other pack members and when you have generations of wolves that have no longer no longer hunt right they're scavengers now then what do they teach their young to be scavengers and then they're young or scavengers and then eventually you have generations of wolves have never hunted they only know scavenging so going back to a hunting lifestyle is not as easy for them and they only know a scavenging lifestyle and eventually you kind of narrow that population down to this population of wolves that are scavengers who are

comfortable living alongside humans and then that's just like ripe for becoming a dog how long would something like that take i mean it would only take a few generations right to get wolves that have never hunted before yeah no yeah that's a good point well how did it back fill see i thought the answer is gonna be different because you're talking about these these pre-agriculture cave art or rock art yeah um is it is it petroglyph what the hell which is which petro and picto which one pictographs or petroglyphs pictographs are that's a chiseling noise yeah and this is petroglyphs right you can call them petroglyphs so it backfilled it went in reverse meaning humans were in saudi arabia long before they were in siberia and if the technology um did i just say yeah humans were in saudi Saudi Arabia long before they were in Siberia.

So if the technology emerged in Siberia, it somehow also. Yeah. Yeah. So like it transferred. Yeah. Not just the direction that people were that some people were flowing. It would have dispersed. So if we're right about Siberia, you have dogs essentially being domesticated there on their own accord. And then once the LGM, this kind of nasty climatic thing, simmers down and we get into the Americas, but also that population disperses back down into the rest of Eurasia and

Arabia and everywhere else across the world. When, when those first Americans, whenever I talk about Beringia, I always like to point this out is that people, no one, and maybe you'll disagree no one in siberia woke up one day and said fred let's go to america okay they hadn't been there they didn't know what was there and i feel that the generations of generations of humans would have lived and died uh in what is now

the Bering Sea yep right you were not you were moving along and you know someday you go like let's go check the next valley oh that's pretty sweet all the stuff there has like no idea what we are and you just kind of walk up and kill it. And the next day you're like, let's go over to the next Valley. No concept of that. You're heading anywhere. And it was a huge landmass. Huge.

600 miles wide. Yeah. It's not like a bridge. Which is the same width as Montana. Yeah. So be that you would have people who were born. You would have had people born and died. Yep.

On this chunk of ground that's underwater now in the shallow sea. Yes. So if you have a domestication event in Siberia, by the time people get to what is now Alaska, are their dogs still making love to the new wolves they're finding in alaska like how are you not constantly updating what the hell a dog is by every you are every like genotype of every genotype of this almost like pan-global wolf you are So we like to say domestication is a process, not an event. Because domestication also starts, stops, has dead ends, maybe started up in other places and then petered out. No, it's not working. Taming these wolves, not working out for us. And then that kind of lineage of tamedamed wolves semi possibly domesticated dogs kind of

you know peters off these are the ones that worked right so when you let's let's say you get to the point where well just there's two so there's two things i'd like you to get into to help try to explain eventually you have across north so so you have the first americans come in and they very quickly just explode southward and then later you have this wave of people who are possibly more Japanese illusion. And they exploited like Marine resources and had composite toolkits for harvesting whales and shit. And they come across the North of Alaska, very different, like very different people had dogs.

Yeah. And then, so you get to where, uh, Stephenson in the, in the early 1900s is, is going in likeation Gulf, and he's finding people with dogsison hunters with huge packs of dogs which they're using eating these things look nothing alike yeah uh how is all that happening i mean because they're not buying dogs from they're not buying dogs from europe. No, where dogs go, people go.

So anywhere people went in America, dogs are going, right? And eventually, just like humans, these groups of dogs breed only with each other. And eventually you get independent lineages of ends up looking very different than a dog you're using to hunt bison and looks very different than a dog that you're using to hunt white-tailed deer and boar looks very different from a dog that's a sled dog that's pulling you across the Canadian Arctic and so these things can happen fairly rapidly you're just saying like you know you want a dog that is good at being in the water and has a better coat and blah, blah, blah. So you just make it. Just kick out the ones you don't want out of that line. And, you know, you get one that has a really good coat that you like, you breed that one. And eventually, you know, you get a dog that does what you want it to do.

Yeah, you're just breeding for characteristics. Right. Characteristics and traits. Right. Yeah. So, you know, up north they need dogs that are pulling sleds and have a certain physiology and have certain types of foot pads that are good for pulling and certain types of oxygen intake at higher altitudes. And that's what they breed for. And like the first, I mean, the first population of dogs, that initial population of wolves, if they kind of self-domesticated, right? That population naturally gets culled down,

right? Say one of those wolves decides like, you know what? I'm going to wander into that village today and I'm going to take a little snap at a toddler. That wolf is not in that population for very long, right? Humans make sure like nope cold all right that guy and his bad attitude are gone no longer in that population um and it's the same thing for dogs across early americas you know this dog sucks it doesn't hunt it's not doing what we want done out of food out of the out of the population right has nice fur though. Yeah. Could use that, right? So you have these dogs being cold and cold and cold and cold.

We're working on a paper now. You're saying culled. Culled. Culled. Culled. C-U-L-L-E-D. Speaking of which, you know Danny,

we were just up at the fish shack and Danny was telling me he saw where someone was selling firewood in Alaska. I can't remember what part, where he was, but someone was selling firewood and kindling where they just cut to it and it's spelled k-i-n-l-i-n kindling which everybody says it kindling they're just like i'm like you know what i'm not getting the d involved

anymore the d's out it's kindling that's south alaska or the g yeah he says his k-i-n-l-i-n he knew exactly what they were talking about saved on paint on the sign uh anyways go ahead yeah so cold cold cold yeah i mean you know i mean i honestly think somebody should explain cold because i'll bet you a lot of people don't really know go ahead are you volunteering well tell. You're the archeologist, but I know more about culling probably. It's the process of taking something that's not desirable and killing it as it, and usually in its infant stage. Yeah. You don't usually wait till they're, find out if they're two years old and they're practical to use. That process has been done with domestic dogs for years because you could see if you're

looking for a standard size or a standard coat and you'll see puppy differences and be like, oh wow, that one's tiny. You know, that way it just. Because it's a resource thing. Right. It's like, we're only going to have to feed eight of them if everything works out right.

And that one that's really big, that reminds me of the dog that the neighbor had from 20 eight of them if everything works out right. And that one that's really big, that reminds me of the dog that the neighbor had from 20 years ago, the one that was killing things, big ones out. So they try to keep it to a standard basically. And I'm sure they did that back in the day. You know, they, they could tell.

And then the neat thing about those people are they would have kept those dogs around to observe them as they're growing up because dogs are like kids, but they grow up in 12 months kind of. So you might see that behavior of a really aggressive one at six months and they would probably still call it there because they still want the milder temperament dog. You know, they, so yeah, but I just didn't, I know you were saying that and I wanted people to like, we're talking about.

Yeah. Selective. It wasn't being like a euphemism. This to like, we're talking about selective breeding. This isn't selective breeding. This is selective killing. Real slack. Yeah. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

And boy, my goodness, we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking a high-end titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a

fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24k topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right, we're always talking about OnX here on the MeatEater podcast. Now you

guys in the Great White North can be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services

hand-picked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. You know, and Francis Parkman's The Oregon Trail. So there's a historian named Francis Parkman,

and he wrote one of the, he wrote what would become one of the early definitive histories of the French and indian war um he had you know what was the disease that you send everybody out west the doctors to say like go to an arid climate go to an arid climate tb oh yeah consumption something like that so he went out in um i think it was in 1834 franc Francis Parkman went out onto the Great Plains and then later wrote a book called The Oregon Trail. They think that he was probably, so he spent a bunch of time with the Oglala Sioux, was probably in Crazy Horse's camp when Crazy Horse was 13 years old.

He one day goes into, I think he goes into a trading post and laramie what's now laramie wyoming i think he was in laramie and he's invited to dinner in a sioux family's so in a guala sioux family's teepee he's invited to dinner all of their puppies are in the teepee. Okay. So you've hit a level of familiarity and care where the, the, the, the female dog is nursing her puppies inside. Yeah. Like the first house dog.

Yeah. Which like, so it paints a picture, right? I mean, you have, it's like, it's,

it's, it's not a huge space, but you're giving that space as litter of puppies, which demonstrates this level of familiarity and care. But here's Francis Partman. He's a guest. A woman goes over, sorts through that little collection of puppies that is inside the teepee, thumps one in the head and cooks it for him. So it's like this real you know i mean it's just it's like this real collision of two it's this collision of two attitudes about dogs it's really interesting right oh they're inside right we're gonna take care of them and make sure that whatever

nothing kills all the puppies but but we're gonna eat if someone comes over i mean come on dog is good yeah i mean it's just yeah so like these you know you get these glimpses into these very complicated these these like complicated contradictory relationships yeah i mean some of the the sites that i was working on for my um when i was writing my dissertation were super interesting because you have clearly hunting camps, hunter-gatherer sites, where you have elaborate burials of dogs, which must be hunting dogs. They're burying them with hunting implements and red deer antlers and very elaborate points and things like that, covered with red ochre.

Oh, really? In these very elaborate burials. It looked just like a human burial. But then next door you got a bunch of butcher dogs that they've clearly been eating in the trash pile. Right. So there, you clearly have these like.

In the same camp. Same camp, same camp. So you have dogs that are, you know, and we probably have that a version of that. We're not butchering them and throwing them in a trash pile, but we have versions of this, right. Where we have we have you know if you're a hunter and you have

hunting dogs and you've got that like prized hunting dogs and then you got the kind of you know someone was telling me in a bar yesterday at ted's we had this german shorthand pointer like great hopes for it scared scared of guns now it's a couch potato, right? Yeah. It's not. But then they have another dog that's just like an amazing hunting dog. So, you know, you get these levels also of, you know, where that dog falls in the pack. And we think, you know, as an archaeologist, I think about humans as another animal on the landscape. We're just another animal on the landscape. We're just another animal on the landscape. And a dog is our greatest technology if you're a hunter-gatherer and you're using dogs for hunting. And in many ways, if you're a hunter-gatherer, you know, 10,000 years ago, a dog is much more valuable to you than another human

hunter, right? So when I was hunting boar in Japan, you know, we would enter these dense, dense forests. No way we're going to track a boar, but dogs were like. Oh, and you're talking about you. Yeah. Okay. So tell me about this now. So part of my PhD where I was in Japan, working

with hunters and hunters in Japan, trying to see how they use their dogs to hunt boar there. Um, in some of these really, really dense forests, you know, you can't see two feet in front of you because the forests are so dense. And the rise of hunting dogs in our kind of archaeological past is most likely tied to the beginning of the Holocene period, somewhere between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago, when we kind of move out of this

time of having more open forests and polar tundras and the deciduous forests start coming into the northern latitudes and forests start getting really, really dense. And the animals move from these huge megafauna, you know, mammoth and mastodons that we see out on an open plain to like super fast white-tailed deer and boar who are moving through a dark, dense forest, right? Got it. We're humans. We're not usually tracking a white-tailed deer through a dark, dense forest. Can I throw something into that?

You tell me. I think that you're also starting to see that they've had, that people are living and encountering animals that have had more experience with humans right yeah i mean i brought this up before but there was a time when there was the first person i don't know who he was i'd love to meet him there was the first person that ever saw a rattlesnake and that person had lived hundreds of generations in the absence of venomous snakes yep or there was the first man there was the first person that ever walked up to a mastodon yeah and the mastodon maybe just stood there yeah his island doesn't seem that big yeah what's it doing right

and then after a while you get where stuff has kind of a yeah it has a different attitude and you might be looking for new ways of dealing with these new attitudes yeah but we're meaning where they catch a smell on the wind and they're gone yeah you know yeah but we're also dealing with that right so generations before you were mastodon hunters on open plains. Every technology you built was for that. Everything you've taught generations after you is for how you go hunt a mastodon on an open plain. Now, you have dense forests coming in quickly. Prey species are changing.

They're becoming these kind of mesoprey species, smaller, medium sized prey species. They're very quick and moving through a dense forest. That takes a different type of hunting. Yeah. Different types of tools, different types of technology. Dogs are really good at that. I had no idea they hunted boars with dogs in Japan. Yeah.

So what happened when you went? How did it go? I mean, the dogs, the dogs do most of it, right? Yeah. I mean, so what's interesting, I love debates about hunting with dogs, modern hunting with dogs. Because when I talk to hunters who don't use dogs, not for like birding or something like that, but hunting deer or boar or something like that. They say there's no sport to it. Hunting with dogs is cheating, right? It's too easy.

It's too easy. If you're a hunter-gatherer 10,000 years ago, it's exactly what you want. You want it to be. It's not a sport. It's subsistence hunting. But even I'll, I mean, this is a subject for a different thing, but I would love to debate with one of these people uh how it's not

easy right because the thing i always like to bring out to people is if you could measure hunting knowledge in like bits the way you might measure information in your computer in a drive to successfully use dogs meaning selecting breeding caring for training someone who can effectively use a dog to get a big game animal it holds more bits of holds vastly more bits of information in their head than is required to shoot a deer coming into an ag field it's just like like you might find one to be more fun or less fun, but don't get into me this idea that it's easier or cheating to pull that off.

Yeah. Yeah. Because that's not easy to pull off. That takes lifetimes of dedication. You might like, you might have other problems with it, but the easy thing, come on.

So it's just not true. I debate this a lot with a colleague of mine, Jeremy Koster. He's a professor at Cincinnati cincinnati and he works with um indigenous mosquito and mayongna people hunting in nicaragua um and tell me that name again jeremy coster no no the mosquito and mayongna people so um in nicaragua where they're they're horticulturalists but they still primary meat is coming from subsistence hunting. And these like neotropical forests, pretty dense kind of tropical forests.

And so we debate a lot about, they use hunting dogs there. Their dogs are not really trained. They come out, one, they might get killed by a jaguar. In some ways that's good for you because killing your dog is not killing you, so that's alright. But a lot of them get lost to jaguars or snake bites. A lot of them are just clearly not up for it. But then you get some small

population of dogs who are really good at it and then teach other dogs. But there, he does a lot of calculations of tracking cost-benefit analyses of using dogs and return rates using dogs versus not using dogs. The issue there is he's got a dense forest and he's got probably 20 or 30 animals in that forest that that dog could go after. And you don't know when your dog goes off and it's barking and it's gone if if it's going after a forest rat or a brocket deer.

And you have to debate whether the time lost in tracking down your dog for four hours, if it caught a rat, is worth it, right? Or does it have a deer? And you don't know, right? So you can lose a lot of time in an environment like that. If you're a hunter-gatherer in a forest in you know northern u.s or germany or the uk your your idea of what your dog is going after is is a much smaller breadth of prey species, right? Yeah. And so you could have 30 things of which 25 you don't care about,

or you could have a forest in which if your dog's going after something, it's probably something you want to kill and eat, right? Yanni's got it narrowed down to one thing. Tell us, Yanni. Well, I'm trying to train him just to chase mountain lions and bobcats. How's it going? And raccoons. Oh, three things.

Never mind. He's got to narrow down to three things. But there has been a lot of narrowing down. You know, a lot of teaching him what not to chase.

Right. And how much time does that take? What kind of effort does it take? We're not done. We're three years in. Roughly. Yeah. Lots of time. This is the debate of like, we're not done. We're three years in, roughly.

Yeah. Lots of time. This is the debate of like, as an ancient hunter-gatherer spending three years training a dog. Probably not. It's probably a game of nope, nope, nope. Oh, this one's all right. All right.

He gets the red ochre. He gets the red ochre and the spear point. The rest of our general towel chicken. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, you know, this is the, this is the debate we have. Do we breed the good one with another good one from the village next door, produce some good pups. Then you go from there.

That litter produces eight pups. Of those eight pups, six of them duds. Two of them duds two of them all right i need to i want to just really quickly get back to this japanese thing how many how many boards did you guys get we got well we went out for weeks so um oh so you're really putting some time into it yeah yeah we're tracking we had gps callers on the dogs trying to track like where they went, how long it took them. They have chase dogs and catch dogs? The chase dogs were the catch dogs there. So they track it and hold it down. Yeah.

Track and hold. They have the full vests and everything though. Those boar aren't messing around. So then they come in and kill it with a knife. Yeah. I mean, so basically this is what we did. We get to the edge of the forest, right? Super dense. basically this is what we did we and we get to the edge of the forest right super dense and i'm

thinking how we look for the the tree that has you know the rubbing on it like okay they're they're somewhere dog sniffs the tree looks at us all right we'll go he's got the scent there they go tracking them on gps callers where where are they going um you can hear them they're they're barking to each other tracking each other where they're going you can you can hear them going up the mountain you can kind of hear where where the barks are coming and you can hear when they get the scent that they're close because then they're barking really you know it's increasing um and then you can tell when they got them you know they're doing that go go and then you're just when they got them. They're doing that. Go, go. And then you're just like, all right, here's where the humans step in.

And we do the real hard work. So we track them down and then kill them. So did you take a real liking to that or was it just work for you? I mean, it's fun. It's interesting to see the process. I'm an archaeologist. I see the dead animals on the ground, right? I need to know how does this work in reality?

I try to think through what are the places that things go wrong? Where does the path split in a hunt where a choice could go this way or this way? A lot of people in archaeology talk about hunter choice, hunter prey choice, and what we decided to do, what we decided not to do. But when I've been hunting with dogs, we're not the ones who decide what animal you go after. We're the ones who decide if you kill it or not, but we're not the ones deciding on animal you go after. So when we talk about, you know, humans in the past 10,000 years ago always killed males or females or ones this size or ones over here. A lot of that, if you're using a dog to hunt, was decided by the dog.

We decide whether you kill it or not. Yeah. But prey choice is largely decided by what animal the dog goes after. Um, and so, you know, we, they're regularly going after females with young regularly going after males that are rutting or on their own sick, old, injured. You know, these are the animals that, that dogs are going after over and over and over. Yeah. That's a good point. You might fine tune it on, you might fine tune it on species, but it's pretty hard to fine tune it on, go get me a big male. Hey, go get the big one.

Go ahead, Spencer. Have you ever found any crossover of ancient cultures that used falcons and dogs? Yeah, so I worked in Kazakhstan. In Kazakhstan, they're using birds of prey, dogs, and horses. It's a three-prong approach, right? And how old do you think that three-prong approach is? Pretty old. I mean, horse domestication, trying to track down right now

exactly when horse domestication happened in Central Asia somewhere, most likely. But, yeah, thousands and thousands of years ago. So it was interesting in Kazakhstan. Problem for me as an archaeologist who uses ancient DNA, when I was in Kazakhstan, I would talk to local people who were still hunting with falcons and horses and dogs. I was in a tiny, tiny little museum in the middle of nowhere, and I saw this picture of hunters. They had their horses they had their falcons and they had their dogs and they

had two wolf pups so kazakhstan has one of the largest wolf populations in the world um you don't really think about kazakhstan being a place where tons of wolves there they have these two live wolf pups and i was asking the guy that we were with and in the painting the wolf pups look different than the dogs. Yeah, they're clearly wolf. I mean, it's a photo. It was a black and white photo. I got you.

So they had these two live wolf pups that they'd tracked. They'd been on horses with their falcons and their dogs, and they'd tracked these two wolf pups, and they caught them live. I see what you're saying. Right. And so I said to them, first of all, why are they going after wolves? And what are they going to do with them live? I said, oh, they'll breed them to their dogs. Oh, put a little extra pep in them.

And I was like, I was like, what are they, tell me more. And I said, well, they, you breed your dogs with wolves to fight off the wolves. You know, I'm, I'm an archeologist though. And I'm thinking, you know, we study ancient DNA, try to figure out, you know, the genetics of dogs. And I'm thinking, what a nightmare. You're messing this up for the archaeologist in a thousand years. Oh, yeah, like the fact that it's still happening, right? No, it's still happening.

It's happening all the time. Like creating all kinds of noise. Oh, yeah. They're introducing like local wolf genetics into dogs. And this happens all over the place, right? So there's a dog breed called a Sarlous that genetically looks like an ancient dog. I love talking to people about ancient breeds

and ancient dogs and why they look ancient. And this looks like an ancient dog, but it's not. It's a recent breed, about 50 years old, that they just took a wolf in a zoo in Germany and bred it with German Shepherd or something like that and created this Sarlous. But you look at it and think you're looking at some badass thing from there. Genetically, you look at it. You think, this is what.

Oh, even genetically you look at it. Oh, yeah, genetically, because its genetics are wolf genetics, right? So if you turned up that bone in a hole in the ground, it would have threw you off. Bad news. Bad news. Right. So you might get a dog that looks ancient. Oh, man, this is an ancient dog.

So when you say looks ancient, you're talking about what you see in the DNA. Like genetically, but also morphologically. I mean, because a dog that has recent ancestry of a wolf is going to morphologically look probably a lot like a wolf. But, you know, we think what happened with dogs and the reason why no one can sort out your question of like, why, when, how, where, when did this all happen? It's probably because dogs, if they're domesticated in somewhere like Siberia, they're coming back down. They're coming back down with human populations into Eurasia via different routes, right? And of course, as they're coming down, they're interbreeding with Asian wolves and European wolves and wolves in Germany, wolves everywhere, right? And so then they end up looking, all of them end up looking ancient, but with independent local wolf populations being kind of blended in there and so for us genetically and

morphologically it's a nightmare because they all look old because they've got these local wolf populations being bred into them these local ancient local ancient local modern local historic like wolves and dogs if you leave a dog out, they're going to hang out with wolves, right? They'll either be killed or they'll hang out with wolves. And, I mean, canids love to interbreed, love to interbreed with each other. We had some from a site in Illinois that's one of the, used to be the oldest dogs in the Americas. And we had two sites right next to each other, overlapped in time. But the dogs look very different morphologically. We had these one dogs that, one site had these really robust dogs,

and then the site 20 kilometers away, the dogs were much more like grass isles, so kind of thinner, more thin-boned dogs. And we were like, this is the same time period. They're 20 kilometers away from each other. That's strange that they would have that much variation. We did the genetics of the kind of grass-style thin dogs, and they were koi dogs, but they were buried. They were buried in burials with grave goods,

but they had very recent coyote ancestry. And they were in some fashion esteemed or cherished because they had a proper burial. They had proper burials or probably being used for hunting. But like, I don't know much about what a coy dog, how you live with a coy dog, but maybe you guys, you know about coy dogs? I love it. I was with my kid yesterday and he was telling me all about what you need to do if you want

to have a pet coyote. Okay. Right. Exactly. So. Which presumably he learned on YouTube. Oh, that's, that's not in Catch a Crayfish Count the Stars. He's telling me like all the ins and outs of having pet coyotes.

And, and, uh, I was just kind of half listening to what he was telling me. I got to throw something in. So Yanni, you might be familiar with the name Delmar Smith with dog training. Maybe Brent, he's, he's from Oklahoma, probably one of the most famous dog trainers, horse person that you've ever met. And he had coyote pups around the farm when he was a kid. And I did an interview with him, I don't know,

six, seven years ago. And he just looks at me, he says, Ron, I can take a coyote pup and teach him what your pointer knows. It's on audio. So I didn't know about that they could breed with them, but I do know that they could breed with them, but I do know that they could be trained up pretty good.

There you go. Before we move on, though, just one more question about Japan. What were those dogs like? What would they be similar to breed-wise? So they were all over the place. So we had some hardcore guys that had Shiba, Shibinyu, like local Japanese hunting dogs. I don't know that dog.

Tell me the name again. Dogecoin. Dogecoin. Yeah, Shiba. Shiba Inu. So they got the little curly tail. They have a fox-like kind of face. Yeah, I know that dog.

So Japan's interesting because they got all sorts of really interesting specialized dogs. Can I, I have a trivia question planned for Angela coming up? Oh, I got a bone to pick with you. Okay, well she may say too much. Can she talk about this when we get on the trivia show? Come on, you're going to throw her. She's already given the answer to the bone you're going to

throw her. No, not yet, but I'm worried she's approaching that territory. So I think we should just leave it until trivia. Should I pick my bone with you? Oh, what I think we should just leave it until trivia. Should I pick my bone with you? Oh, what do you got? Now or later, during trivia. To your choice.

If it's a trivia bone. Trivia bone. Okay. Oh, you know what I did? When we had that tent sale in the parking lot, I met this family. Oh, remember I was going to tell you the story? I sent you that picture of that little mountain man trophy.

And I said, I'll tell you later. I never told you. So there's this family and they do, they've made their own trivia tournament out of your trivia show. Oh, I'm worried about what you may have done, but carry on. Well, I ran up into the office and gave them one of the trivia games. Yeah, a prototype that was not ready for the market. That's okay.

Now one's just out there in the world. I said, listen, I'm going to give this to you. Don't show anybody, especially anybody that works here. Five people came up to me. You gave that guy that trivia game? I'd heard from five people. I told him very clearly, put it in your bag. Don't show anybody.

Yes, and I had heard from five people that some family was walking around the board game. I was like, well, that's not possible. I don't know how I can't fathom how that would happen. He went on the show. Everybody I said not to show. Perfect. I'll pick my bone. And she will talk about her Japanese.

Yarny's going to continue his line of questioning. Yep. To answer your question, there are some local dogs and some European like bloodhound type dogs. So that's a mix of both. That's all she can say for now.

And that's all I'm going to say. Oh, because that's right. Because the bone. She may just give it away to everyone in the room. It would be at your advantage to just wait about an hour. Got it. There's a Scottish woman that has an album called Bones You Have Thrown Me and Blood I Have Spilled, which we should work

into the show. Can we switch to wolves for a minute? Yeah. So you're an ancient dog, but that means categorically that you're interested in wolves. What is the term I'm trying to think of how to set this up. When we now look at the wolf landscape.

Okay, we talked about, we have the Mexican gray wolf, right? And then that wolf ends at, what highway is it? There's a highway that it ends at. It'd be like, if a mule deer crosses, if a mule deer crosses the I-5 corridor, he becomes a Columbia blacktail in certain places, so he can go back and forth all day long. And if an Osceola turkey walks across a certain road, he becomes an eastern turkey. And we have these little divisions. But this one actually has teeth, because from a legal perspective, in terms of how it's managed in experimental species and endangered species, there's

a line, there's a highway, is it I-40? I experimental species endangered species there's a line there's a highway i can't is it i-40 i don't know there's there's a highway at which a mexican gray wolf ceases to be a mexican gray wolf crosses some highway right uh it's been pointed out to me i can't remember the word they use that that all this is nonsense that you had like that. Yes, there were wolves in Mexico, but as you rode North, you never left Wolf land.

It's just, you would gradually see different morphological types, meaning in the desert Southwest, there's wolves running around slightly different color, generally smaller. You'd go north and they might get bigger and grayer. And you'd go north yet and they get bigger still. And then you go north yet and they might get smaller and whiter.

And then you roll into Siberia and it's a little bit different yet. But you never cross a line at which they're not interacting. What's the word I'm looking for? I don't know what word you're looking for. They were a continuous blank. They were You're thinking like a monoculture

of a... Yeah, it was like that you can later go in and make these distinctions and these arbitrary lines at which they change, but they were just all there, all interacting, all breeding. Right. And you would just see different demonstrations, different like phenotypes. Right. Phenotypes or morphotypes.

So you would not have ever gone anywhere and not seen wolves. If you're an ancient hunter gatherer there would have been wolves everywhere i think and all these wolves can interbreed yeah with each other they're alkanis lupus of some of some description um they have globally uh yeah yeah i mean well if you took a wolf from north america and you moved it to eurasia he He'd be fine. They're all Canis lupus. Got it. They could interbreed. And the wolves that are here now came from, you know, when you say why people were living and dying on Beringia, that's true. Why did they make it that way? Well, you have animals, tons of animals moving into the Americas.

So you have a constant migration of animals moving through Beringian land bridge. So probably people are following animals. You know, people didn't just wake up one day and say like go east yeah right they're probably following herds of animals both predators and prey that are moving you know their way into there including wolves well you know who's brand new that i didn't know this elk yeah yeah yeah elk like there could have been people um i'm not sure what the latest is on this like there could have been people, um, I'm not sure what the latest is on this, but there could have been people that showed up here before elk. Oh yeah.

Yeah. I mean, so we think that wolves didn't actually make it here. Wolves and coyotes didn't actually make it here until fairly recently as well. So probably wolves came over in the same time humans were making their way over there, which is why dire wolves will get. So that was a wolf that was here before Canis lupus. So dire wolves were probably, um,

the ancestor of dire wolves probably came into the Americas over a million years ago. Probably dire wolves evolved in the Americas somewhere. And then we're here by themselves as the only kind of, the only wolf hanging out for a very long time until gray wolves and dogs eventually show up on the scene. But by then they, they're, they were so removed

from each other evolutionarily. They would not have been able to. Oh, okay. So we have. So they weren't bred into so they weren't bred into they weren't bred into the gray wolf no they probably just blinked out i mean you think they blinked out because of being displaced by wolves and dogs or do you think they blinked out as part of the megafaunal extinctions you know that took off the mammoths and mastodons it's probably a

combination of both um i mean there are a lot of mega predators that were in the Americas that are no longer here. You know, we had American lion, American cheetah, short-faced bear, all the shimtar cats, like all sorts of predators that are no longer here because they're prey wet. Tons of weird prey species that, you know, most people don't, there are camels in America, original horses, real horses before the arrival of European horses. We had horses here, camels, giant ground sloths, right? A glyptodon, which was like a ginormous armadillo. We had all sorts of things that were here. And when those things went with the climate, the predators that relied on them, you know, went as well. It didn't help. You know, humans would have seen dire wolves. By the time we got here, there would have still been dire wolves. We would have interacted with dire wolves. We would have seen them. But probably didn't help that we arrive with

our dogs hunting everything. Angela, how big was a dire wolf? Like a dog species we'd recognize. So a dire wolf isn't as big as we, you know, Game of Thrones, Game of Thrones style. Game of Thrones makes them 300 pounds and like four feet tall. I know, I wish.

No, the average dire wolf is probably about the size of like a big Arctic timber wolf. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah. Do you know, you don't know this. I was gonna say, did you know that me and my wife's first date was at La Brea Tar Pits, but

you had no idea. I did not know that. Well, I'm here to tell you. Well, no, hear me out. So I have a very nice, I don't mean to brag, school display at my house built into my wall. My first date with my wife, we went to La Brea Tar Pits. The wall. And they have the wall of dire wolf skulls yeah

and um i said at that time someday i'm gonna build one of those into my house you did it and then married her and built the school well stick to my word score yeah can i tack on to this conversation this this tattoo is the uh that is the cattle brand of the original owners of the labrea tar pit when i think it was called the laroca ranch yeah because i also went there and i was so moved by like the dire wolves thing that was like i want something associated with that yeah yeah bray tarp it's very cool i mean they're very cool i worked there several times and one time when I was working there, I had this office that kind of looked out over the tar pits,

and I just watched as one after the other animals just adding to the- Oh, like birds or squirrels? What? Oh, yeah, birds. Birds mostly. Just landing, and then just- Are you serious? Oh, yeah. i was just like the the tar pits are still taking victims but you know what is crazy that is and i don't know how many hundred

175 dire wolves to come out of there whatever the hell yeah all that stuff you you think of it just be like a death like smell like death but they're saying that as long as those pits have been going, I think it was that if you had an incident, meaning a baby mammoth gets stuck in the mud, a dire wolf goes out to scavenge on it, he gets stuck in the mud, a golden eagle lands on there, he gets stuck in the mud,

or in the tar, as long as that happens every 40 years, you're fine. That would account for the the bazillions yeah of dead things collected in that tar and they never had no idea they're still fishing they never learned they never learned it just kept going i would just watch and you know some bird would just land and i thought humans must have learned though there's been one human ever found there was like an 18 to 20-year-old woman.

But she was thrown in there because she had an axe wound to her head. Yeah, a Braille woman. I didn't know that. She was thrown in there as a cover-up. Whoa. Yeah, there's a dog in there. 10,000-year-old crime. She had an axe.

Yeah. She had it blown into the head with an axe. And somebody said, I don't want to stick her. Yeah, humans love to throw bog bodies. They just love to throw a dead body into into one of these things. Bogs, tar pits,

swamps. Yeah. Be addicting. Yeah. Throwing things in there. What happens? Wow. Yeah.

Still taking victims. Oh, hold on a minute. Did you just write that Korean I-40? I did. Huh. I was right.

I was waiting to get in there with it. You should have celebrated my rightness. I was, you know, I was going to get there. I was waiting to get in there with it. You should have celebrated my rightness. I was going to get there. I-40 in Arizona and New Mexico is the northern boundary of the Mexican great wolves. I got two more dire wolf questions. All right. Have you guys found where anybody was any butchered remains of dire wolves?

We're not sure. That's the answer so we we don't have a lot of sites where we have overlap between dire wolves and humans the few sites that we have are in new mexico and arizona where we have butchery sites where humans have butchered a mammoth and we also have remains of dire wolves got it um but no obvious interaction like no tools made from dire wolf bones or no no nothing very specific like that we think probably humans caught the tail end around 12 to 13 000 years ago is is the time when a lot of those mega predators in america start to go um short-faced bear um saber-toothed cats dire wolves they all start

to go out so there may have been like a kind of holdout group in the southwest that kind of held on for some period of time and then kind of petered out i think for our paper we got one of the kind of latest dates of dire wolves and it was like 12 700 years ago and that's probably towards the very end of the dire wolf population and do you ever see are you ever running um running genetic lines on on anything living today or anything from um okay how to put this so dire wolves 12, 12,000 years ago, they were gone. Yeah. Okay.

Do you ever see in anything living today or anything that died in the last 10,000 years where you're like, oh, somehow some dire wolf snuck in there? No. So it legit went, it's gone. So we checked everything we think is possible. Dogs, coy coyotes gray wolves nothing has any kind of dire wolf in it and dire wolves and so dire wolves and and gray wolves have a common ancestor about 5.8 million years ago but after that they diverged so what was interesting was that we always assumed that dire wolves were just gray wolves. They look nearly identical in their morphology.

And the people at Tar Pits are the experts in dire wolves, and they just look so similar. We figured that they're like a sister species or just very closely related. And so when we finally got DNA out of them, the reason it took so long was because the stuff at La Brea, where most of the dire wolves are coming from, covered in tar. Not a great place to find DNA. Oh, is that right? Tar destroys the DNA. I didn't know that. Yeah, so can't get DNA out of those.

Just can't? No, can't. Really? Any of that stuff? No, the tar just destroys it. I didn't know that i went on this like bonkers road trip where i just drove everywhere i could think of that might have dire wolf bones and collected a knock on the door bunch of dire wolf samples like idaho museum natural history hey you guys have dire well i just went everywhere

and tried to get as many as i could and we managed to get five out of hundreds that we that we tested that from where we actually so have two from American Falls, from Idaho, and then one from Ohio, one from Texas, I think, and another one from somewhere back east. So five random ones, not La Brea or anywhere famous that we know dire wolves from. And when we tested those, there's just no relationship at all. We found that they are more closely related to, like, jackals

than they are gray wolves or dogs or coyotes or anything like that. They were? They diverged so long ago. So their ancestor that was related to, like, a jackal, African jackal ancestor, diverged, came over from Africa, across Eurasia, and into the Americas. Right. And that split happened 5.8 million years ago.

And so their relationship to wolves is not very close to relationship. They just look like wolves. It's like convergent evolution. They do the same thing. They live in the same place. They eat the same thing. They kind of, so they look the same, but yeah. Uh, are you familiar with the Grateful Dead? same place they eat the same thing they kind of so they look the same but yeah uh

are you familiar with the grateful dead i've become familiar with a lot of things that are tangential to dire wolves you know where i'm going with this you know where i'm going with this i do yeah they have one good album yeah reckoning yeah that's it you think that. Okay. I don't care what Doug Dern plays in his car. They got one good album, Reckoning, which includes the song Dire Wolf. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

You should license that, Phil. We can play it during the podcast. Yeah. Sounds good. Sure. It'll work out just fine. When I talk about Dire Wolves, a lot of things come up. Game of Thrones, obviously.

Yeah. I don't traffic in that kind of stuff. I don't like any kind of new stuff that people know about. Game of Thrones, obviously. Yeah, I don't traffic in that kind of stuff. I don't like any kind of new stuff that people know about. Game of Thrones. Because then it's just, I'm always afraid my brain will become like their brain. Well, you got to work backwards then. You got Game of Thrones and then you got D&D, Dungeons and Dragons. Yeah, I'll talk about that.

The guys in high school were into that. Dire Wolves. There's like a Dire Wolf card. Dire Wolves are part of that. And then, you know, Grateful Dead. Those are kind of the touchstones of dire wolves. Most people, though, a lot of people had no idea dire wolf was a real animal. Thought it was a completely mythological creature that was just made up for Game of Thrones or made up for Dungeons and Dragons.

And don't know it's real, that it was a real animal. Hmm. Yeah. Did you know? Did you all know that dire wolf was a real animal? Yeah, dude. I told you from my first day. Probably not in high school I did.

But yeah. Come on. Game of Thrones. Who's the ass on your necklace? What's that? My kid. What's your kid's name? Scout.

Huh. Oh, that's from the movie? Yeah. Yeah. Yellow Mockingbird. Yellow Mockingbird. It's a novel. It's also the movie? Yeah. Yeah. The Yellow Mockingbird. The Yellow Mockingbird. It's a novel. It's also a movie.

Steve, how many books do you know me to read? Okay. If I quote something, it's from a movie. You were probably forced to in high school. Yeah. You named it. Are you familiar with the somewhat misogynistic theory that Truman Capote wrote that book? No.

Yeah. No. So yeah. I learned that in the movie Capote. Oh, did you? Oh, that's in there? Yeah. Wasn't he supposedly the Dale character in the novel? Oh, you're asking the wrong guy.

Harper Lee doesn't have a big pre-publication record and then it kind of dropped off the face of the earth. And when they line out what her influence is, it's like Courtney Love, all that great music by whole was when she was hanging out with Billy Corgan from Smashing Pumpkins. That's another misogynistic music theory. And then, so it's like that wasn't actually her. It was Billy Corgan. And then that Truman Capote wrote To Kill a Mockingbird.

Didn't know that. And published it under her name. Because then she never, I guess she didn't like write anything after. I'm not telling you a theory that I think. I'm just telling you about a theory. It's like when I tell jokes you're not supposed to tell now. I tell people about the joke. Oh, right.

I don't tell the joke. I'm like, you should be aware. There's a joke that goes like this. Should I rename my daughter now? I don't know. Okay. No, it's tell the joke. I'm like, you should be aware. There's a joke that goes like this. Should I rename my daughter now? I don't know. Okay. No, it's after the movie. It is.

It's okay. It's a movie too. It's a movie too. Spencer, what are you dilly-dallying around here? You got another question? Oh, no. I see a little cursor hopping around. Yeah, we could.

I was just making notes. We could hit on this. I feel like the rotten meat fermentation topics are interesting. You guys take over. Oh, yeah. Well, it was just in the notes about the consumption of rotten meat. You want

to speak to that? Do you want to speak to that? I can't speak to it. I'm asking her if she likes rotten't speak if you could um yeah was it was it the wolves or the humans that were doing that so i think the idea behind this this is still a kind of new idea um that humans you know wolves do this they cash meat somewhere they kill something they eat their fill and then they'll they'll cash the meat um in water or you know under snow or something like that and come back to it by which point it's you know sometimes putrid rotten but fine but fine for them, right? So the idea is did Neanderthals or modern humans kind of pick up on this idea of if you put meat into an anaerobic environment,

if you put it in the water in a frozen lake or something like that and come back for it next season when you're low on meat, is this something that you could kind of get away with? So I have a good friend, Melanie. She worked at the body farm in Tennessee. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Where they do all that stuff for corpse.

Yeah. What's the word? It combines like insects and crime. Yeah. Forensic entomology. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah.

Studying like when does a blowfly hatch on a dead body or something like that. Yeah, so she was working there. She's a professor at Purdue now, but we were working on this idea of like, we're trying to figure out why nitrogen values. Can you hold off for a minute? Corinne, if I was a producer, I'd be taking notes right now about getting someone from the body farm on the show. Okay.

Yeah, we've talked about that. about getting someone from the body farm on the show. Okay. Yeah. We talked about that. Forensic, just someone who puts a person out and then a while later goes and checks on them. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting stuff. Can you hook Corinne up? Yeah, sure.

I mean, there are a couple of them. There's one in Texas. There are a couple kind of around where they're doing. We want the person who's best at it. Body farm. The one at Tennessee is kind of the most well-known one. And you'll make an intro for Corinne?

Absolutely, Corinne. I read in the notes, too, that you can donate your body there for science. You can. They're kind of full up. There's a lot of people that want in on it. No kidding. Wasn't there a whole thing about

one of the heads of the lab at, was it Harvard or another university of a cadaver lab where they were actually selling off body parts? No. Didn't we put this in the notes? I wouldn't mind

picking one up. I swear. For the wall. Be like, see that? You know what that is? It. I swear. For the wall. Get your own experiments. Yeah. Be like, see that? You know what that is? It's an arm. It's Frank. Right in my freezer.

All right. Sorry, Yanni. Go ahead with your line of questioning. I don't think I had a question. We were listening to Angela explain about the body part. I mean, last heard they were they were full up and that they had their they were at max capacity of um you know the number of people that they could take on that had signed up to donate so many people want to donate their bodies and there's a pretty um you know an extensive process of paperwork that you need to do before you know because part of the

work that they're doing at that lab is you know being able to track things that have to do before, you know, because part of the work that they're doing at that lab is, you know, being able to track things that have to do with knowing, you know, kind of what your diet is and what your age is and things like that. So they need some background information on who you are and kind of what kind of lifestyle you lived or things like that. So, you know, my friend was clipping cadaver fingernails to do some work on cadaver fingernails, things like that. I mean, it's really interesting work. Definitely be a good episode. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know know sucking high and titty there on x is now in canada the great features that you love in on x are available for your hunts this season the hunt app is a fully functioning gps with hunting maps that include public and crown land hunting zones aerial imagery 24k topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right.

We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit OnX maps dot com slash meet on X maps dot com slash meet. Welcome to the

on X club y'all. Are you familiar? I think this might have got debunked, but there was a site where they had the way they interpreted this site at the time was someone had they had killed some mammoths put those mammoths in a pond and then took the intestines and packed them full of gravel and wove the gravel over wove the gravel filled intestines as weights oh okay over the carcasses to hold them underwater so the intestine rotted away but you had this skeletal remains the of this meat overlaid with these cylinders of gravel and that's what they suspected that they had made like

no yeah anchors i mean I wouldn't be surprised. I think we think of ancient peoples as kind of like slow. No. Right. No, of course not. They would have figured out all sorts of stuff like this, right? They would have figured out pretty quickly. I don't think of that as like a new timey idea.

What? Packing intestines full of gravel and laying them over some meat. Yeah. I mean, you could. Because I got got friends that none of us proposed that we do that try it i mean next time you guys go out hunting take take a carcass that has something left on it and put it put it in a you know a cold body of water cover it with some gravelly intestines and see how long. Yep. See how long it takes. We've done that just to keep flies. It's kind of nasty the way it looks after a while, but between getting full of fly eggs and hot or putting it in a creek,

we've opted to just stick it in a creek. How long did you leave it there? Just days, a couple days. What was it like when you took it out? It just looks like something that drowned. It gets bled out real bad, so it gets white. But I don't think if you Pepsi challenged it, I don't think you'd be able to taste the difference, to be honest with you.

It just looks off-putting. How long do you think you could leave it in the water? Well, if you put it in a creek, and that creek was running like a glacial stream where that thing's running 40, 50 degrees, I bet you'd put them there for weeks, and it'd still be edible. You should try it.

Yeah, as long as something else wasn't starting to eat on it. Yeah, but just cold glacial water. Yeah, I guess the colder it is, probably less bacteria and whatnot in there to eat it. In the case where we did it, that stuff was a glacier earlier that day. So it stayed really cold. Real cold. Ana it stayed really cold. Real cold.

Anaerobic. Yeah. Did you notice any trends with the average lifespan of domestic dogs thousands of years ago? Did it seem very different? Not really. We found lots of 10, 12-year-old dogs. Wow.

Ancient dogs, which is not that far off from... How old do your guys' hunting dogs? I always say 12 is an easy number. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's about right. Of active hunting.

And not necessarily the last year or two, but in some cases, you know. What is the life cycle of like a hunting dog in terms of how long does it take to train? When does it get good? When does it kind of plateau? And then when does it? In the bird dog world, I don't know in the hound world, Yanni, but in the bird dog world, where he said by three years, you know what you

have. By his third season, and of course that takes training to get there. His die has been cast. Right, right. Like he's, put it this way, he's not going to get better. He's not going to start pointing them 40 yards away and giving you more opportunity.

Whatever he's developed over a couple of three seasons, there's your dog. How long until you know what you got? Usually you could tell about a year and a half. Like, you just get one hunting season behind you and you see potential, and then you're just hoping to build on that. But sometimes it just never builds got it it just but you've got one dog strong at a year and a half you have a strong hunch oh yeah yeah and at three years you know yeah I got a dog right now that hunts behind me

I just can't bear to call her. We lined up in North Dakota last year. She's like, I'll take up the rear, Ronnie, just in case you pass one by. We had five of us pushing this big state land, and Eddie's behind us. She's doing a nice job of going left to right, but she's behind us. So I think Trent said, well, how about if we turn around with the guns and walk backwards? So, yeah, she's not going to be a rock star. How long does it take with a hound? Hold on a second.

I want this rear hunting dog. So that kind of thing, there's no way you're going to correct that. And I'll be honest with you. I know for a fact, because I know who owned her and I got them from her, she did something very similar to that in her little puppy test before she was a year of age. And you're not going to correct that. No. You're not going to say, listen.

Oh, you could overhandle her and call her around and call her around and call her around. I just let her hunt. She hunts fine with one person, but with more than one person, she decides to go left to right behind you. I don't know. But how long does a hound take? I think Brant could probably speak to it better than I can. Well, they have been bred so strong over the last 50, 60 years. Your line of coon dogs.

Yes. And if you're pleasure hunting or you're competition hunting, you're getting your dogs from the same place, all out of the same litters, and they're bred for competition. So the breeding is to have a dog that's barking quicker, that's treeing quicker for competition. Because in competition, you don't necessarily have to see a coon in the tree in the summertime. If the trees are full of leaves and you can't see a coon, it's called circle points.

And you get credit for that. You could win a coon hunting competition at night and never look at a coon. If there was any doubt that there wasn't a coon in that tree, you know, if you, if you went to a tree that didn't have any leaves on it and you couldn't, you, everybody could look. Like a dead tree in a swamp. Yeah. You could look all the way around and there wasn't any holes in it. And you could see, you know, that's called slick treeing. You know, there's nothing in there. That's, that's a minus. If you tree on that same tree in the summertime when it's full of leaves and you just can't

happen to see it, you can say, well, there's theoretically, you know, you could hide six up there, but we just can't see them. But that's, you know. So Brent, what age would you say, would you see your best? Well, my, my dog was started treeing by himself when he was nine months old but that's not i mean that's not highly unusual there's no that's instinct yeah it's all that's what it is he is following that genetic code that's been instilled in him but at a year like you were saying a year and a year and a half that's when most folks start deciding i'm going

to keep this dog or you know maybe he's got some characteristics that I don't like then I'm that somebody else is okay with and I'm not a competition hunter so I'm just I'm just looking for when I cut the dog loose that when he starts tree and that he's he's looking at it looking at a coon so what he does between the time I turn him loose and he treats a coon is really immaterial to me as long as he barks enough that I can keep up with him. He's not running deer, not running, chasing armadillos or tree and possums or anything like that off game, which he doesn't. And it's, it's, you, you talk about wolves and how dogs came from that, you know, it's

inherently against what a predator would do, chasing prey to make noise. You know, a coon dog or any kind of dog that chases game that barks out loud for you to know where he's at is really going against what would be able for them to feel in a dinner plate. Because if he's chasing a coon to eat because it's a prey drive a prey instinct that he's going after he's giving him a lot of warning he's barking he's saying i'm coming you know and that that's no bueno find that tree with the hole exactly he's like kevin murphy

i feel the need to quote jerry clower jerry clower said when brummie trees out on a coon you don't have to worry about no possum or no wildcat. That's right. That's exactly right. How many prime years will you get then out of that coon dog? You know, with proper care, and he gets cared for properly, you can hunt a dog seven, eight, nine years old. And we hunt. I keep him in shape.

We hunt, you know, year round. His doghouse has an air conditioner in it. Oh, great, that'll build up heat tolerance. And a heater, so it never gets hotter than 75 degrees in there or colder than 55. Hey, Steve, did you know that your hometown, my adopted hometown, is home of one of the most famous coon dog walker breeders in the history of the world? No. Yeah.

The Giddings family? Chuck, Frank Giddings? Oh, Frank Giddings. Frank Giddings. What? Really? Yeah. Is that where Carl got his walkers from and everything? Yeah.

And his son, Chuck, lives right next door to me that log home next to me mm-hmm that's Chuck Giddings house seriously yeah and his dad is in his 80s and he still runs Coons every night every night every night so is that well no you can't cuz I thought there's a training season there oh there is the season when it is Oh, never mind. Scratch that out. Cut that out, Phil. In Arkansas. No, you're right. There is a season when it is closed. You're right. But any night that he could be out, he is out.

That's a good correction. Never mind. Leave it in, Phil. He backtracked. Thank you. In Arkansas, you can hunt year-round. And you can take game. You can kill coons on private land year-round, and there's no limit on them.

I don't kill very many coons except in the wintertime when the fur is good. I'll bring the fur home. But you can still get out there and do it. And, you know, those dogs, there's the domestication of them. And a lot of people would think, or I used to think, that it was you had to train a dog to make him do what you wanted to. It had to be about force. You would think, you know, somebody really had to be heavy-handed with a dog to get him to do something. But that's not the case.

You know, every dog that I've ever owned, even Labradors, when I was training Labradors, they have an inherent desire to please you. And you just got to, if you can't show that dog that you appreciate what he's doing and let him know that when Waylon trees and he, when I cut him loose and he tracks, he barks on the trail and then he trees and I praise him, that's all, that's his reward. His reward is not the coon in the tree because those days are over with. His reward is me being pleased with how he did it. And getting to do it again. Yeah, and if he goes out and does something, he does something wrong. I mean, knock on wood, he's never treated a possum.

But how I would deal with that is he wouldn't get a reward. He'd be like, come on, let's get out of here. I'd put a snap a leash on him and lead him away and cut him loose again and it would be different for him he'd be like wow he's like oh man yeah no high five he usually rubs my ears real good when we do this yeah alexis is still gonna let him come in the house but those ancient people get the same feeling of just joyful pride that i got when i was in arkansas and mingus treat his first coon that doesn't show up in the gene i mean let me tell you i we

i've seen some really elaborate elaborate dog burials ancient dog burials there's one site in Sweden where big cemetery, we got humans in big cemetery, but humans in one location, young children in this kind of like middle ground location, and then a whole cemetery of dogs. And some of those dog burials, one of those dog burials is the most like richly decorated, more than the human burials it's got i mean all sorts of shells and and points and red deer antlers and ochre and the whole it's it's um curled up with its tail kind of between his legs and it's its legs tucked up and i mean you have to think that a dog's not being buried like that unless you use a bad there's something yeah there's that there's something like we probably saved somebody in the family yeah exactly they're just thinking like this is the greatest dog ever but also you know there's no telling how many hunting dogs they lost oh yeah in the forest right and the dog gets buried in the forest and never makes it right makes it back

um but i mean what for, for domestication studies, I think one of the most interesting questions for me is this thing that you guys are talking about where they are the ancestors of wolves. They have a prey drive, but somehow, something's happened in the relationship with humans where they have, most dogs, released to let the final step be kind of taken over by

humans right to make the kill to to make whatever that just that final decision is on okay i've chased the carcass i've sent it i've we've i've gotten you here i've done my job as i've used all my innate senses as a dog to get us here. Now you're the one to make the kill. That's a good point, man. Or when that raccoon falls out of the tree. Yeah.

Yeah. It's like, you get like a couple seconds and then I step in and I portion it out. Like I get what I want. So this is the question of like, how did that, this is interesting to me of like how that process happened. That's a really interesting point.

Where wolves released that control over the final step of the kill and then what happens afterwards. And so when people tell me, you know, we chose to domesticate wolves, like we would have, we're hunting alongside them. I'm trying to think like, you know, it's almost like Twilight, like running in the woods alongside the wolves and you're hunting deer and I'm hunting deer

and so we decided to hunt together. I just can't see that. I can't see the scenario in which you make a kill, you're there, the pack of wolves and you

and a deer between you. I'll take it from here, boys. The first wolf that looked at the hunter and a deer between you. I'll take it from here, boys. The first wolf that looked at the hunter and went, go ahead. Well, 70, I would say easily 70% of the dogs that I hunt with now, if it's during kill season in the winter and we shoot

a coon out, they'll grab a hold of it and then that's it. They'll just turn and walk away and go look for another. Yeah, they just need a little. Maybe it's the same way. You think he's just going to tear the thing to shreds, but he gives it one little. He gets his food from you.

No, my kids have a red squirrel dog. It is an expert red squirrel hunter. And all she wants to do is she wants to know that they've been shot down out of the tree. Won't eat them. No desire to pick it up. She's treeing those red squirrels? Oh my God, yeah. She trees them.

With a bark? Nope. I said, if you could get that dog to bark, they got to follow her. She'll hear if a pine squirrel cuts out, she's going to that pine squirrel. And she will get and sit at the base of the tree and stare at that squirrel. And if you find her, there's a squirrel squirrel there and she's sitting there staring at it and when they shoot it down she's just done did you do any gun preparation for this or did it just work out no they kept telling me how good she was at and i kind of didn't believe it but it's it's true man

that dog is a that dog will get one squirrel after the other after the other after the other right yeah because pine squirrels are so vocal and they have the the achilles their achilles heel That dog will get one squirrel after the other, after the other, after the other. Right. Because pine squirrels are so vocal. And they have their Achilles heel. I'm not saying every one of them does it. But when they're not happy with your presence, they... Oh, so it just keeps it going. If you're in a good area, there's always two or three of them going... And so she just goes to that one and she'll find out where it is and stare at it and they act different they'll when she trees

them they'll tree lower and out in the open and often sit there barking at her not like they would with a person yeah so they my kids clean up on them anyway zero interest what's happened something's happened like it wants to see them it wants to go up and be like yep that one's dead yep and that's it but they've like that last final step of like predator response partnership has like released to humans that's a great point right why you'd go through all that trouble and then a thing that would once reward you and your pack with all this food, you'd go through all of that same trouble. Yeah. And in the end, not get to be the one.

You get to scraps, not get to be the one that decides on allocation. You do all the work and then you just like let go. And then like beg for a scrap of the food. Maybe he'll give us some. Which is interesting when we have conversations with people who have cats. It didn't happen until they made kibble dry dog food. Yeah, exactly.

But, I mean, you know, people have cats who, you know, those cats go out and they'll fend for themselves all day long. Yeah, get a cat to do that. Most dogs, like, they can chase, they can. Yeah, I can tell you a little something about cats as far as law enforcement goes. Anytime, any kind of investigation where we had a death, you know, an unobserved death where someone, old person or something, may have died in the house alone. Cats and they're feeding on them. If they had a cat, the cat would be eating them. Where's the cat go? What's it like to eat?

Nose first. Nose. Yep. That's where they'll start. And then you go in there with a dog and the dog will be starving to death, will be dead laying beside them. They won't eat them. Cat will eat your nose. Yeah, that's where they'll start. And then you go in there with a dog and the dog will be starving to death, will be dead laying beside them. They won't eat them. Cattle eat your nose.

Cattle eat you. Be good name for the show, Crenn. Take your last breath. Cattle eat your nose. See all that does on search. I was going to say, just crushing the SEO. This podcast is all about dogs. We put cat in the title.

Take that. Yeah. Cattle eat your nose. I'm thinking C-A-T-L-L right. Cattle eat your nose. We have to put a parenthetical part of the title like dogs are better or something. I got one last question then we're going to hand it over to Ronnie.

You're not interested in dogs like uh you don't have a bunch of dogs i have dogs oh you do okay i thought you were saying that you just didn't you weren't into like actually having them no i have dogs i've always had dogs my parents somehow in the pre-chat i picked up that okay i didn't get that yeah i have westies oh i did pick that up okay i thought you were saying you were fixing to get into Westies. No, I'm fixing to get into some new dogs. I'm fixing to get into some. I want like big livestock guarding dogs, you know, like. Do you got livestock?

No. That's what we were saying. She goes, now I got to get goats. Now I have to get goats and sheep and property. You're going in the wrong, you know, you're taking this in the wrong direction. You don't start with like. Usually you'd start with like the animal jail no this is this is this is part of what i argue with some of my you know archaeology colleagues about is like if you decide you're gonna you're gonna use dogs to hunt right and the dogs are like the primary decision makers then does all technology follow from using dogs to hunt this is the other technology that you

use then have to align with how you hunt with dogs you know my guess would be with humans, it was that initially it was that it was useful for an activity already occurring. And not that they said, hey, if we had one of those, we would change how we go about this. Yeah. It was probably, you know, when we try to drive all those things up into that box canyon that would go even better yeah with a dog yeah so the ethnography and the history when you read about hunting i read a lot of like you know modern ethnography but but historical ethnography about people who went and lived with indigenous groups somewhere and how they use dogs and you hear similar stories over

and over there's always like a prized dog who's just the best and everyone wants the puppies from that prized dog and like allows them to do something that they couldn't do before you always hear stories about some type of prey usually something semi-dangerous boar or something like that that is just too dangerous to go after on their own. But now that they have dogs, they've decided they're going to go after it. So I was wrong. Well, for certain animals. I think for some of the more dangerous animals, you hear this in Arabia, for example, going after ibex.

Super dangerous. And they get themselves up into crevices and stuff that you're not going to go after them but your dogs will got it so prey species that you normally would be like nah not it opened up opportunity open up opportunity well you know what backs you up on that the last thing you're gonna do is catch a lion yeah i mean you live you can live a lifetime i mean a mountain lion yeah you live a lifetime and be like uh I spent my whole life in the mountains and I've seen two mountain lions. Yeah. So that opens up a thing that you just are not going to accomplish.

Yeah. And it makes it possible. Yeah. Right. It's not like, so that contradicts my earlier point. You're right. It's like, you're not going to get one without it. Yeah.

You know. Yeah. There are certain things. You also hear a lot of stories of, we used to have to go out in five or ten person hunting groups. But now Phil can go out by himself. This Phil? Or that Phil. Any Phil.

Phil can go out by himself with a group of five dogs and do what we used to have to take ten people. Now the other eight people can go and do something actually useful around the camp or go somewhere else and do something else. So it frees up people to do other things because a pack of dogs can do what a pack of humans would do and probably much better. Me and Yanni interviewed a guy. Do you remember this, Yanni? A Chimane guy. He had to tell his story in Chimane to someone who spoke Spanish.

No, to someone that spoke, correct, that spoke Chimane and Spanish. He told someone who knows Chimane in Spanish who then listened and told it. To a Spanish-English speaker. So we're getting it like third hand. Telephone, telephone. However, it was a big story about hunting jaguars with a dog and a jaguar that had killed some of his dogs and eventually getting a jaguar after it killed his primary dog, his main dog.

Yeah, yeah. So my colleague that I told you about before in Nicaragua, lots of jaguars where he is, and he says, you know, when he goes back, the percentage of dogs that are left from the year before is very low and it's largely due to jaguars. But they're also using the dog, they're using the dogs as hunting dogs, but also as in many ways, like kind of not bait, but if a jaguar is going to attack someone, then you'd rather it attack your dog than attack you. We were in a village they had lost at the time we were there, and it continued for a while. At the time we were there, they had in the last month or two, I can't remember the timing, they had lost 24 dogs to a jaguar, which they thought to be a single jaguar had killed 24

dogs. I can't remember if it was the last month or two, and it went on after we left. Right. But this is also the reason why when you ask people in a village like that, like how much time you spend training your dogs, how much time are you going to spend training a dog that like tomorrow could get killed by a Jaguar? So you rely on some level of like natural ability and instinct, which is probably also why hunting dogs can be really great there, but also really frustrating because they don't have much training you're just hoping for a good one when you do get a good one you breed them and you everyone wants the puppies because they're hoping that that one's natural abilities of hunting you know kind of pan out but you don't have three years because they might get killed by a jaguar tomorrow so that was a lot of training investment to put into the dog that's going to get killed tomorrow so um i think the use of hunting dogs is highly correlated to like what prey you're going

after the environment that you're in um that determines how useful a hunting dog may or may not be and a lot of places where you read ethnography or ethno history of hunting dogs um you know the use of hunting dogs is like critical to their economy. They can't go out and take the number of animals that they could. They were doing it by themselves. Or, you know, you have a single guy who's trying to feed his family and he can go out and maybe take down one small animal, but with a pack of dogs, he can corral an animal and then kill it and make a much bigger kill or something like that. So, you know, there are these kind of variations based on what prey you're going after or, you know,

your dogs make it eight, nine years with productive hunting, but if they're in an environment where mountain lions are going after them or jaguar or something like that. Or wolves. Wolves going after them or something like that, maybe you wouldn't put the time and effort into the training if you're losing dogs more regularly or something like that.

Yeah, concentrate more on quantity over quality. Right. With your dogs, do you guys, are they trained by humans only or is it reliance on other dogs? That's the two methods that coon dogs use. But they're so independent now. When I was training mine, I was training with a friend of mine he had an older dog a well-established and straight coon dog he didn't treat possums or anything and and we'd cut them loose together but they would after

150 200 yards of my dog following him around, he would just break off on his own. And that independence has been bred into him a lot because of the competition hunting. Oh, because he's got to score his own points. He's got to scoot his own points. You don't want a tag-along dog. Right, because if he's second to the tree, then his points are less.

But if he goes and does his own thing, he gets the same amount of points. So they prioritize a dog that doesn't like peers. That's more independent, yeah. And what is the through rate if you have a litter of six pups? How many of those six pups in the dogs you're talking about turn out to be? There's a they who's the grandfather of my dog and that dog was like one of 10 or 12 and it was the rest of them were nothing this dog was an absolute world beater they he bred him with another world beating female

whole litter of puppies that you would think would be dynamos. None of them were worth anything. Bred them again the next time, and maybe three out of ten were world-beaters. So it's just, you know, there's a lot of math that goes in there that nobody understands because it's not always best and best bred together make the best and it just doesn't work that way and i i can't i can't answer why that is but you would think the same and i was like me and my brothers we got the same mom and the same daddy i'm the only pretty one in the whole bunch so it he did you're pretty boy puts me in a whole new

life did he say it like how like say a clown way to say a grandpa. Oh, okay. Not like, you know what I'm saying. No, like, no. All right, Ronnie, take it away. Well, I just want to thank you for letting me come out to do a little advertising. Yep. You let me come out a couple years ago, and we released the Upland Institute Pointing Dog Training Series, which has done very well, and I do get notes from emails, heard about you

on Meat Eater Podcast. Great. Finally got a puppy and they remembered it. So I called you up and I said, I got into the project I'm working on right now. And I had so much fun like getting into the, not that I'm the editor, but sitting in on the editing process and watching how you could just take a bunch of, let's say B-roll, or if it's on purpose, and you could turn it into something.

And Matt, my partner, he loves the job of editing. And he kind of said, what could we do down the road? He said, he's burning a candle at both ends, but, um, he said, what can we do? I mean, he's got a day job. Right. As an editor, you know, but he, uh, he would like to do this full time.

I'm like, um, boy, I mean, we could do, I didn't want to do a different training video because I already did a training video and it, it came to me like, I get so, I filter so many people's emails. Ronnie, I'm getting my next dog. Ronnie, I'm getting my first dog. Ronnie, I went from German Shorthairs and I want to try one of your big long-eared Broncos. So I realized it's just like until you've been in it, there's a lot of people just never really get into the minutia of how dogs are bred, how they're selected, how it happens.

So we decided to build this series that we're filming. We're in the middle of filming. We've got a couple episodes done. It's called Behind the Dog. Because that's kind of like if you're a dog person, everything you do is behind the dog. Or in the case of your dog, in front of the dog. In one dog's case, right? Exactly.

So yeah, so behind the dog films, what we're doing is we're trying to find, let's say the top tier breeders of every breed in this country. And there's a lot of them, right? We did one with a short hair, a German short hair pointer breeder. We're working on editing one that we did with a Weimer Weiner, a Weimer, I'm going to do it

right, a Weimer Weiner or Weimer Weiner. Is that how it with a Weimaraner, a Weimah, I'm going to do it right, a Weimahreiner or Weimahreiner. Is that how it's supposed to go? Yeah, Weimah. Yeah. It's like Wagner group and the Wagner group. Exactly. Exactly.

And then of course, you know, a more difficult one will be, and we found a Labrador breeder and there's so many Labradors in this country, but what we're trying to do is find the breeders that put the most back into the breed. Got it. From health testing to hunt testing and an actual hunting. Like there's never going to be someone who just shows their dogs in a show ring, but they might hunt them, show them, and sign up for every possible health test they could. Because they're so concerned that like look i'm

selling these dogs for a lot of money now remember what a dog cost 20 even 20 years ago yeah we spent 200 on a dog or 500 maybe and so we want to kind of bring these what are not don't give me the extremes but what's happened to that price two to five five, 20 years ago has become. 2000. Okay. That would be easy right in the middle, $2,000. Yeah, there was an auction recently, like an outfitter auction down in New Mexico, mule and hound auction. I don't know what the mules went for, but there were a couple of dogs that broke 20,000.

For lion hounds. Yeah. Wow. Dry ground lion. Yeah, that's every day in the coonhound world. So that's kind of our grail quest. We want to find the top tier breeders

and eventually even go down to terriers or collies. You got a ways to go before you get there. Oh, we got, but it gives me something to do. I'm retired, so I can just drive around the country. Well, let me just chime in about it. What one was I looking at? I can't remember the kind of looking at the one about the german short hair breeders so so ronnie's at a breeder right kind of doing a podcast yeah

and they're but they're showing so they're they have all these dogs running around different age classes and just this is just one of the many things in here right is they stand one up okay they stand one up on a pedestal what do you call that thing just tap a platform they stand one up on a platform and they say when i'm when i'm looking at these here's what i'm looking for right very specific the the nose would do this confirmation yeah it would stand this way this should look like this this should look like this so even if you weren't at even if you weren't going to that breeder let's say you couldn't afford it or whatever you could you still watch it and you'd be like oh okay so when i go look at pups i'm trying to select the pup from my neighbor right from the dog pound whatever

these are attributes that would be canine attributes yeah they. They'd be like, you don't know. And like you said, you don't know yet how it's going to turn out. Right. Maybe. But these are attributes that would be signifiers of, of, of some of the things you might want to look for in early selection. Right. Yeah.

And we will, in some of the episodes, we'll get into it as deep as we did in the first one where we showed, basically we took like a year old dog and then went backwards to a 16 week old dog, then a 12, then an eight, then a four. And what she did with these pups for confirmation, it's been done for decades. Another woman started this where they literally can pick the dog up under the collar and between the legs and just watch the way the legs hang. I mean, some of them are going to walk like me, Steve, and you know how funny I walk with my knees out. He's going a long ways.

A puppy will show you that same thing. If he's going to be cowhocked, which is where they would be knock-kneed if you were a person, you don't want to find out that you're going to have a cowhawk. It's going to run funny and eventually not be able to do the performance you want to do. It's going to wear out its back end. It's going to wear out its joints just like I did, you know, walking with my knees going out in two directions. So, yeah, there's things you could learn.

You don't have to be interested in a German Shorthair. You could watch what she's doing with that puppy and be like, wow, I'm going to do that next time I look for a dog. And then, so yeah, it's like we always interview the person at their home or their kennel. Usually it's always both, of course. So we record a podcast just at the kitchen table. And then we film the whole time. We're doing it like you're doing here now. We'll have cameras, two or three cameras set up.

And you film that and the hunts and everything. Right, and in that person's case, yeah, we hunted together that prior season in North Dakota. So we used some of that footage when we're talking about how we met. You're actually watching our footage of our hunt in North Dakota. And you learn, in that case, the one I watched, you learn why is hunting with this kind of dog? How is that different than other kinds of dogs? Meaning what are some of the expectations? If you think about a bird hunting dog, what are some of the expectations of this breed?

What are some of the expectations of that breed? Yeah. And I honestly, I think where the point I want to make to people is like a bird dog is pretty much a bird dog. Just like a hound is pretty much a trailing hound. They have some that are a little better at big game, a little better at small game. But it's what the breeders put into it. It's the standards that they hold themselves to. And when I say standard, it's their breeding ethics.

But every breed in this country now, and that's why I wanted to ask you, Angela, if you had a, like if, if you had a dire wolf skull, so all dogs have 42 teeth, would you see, yeah, 22 and 20 and, or 22 and 20 up. Yeah. Would you see teeth misalignments in old skulls? Yes.

So that would indicate to me. That would be a hell of a trivia question, man. Damn it. You see my location. Hell of a trivia question. I told Ronnie that yesterday. I even wrote it down in my notes that I was going to use that in a future trivia. Yeah.

Nobody would have got it right. I blew it. What about a tiebreaker? But you also said that nobody would get it right, so it might not be. It's too hard. But what I wanted to ask. It's phenomenal tiebreaker material. What I wanted to ask Angela is if you found there was a dire wolf or a wolf or whatever

with bad teeth, that's an indication of probably too much generational breeding. Possibly, yeah. Because if you had a dire wolf skull, how many of those exist out there? I don't even know. I'll tell you what, there's 175 of them. Oh, there's. Okay. So would they have any malclusions in their mouth?

Yes, they do. They would too. Yeah, they have malclusions, they're missing molars, they have all sorts of, yeah. So all that is coming from that far back. I thought it was more of a last hundred years breeding thing. Like from messing with them too much. But this is what we're trying to sort out right now is that we think some of the things you're selecting for positively like you know a water dog you want something with this type of coat right choose something that goes with this

type of coat but what trails along with it the genes that partner with that right that you don't necessarily want but you're not thinking about come along for the ride like bad like bad hips come along for the ride on good water i think think we got to have you on an episode someday of Behind the Dog. Well, anyway, thank you, Steve. All you have to do is go to BehindDogFilms.com. Well, so how many, when you launch, tell me what ones you're going to have done now. Well, we have two completed. One of them was not a breeder specific, but it was a training video that we were shooting.

Yeah. And we really got into the weeds about how any good bird dog, especially duck dog, obviously, has to be comfortable with the water. Yeah. And water should just be another terrain to even your house dog, right? If you go across. Like don't need to coax it at the shoreline to go out there. If you took your dog on a walk and it won't cross the creek with you, your kids aren't going to let you finish the walk because the dog's like, I don't know.

That's how deep it is. But some dogs literally won't put a foot in water. My daughter went down with her friend to swim at the creek yesterday, and her friends got her dog in a life jacket. They don't need that. They don't need that. I said to her, I said, you sure a dog needs a life jacket? She said, oh, she'll sink. Mingus might need that. I said to her, I said, you sure that dog needs a life jacket? She's like, oh, she'll sink.

Mingus might need one. That dog does not know how to swim. Does he swim like vertical? Yeah, that's not good. That's going to wear out quick. But to answer your question, we did one with a breeder in Michigan that breeds German short heirs. We have a training one about the water.

We're editing one currently with the Weimaraner breed. Got it. We're going to do a wire haired pointing griffin breeder and then a lab breeder and then a poodle pointer breeder. Got it. Poodle pointer is not, think of poodle, it's

P-U-D-E-L. It's a German breed. We're going to do that up in Boise. So it's going to be probably one a month until you know we say okay matt quit your day job yo and someday you might tackle the hounds and oh absolutely in fact if frank giddings could be alive for long enough i mean he might but you also have to have the person that's good on the microphone too which Sure. I always remember like you had the first show, Wild Within, and you did that moose hunt. And I specifically asked you, how come you didn't have the guy on camera with you very much?

And you said, he just, well. Come on. No. But I mean, all right. Well, I'm just saying you have to find the right, not just the right breeder, but the right conversationalist. Yeah, yeah. They can be great at what they do, but they don't convey it. So that's my goal is to find the people that can convey their passion.

Sure. And then your area of expertise is birds. You like stuff with feathers. Right. Everything to flies. Right. But that's why I want to, you know, like the hounds is going to be a tough one to do. You know, there's houndsmen that don't follow any pedigree.

Like they'll just, they'll breed another outside type of hound. There's, what is there, seven basic hounds? Mm-hmm. Five? Yeah, seven. I think seven. So if Brent wanted to take his, what is your breed? Tree and Walker.

Tree and Walker. And he did it to Yanni's red bone or blue tech same thing and that that's a hound joke and they brought them together they'd probably get the same money for him tell me the joke oh it's it's more of a sarcastic yeah oh yeah i was just being sorry yeah you mean like you you like a walkers you're down on red bones and blue anything else right right not really um but only among friends right so the houndsman like for me i'm gonna have to find the houndsman who probably has a 10 generation pedigree on his dogs and really collectively and consciously it's like, no, no, no, her, her, her grandma did the same thing.

Literally stood in the kennel, barked and made circles. And you'll see that follow in litters of dogs all of a sudden. Oh, is that right? And a breeder's like, oh my God, that's just like her great aunt drove me crazy. And it just pops up.

Right. So I'm going to have to find a hound breeders that are like you guys, Yanni and Brent might have to help. Yanni got his dog from the dog. Well, I'm not going to go to the, but you're meeting so many, you know, houndsmen. Yeah.

There's gotta be that houndsman out there that like knows that breed, like the plots do. Like, like, like obviously I would go to Bob Plot to learn about the Plot Hounds. I didn't know the Plots were still the Plots. Yeah. The Plots are the Plots. Still.

Yep. From Johannes Plot. Yeah. A lot of times. So they become like the Dickinson's or something over time. Right. Right.

Really? So the Plots. Yeah. Patrilineal descent. Well, obviously there's some, you know, some coyotes and some other stuff that's probably happened. There's something in, there's something in the wood pile, but for the most part, yes. Yeah.

Like Clay would know all about, like Clay could lock me up with a bunch of good ones. So behindthedog.com. Behindthedogfilms.com. Behindthedogfilms.com. Yeah. I don't think we could get behind the dog for some reason. Yeah. When you look for URLs, there was behind could get Behind the Dog for some reason. Yeah, yeah. When you look for URLs, there was Behind the Chicken, Behind the Horse, Behind the Dog, Behind the Cat.

I'm like, damn, we kick it. URLs are getting hard to come by, man. I found that out. That's why places now just make up words. Tubi, Hulu, whatever. You just make up words because you can't check it because nothing checks out anymore. Right, right. So, yeah, it's Behindthedogfilms.com.

Yeah. And Upland Institute is still kicking assedogfilms.com. Yeah. And, uh. And, and, and Opplin Institute still kicking ass or no? Oh yeah. Yeah. Now that, that's a, that's a complete four and a half hour training course. Yeah.

Yeah. Um. Still available. These, oh yeah. It'll be available till the internet blows up. Got it. Um, or till we hit the little button in the background that says.

Disable? No, you can download it yourself. Oh. Cause it's not downloadable. Otherwise you could just give it to can download it yourself. Oh. Cause it's not downloadable. Otherwise you could just give it to your friend. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, this is, this is a pay system right now. We charge 499 to watch it and we're not sure if that's the model it's going to stay at. Yeah. But literally just to earn the money to keep going to the next town, we like, we had to monetize it before it was big enough to monetize in another fashion. But it's honestly, it's, I don't know, Yana, did you get to watch the rest of it?

Yeah, we did. We did. If you like dogs, you're going to love it. There's a bunch of shots of dogs running around all over the place. And some interesting conversation about dogs. I think it's going to go well. Behindthedogfilms.com.

That's it. All right. And then tell folks how to find yourself there real quick. Is there a preferred way? Texas A&M. Texas A&M? Yeah.

Do you want people to write in with all kinds of things like, hey, I got this one dog. I got a dire wolf. I get a lot of interesting emails.

What's the thing you'd be most interested in hearing about? If a museum had a dire wolf. Yeah. Well, I get a lot of people asking me about dire wolves or saying that they think they have dire wolf stuff at various museums.

What's the most annoying email you get? This will help people not email you about it. Like ancient alien dog theories. I have enough of those. I hope no one listening to this show

emails in an alien dog theory, man. That's going to be embarrassing. Do like Steve, though, and explain what the theory would be that you don't actually So I get a lot of people saying that dogs are actually aliens that have come from the dog star Cirrus.

Okay. And that some genetic material has come out the dog star Cirrus. Okay. And that some genetic material has come out of the star arrived on Earth and that dogs have appeared from there and that I'm dumb

for thinking dogs are domesticated from wolves. Now that I heard it, that's what I think for sure, man. This is a thing. It's a thing. It must be like

on the internet somewhere that the dog Star series is, you know, stuff is floating down. Well, when you look at a wolf and a Westie and then that star, it just makes more sense that the Westie came from the star than from the wolf. It's true. Yeah, the writer Joan Didion speaks about this, and this is pre-internet. The writer Joan Didion in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, she talks about how some people cope with how much information.

There's so much information. And you face a fork in the road where you are interested in a subject, let's say like geopolitics, whatever economy economics you go like man i could take the fork that would be to just to try to digest and understand all of this information or i could take the fork where I know a little thing that no one else knows. Yeah. And that's really what's going on. And that's a seductive little fork. Dogs are aliens.

That's where you get, that's where so many conspiracy theories come from. Yeah. Is you're just, it's like there's insurmountable amounts of information. Mm-hmm. And you're like, eh, that seems like a lot of work. Yeah. I'm buying this dog star deal yes because that is just easy and then only i know it yeah yeah um a lot of i get a lot of emails

that um from dog people who are convinced they have it all figured out i like you call them dog people dog people you know keep keep emailing me Keep emailing me. Keep emailing me. I have some good theories in my inbox. Okay, so she doesn't want to hear about dog stars, but she does want to hear about... You can send those to me. I'm interested. Give me everything but dog stars.

Yeah. Yeah, I'm up for it. Oh, can you get me a dire wolf skull anyhow? Anyway? We could 3D print you one. Really? You want a real one? No, I'll take that. That's the best I can do.

Yeah. Let me know. Keep you posted. I could go in the backyard and dig up some skulls too. I wouldn't know the difference. You wouldn't know the difference. We could just give you a wolf skull. No, no, no. I want a 3D, if I can get one. I'd like to have a 3D of a dire wolf. Oh, heads up,

speaking of that, we have, Corinne, you haven't seen it yet hunter spencer's working on a big octopus holding a gaff so it's an octopus he's got a gaff and he's got some shrimp tucked under his arms we're gonna do a t-shirt run if you've listened to puss in the pot which is also really good on search dominate search hind titty puss in the pot cattle eat your nose whatever this one's gonna be cattle eat your nose

cattle eat your nose dominates on search man alright well thank you for joining yeah thank you for having me this is great man

yeah Corinne how long were you talking about getting a real dog expert on like years like about dog years

like a hundred years Yanni already took his head he's done he just took his headset off he's like she doesn't know nothing about blueanni already took his he's done he just took his headset off he's like she doesn't know nothing

about blue jigs took his headset off he's done talking about this come on come on there ain't anything more funny than that come on it was a headset drop

alright thanks everybody oh ride on ride on ride on ride on, ride on, little blood. I want to see your gray hair shine like silver in the sun. Ride on, ride on, ride on Sweetheart, we're done beat this damn horse to death So take your new one and ride on

We're done beat this damn horse to death So take your new one and ride on. 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. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians.

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