The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 605: A Woman Among Wolves

Episode Date: September 30, 2024

Steven Rinella talks with Diane Boyd, Janis Putelis, Brody Henderson, Randall Williams, Seth Morris, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider. Topics discussed: Diane Boyd’s new book A Woman Among Wolves; a tame pet pigeon with the bird sitter; when Diane was on Ep. 166: Hunting with Teeth; it’s MeatEater's Whitetail Week!; F*cked Up Old Shitters calendar is here; a good use for a tandem outhouse; "a retraction never gets the traction of the reaction to the original action"; Sonoran hotdogs; if you could snap your finger and get rid of CWD, would you?; the first wolf reintroductions; lady wolf trapper; where are wolves tolerated?; bringing home any Mexican wolves that wander out of their area; being a lumper of a splitter; why wolves generally don’t kill people; the average age of wolf death; high running feelings about wolf management vis-a-vis deer hunting; re-listing wolves on the ESA?; wolves in Colorado; ballot box biology; and more. Outro song: "Fever" by Pick & Howl on Instagram Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube  See 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. 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. Brought to you by First Light this week.

First Light is celebrating its annual Whitetail Week. We can tune in for tips, tricks, and tactics, as well as incredible deals site-wide. Check it out. Firstlight.com. F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T. Check it out. Firstlight.com. F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. You hunt big game too? I have, yeah.

Yeah, I've got a, I haven't hunted big game in about four years now, but I've shot a lot of deer, antelope, elk, bighorn sheep, ewe, bears. And I just, I train dogs and I bird hunt. That's what I do now. And so that's podcast.

What's that? We already pitched her earlier on this. Talk about the hunt in the podcast. I might bring that pigeon down here in a couple of days. Let them walk around up here. Is it a homer? You build a little roost for him in here. Yeah.

Is it pretty tame? It's extremely tame. Oh, nice. When you, all it tries to do is get into the house. You're kidding me. Because it knows people are in the house. Oh. Did you raise it?

My kids did, yeah. It's not going to be a shooter then, right? No, he got a pass. 40. Clemency. 40 of his roost mates went to bird dog trainers. Right. Yeah.

But this was, so what's his name? Peanut butter. Peanut butter. Because there was peanut butter and jelly, but jelly. Gone. Had to get euthanized. Yeah. It had a health problem.

It had a congenital birth defect as far as we can tell. Come on. Oh. You really did euthanize it. You didn't train it to, yeah. Well, it started passing its own intestines. Oh my God. Real buzzkill.

It was gross. Yeah. Oh, yeah, Brody's over. Is peanut butter aware of the windows outside? It knows where the door is. The bird killing windows? Yeah, but it knows where the door is. It goes to the door. Unbelievable.

So does it live outside? It lives outside. Oh, nice. It's at a bird sitter's house right now. Did he fly over there? I know it shouldn't be like, hey, you let the pigeon go, so it comes back home. This is the start of the show. We're already rolling. Okay, perfect. Give me your book.

There you go. Phil, where's a good spot? That's a great spot. That looks good. Yeah, we're missing the bottom quarter of the cover, but we've got the title. It's just me. It's okay, cover it up. That's better?

That's better. Joined today by Diane Boyd, who came on the, you were on the show a while ago. Probably five years now. Five years ago, way back in episode 166 days. Okay. That was a great episode. Thanks, you made it great. We did an episode called Hunting with Teeth with Diane Boyd.

Lay out your, can you lay out your, your, uh, an abbreviated form of your resume so people know what you're all about? Oh golly. Yeah. I started working with wolves in Minnesota in 1976. I was just a child prodigy. Not really.

I'm just old. And anyway, I picked up Minnesota wolves. I went and worked in wild wolves in Northern Minnesota. And then I worked as a, for one summer before I came to Montana as a depredation control trapper and research caller in northern Minnesota. And then I moved to Montana in 79 to pursue a couple of graduate degrees.

And I basically started with the first wolf that walked down from Canada and have maintained wolf reintroduction, not re reintroduction, non-recolonization information all those years. So kind of from the first wolf to 3000 wolves. Now that's what we got in the West. Roughly. Got it. And the reason I like the reason I like, uh, Diane Boyd and the reason she's back on the

show is, um, you caught a lot of the hysteria and a lot of the, on each side. If, I don't know, it's not right, especially in today's climate of an election season. I don't want to put it as the left and the right. How do you put it though? The yin and the yang now? Okay. If this, can you see my, the book and my hand, Phil? Yeah. If this is attitudes of wolves, then this is what, this side is that they're going to kill your children.

Okay. And this side is that they snuggle fawns. They're going to save the planet. They're going to, yeah, they're going to save the planet and reverse climate change. Diane Boyd is, I don't want to have you be the middle finger. That's a bad thing. No, I like it.

Diane Boyd is, I'm going to move this finger over where the middle finger lives. The middle finger's great because it's like. Diane, yeah, she gives the middle finger to the sides. I like that. Never had it put that way. And she's got a new book coming out a woman among wolves my journey through 40 years of wolf recovery when is it available right soon it's coming out september 10th it's being released and you can pre-order it on amazon

and barnes and nobles it's up there now got it my mom's husband my mom got married after my dad died my mom got remarried now that guy passed away you know he called barnes and noble he called it books and nobles well that's okay it makes sense yeah it was mcdonald's and it was books and nobles uh case you forget later i think you you should ask Diane if she's gonna read her own audio book. Oh, listen, I'm gonna tell you, are they letting you read your own audio book? Don't don't have them do a person like don't bring in a soap opera person who who's gonna do the audio book.

It's gotta be you. Do you want to store a little bit? So um, my Greystone publishing sold the audio rights to a media company. Yup. Yup. Um, understood. That's how that's normal.

They hired a professional actress to read. Did you really come in there and complain? Well, I didn't know that. And then when I found out, I just said, well, you know,

I, I know the story pretty well and I do a lot of public speaking and I think I've got an engaging voice even with my fargo accent so um they had me send an audio edition and they wrote me back and he said well if you want to do the reading we're gonna have to basically train you and it's going to take a lot of time and blah blah blah so you know why they're telling you that they got these hosers that do it all the time okay and they come in they know they're going to get it done in two days whatever don't let that happen i let that happen before

and i've mentioned this a bunch of times i let that happen before i got the thing in i turned it on and i could not cross the room quick enough to turn it off the minute that person opened their mouth oh dear because like you live your work yeah right and when you're writing it you're it's you you're it's you know what i mean you're doing it you're saying it you're reading it to yourself you're making it perfect and then some other person picks it up and touches it it's like watching it it's like are you married? No. If you were, it would be like watching someone handle your husband. That was an impossibility.

I was married. Briefly. I get it. Picture that you were still married, you really liked him, and you had to watch someone else. No go. But anyway, I, the other thing was they're

doing this, they want it to be done when the book is released on September 10th and I'm going bird hunting. I mean, I got stuff to do and I actually just don't, at this point I just threw my hands up, said whatever. Yeah. I'm all, whatever.

Okay. Thank you though. time next time next book you appreciate the advice yeah i do whitetail week uh coming up here at me either one week only 9 30 to 10 6 whitetail week's the best time stock up on whitetail gear with deals from First Light, FHF Gear, Phelps Game Calls, Dave Smith Decoys at the Meat Eater Store, plus a full week of Whitetail content. We've done these in the past. It's like, you know, there's a TV channel that has a, they celebrate a fish all week every year.

It's like that, but it's for people who like Whitetails. Oh, you know what's funny? I'm working on this new project and we got to do a bunch of scuba diving over the last week and we had these underwater you can talk underwater.

It's a special mask. You normally use a breathing apparatus and a regular mask, but it's this big contained thing so you can hold a button and like talk underwater to people. It's hard to be heard. And it's just, it's not a perfect system, as you can imagine, talking underwater. And someone, so we rented this equipment from this place that rents this stuff out and like well

how in the world on shark week are they all talking to each other underwater he goes oh they dub that all in uh mid uh very this is uh you folks will appreciate this. Sometime between mid and end of September, the fucked up old shitters calendar is out. It's the third in our effed up series. We did deer stands, taxidermy, and now it's shitters. Some of the world's best. And worst. Worst.

Not best. Best worst. Yeah, the best of the worst old shitters laying around out in the woods. From the Arctic to the Midwest. And probably point south. Did you do captions this time? Oh, yeah. Great captions.

Oh. Yeah, I don't know that I'd say that they're all the worst, because some of them are just intriguing. Intriguing. Like you'd want to give them a run yeah carved out a giant tree stumps so like one yeah one is sort of i don't know what that looks like a giant redwood or a sequoia or something i don't know what it is probably not no it's a cedar cedar a huge western red cedar that's what it is and they carved a shitter out of

a western red cedar beautiful so in the caption process we sit around thinking of what would be funny and we're like something to do with ewoks would be funny and then you work that into a caption there's one that is very southwest and when i looked at it i thought of the alamo and so then you work up a caption that's like a joke about the Alamo. That's how that process works. Are there any outhouses or shitters that you wouldn't want to stop? Oh, there are. Yeah, yeah.

There's some gross stuff. I'll tell you the one I wouldn't want to do. The one in need of an upholstery job. I wouldn't touch that thing until someone's recovered it. There's definitely some that made me lose my faith in humanity, like gross, like stuff laying around. That didn't make the cut. Yeah.

There's nothing gross about the calendar. No, no, no. There's no like, ew. No, no. We had some gross submissions. Yeah, a lot of gross submissions. None of our submissions has, none of the submissions are like poor etiquette.

None of the submissions, there's no toilet paper. There's no fecal matter. There were a couple that you guys didn't see that were being used. The people sent in. Oh, you cut those out? Yeah. No people in it. Thank you.

I didn't think they'd make the cut, so I didn't send those along. It's 12 months. That's how many months are in a year it's 12 months of um beautiful photography of if you're wandering around out in the woods or winding around up in the arctic or wandering around wherever and you came into a and you came across a old shitter and you're like wow the stories that old shitter could tell that's what this calendar is all about and they're all shitters you'd tell someone about oh you're like you wouldn't believe what i found oh yeah if you were hunting with your buddy or whatever

and you went off to go check on something and you encountered one of these and you came back i don't care if you saw two booner bucks fighting and stuck together you'd run back to your buddy and you'd be like you would not believe the shitter i just saw oh plus there's two booner bucks stuck together over there that's how that that's the quality of these shitters like recently i was or his last hunting season i was up on the rocky mountain front in that augusta shoto zone you've probably randall seems like you've been to every bar in every small town in montana so you've probably been to this one but in their bathrooms they have pictures of uh some outhouses and one of the favorite ones i've seen it's like it's you can see the front but the outhouse is out in the flats and it's got these,

it looks like two telephone poles that are wedged like between it's like upper corners at the Eve and the ground. Just basically meaning that the wind blows so hard there that if this outhouse isn't supported with telephone poles, like, you know, at an angle, it's going to lift it off.

Yeah, or at least knock it over. There's one in the calendar that was brutalized by the wind pretty good. Yeah, it's just... They needed those telephone poles? You're looking down a hill, and you can just see the shitter blown off away. We also had a lot of tandems, and we only put one tandem in because I don't really understand. Like my, when my, when my little kids were littler, I could see them utilizing a tandem.

But you wouldn't park next to Giannis in the morning. But even now they're not going to utilize the tandem. Right. I, I know of a use for a tandem outhouse. Oh, please. So my first year up there in 79 got Giardia and there was a two se tandem outhouse. Oh, please. So my first year up there in 79 got Giardia and there was a two seater outhouse and there was a moment one day when I needed to use both

holes at the same time. Just saying. Yeah. Do you know what the next installment of F'd Up? I want to do, it's a, it's a photographic challenge. I want to do fish cleaning stations or just fucked up old fishermen. Or fucked up hunters. But I'd like to do fish cleaning stations, just the nastiest, grossest fish cleaning stations.

But it's hard to capture the smell. If you remember Scratch and Sniff when you were a kid? If you could scratch and sniff old fish cleaning stations and scratch it. If we could figure that out, we'd hit this. The one in the shack is too nice now after the fix-up job. I don't know. It wouldn't even be good anymore.

I know. We got ruined for that. Yeah, I'm not sure, but this one is great. If you know someone who just appreciates an old outhouse oh one of these old outhouses that got caught on fire and put out and i was trying to think of a taco bell joke fire so many flaming hot cheetos but i think on that one the joke landed around like it was from southeast alaska and I think the joke was something about how hard it is to get anything burned in Southeast Alaska. Like nothing wants to burn there.

So how would you get, you know, some kind of joke like that? A couple of thoughts from Heffelfinger on a past episode. It's a rebuttal. It's a retraction. It's actually not. It's a fortification. But Heffelfinger had a goodraction it's actually not it's a fortification but half a finger had a good quote it's not his quote he wrote it down a retraction never gets the traction of the reaction to the original action once again a retraction never gets the... From the top.

A retraction never gets the traction of the reaction to the original action. A great illustration of that would be when it came out, two i can think of years ago it came out that like a guy supposedly got died from eating squirrel brains and then it was all that was everywhere every news agency picked this article up and then it came out well actually no he just died of a brain disease, and in his past, he had eaten a squirrel brain. So of the 100 or 200 people that die of this every year, he happened to, in his history, had eaten a squirrel brain, and it just didn't quite get the traction of the reaction to the original action.

I was commenting. I used to always tell people i used to somehow some somehow it was told to me that automobile insurance companies often push to reduce deer numbers so that to to reduce their premium load from all the claims made from crashing and cars hitting things. So agricultural interests and I would say automobile interests, automobile insurance interests would like to suppress deer numbers.

Now, Heffelfinger, I don't know where he hangs out, he's saying automobile insurance companies, plural, have told Heffelfinger personally they have no interest insurance companies, plural, have told Heffelfinger personally they have no interest in spending any money to reduce

audio collisions because they just run the numbers and charge whatever premium they need to cover collisions with deer. Why would they want to spend time or money on something that might reduce deer collisions, like overpasses, when they can just simply take it into consideration

when they do all their math. They pass it along to the consumer. Also, so Heffelfinger commented on that. Heffelfinger commented on this. We were discussing a plan taking root in oklahoma and elsewhere of taking this is a little bit complicated there are some white-tailed deer farmers white-tailed deer ranchers whatever the hell you call them that that believe they have some deer that are resistant to cwd um meaning they'll have a population deer and some deer just don't get it.

And they're saying, hey, we should take these deer that don't get it and seed wild populations with our resistant deer in the hopes of sort of speeding along or making, you know, these deer have a gene mutation that makes them not so susceptible. Let's put them out in the wild and hopefully they'll breed with wild deer and eventually we'll create this CWD resistant wild deer deer herds which just strikes me as like incredibly dubious uh heffel finger says deer with that genetic combo are not resistant to cwd they just don't die as fast and it's not a good thing to have CWD-positive deer running around for a longer period of time in the environment shedding infectious prions. I can't remember if I decided on prions or prions.

What do you say, Randall? Prions. Okay, that's the one I'm going to stick with. The Pandora's box is that when you intensively select for those CWD-related genes in captivity, you are also selecting for other genes that are close to them on the same chromosome. Genes that are physically close to one another on the same chromosome are inherited together at a higher rate. We have no idea what those other nearby genes are. They might be genes that lower reproductive rate, produce smaller antlers, a higher susceptibility to other diseases, tameness, who knows?

It's just a bad idea to circumvent natural selection for a lot of reasons, and this would never move the needle on CWD spread or prevalence in the wild. These genes associated with deer surviving longer with CWD are in fact increasing in frequency in the wild populations through natural selection, but very slowly. Steve's point is right. Ha! That's my favorite part of the letter. I don't even know what I said. It makes me feel like when I,

once every five years and I go bowling and I always get like at least one strike. Steve's point is right. That releasing a few more of those animals from captivity is not going to change gene frequencies in a free-ranging wild population and has the potential to do harm. He goes on to say, if you like Sonoran hotdogs Guerrero which I do well I think it's time out who's gonna take a stab at this Guerrero Canelo Guerrero Canelo mm-hmm very good top 10 in Tucson number one in his opinion but prices have gone up in a way that exceeds the quality of the food, he says.

No, no, no. Guero Canelo is where I always take you. He's giving you another option. Yeah, we plugged Guero Canelo in a trivia episode. Oh, and he's saying La Cerita del Roro is a better

Mexican hot dog. I think it's La Careta del Roro. But you're close. That's in Tucson as well? Yes. Where the Sonoran dogs are famous. And it looks way different. And I think you can...

Didn't he read what goes on there? And what is or he wrote sorry but yep uh jim if you uh jim's got his eyes on a good mexican hot dog uh 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.

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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,.com Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Another rebuttal. This is a rebuttal from BubblyDoug.

We're going to eat him in January. Heffelfinger and BubblyDoug are sort of the main rebuttal generators and clarification generators. But this is from Doug slash like a friend. Doug's friend. They're g Doug slash like a friend Doug's friend they're they're ganging up on you Doug's friend is very annoyed about something I said about CWD and I've said this and I've said it before I don't know if I'll say it again but there's a there's a point I

often make and and it all it always irritates some people but I just I I I say it because it's just it's a true feeling that I have. In discussing chronic wasting disease in deer, I often say the thing most scary, this is not what I say, but I'm trying to say it in cleaner terms. What's horrifying to me is that some hunter out there, it horrifies me that some hunter out there would contract cwd from a deer and it would jump the species barrier and so because it because it's so alarming to me and

so scary to me i'll often say that that i'll put some statistic around it where i'll try to say you know i might say something to the effect of um 90 of my concern about chronic wasting disease is it's going to pass to some that some hunter's going to get it and if it were to jump the species barrier just it would just change deer hunting it would change deer management it would change deer hunting it would change the perception of deer like we put a huge cultural value on deer if they were this thing that was causing um you know like like these sort of like horrible prolonged deaths from like prion diseases and humans i mean it's just disgusting to even think about so when i track see when i follow news about cwd and try to

advocate on behalf of research around cwd and trying to stop the spread of cwd a huge part of my motivation is that it just makes me sick to think about anyone, my kids, whatever, somehow doing this and how it would affect my diet. That's kind of like the main thing I like to eat.

It's deer meat. This does not go over well with some people. And Doug's friend, who's a landowner farmer in the state of Washington, she says, if Steve's biggest concern with CWD is the potential risk to humans, it feels contradictory to the values he often expresses as a conservationist. You can be a humanist and a conservationist the same time but back to the back to the letter it gives the impression that he values animal welfare less than he claims

which stands in contrast to his usual corner arguments against vegans that he likely cares more for animals and understands them better than they do it's frustrating to hear him repeatedly say that his greatest worry is the disease jumping to humans when animal welfare is at stake right now. It's not just Doug who's upset about this, me too. And she goes on as well

to counter my observation that if C... Another thing I've said about CWD, and then I'm going to leave the subject behind for a minute. Another thing I will've said about CWD and then we're gonna leave I'm gonna leave the subject behind for a minute another thing I will frequently say about CWD is how can it be or why is it that I'm so afraid of it jumping the species barrier to humans I would feel that livestock producers would be more afraid than I am. Because, as I said, a cow and a sheep

look a hell of a lot more like a deer than I do. All you got to look at is what happened with mad cow disease in Britain, right? Imagine that across the entire United States. Correct. What it would do to the cattle industry. And this person is countering

she's saying don't think they're not worried about this. I can't really do a tit for tat on that issue. I understand what you're saying about animal welfare. I'm just telling you a thing that like for instance when my kid's out playing in the road okay and i get nervous that they're chasing their that they're that they go to chase

their baseball across the highway without looking and i'm like man the main thing that worries me about my kid chasing the ball across the highway is that my kid will get hit by a car someone would say like well that doesn't go with your view as a conservationist because why are you not so worried about the deer that get hit on the road aren't you worried about animal welfare i'm like yes not as worried as i am about my kid getting hit on the road yeah i i mean it i i read this as like the only thing you're concerned about is humans but it's not what i said i know but that's what it kind of sounds like she's saying here like you can be concerned about humans and worry about the deer herds too yeah when i see a deer run across from i was like watch

it and i was driving down the road the driver i freaked out on i was in the passenger seat and i freaked out on the guy be like slow down dude how do you know there's not more i think that she's just i think it's a she. I don't know why I think that. Well, because. Because of her name already? Because of her name. And the fact that he says she. But I think she's pointing out that maybe there's a constant omittal when you talk about

CWD about that part. I always qualify that part. I also think it's hard to, I mean, the CWD is going to be a lot worse for deer if people get it from deer. Like if you're concerned about deer as a whole, if it jumps the species barrier, CWD all of a sudden we have to have the same conversations about deer and CWD as we do about free-ranging buffalo and cattle because of brucellosis. And people are like, hey man, if the state owns the deer, keep those deer away from my place. Yeah. It's a much darker picture for not only people but the health of deer as a whole if that were to happen and i don't omit the other thing i don't omit the other thing the same way when i'm

driving or i'm riding the car and i see a deer cross and i see that the driver that i'm with isn't thinking about how there's probably some following it and i was like dude slow down come on um but if i saw a kid run across the road my reaction is gonna be even stronger i might get out yell at the kid yeah i think it's perfectly normal to be more worried about your kids than deer then you are worried about like the welfare of a deer or deer as a population i do worry yeah let me. Let me ask you this. I think it's pretty valid. If I could guarantee you that it would not jump the species barrier, but you could get rid of it

by snapping your fingers, would you still get rid of CWD? Oh yeah. I mean, that's the thing. It's like, you can, you can be worried about one thing more than the other, but still have concern for CWD as a problem for deer. If if if we could spend money and get rid of ehd in blue tongue i'll be like oh let's go spend the money and get rid of ehd in blue tongue yeah

it's like it upsets any it upsets equilibrium and causes a lot of trouble for deer hunters when their area gets wiped out it's like rags to riches on deer populations where you get a lot of deer and all of a sudden you're like well we got we got a lot now, but now that we got this many, just wait for EHD to come through and then they'll all be laying dead on the side of some pond. I would still think we should spend a bunch of money. Here's the thing, too. From their perspective, that's the reason I'm always advocating on research. Knowing that there's that risk out there, study the hell out of it.

I think there should be a lot of money getting pumped into studying it. That perspective is not adversarial to wanting to control what's going on. Who wants to talk about wolves? Me. Everybody. Where do we start? Let me ask you this question. Can I remind you of something you told me the last time?

Oh, yeah, sure. The last time you were on the show, and I want to pick this up and have you extend that logic. I want to see if you still feel that way and if you would extend it to Colorado and just run with this. You said something that surprised me when you were on the show before you had said had we never did we humans americas americans whatever

had we never conducted had we decided to not do a reintroduction of wolves in yellowstone national park in the frank church wilderness area meaning have we not gone and live captured wolves elsewhere and brought them to turn them loose we we probably would have i can't remember the exact way you put it we probably would have eventually landed in the same spot we're at right now from natural migration. Yes, I still feel that way. And the only, so wolves are expanding globally in Canada. They're all over the Midwest, here in our West, Europe. And the only place where wolves have been reintroduced was Yellowstone and the Frank Church,

Mexican wolves, red wolves. But wolves have globally expanded without any reintroduction. There's wolves in the Netherlands now. There's wolves in Denmark. Nobody put them there. Wolves have been getting there on their own. And the wolves did get to Colorado. They've had the first reproduction, I think it was 2020 or 2021, from Wyoming wolves.

And those wolves ended up a lot of them being gilled, but they were getting there on their own. And I feel very strongly that where Colorado is at since 2020 is about where we were at in Montana in 1979, 80, when a few wolves started walking down on their own power from Canada and slowly got a toehold, so to speak, and repopulated on their own. You mentioned the Great Lakes. Can you move over? Can we move over real quick to the Great Lakes and touch on that real quick? Talk about that for a minute.

Like, no reintroduction. Right. that for a minute like no no reintroduction right uh if we look at in in the northern great lakes we have minnesota wisconsin michigan yeah anyone else have a have a like have a stable population no isle royal there was a recent reintroduction to isle royal because the wolves are dying out other than that but that's still michigan waters yes yeah um can you give a little crash course on how how uh were they ever gone gone no good question so when i left minnesota in 1979 working with wolves there was just under a thousand wolves 900 to a thousand wolves in minnesota there was a handful in wisconsin probably less than a dozen there was a handful in Wisconsin, probably less than a dozen. There was maybe 25 in Isle Royale that had gotten there late 40s, early 50s

by crossing the frozen Lake Superior ice. And that was it. And now there's, I'm trying to think of the numbers of wolves in the Midwest. It's over a thousand, might be a couple thousand, 3,000. I'm trying to think. Have they been extirpated from Michigan? Yes, they're extirpated from Michigan? Yes. They're extirpated from Michigan and Wisconsin. They were never extirpated from Minnesota because the Northern fourth or third of the

state is too remote, roadless. So there always was a stronghold. And I'm trying to think. You're not calling me a liar when I say that I saw a wolf track in the Eastern UP in 1994, are you? No. Okay. No.

But I. I'll fight you. No, absolutely. I'm saying viable populations, breeding, reproducing, established packs. No, cause my friend Dick Thiel was documenting wolves recovering to Wisconsin starting in, I think, I think he saw his first wolf track in like 72 or 73.

Oh, crazy. They were trying and Michigan, same thing. And actually there was a reintroduction into Michigan, the UP. What? In 1970, 74, 78, somewhere in the middle of actually there was a reintroduction into Michigan, the UP. What? In 1970, 74, 78, somewhere in there, 74. You can read about it.

It's in my book. And they took four wolves from Minnesota and they transplanted them, reintroduced them to Northern Michigan. It was during, just before deer season. Did they really? And then eventually all four were killed pretty quickly so that what people guns animal rights people feeling sorry for him in the michigan winters

so that was actually the very first rule for introduction that i'm aware of and people don't who did that reintroduction it was like the state was it real hot politically at the time you don't you didn't know about it. I'd say no, it wasn't, right? There's no internet. Right, no internet. No Facebook, no social media. So it was done.

They were held a little while in a pen, and then they were let go. And that was the model for how they were going to reintroduce DeWolfsey to Yellowstone. So Yellowstone wasn't Yellowstone, Idaho. It wasn't the first reintroduction. Michigan was. They took them from Minnesota and put them in

Michigan. Yes. I'm from Michigan. I didn't know that. Google it. Try it. Michigan wolf reintroduction if you want. Well, anyway.

Do you mind doing that, bro? Yeah. So, and look in the seventies, I think 74. So yeah, but none of them made it. And it wasn't that they didn't know how to hunt or didn't know how to find their way around because they're wild wolves. Just that too many people with guns. So anyway, that was, you asked, that was the first.

And then of course our wolves were coming down into Montana from the North country, from Canada on their own. What year were they, so in the Rockies, so let's leave the upper Midwest out of it. Yeah. So we'll go from like the hundredth meridian West or whatever. Okay. Uh, in what year can you say with some certainty there were no wolves south of the Canadian border? In the whole West? Yeah.

In the whole West. Well, the statement, so wolves have always trickled down. So I can't say there was never a wolf, but in terms of a viable breeding, surviving. Well, no, no. I want to hear about that a little bit. Okay. So by they say generally by the 1930s, wolves were extirpated as a viable population in the West.

But I know of individual people like what you just said, who saw wolves, um, wolf tracks, a wolf. Um, there was a wolf shot in Glacier Park in 1953. There was another wolf shot outside of Bulbridge in 1970. There's individual shot, they get run over, they show up. Um, but in terms of a viable reproducing

population, 1930s is pretty well the date that they've chosen okay but since from from 1930 up until the area we'll come to focus on like uh when a viable population came yeah at any time along that there could have been singles that would come down from canada yeah and i hearing from people who live over on the, on the Rocky Mount front, uh, the Blackfoot Indian reservation, Glacier park, it's pretty remote, inaccessible Badger to Med and people

have seen wolves there more commonly than other parts of Montana. And then of course they don't survive in Eastern Montana because they got nowhere to hide. They show up, boom, they're dead. Got it. So there's been a little bit, but not reproduction. Okay.

And then when did they start coming down and getting a foothold and how did that work? We keep using toehold and foothold, which is, is that the right word? Leg holds. Anyway, one of my better tools. Sorry. Hold on. Did you find it? holds. Leg holds. Anyway. One of my better tools. Sorry. Hold on. Did you find it? Yeah.

Go ahead. A failed attempt by Northern Michigan University and the Michigan DNR to reintroduce four wolves to the Upper Peninsula occurred in 1974. See? You're all smart, Brody. Eventually, wolves moved from Wisconsin to Upper Michigan following strong prey populations in the early 90s. When did you see that wolf track? I saw a wolf populations in the early nineties. When'd you see that wolf track?

I saw a wolf track in 1994. There you go. Eastern UP. Yep. That, that corroborates your. Yep. Your story. Hmm.

Try and travel. Right again. It's not far from the final resting place of my dog, Duchess. Wolves got her, huh? Nope. Two guys duchess wolves got her huh nope two guys named ben and matt got her oh man well they were supposed to oh oh i got you she's crippled up oh god sorry goddard's not the right word thank you for the yeah good job Brody. Thanks. So the question was? Oh, from 19, so 1930 there's, around 1930, there's no viable population of wolves left

in the lower, in the American West. Yeah. They even went in the parks with poisons and traps and rifles and killed all the wolves inside Yellowstone and Glacier and all the parks. Yeah. They were pretty well gone. Coyotes didn't disappear, but wolves did.

Why is that? Why did coyotes stick around? I think because they're smaller, they have a higher reproductive capacity, they breed more often, they're breeding in smaller units. And people weren't so focused on eradicating coyotes. You know, you see a wolf, by God, we've got to kill every last one.

A coyote like, well, whatever. It's just not, doesn't generate the emotional impact of hatred. Gotcha. What about Mexican gray wolves? Were they always, were there always some north of the border or had they been eliminated, eliminated also? So interesting. So the Mexican wolves were basically eliminated

except in Mexico and there were a few into the southwest, Arizona and New Mexico right at the border area. They captured every last one that they could find out of the wild. Rory McBride went there and I think the last wild capture was about

1970s, early 1970s and early 1970s. And they moved them into captive breeding facilities to help build up the species. But their founding population was seven. There's a lot of genetic concerns, obviously, with a bottleneck of seven. So they're always managing and manipulating them to try and maximize genetic diversity, including taking pups from captivity at a young age. And then finding a den in the wild where the mother's got wild pups and they'll go sneak a couple of the captive pups, like 10 days old, however.

Really? And with the wild ones, because that has the desirable genetics. Yeah. I mean. What's that bird does that? A cowbird, right? Yeah. Yeah. They call them a parasite though, instead of an improvement. genetics. Yeah. I mean. What's that bird that does that? A cowbird, right? Yeah. They call them a parasite though,

instead of an improvement. Okay. Right? So, yeah. So the Mexican wolf, they were pretty well gone. And interestingly, one of my first years in the North, I think it was 1980, Chuck Jonkel brought up a Mexican carnivore biologist, Pepe Trevino.

And he showed me a Polaroid, you know, photograph he brought up of Mexican carnivore biologist, Pepe Trevino. And he showed me a Polaroid photograph he brought up of a wolf. It was like in a barn or a shed. And he said, is that a wolf? I said, well, yeah. And I know it's a wild one because this is a Mexican wolf from the Chihuahua area of Mexico. And it was coming to a ranch and it was a male wolf and it was bringing deer legs and meat to the ranch dog

who was a female on spade because it was the last mate choice out there. And they ended up, the rancher could have just killed it. Everybody did, but he did. And he called some authority, said, if you don't come take this wolf away, we're going to kill it. So they went and captured it and held it in his barn

until they moved it to the zoo. But it's kind of a sad story the very last one yeah we played this on this podcast some time ago and it was uh some bird from was i think of some bird from hawaii and it was the i can't remember some bird species and it was just down to one it was down to a male or a female and this bird species would do wet i heard it yeah and so they have this recording of the last bird let's say it was a male yeah the last male of the species doing the duet without his without accompaniment because he like does his part and you wait and the female's supposed to yeah yeah and it was gone i heard that it's kind of tears at you a little bit yeah yeah um have you ever

heard a guy named frank glazer old pilot different guy don that was don glazer no i haven't he was uh he has a book called alaska's well there's a book about him called alaska's wolf man huh and he had gone up to he'd gone to alaska very early and was a market hunter for people building roads and people building rail roads and whatever and eventually just became this like very accomplished hunter and at the time they were trying to get they were trying to do economic improvement for eskimo groups in northwest alaska and part of this economic improvement plan was to introduce reindeer herding which never never really took so as they're trying to to go into eskimo communities and the feds are trying to

get eskimo communities um established reindeer populations but they're having a hell of a time with wolves and so frank glazer in addition to a lot of aerial gunning was doing bait operations and uh he would go into an area and get them poison bait yep strychnine he'd be able to go get them all yes in his book he talks a lot about all the other stuff that would turn up at the bait pile a lot of stuff but it was so effective you got he doesn't talk about its effectiveness with poison this way but it was so effective he has some anecdotes in there where he gets them all and then someone will say there's this part of it where an eskimo tells him that he saw it's like seven come across the ice it was like six white wolves and a black wolf and a couple days later he goes to his bait pile um there's six white wolves and a black wolf at the bait pile.

Just very effective. Yes. Yeah. And even talked about, you want to set it on a high knob. Like he's got like, he took like a real approach to it. You know, like he was good at poisoning wolves. He's a good predator on wolves. Good at poisoning wolves.

Yeah. Well, I mean, poison is how they wiped the wolves out of the West. It wasn't at poison wolves yeah yeah well i mean poison is how they wiped the wolves out of the west it wasn't so much traps and guns it was poison how else are you going to get every last one that's it yeah um when they started coming down what what eventually what factors eventually led them to you know what what factors led them to kind of get a toehold was it esa protection you were, where people were more afraid to shoot them because they'd get in a bunch of trouble? Yeah, I think, I mean, Rachel Carson and, you know, the whole wave of ecology and being

environmentally aware started in the late sixties and then ESA came about, the act came out 73. I think the final version wolves were protected in 74 and there was just a little change of mindset and the interesting thing was that they would find the north fork of the flathead you know right along glacier because back in the 70s people like myself and other people they just wanted to move to a quiet place where there were few people and could enjoy wildlife and have a simpler life they weren't loggers or hunters or ranchers well there were some there were some but mostly just sort of go back to earthers and have a better quality life so they didn't mind wolves and these wolves happened

to find that valley that corridor of tolerance and they that's how they found their way they didn't work on the rocky mountain front it didn't work in eastern montana it didn't work on the Rocky Mountain Front. It didn't work in eastern Montana. It didn't work in Idaho. Because of cattle. Yes. And so they found this little zone and they were able to, one came and then two years later, the Hermale came and they made it and then more wolves come down. But it was the tolerance of the local community that found wolves interesting and novel versus dangerous and threatening. Where were you then then i came to that

valley in 1979 the first wolf that survived that we got a radio caller on kishnina she arrived in 19 the fall of 78 we put a radio caller on april 4th 1979 and i trapped there for forever just trying to catch more wolves and there weren't other wolves until about two years later when this male came down and joined her. But the meantime, you know, she wandered around looking for a female like that poor bird in Hawaii. Looked for a male. Yeah, looking for a male, right. And eventually found one and they mated and had the pups and so forth. So that process just, they filter down on their own four paws without any assistance

whatsoever and no fanfare and no no people from washington dc carrying crates and they just they just walk down and i think that's why they made it it was just socially acceptable and tolerant because it wasn't forced on anybody um you tell that story in your book. Yeah. How did you get a collar on that? Or was it collars at the time? So the British Columbia berry researcher, Bruce McClellan, he's been up doing bears. He's now retired, but he saw the wolves and wolf tracks and he contacted Bob Rehm at the university. And Bob hired a wolf trapper from Minnesota, Joe Smith, uncommon name, but it was Joe Smith. And he came out and set traps and caught that wolf. And then I came out in September to replace the crew that was there and follow her.

And I was a trapper and to try and catch more wolves. And that's kind of how it started. So she was already collared, although I know some, there had one neighbor who didn't really like wolves and said that i brought the wolf with me which you know or that a sled dog got loose but you know you don't see sled dogs that are three feet at the shoulder with yellow eyes i mean it's just all the stuff but that that was how they got there they walked and she had to come a long ways because they poisoned off wolves in southern bc and alberta in the rockies just like they did in the states because they were afraid of rabies and they started poisoning wolves in

the 60s late 60s and so there was a zone they were at late yeah there was a zone when there weren't wolves along the border there weren't wolves in waterton and banff so this first wolf kishnina may have come from as far as jasper but she came came quite a ways. We didn't have genetic resources back then to determine where she came from. Of course, now we could if we'd had a sample, but we don't have a sample. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, we hear from the Canadians

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Welcome to the OnX club, y'all did you when you say you were a wolf trapper then were you trapping uh problem wolves too yes you don't like talking about that no i don't mind at all when i so or whatever word you want to use you'll enjoy the chapter north Home in the book, but did you like the North Home chapter? So I started working with wolves as a starry-eyed, waist-length, blonde-haired, hippie wolf-hugging lady. And I came from the university. Can you walk me through that descriptor again? No, no.

Starry-eyed. I was a bit enamored with wolves. I was a university college student. Dave Meech, who's like the wolf god, he's still working full-time atored with wolves. I was a university college student. Dave Meach, who's like the wolf god, he's still working full-time at 86 studying wolves. He's published more scientific papers than anybody I know. Anyway, I got to work on his captive project, and then I got to go to northern Minnesota and work, and I learned how to catch and collar wolves and track them. And then I was hired as, a year after this, so I'm pretty early in my career, in 1979, I was hired as a livestock depredation control trapper and research trapper.

So when there weren't wolves killing livestock, I went out in the forest and collared wolves that were just wild and added to the database for Steve Fritz, who's post-docing PhD stuff. So my job, picture you live in North home. Picture you're a conservative guy from Michigan with a few cows and you have a few acres and some young blonde gal is going to come up and save you from the wolves, right? I mean, it was a hard road. Oh, so that was my job. And, and I learned so much that summer. It was so important to my career development and having me be in the middle finger, as you described, of behavior, of public wolves reaction on my part. So there were truly farmers. They don't call them ranchers.

There were farmers that had chronic depredation problems and there were some farmers that had none. I worked with both. But getting into that community was real challenging and um i could tell stories forever about that how would you generally handle those situations okay example i try to use there's no point in feeding them a lot of scientific data they don't care you just have to work with them and develop a relationship. I use my sense of humor. There was like, for example, I was working in

there and I kind of stayed on my own and I tried to stay away from people, just do my job because I was young and inexperienced and I kind of didn't want them to know that. Right. Well, one day I'm at the gas station, a guy pumping gas, they actually pumped your gas back then, says, you know, you got to pick up the local paper and see what Bing wrote about you I said well

who's Bing girl he's what he's like close to God he writes our local news column in the weekly paper and he knows all the goings on so I go by the paper and I open it up and there's Bing Bing Elhard's column and he talks about who visited who and what they were having the church bazaar at. And then he says, and by the way, we have a new community member. There's an attractive young blonde lady wolf trapper. And next exact quote. And next to his words, he had a photograph of a six foot tall cardboard cutout wolf. And he's got his arm around it and he's sitting outside at his house.

And he says, Lady Wolf Trapper, I have a problem wolf. Like, what do you do, right? I'm 24 years old. I'm like, oh my God. And knowing that how I deal with this guy is going to make or break my summer. So I thought about it really hard. I went home. I took out a bunch of cardboard and tools

and I built a perfect replica of a number 14 new house wolf trap complete with double long springs made out of cardboard and a fake chain made like your kids make the Christmas loop chains. And I wrapped it in black electric tape so it looked looked like it had been dyed black, like a real trap. And I got a jar of my stinkiest wolf bait and I crammed it full of cardboard. I drive to his house the next day and I pull up in the government truck and he comes out on his porch and he kind of stands there

and smirks and he crosses his arms and says, well, you must be the lady wolf trapper. And I said, yes, sir, I am pleased to meet you. I'm Diane Boyd. And he says, well, you must be the lady wolf trapper. And I said, yes, sir, I am. Pleased to meet you. I'm Diane Boyd. And he says, so you're going to take care of my problem wolf? I said, I am. And I walk around the back of my truck and I pull out this cardboard trap and the corrugated cardboard stinky goo. And I walk over and I say, so this trap and this bait,

I guarantee we will catch your particular subspecies of wolf that's causing you your problem. And I reach out with it like this. And he stands there and he looks at me like for me, Diani, five feet away. And he just kind of stands there. And then finally he breaks into his granny and comes over and he puts his hand on my shoulder and says, come on in. The wife just took a pie out of the oven and i sat there and had blueberry pie with him and tea and coffee and we chatted quite a bit and the next week in his column he put a photograph of my trap and he said the lady trapper come paid me a visit and my problems taken care of and you know what he

actually said some nice things about me in his column with the rest of the summer when I'd catch a wolf, he'd put it in the column. And, and so it's like, that's how I work in the community. You can't fight it. Just put your head down, think hard and move forward and try and do something a little creative.

Just, you asked, that's just one of the stories, but yeah. Well, that's good career advice for everybody. Just be a pain in the stories but yeah well that's good career advice for everybody just be a pain in the neck um when that was happening and the wolves were coming down let's talk about that scenario that you said you know we might have eventually landed where we landed yeah there's no way it would have been the same timeline right probably not but you know once so once we had our first wolf in 79, by 1995, without any reintroductions, just simply not trapping, poisoning and shooting

them, by 1995, just before they put the wolves into Yellowstone and central Idaho, we had 70, 75 wolves in eight packs with nobody reintroducing them. Documented. Where were those? Northwest Montana. Marion, Nine Mile,

Kalispell, all through Northwestern and Western Montana. The Marion wolves became famous because they started killing livestock in the, it was about late, late 80s. So they were there. And because nobody forced them out, they were just kind of existing in those

wolves that caused problems. you know, shoot shovel shut up and the other ones kind of left to be. So in the nineties, there were wolves dispersing. Can you tell me those numbers again? So the number of wolves? Yeah. Pre, pre reintroduction. So by 1995, there were about 70 to 75 wolves

in Montana in eight packs. And if you go back to the old U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service website, you can find the data there. It's published. I'm not making this up. I mean, I don't, I only talk truth. And my book is stories of truth.

So they were there. They had collars on. Sometimes this one pack was giving a guy, a livestock producer, problems. But mostly they were just making a living. There were wolves on the Rocky Mountain front. They were moving down. And they were as far a living. There were wolves on the Rocky Mountain front. They were moving down and they were as far as Missoula, the nine mile wolves. I'm sure you heard of them.

So the wolves, before they were introduced into Yellowstone, there were two wolves that had gotten there already pre-1995. One was shot just south of Fox Creek. Two had gotten to Yellowstone. Yeah. And one was filmed. So that was like 1991, 92. So it's just like Colorado. Those wolves came from Wyoming and Colorado now, and they found their way down and they

began reproducing. And then the reintroduction happened on top of it, which is what happened with Wyoming, with Yellowstone and Central Idaho. So the wolves were starting to get down and the reintroduction happened on top of it, which is what happened with Wyoming, with Yellowstone and Central Idaho. So the wolves were starting to get down and their introduction happened on top of them. But the two that were seen didn't survive long enough to reproduce. They weren't viable. They didn't have packs. They were just sort of passing through, just like we saw in Montana a lot prior to Kishinina

and the successful breeding. This is going to sound like a dumb question because i know it's probably not too challenging but uh when they kill cows what when they kill cows how do they generally approach it do you mean domestic cattle not cow elk no sorry yeah when they kill cattle it it depends on how many wolves are depends on the experience of the wolves but and every kill is different i just remember in min, I had to go skin a lot of really disgusting maggoty carcasses of cows and heifers. If it's a calf, they basically eat it all. So there's not much to find. You might find an ear tag in a pile of scat or something.

It's hard to prove they were there. But the big cow, you find bites. They're pretty effective predators. It, again, the, the hind, the belly, the neck sometimes, they're not, they're not efficient killers like lions. I mean, lions live alone because they can kill an elk alone. A wolf pack needs other members because they

don't have fit sabers on four paws to help them hold and contain their prey. They just have teeth. Do they key in on calving season for cattle? I have always wondered why they don't more. I mean, they can, yes. Because it seemed like those wolves that were reintroduced in Colorado, just this past calving season, that's when they really started to get in some trouble.

Yes. And those wolves, before they were transplanted, they were livestock killers. So yeah, if there's calves around and cattle, wolves, you will know there are wolves there if you're going to have problems, you have them. But not every wolf is a livestock killer. And sometimes they might kill a calf or two and never have a problem sometimes they might come in and kill repeatedly until you remove the wolves it really depends on the situation and it kind of depends on how the rancher is managing their livestock herd do they have a herder out there do they have guard dogs are they turned out in

a national forest in a grazing lease in may and then they're not picked up till october nobody looks at them i mean you know it really depends on the management of the stock a lot uh you just said something that uh i can't remember what the hell you're talking about um but it caught my attention oh i know can one i guess what i was kind of getting at can one do it yes effectively depends on if you're talking or can they kill one adult cow effectively can one wolf kill one adult cow do you ever see that it'd be tough the cow would probably have to have something wrong with it okay but it's usually more than one and then you just get a hold of it and hang on to it basically yeah no yeah when did you say that colorado put in known livestock killers yeah yeah explain what what that means and if that's like you're nodding your head

is that is that fixed behavior do you feel like it's hard to unlearn that what i would say is if i wanted to reintroduce wolves with minimal problems, I would seek wolves that have only had wild meat. It's like the wolves that were introduced to Yellowstone in central Idaho were taken from Canada where they had never been exposed to livestock, but they had never been exposed to buffalo either. I mean, they're pretty good at killing bison now. They had to learn it because they're very formidable. I wouldn't want to try and kill a bison with my teeth. But, um, so I think, I don't know all the background of why they chose those wolves. They probably had a shortage of supplies and a shortage of time to get the job done. And they had this opportunity to get those

wolves. They weren't all livestock killers, but the ones that are causing the problem now had history before they were put there. What is the, I'm a little, I haven't followed it as closely. What is going on with the ones they put in Colorado? Like, how has that gone? How many and what are they doing? Oh boy. To be exact numbers, I couldn't tell you.

I'm not that involved, but there's a male. I forgot his number. They put him in and he's paired with a female. They had at least one pup and I saw in my newsfeeds this morning, they've seen three now, three pups in this particular pack. But they had only documented one up until yesterday or whatever. And they were put in at the end of the year, like December or so, and they started killing livestock in April, I believe it was, when the pups were born.

And they're now debating how are they going to manage the situation. No matter what CPW does, they aren't going to have the happy winning outcome because if they remove all the wolves and kill them all, they're going to have the wolf protectionists screaming at them. If they don't do anything, they're going to

have the livestock growers screaming at them. If they take, I actually had this conversation with a journalist yesterday. He says, well, how about if we just take one, say we know the male has been a livestock killer. Can the female survive long and protect and feed those pups without help? And I said, well, I can give you two examples. In 1982, when Kishanina had her first litter of pups in the flathead in 50 years, her mate was killed in June and those pups were seven, eight weeks old. And she- Killed how?

He was killed accidentally by the grizzly bear trap people. He was caught in a grizzly bear snare and he subsequently died. Okay. Accidental death and still just as dead though. So the female had, yeah. Doesn't do him much good. Doesn't do him much, kind of like got your dog, right? Anyway, the female had seven pups to deal with. And you raise kids and you raise dogs, you know how much food they start to consume as they become teenagers? Oh my God, talk about a full-time job trying to feed seven growing pups that are 50, 60 pounds by fall.

And I thought they're not going to never make it. They all made it through winter. We were seeing tracks of eight wolves in the snow. So there's one example. The other example was, so that was re keeping the female remaining. And then in the nine mile, in the early recolonization, those wolves got to the nine mile Montana on their own near Missoula. The male and female had pups. The mother was poached over Memorial Day, which is pretty early. So those little guys were maybe four, maybe five weeks old. They were probably still drinking milk from mom, but they already had getting regurgitated food, certainly.

So it only had the male to raise a whole litter of pups. And Mikey Mannes, who was studying him at that time and Bart O'Gara University, do you know Bloody Bart, Bart O'Gara? He's passed now, but he was the most voracious hunter I know. We loved him. He's a university faculty.

We call him Bloody Bart. I could tell you stories. He, whatever he shot, he would kill. So he had their permission to go shoot deer or pick up roadkill to supplementally feed those pups because they were fully endangered. This would be like 1988 or so. Yeah.

To do anything. Fish and Wildlife Service was mandated under the USA to do what they could to keep them alive as an endangered species. So they got these permits to go do that. That male raised those pups without a female and they all survived. So yes, wolves are incredibly resilient. So then this journalist asked me yesterday, so should they take the male or the female? I'm like, oh my God, you're asking me a Sophie's Choice question. I can't tell you. And, you know, we talked about it at length. And starting with two wolves, adults, that have both been killing livestock,

and then you're going to take one wolf away to try and hopefully minimize it, you might be causing more of a problem because the remaining parent now has the burden solely of feeding hungry pups. And maybe it's going to kill more livestock because of that. And those pups are going to learn to do it too. Yeah. This is the problem. So it's, I just think maybe thinking ahead a little bit ahead of time may have headed this problem off. But it's amazing to me that all those wolves they put out, they only had one reproducing pack.

You'd think they would have had more. But this is a problem. How many did they put down? Ten total, I think. And are all ten still alive? One of them got killed by a mountain lion, which is kind of ironic. It's usually the other way around.

Yeah, yeah. But I'm not, there may have been another one that died somehow. A mountain lion got one. I think I knew that. Maybe I forgot it. But I think most of there may have been another one that died somehow. A mountain lion got one. I think I knew that. Maybe I forgot it. But I think most of them are still there. And they formed one reproducing pack. Yeah.

It's surprising to me because they did it before breeding season. And then they'll be reintroducing more wolves. And of course you heard Washington state is now refusing to give them more wolves. It's becoming this huge political. But they got, I thought they got them from the Nez Perce, didn't they? They got them from Oregon. Oregon.

And one of the. But not the state. It might've been the Nez Perce that originally said, yes, we'll contribute to, but that just got, they just said, we're not doing it. Right. Oh, helmet. This was just in the last week.

So how did they get the ones they had? From Oregon. I think from the state. From the state. Oh. Hmm. But I wasn't the new ones new ones weren't they going to get the next batch from washington wasn't it it was i think it was could have been oregon it was a tribe

i'm not sure where but that whoever it was just said no we're out we're not doing what what is the argument to not let them have them politics i'm sure what's the time explain the politics don't know you know it's politics but you don't know what office she doesn't study politics so i'm just saying every decision made about wolves is based on politics it's not based on biology so why yeah but of course yeah because biology is largely politics when people say like I don't want to be political or so political everything's political everything is political there's nothing that's not political right right I mean every decision is political I know creating national force was intensely political yeah like what's not political I mean most actions are taken by elected representatives in this country

or appointed appointed by elected i'm saying everything is yeah yeah i know we don't have to go there no i mean but it's like i don't know like earlier i had a headache and i took two ibuprofen that are like 250 milligram ibuprofen the fact that you can go buy 250 gram milligram ibuprofen is i don't know the history on it that's probably political oh no doubt so i would guess because there's i would guess that because the colorado reintroduction has had a lot of problems the the native americans say that i'm sorry and the native americans are probably saying you know we just don't want to deal with it so i wrote a i was telling you honest i wrote a uh was asked to write a document for the

national wildlife federation um about wolves returning to colorado and it's basically called lessons learned from everywhere else for that colorado can use as a base as a template for reintroductions okay um it's 60 pages long. Really? It's on the Colorado Parks and Wildlife website. Is that an addendum in your book? No. No, it's not. You didn't staple it into the end of your book?

No. Maybe you can read the audio version of that when that comes out. Oh, my God. Anyway, it laid out all of the problems that challenges people have had elsewhere where their wolves are coming back on their own or reintroduced, how

agencies, federal and state, dealt with them, how local communities dealt with them, how conservation groups and ADC or Animal

Dance, no longer that now it's Wildlife Services work together sometimes or not. Just all these things. There's a template.

There's nothing that needs to be reinvented about wolves being on the landscape it's it's old hat so this is pretty interesting the colorado thing yeah um the colt they were going to get them from the colville nation 15 of them that's washington washington the colville nation said no because colorado parks and wildlife wouldn't agree to give the southern u tribe like management over wolves on the southern u tribes oh political so out of tribal solidarity yep that that's an interesting point thank you for clear that clarification i knew it had something to do with people and i knew it wasn't yeah i bet it had something to do with people and i knew it wasn't yeah i bet it had something to do with

people not always um i want to get back into some of this but i want to ask you another question that that corinne highlighted it's a good one uh you're familiar with the like with grizzly bears you're familiar with the distinct population segments okay that there's so they it's kind of like looking at part of this whole idea is with grizzly bears is being like okay when we're talking about grizzly bears being on the landscape where could they actually be like what areas could actually support bears right you mean okay ecologically yeah yeah i mean there's a handful of other things but i was going to bring up that there's a there's a distinct population segment that doesn't have bears but it could where that's the the the bitter the bitter right well they've taken they're getting

there yeah they're getting there yep and there was at a time there was talk of putting them there yes okay so if you were gonna maybe i set that up the wrong way let me just let me skip all that crap about the dps okay okay if you were gonna make a map if you think there's a chance of having viable wolf populations meaning there's enough habitat enough wild food low enough chance of intense friction right how would you start to color that map well the last qualifier you just put on is the deciding factor for everything i mean there's oh god yeah i mean so historically wolves had the widest distribution of any mammal in the world, except for humans.

I mean, they live from the Arctic to the desert. They live in every biome, every habitat. They can eat anything. They're habitat generalists. They're food generalists. They're like a, you know, 100-pound coyote that way. So, they can live anywhere. I mean, they did.

I mean, they covered the entire United States. So, where could they live? They would live anywhere where I mean, they did. I mean, they covered the entire United States. So where could they live? They would live anywhere where us humans will tolerate them. And they're trying to get back. I mean, wolves are showing up in Illinois and Missouri and, you know, they just get shot. And, but they would be there. I mean, they would, they would find a way to, to live on Central Park if we didn't kill them. They'd be eating poodles and whatever out there, but there's not, who knows.

So squirrels. RFK Jr. would have to lay a dead one of those. Yeah. On the park trail. So that's a hard question because they would live everywhere. So we don't have to color in a map cause they just color in everything. Okay.

I mean, I. Until you get to that last qualifier. Yeah. Then, then you get to that last qualifier. Yeah. Then, then you have to constrict it. So the wolves have shown us now in Montana. Anyway, let's pick Montana because we're all sitting here and thinking about Montana. So wolves basically live in the Western one

third or one quarter. And they've been doing this for decades now because that's where we tolerate them. But they keep showing up at Miles City and ecolacca and they get shot and they don't make it that's not an ecological issue at all they would live there they did so I don't know well they did under different circumstances okay let me re-qualify okay let me re-qualify because it's going to throw out. Did you say Cleveland earlier? Did I make that up?

I didn't hear Cleveland. You made that up. You said something. Missouri, she said. Illinois. Let me redo my qualification. And not live on that somehow we make this deal. Humans can't kill them, but they can't eat any human generated food sources.

Oh. Now, hit me. There would be nowhere. No, I'm serious because the only pack that I'm aware of in Montana that has never come into contact with livestock is the one up in northwest corner glacier national park and there is livestock in a southern portion of the north fork or there was ladenburg sold his stuff but um other than that they can always come into contact with people who are raising sled dogs people of llama farms people of livestock chickens, just because we've taken over all of the wildlife habitat.

Could they make a go of it without causing too much trouble in like Maine, New Hampshire, like the upper. Yeah. I'm not going to give up on this map idea. I can see that. It seems like Maine, there's certainly plenty of whitetails there, right? They'd have to get there. Yeah.

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. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps

that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the 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 handpicked by the OnX Hunt team.

Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com. onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Okay, stop being so obstructionist. Somebody

just get out the map. You understand what I'm trying to ask. No, I don't actually. If Steve cut a semi full of wolves loose in Maine. Yeah. Let me say this. Okay.

I'm not trying to avoid the question. You're going to color in the country of where however you want to put it, man. Where could you visualize where do you think when the dust is settled in 100 years, and don't hit me with like, well, is there a zombie apocalypse? In 100 years, where are wolves?

If they lived where there weren't human conflicts. No, no, no. Forget all those. Okay. New direction. Yeah. meaning new direction yeah meaning it appears that it wound up being that northwest montana was a suitable place for wolves yeah it is right it wound up being that the northern great lakes yeah the northern third of minnesota the northern third of wisconsin the northern third of michigan

wound up being like a pretty good, like from the wolves perspective, a good place for wolves. What are the chunks that are probably like that, that don't yet, but could. It's, it's hard to answer because I'm not avoiding. I'm just saying they go everywhere and they get shot. They go to Eastern Montana. So I would call her in Eastern Montana. They don't make it a hundred years from now.

They're not going to make it either. So I, I met him, I'm at a loss kind of, I'm not trying to avoid it. I'm at a loss how to answer it. They would live in Illinois. They would live in Missouri because there's plenty of places where there's enough habitat for them. They just for habitat, all they need is someplace where they find large hoofed ungulates.

They don't get shot by people and they have a secure place to raise pups. There's plenty of places throughout the country like that. Do you think we've reached, like we've filled in the areas that people are going to, well, that people are going to tolerate? Like they're where they are now and they're

probably not going to be in a lot of new places. I disagree. No, I'm asking like, like, will there like, are they where they are now? And that's probably all the space they're going to get. I think there will be more wolves expanding across Montana. Certainly. I mean, they showing up in the snowys and they're showing up all over and if they can get a foothold and have a pack, then at some point, if you're hunting and

trapping them, there'll always be a few remaining. But the stronghold is the western portion because it's mountainous, because they're not seen, because there's less road access, because there's the bob, the glacier park, the scapegoat wilderness. Those are all those things that these wolves need to live. I don't see that. There's a lot of places that are very wild across the eastern Montana. I bird hunt, antelope hunt. But there's always a conflict there. There just always is with livestock, with hunters, with whatever goes on. And I'd love to hear what you think. So in terms of mapping, right now wolves are all the way through Minnesota. You got wolves around the Twin Cities now. You don't know, maybe you don't know that, but they're filling into Southern Wisconsin.

They are moving South. It's a really slow wave. Nobody's reintroducing them. I got to point that out. It's on their own and they have been making it to the other states, but get killed. So what I'm, cause I don't kind of totally maybe get your question or maybe I'm less optimistic

than you. Where do you see them going where they aren't? Oh, Utah would be a place. Utah, Nevada. Well, it's funny you say that. It's funny you say Utah because I was at an event. I was at an event this winter

and Utah's governor spoke at the event. And Utah's governor made a pledge to the audience that there would be no wolves in Utah. And I remember thinking, I don't know that that's your call. Yeah. What, what he,

uh, mean by that? He means, he was saying, he was saying, um, in addressing the audience, which was an audience of,

of, um, uh, people that do a lot of work for big game habitat improvement right bighorn sheep mule deer whatever putting it putting ungulates on the ground putting game animals on the ground he made a pledge that there will be no wolves in utah and i remember thinking like don't worry hunters yeah but i remember thinking well the way it sits now with federal protection that's not really your call i don't know, hunters. Yeah, but I remember thinking, well, the way it sits now with federal protection, that's not really your call. I don't know what, I appreciate the sentiment, but I don't know what tools you have at your disposal.

So I get that what you're saying, but that agrees with what I say. Because wolves have made it to Utah. And we had a wolf go from Yellowstone, go all the way to the Grand Canyon and started on its way back, a collared wolf from Wyoming, from Yellowstone. And they got shot on the way home. They get shot. I don't know how to better tell you, but they just get killed. So maybe when he said that, he was just saying, if they come, it wasn't that he's going to

do something. It's just that if they come, someone's going to shoot them. That's exactly why I was asking that. That's what he's threatening. People will kill them. I think what you're saying too, though, is that, I mean, there are areas of the country someone's going to shoot it but i think that's what he's right yeah people will kill them i think what you're saying too though is that i mean there are areas of the country that have other than northwest montana that have sufficient habitat security like you in a hundred years

you know i would imagine all the way down the spine of the Rockies, right? Mm-hmm. Over maybe from the Cascades down, I don't know, do they go down the Sierras? They have. Well, that's my question. It seems like California would be maybe a little more tolerant. Well, they have a bunch now. They already are.

I mean, there's wolves there. They have breeding. Like six packs or something. And if I had asked you my question 20 years ago that you're trying to like dodge and obfuscate. I'm not dodging. If I had asked that question 20 years ago, would you have said Lake Tahoe? I think wolves have a good chance of being in Utah, except people kill them. So I don't know if that's a yes or no.

That's a yes. Okay. And I'm really trying to. You might not know it, but it's a yes. I'm not squirming. I'm really trying to. You might not know it, but it's a yes. I'm not squirming. I'm not uncomfortable. I'm just saying I have lived with wolf killing for so long and where they're going to be tolerated is where they're at.

And wolves getting in California is great, but they're going to start killing people's pets. Right. And they're going to be not tolerated as well. But what about like the wolves? If the Colorado plan goes as they yeah some people would like it to go they're they're gonna push into new mexico and arizona yeah yeah so my question is what happens to those mexican wolves then so i love this question and heifer finger

and i will disagree on this so okay can you guys can one of you make the question really clear for people because i think a lot of people aren't gonna understand what i think she's probably the better yeah do you mind like why we're even asking gonna understand what they're getting at. I think she's probably the better. Yeah. Do you mind like why we're even asking that? Like what we're talking about? So as I explained about the Mexican wolves, they're, they are a unique subspecies.

It's the only population really that's got its separate subspecies classification for protection other than the red wolves, which are a different animal. So they come from a very unique gene pool of seven founding members. They're trying to protect that gene pool. So if you read, I mean, every time a Mexican wolf starts to go north, it disperses like a wolf is going to do.

They live by their feet and they go north. They go and catch them and bring them back. They don't allow them. They do? Oh, yeah. They don't allow them to travel out of the recovery area. What? You can Google it if you want, but they don't allow it.

I think Halfle Finger mentioned that too. If one of the Mexican wolves strays out of Mexican wolf area, they fetch it and bring it home? Yes. It's a defined zone. And so, and so because number one, that was the promise early on with the plan. But they've expanded the Mexican wolf recovery area slightly. But they don't want those wolves to mix with other gene pools. And those Colorado wolves will eventually make it down to four corners and come down. And they will approach and get in, I would assume, get to the Mexican wolf population.

And then what are people going to do? They're going to start killing one wolf species, subspecies to protect the other one. I think, I mean, you've had some really good genetic people on your programs. I've so enjoyed their discussions. If you were trying to preserve a rare species with a unique genetic pool that was highly inbred, like the Iowa ones were,

and then they all went to extinction because they were too inbred, wouldn't you want to have some gene flow from the most similar population adjoining and bring in new genes because historically there was that back and forth right but it was it but even though there was all connected all the way to mexico to central mexico they were still had unique genetic markers because they have a different habitat than the rest of the wolves. It's a different habitat. So they've been isolated on their own way. But that's my humble opinion.

I'm a lumper, not a splitter. And I think it would behoove Mexican wolves to have some new gene flow. And I am not in maybe a majority opinion, but I think people who have genetics background would agree. It's going to happen. They won't be able to stop it. Well, sounds like they will maybe try. They will try. They're already trying.

They do move all these wolves back every time they go out of the recoveries. How are they getting them? They catch them. Every one of them is collared just about. God, no idea. And also when a wolf is in an area, you'd usually see them.

Reminds me when you have like a little baby and like you put the baby in the middle of a room and the while it crawls away and you go get it and set it back. Have they thought about it? Get an invisible fence, right? I mean, that's how we deal with dogs wandering. I don't think that would work for them, but

anyway, and when wolves go to an area, they leave scat, they kill things. People see them. Everybody's got trail cameras, everybody in the brothers out looking for the biggest elk or things. People see them. Everybody's got trail cameras. Everybody in the brothers out looking for the biggest elk or whatever. You see them, you see them, right? You know, they're there.

They're, they're not small and sneaky like lions. They're just not. They, instead of sneaking around and hiding in rock crevices, they come into town and Harleys. I mean, wolves are big, noisy animals. That's a t-shirt. That's a t-shirt. That's a t-shirt. I want to talk about,

just to give you a little taste of what's common. I want to talk about mountain lions. Difference between mountain lions and wolves. I want to talk about why wolves don't kill people. That's a good one. But first I want to talk a little bit more about Colorado. Crystal ball it for me. and you're totally excused like like this is just crystal ball land this is if you had to like make

a guess yeah what is um give me a time frame uh 20 what's going on in 20 years in colorado just take a wild stab and i'm gonna announce diane boyd is taking a wild stab. I'm going to announce, Diane Boyd is taking a wild stab. This is not an academic exercise. She's taking a wild stab. 20 years. What's the landscape in Colorado? What's going on? People will still be fighting

whether wolves should be or should not be there. And despite our human intentions, they will continue to expand their populations and fill up appropriate habitat in Colorado. And they will have to kill some for killing livestock. And the other ones that aren't killing livestock will continue to find habitat and reproduce.

And I think there'll be more wolves. So it'll be Montana 20 years after 1996. What about hunting season? You see that happening eventually? Hunting for wolves? Yeah. I think that when you get enough wolves to create social tolerance, hunting season is a good idea.

It's probably not such a good idea for individual wolves, but in terms of creating tolerance on the landscape. And I think you have to give the tools to livestock producers that they can take care of problems themselves. I mean, that's what they did in Montana early on.

I just say, follow the model that worked in Montana. It's worked pretty worked pretty well i mean we went from one wolf to you know a thousand wolves pretty quickly and then in your crystal ball can you extend that crystal ball scenario to the the mexican gray wolf they're all making love and they're just mixed in together should have heffelfinger here too. Well, yeah, but this isn't what you want to happen. No, it's what I foresee. Yeah, this is just your guesswork.

People will still be fighting over Mexican wolves. And Mexican wolves may hit. I'm just trying to think. They may hit a critical mass where they're not all colored, and then some of them will escape beyond the the geo-fencing of their their allowed recovery zone and begin going elsewhere but if they continue to heavily heavily handle and manage the wolves and collar everyone that that well they're not all collared but manage its significant portion population it's going to be really hard for those wolves to

sneak through but that's going to be and i for those wolves to sneak through, but that's going to be, and I just think the wolves from the North will come down and start integrating. I'm hoping they will. And I think Mike Phillips would disagree with that too, but the other people I know, biologists, we talk about this. It's like, yeah, let them, let them blend.

Let's see what happens. It's sort of like this, this animal of the Northeast, the coy wolf dog thing. Nobody really knows what it is, but that animal has made a really successful living. It's found a niche that was partially formed by what we tolerate and how we modified the landscape. So this animal that lives there now is doing really well.

Well, Mexican wolf, gray wolf mix, probably be the same way. At least they'll have more genetic variation. They probably won't go extinct due to inbreeding. Who knows? But you asked my crystal ball. I think there will be more wolves. I think they will fill in more places.

And there will always be the battles to have them on the landscape. Always. I feel like, you know how there's sports betting? I feel like there should be a way that you could a way that we could run like a bookie thing and have Colorado Wolf betting. I mean, you can bet on anything, though. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if you could get odds on Colorado's wolf population in 10 years.

Yeah, people could make bets and you could win money and lose money. I think too, the more, the more radical people get, I think it will cause more people to feel sort of move towards the middle. Like this fellow over in, what was it? Daniel Wyoming who ran over the wolf with the snowmobile this winter. You must've read.

Oh yeah. And he crippled it so it couldn't get away. And then he ties it up and brings it into a bar. All of this is illegal, which is a minor thing, but it's really immoral. And he brings it into a bar and people are laughing with it and getting their pictures taken in and finally hauls it out back and shoots it. Well, that's just one animal, but it had huge ripples throughout the country. And that's affecting wolf policy because of one guy's action.

And I think those people that maybe didn't really care about wolves or maybe dislike them somewhat moderately see that is, that is not fair chase. That is not acceptable to me as a hunter or a human being. And we have to put brakes on that. I kind of see the more radical people get, I'm hoping that people come to the middle more that's my hope uh why don't wolves kill people because they do in romania i've wondered that

for a long time well sometimes come on so so it's not more common there no but there's all those like crazy old stories about that's not not, none of that's true. So in my book, I could read you a little paragraph about statistics, but. Please. Do you want me to find it? I'll have to look for it for a moment. Let me, when you're talking, I'll look for it. But wolves have occasionally killed people. In modern times documented, Kenton Carnegie was killed up in Northern Saskatchewan in the eighties, early nineties by, he was at a

remote camp and these wolves were coming into the dump. So think, think dump bear. Yeah. Not afraid of people. And he went out one evening alone with his camera and he was found the next morning, I believe.

And he had been killed and partially consumed and it appeared to be wolves. There was wolves and bears both feeding on him, but it looked like the wounds were, were wolf probably. So that's one guy. And then there was a woman jogger in Alaska who was jogging and she was attacked and killed.

I don't think she was consumed. I don't remember on that, but it was definitely predation. They killed her. And there's, there's been a few, I guess, attacks, encounters of wolves that have been habituated, especially like on, um, some of the, the islands off of British Columbia and Washington where people kayak and they're feeding wolves out on the beaches and the wolves get friendly and they come in and bite somebody in their sleeping bag because they don't. Stuff like that. Algonquin Park, habituated wolves. That's becomes a problem.

So those are the cases that I know of. And then Mark McNair wrote a really long document published. You could Google his name, Mark McNair, of all the wolf encounters that he could find that were verifiable. Olden days, a lot of wolves were rabid. I mean, a lot, I shouldn't say that. A lot of the encounters with wolves that had bitten were rabid. I mean, a lot, I shouldn't say that. A lot of the encounters with wolves that had bitten were rabid.

Okay, that happens with every species, bats, foxes, it doesn't matter. But if you look at what other predators attack humans, people are killed every year by black bears, grizzly bears, some deer, some elk, mountain lions, coyotes. That's not true with wolves and so you say why don't why don't people kill wolves more often oh my god wolves kill people i'm sorry i'm

sorry right that's what i'm and there i think it's an interesting question because they could oh absolutely i look at any of us in this room if one of us was out in the woods by ourselves and a pack of eight wolves came along, we'd be toast. Yeah. I could handle three, but eight. Probably not with a bull. Yeah, I mean, domestic dogs kill all kinds of people. Yeah.

It's like. Like they could, right? Yeah. So what, what is your hypothesis as to why not? My thought about that is, well, we've, first of all, when we domesticated dogs, we, we changed the gene pool to have the dogs here, but. He's on my foot right now.

Okay. I'll make sure he doesn't pull any cables. Over the course of time, we have, when we started domesticating livestock about 11,000 years ago, we changed our relationship with wolves. Prior to that, it wasn't much, there was no reason to have conflict.

And a matter of fact, I talk about some archaeologists, some ancient people who studied wolves anciently. Their theory was that humans in primitive times would watch wolves hunt successfully.

Wolves and humans live in the same family structure, group of animals that are related usually. They would watch them hunt and they ended up learning that if they could follow the wolves, they could steal meat from them. So they would watch the wolves and when wolves picked out something, then the wolves, humans,

really humans, could go over there with their addle addles or spears, drive the wolves away, take the meat they wanted and then leave. And then the wolves clean up the scraps. This was their hypothesis. So they actually, it was no way a synergetic or altruistic relationship. It's brute survival, but they sort of collaborated.

And out of that, eventually we learned that we could make dogs, I guess. But I think over time, once we start to domesticate animals, especially livestock, those wolves that were aggressive towards people were weeded out and killed. And I think that gene pool has been so heavily selected against. And I think the behavior is still there. That's the only thing I can think of because how many people

have successfully domesticated lions and made a different animal out of it or bears or coyotes, right? These other things that kill us, people haven't. And we've spent so much time competing with wolves with their livestock and killing them that I just think that aggression towards people is no longer there. And maybe with the crystal ball, maybe 300

yards from now when we haven't been killing wolves, maybe that'll change. I don't know. I don't know. But it is an interesting question. I'm just going to, oh, just wanted to weigh in episode 466, dire wolves and ancient hunting dogs. We touch on some of what you just mentioned with Angela Perry. And what did she say? That. Same thing. Yeah.

We talked about that. Okay. I'm going to have to look that one up. I didn't hear it. Where do they fall, like, maybe this is a weird question, but where do they fall on the intelligence scale compared to like a bear or a mountain lion? Or like, would that play a role in their like understanding of how to interact with humans?

Like, are they smarter than a bear? The bear researchers would say, hell no. Right. But I can tell you, I mean, I've trapped a lot of animals in my life, everything from weasels to grizzlies. And the wolves are the hardest animal to catch. Bears are not hard at all because they don't need to be. They're the top thing and they eat everything.

Wolves have had to learn to sneak around strychnine baits guns and um i because they're a social species they have to communicate well they have to collaborate they're different i mean none of these other predators that we've been talking about are social and live in groups and i believe that gives wolves an a need evolutionarily to be high intelligence they have to work i do they think i mean you can look at your dog which is kind of a a need evolutionarily to be high intelligence. They have to work. They think. I mean, you can look at your dog,

which is kind of a challenged version of a wolf. I mean, they're not that good at anything. And they're incredibly bright. I'm trying to use the right political term here. But they're incredibly brilliant. I mean, if you look at what you can train a melanoma or border collie to do and the wolves are much smarter than that they just are so that's my humble opinion but again the bear researchers would argue that and because you have to i mean we're looking at

a human lens to value intelligence that's really interesting man that's a to say that um a wolf is smarter than your pet dog. Oh, yeah. They don't have to be smart. We feed them. We house them. They don't need to be smart. They don't have to kill an elk every couple days.

Right. And, yeah. It's like a wolf with a restrictor plate or something. 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 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 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 you were always talking about. We're always talking about OnX here on the MeatEater Podcast. Now you, 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. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Our dog is not an exceptional dog. It's totally fine. Everybody loves it, but it's not exceptional in any way. It used to, for whatever reason, would like to chew on rose bushes and chew on raspberry bushes.

It liked the, for whatever reason, the thorniness of it. And I, one time just took my kids out and we put a bunch of cayenne in the dirt around a rose bush and she went up to it and got a nose full of that. Right. It has never, ever gone near. Nope. Same thing with, you know, e-callers and training. Yeah.

No, dogs are smart. So you're like, when you think about getting hard to catch, a dog's like, dude, you know, to make that connection. Right. So you think of something being hard to trap. Like you sting its toe one time and there's just something about that situation. Oh, yeah. like you sting its toe one time and there's just something about that situation yeah i mean the old timers when they read the books the last of the loners and the last renegade wolves and guys trying to catch him the stuff they did to try not smart these wolves sometimes well one of the worst things i read was they would drop in this this this couple of wolves the last ones in the southwest

and they just couldn't catch the male and And so they ended up catching the female and then they took her and used her for bait and the wolf went in the next day. That was it. He was done. Got it. And they spent, yeah, kind of sad. And Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing, he's

trying to catch a Mexican gray wolf, which he then brings back across the border, but he winds up, uh, he can't catch it. And eventually makes a set in his fire pit because the he would see that a wolf would now and then come and sniff around so instead of making sets normal sets he'd like made a set in his fire let this fire burn down cool off and then made a set in there i think that's how he catches it that's how he gets it gets it i don't know um then he brings it back to mexico because he can't bring himself to catches it. That's how he gets it, gets it. I don't know.

Then he brings it back to Mexico because he can't bring himself to kill it. Like he's supposed to catch it and kill it, but can't. He brings it back to Mexico and it quickly dies anyways. That's how Corn McCarthy books go. That's a good lesson. Someone kills it anyways. Well, that's a cheerful story. Well, I mean, when it comes to wolves, there's no good ends for any large carnivore in the wild. You know, I mean, they don't, the end isn't good for them no matter what it is, but they try and live a really full life.

And most importantly, they try and leave their genes behind. If they can do that, they've succeeded. But you're saying they don't move to a golf course and watch a lot of network television. There was, okay, this is not in my book, but we, my last couple of years of working, we had a call from somebody living in a gated community between Whitefish and Kalispell. They called up and said, we've got some wolf pups in our driveway. And it's like, oh, okay, great. Thanks. And I'm thinking it's got to be coyotes. Yeah.

They're living in this gated community in an urban area. So anyway, I said, we took some videos. I said, great. Can you send me the video? So they email me the video. It's like, oh my God, those are wolf bucks. No kidding. In their driveway next to their mailbox.

And they're playing in the culvert that goes under their driveway. It's like, wow. So we go out there and talk to the other neighbors. And several people had seen them. And so this is a gated community with people with huge houses. They're all wealthy. They love wildlife. That's where they live there.

There's huge amounts of green space in the community. There's whitetails everywhere because no hunting is allowed. Talk about nirvana for wolves. They're protected. They got endless food resources. No one's going to hurt them. So we tried to catch the adults.

They're male and female. Had no luck. For what reason did you going to hurt them. So we tried to catch the adults, they're male and female, had no luck. For what reason did you want to catch them? Put a collar on it. Oh, I see. I wanted to know what happened at the end of the summer. Oh, okay. So what happens? What's going to happen when they leave this, you know, 10 square mile gated community? We couldn't catch them. They were so smart about people. We had them on trail cameras. Couldn't get them to step on the magic pan, the size of an Oreo cookie, literally. And then after summer came and the wolves went out and they left and they have to disperse to bigger, happy hunting grounds,

200 square miles on average for a pack. They just went by one, got shot, gone. But they can't live in 10 square miles. They have to move on and it but it was so interesting to me that those wolves set up in that community yeah so i mean they will try to live that wasn't by accident i don't know how smart is a wolf i don't know yeah smarter than the army can you contextualize that a little bit more about how there's no good ending for a wolf because i think we all in this room understand what that means when you say that but i think that a lot of people

out there are when you say that you it almost sounds like you're saying oh they're all going to end up getting shot but that's not what you're saying no i mean a wolf is a is a apex predator top predator it's always hunting to hunt it's always having to compete for food so they get in yellowstone park the largest cause of mortality is wolves killing other wolves protecting their territory they trespass and they get killed outside of the park even when i was doing my work when they were still protected 85 percent of mortality is caused by humans um they don't live very long. Take a guess on how long. So if we put together the data from Yellowstone Park

in Minnesota and Montana, take a guess on the average longevity of a wolf from the time they're detected, because some die in the den young. So by the time they're four or five weeks old and they're seen until they die. Take a guess. Annual mortality?

No, age. Like average age. Average age at which they die for 18 months i'm gonna go six months 4.3 4.3 did you read that no i didn't you're right on the money 4.3 i was gonna go with 4.6 but then i hedged my bets and he thought you were gonna surprise us randall for the 4.31 he gets question. 4.3 years. Okay. Oh, it's years.

Years. So most of them don't live long enough to reproduce. What is the... Oh. Dr. Randall, ding, ding, ding. Oh, man. He's got a doctorate. He does.

In an area out like... So do I. Not including Yellowstone, perhaps, but what is the survival rate of say a litter of six pups? How many of them will reach sexual maturity? Is that a pretty high survival rate? If they make it to the, to like the second year, they do pretty well. The first year, when they go between a year and two years, when they're starting to do dispersal and they're starting to look around. But the pups themselves.

The pups generally make it, generally when the time they're little till their first year, they do really well because they're all protected, they're fed until they get trapped or shot during hunting season. Or if they get,

sometimes humans have introduced parvovirus and distemper into the environment. And if that gets into the litter, mortality is very high. Do they ever do that thing that bears sometimes do where a male will come in and kill? No. They don't do that? Yeah, I was going to ask, other than humans, what's killing wolves?

Deer, elk, avalanches. Wolves? The wolves kill each other. Yeah, I just said that in Yellowstone. So like the first mortality, recorded mortality in Yellowstone Park, I was told was a UPS driver killing a wolf when he ran it over. And I thought, could you imagine being that UPS driver?

I was like, oh my God, I just killed the national icon. Can you imagine it? Think about it. I hope FedEx is hiring. So, yeah. And they get killed by lions. They starve. I did have one wolf die in an avalanche.

What about bears? Do the bears get after them? They can if it's one-on-one. But when you add a whole wolf pack, wolves kill black bears. Wolves will kill a grizzly cub if they can, but usually they can't. But one-on-one, I think, well, wolves are pretty fast.

Do they go way out of their way to kill coyotes? In places they do. Yeah. Yeah, in Yellowstone Park, they've filmed them digging up coyote dens and killing the pups. Pretty gruesome. Hmm. Hmm.

Do they got it in for red fox too? No. So there's this, yeah, in the book. So Trophic Cascades, we're going to get in a little bit. And I just want you to know that before I wrote this book or while I was writing this book, I ended up working with Jim Halfelfinger, Dave Osband. I mean, it was really a hell of a good team. I was asked to be the senior author for the latest,

we did an update on everything known about wolves in North America. It ended up being 40,000 words long and an 800 reference bibliography. It was a scientific work. It was grueling. It was interesting, difficult. This was my antidote for writing that, this book. So because this was more fun and personal. But the science is in that book. It's a major chapter. You can get it online. But I learned a lot.

We had Dean Clough from Canada. We had Joey Yenton who does the Red Wolves. We had Brent Patterson who does the Algonquin wolves. We had Adrian Wynneven who does the Midwestern wolves. People from every social, I mean, every segment of the population. I learned a lot. So in terms of getting back, we all wonder why

don't wolves kill people more often. But, um, what was the question? I'm sorry. I'm rambling. Foxes. Foxes. Yeah. So trophic cascades. So they document Yellowstone like, Ooh, what was the question? I'm sorry. I'm rambling. Foxes. Foxes. Yeah. So trophic cascades.

So they document Yellowstone like, Ooh, this is big earth shaking information that coyotes had kind of taken over the Canaan niche in Yellowstone and kept the foxes population subdued. Then wolves came back and killed lots of coyotes. And then the fox population responded by increasing because wolves don't really care about fox they're not really a competitor and foxes benefit from wolves they

clean up kills we documented that earlier in the north fork years because when i arrived in the north fork there was we never saw fox track anywhere up there the first 15 years we had people out all winter tracking on the snow. We never saw a fox track. I never caught a fox in a trap. And then when the wolves started building up populations, I was collaring and studying coyotes at the same time. And the coyote population, as the wolves went up, the coyotes went down. And then we started seeing fox. I got fox standing on my property now.

Fox are everywhere. Wolves are everywhere. Coyotes, not so much so he's a wolf sees that coyote and he just recognizes it as a competitor you think something to get rid of you know when he sees a fox and he just doesn't get too worked up it's kind of a nuisance it's a difference that's funny because i've i feel like i've heard people make that observation just in different parts of the west like in id specifically, people say the coyotes have really dropped in numbers and we're seeing foxes now

and we never really saw them before. Right, yeah. That's interesting too, because in Michigan, where I grew up, it was always fox. Like, you know, trappers just targeted red fox. Was that a- And that just, when coyotes came in in the early 90s,

when they really exploded in that area? I mean, the fox vanished, man. You need more wolves. What's that? You need more wolves. They're to the north. Sounds familiar thing. Sounds like they're coming.

Give them 20 years. A mutual friend of ours likes to use that as an analogy to humans where he's like, a wolf likes to go around the landscape and go, that ain't good for me and mine getting rid of it. And we're on a landscape going, Oh no, let's bring in more wolves. We might have less elk or less this or that, but let's keep them around. And he's saying like,

why are we the only sort of apex predator that would tolerate or even think of having competition as like a good thing. And instead of saying, let's just get rid of all of them, like a wolf might do so that there's, it's better for it or its species. Yeah. That's a good point. Like, like wolf advocates, wolf lovers love all these things about wolves, but they don't like to see it in people. Mm-mm. You know, if you're like, man, that could be a lot of competition. love all these things about wolves, but they don't like to see it in people. Mm-mm.

You know, if you're like, man, that could be a lot of competition. I don't want that here. Just thinking like a wolf. That's terrible. I have a question for you. So when Corinne called me, she said you have experienced increased enthusiasm, excitement, hatred hatred whatever the wolf issue has been

building still like we see it all the time in montana i've seen this well well we talk about this you talk about every now and then on the podcast and then like people write it i mean feelings are just feelings are running higher about wolves now than they were 20 years ago. Well, no, no, no. I would say that feelings, whatever high running feelings there are, are high running only because of what's going on in Colorado. And that reignited the entire debate. Okay. But I would not say generally. Well, okay. What about Wisconsin?

There's another hot area. Another hot area is in Minnesota, Wisconsin, my home state of Michigan, where I just came from and got a lot of earfuls about this. Oh, yeah. Hunters are really disappointed in the collapse of deer numbers and then the state's not having any authority to come in and do any kind of wolf control. Yes. And there's a little bit of a question of like, how bad does it have to get?

Yeah. And do we really need to like trade our deer hunting for wolves and we can't seek a compromise and more of a balance them being like, I don't want to be apologetic about liking to deer hunt. I want to be able to deer hunt and have success. Yes. So what are, what are this? I mean, Wisconsin had a huge wolf season and they really killed a lot of wolves.

And what is the wolf season in Michigan? Well, there's none because they got put back on the USA. It's seesaw back and forth. Yeah. So now they're back on the list. They've closed it. They've had it. They've closed it.

So we've had this discussion about should wolves be listed or not, right? Yeah. Everywhere where they've come back, all of the Midwestern states, Midwestern states, some of the Western states, they have exceeded way beyond expectations of delisting criteria. Yes. For years on end yes so what is the value of the endangered species act if you don't follow the rules of the criteria and i'm not saying i

can tell you what it is it's not anymore yeah it is my favorite animal protection act it's very valuable to the people who that's to, you know, create lawsuits. They don't want to talk about the numbers. They don't care about the numbers. So I've had lots of people ask me when I do public talks, do you feel wolves should be relisted? And I say.

Relisted? Like in Montana. Do you feel wolves should be relisted? They're delisted in Montana. Yeah, yeah. And I say, then I say, okay, geographically, which area? Montana.

And I say, well, you know, I don't like to see dead bleeding wolves hanging off of tailgates, but they have exceeded recovery standards. There are approximately a quarter million wolves worldwide. There are how many whooping cranes, how many black-footed ferrets. And I can't say biologically that we have any reason to have Montana wolves or Midwestern wolves on the endangered species list where they're connected to Canadian populations that go into tens of thousands. On the other hand, do I like what I see going on with the management of wolves in Montana in particular and the very strong anti-wolf sentiments? No. But does it mean that they should go back on the list? No.

So can people through increased harvest, intensive harvest, knock wolves down from the spout 1,000 now or 900 to 150, which is the trigger point at which the ESA says, ooh, you've now endangered this population and we're going to put them back on the endangered species list. It would be really difficult because right now people can hunt, trap, night shoot, predator call, dig dens. I mean, you can do almost anything with wolves for half the year. We've talked about this before, like in the case of Montana or Wyoming or Idaho, it like, it would never be in the state's best interest to knock them back to that point because then the feds would come back in and...

Exactly. But what I'm saying is people are... The pro-wolf public... I sit in the middle, but I'm obviously passionate about wolves. So the pro-wolf public thinks that by increasing all of these parameters to allow more take, I don't like the word harvest, more kill, that we're going to put them down 150. I think you can't do that without poison.

Because that's the point you were getting to is that even as liberal as it is here for six months out of the year, we're still not able to knock them back that much. Right. We've knock them back that much. Right. We've caught them back some. And I mean, like this guy in Daniels, Montana, or Dianual, Wyoming. That just is disgusting.

I just, you shouldn't do that with an elk, with a bear, with a wolf. It just shouldn't behave like that with a wild animal. But with the liberal seasons we've got, and this year they did increase their harvest. It was up to, I think, 286 for the last license year, which is a little more than the year before. But we've had years where there's been 300. The population isn't changing a lot. But on the other hand, using the method they used to estimate wolf populations through POM, I think... What's that mean?

Patch occupancy model. It's an integrated patch occupancy model occupancy models are designed to estimate occupancy where they are they're not designed to estimate abundance or numbers so they're using a model for not what it's designed to do so i don't know that it's a real good representative. What I would say is there's, I'm sorry. No, go ahead. There's other factors to look at, like go to the Livestock Loss Board website. It's public information for Montana or any agency or the USDA, you know, wildlife services. And you can look at the number of livestock losses by predator.

They list them by predator or by death cause. And you will see, especially in Montana, the number of livestock depredations in Montana was less in 2023 than it was for the previous years. The number of complaints was less. The number of wolves taken for killing livestock was less. If there are wolves on the landscape in Montana and there's livestock, they will kill them occasionally. So I would say these other indices should be incorporated into the model because I think when you're seeing less and less and less depredation, it's because there's less wolves.

Even though people are killed more this year, and if you look at the percentage statistically, it's probably not real significant, but maybe more people were out hunting last year to try and kill wolves because it was a milder winter. We don't know. We can't measure effort. Did you say it was 286 that were killed or it was 286 was the quota?

No, that was what was killed between shooting and trapping. Okay. Yeah. I think that's the current number. You can look it up. And it just, that was just released. But there's many things to look at. But what I can say is there's adequate wolves,

and I'd say there's adequate prey. And I was looking, did you see that judge who just in Fergus County near Lewistown, several large landowners got together and wanted the state to kill 50,000 elk because the elk are taking over the private large landowners habitat and they don't allow people to come in and shoot them. So they're all these elk and they wanted to have

this power to kill 50,000 elk extra outside of normal hunting season. 50,000? It's gotta be thousands. 50. That was that United Property Owners thing. Right. Back BHA was.

Yeah. And BHA and Montana Sportsman's Alliance and all these hunting groups said, no, you have to create access. And I think if people are really concerned about elk numbers, because if you look at the tables, the statistics, there are more elk in Montana now than there's been in a long time. And in Wyoming, they're issuing unlimited number of elk tags in 2023, I believe,

or 2024, it seems to, from my perspective, you would know more, you guys deal with your hunting committee. It seems to be more of an access issue than it does a predator issue. And if I were a hunting, big part of a hunting conservation promotion group, I would be working on the access issue more and working with our legislators more and our governors more and

letting them know, you know what? These rich out of state guys or whoever own these ranches said they're not letting us on. I would, I would be really concerned about about it what do you guys feel about that i mean i think that's the in some areas that's the biggest conversation around elk numbers is you have uh just you have elk that are learning um over time elk are learning safe zones yep there are big acreages where hunting's not allowed and there are big acreages where people um have an objective of getting a couple big bulls and they don't want something to mess up those big bulls they don't want people to push

them off they kind of like them during hunting season they don't like them when they're doing crop damage and they're reluctant to have Joe blow running around on their place then they kind of want the best of both worlds they want they want individual access and then they want state help and what they don't want is the science and come one come all right they need more wolves just kidding i'm just kidding on that but you see the the problem again is it's always humans but if you look at the the species responsible for killing sheep and cattle it's number one grizzly bears kill almost three times as many livestock animals as both

lions and wolves. And lions generally kill a few more than wolves, but it's hard to confirm totally because. Lions kill more livestock than wolves. The confirmed kills. The hard thing is when a wolf kills a cat, cattle or a calf or whatever, there's six or eight of them feeding on it.

So there's often not enough evidence list to determine which predator responsible. So there's a lot more probables for wolves than there are lions, but confirmed it's more lions than wolves. 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 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 high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land,

hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services

handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the onX club, y'all. Where you got wolves and mountain lions overlapping, what's killing most of the game? Lions. Do you look at the Bitterroot Elk Study?

Yeah. So it's surprising to me. So there's been three studies that Fish, Wildlife, and Parks has done, and this is an agency that's not real pro-wolf, right? Let's just say. So they do these studies. And when I was looking at the research study plan and the results, I was shocked because I thought wolves would be the primary predator.

But you can go on the FWP website, Google the data. They did three studies that were long-term, multi-region studies, one for moose, one for mule deer, and one for elk. And they looked at the populations of this, the game animals, three different areas, over multiple years. And they put a lot of colors out

and they looked at mortality. So in the bittered elk study, you're probably all familiar, lions killed more. And when they increased the harvest on black bears and wolves, lions still, it had no effect. And the more, there were just lions killing everything. They found the same thing in Idaho.

Lions are way out killing wolves. Yes. And when you, so when they did the moose study, what do you think the number one killer of moose was? It won't be what you think. Lions. No. Black bears.

Black bears. No. It was. Ticks. Yes. It was climate and habitat. Exactly. They killed, like it was 56% of the most mortalities

documented related to climate. That would be ticks, mostly probably ticks and things related. Predation was a very small section of the pie. And I was surprised of the predation section. So humans killed almost the same percentage almost as the predators a little less of the predation section it was wolves first i think bear second lions third but wolves was slightly more but yeah it's the environment changing the

habitat changes got to be way lions was lions so so why do people want to keep increasing wolf because the lions were because the lions were always here that was kind of this thing that we talked about with idaho is you had you had i i don't i'm gonna butcher them these are not the right numbers but it's it paints a somewhat accurate portrait it'd be like prior to wolves coming into the idaho panhandle yeah i don't again this is not the exact number, but it's not crazy. It'd be that lions are killing 30 out of a hundred elk calves. Let's say,

well, yeah. Okay. Something like that. But that had always been true. And everything about elk abundance and everything about what, like what statically normal, right?

Just normal life that was going on. And then something comes in and it adds 10 okay so now 40 out of 100 elk calves are dying from predation because there's this new additive thing and socially and otherwise with the population it winds up being that 10 percent tips of balance that we've become used to and so you know people had seen it's always been normal yeah and then now it's not normal no more what happened different this new thing the baseline had always burned yeah right you'd always lost those 30 yep yep and you had an elk population that reflected that level of predation and all

of a sudden now you have an elk population that doesn't reflect that it reflects something new and it's going to be lower so you're saying all the wolf coming back is additive none of its compensatory mortality man i know the terms you're using but i can't answer that so you're not seeing lion populations diminishing down to 20 of the outcasts say instead that that the oh that the wolves are now taking 10 that the lions would take it must have been additive because how else can you explain the map i mean like this is the thing that that people have to accept like like the really pro-wolf people have to accept that this is true and when they're when they're kind of being honest they acknowledge it meaning um on one hand they like think hunters blow everything out of proportion and hunters are

like oh we're gonna lose all of our deer and elk right and they criticize hunters for that at the same time they'll say oh if cwd is from having too dense of populations wolves will help and you're like moment I thought that you're saying that hunters are wrong and that wolves don't lower game numbers now you're saying they do or they'll say um deer and elk are over browsing right wolves will help it's like helmet let's back up because earlier you told me it doesn't matter the way it doesn't matter for deer and out numbers so it does matter for deer and elk numbers right it's like you can't argue and you know this better than me but you can't argue like in in the greater yellowstone ecosystem when wolves came in in the mid 90s

there's no other word for it elk numbers collapsed they collapsed but and the panhandle of idaho elk numbers just like there's no other word for what happened they collapsed but do you know about the winters that the wolves came into Idaho? It was the heaviest winters ever recorded. The wolves came into Yellowstone. Okay. And 20,000 elk on the northern range of Lamar

is not a normal range of numbers of animals that should be there anyway. Okay. I mean, you know all that. I think we talked about this last time, but the winters of 96, 97, that was the second winter they put in. I don't think you can sit there. Maybe you can, but tell me that 30 wolves are going to kill 10,000 elk.

No, it wasn't. I don't think that it was. I think that it was. Over long term. Yeah. It wasn't, it wasn't that year. It wasn't like the ones they brought in. Yeah, yeah.

But I mean, but correct me if I'm wrong. Like, you know it better than me, is it is it not fair is it not fair to say that let's talk about the idaho panhandle i don't know about the idaho panel i can talk about the lamar pretty good though okay wherever the lamar yeah yellowstone um northern herd okay uh bad winters or not yeah i mean come on that had unless I'm wrong, that had the incoming wolves and the expansion of wolf populations had a big change on elk. Because that's also, if we remember, we're all supposed to celebrate them for bringing the beavers back. Right. Which has now been walked back and not true.

So it did something to elk, right? Yeah. And you could pull up the table, but the elk, the elk numbers fell off really fast in that hard winter. And like in Montana, in 96, 97, Carolyn Syme was doing whitetail deer study in Northwest Montana and 40% of the whitetail died, winter die off and had nothing to do with elk. So I'm just saying. Nothing to do with wolves.

With wolves. I'm just saying. Like in the case of the bitter, the way someone described it to me, I can't remember who, was like, the elk there could sustain, like, a certain level of predation and maintain a certain number. But when you put the wolf on top of it, that was, like, just enough to be a tipping point to push them over the edge or push them on a private land where people don't allow them to be hunted that's what's happening in the

bitter but like in the case of like a bad winner you stack wolves on top of that maybe the elk yeah could have you know what i mean like it's just one more thing they've got to yeah deal with so i mean i just i read the scientific literature and I'm a hunter too, but in Yellowstone, there are so many factors. It's really, I would say it's unfair to say one is to blame. It's a huge puzzle with many factors. And since wolves come back,

the elk numbers have definitely decreased. But I think they're actually at a better sustainable level. I mean, do you know in the 60s, they were in there gunning and killing elk because there were too many elk and there were not enough predators. They were shooting them like a thousand a year or whatever. They don't have to do that anymore.

There's about 6,000, 6,500 elk in the northern herd now versus 20,000. And it's kind of stabilized at that. And the wolves have stabilized at about 100. And they've switched to bison. A lot of their food value now is bison, which is mind-boggling me. I'm not saying they aren't limiting.

I'm just saying there's a lot of things going on. And I think the humans really got used. I've been on one of those late gardener hunts and oh my God, what a zoo in the 80s. Because there were too many elk, they had to do that. Well, they don't do it anymore and people are pissed off about it because I want to go down there and get my late to do that. Well, they don't do it anymore and people are pissed off about it because I want to

go down there and get my late gardener hunt. Well, that is not a sustainable population to have to have people go in and kill starving elk in February. I mean, we can look at it any way you want. Can we go back to our crystal ball in Colorado? Oh God, yes. Was it a 20 year? We were talking about 20 years?

Yeah, 20 years. Okay. Let me hit you with this. Yeah. Let's say there are 100 deer and elk in Colorado today. How many deer and elk are there in 20 years? Due to? Because of wolves. Oh, because of wolves.

There's 100 now. Yeah. 100 deer and elk are in Colorado now. And you do your 20 year crystal ball. Where has that population settled out? 80 or 90 maybe. Okay. Might be a hundred.

The other thing is people population. We keep growing in and building subdivisions. That's not part of it. That's not part of it. Well, it is part of it because people build on elk winter range. Look at the Paradise Valley for God's sakes. They've destroyed a lot of elk winter range where the elk used to win. Well, that's where the wolves could do that tipping point there.

Yeah. a lot elk winter range where the elk used to win well that's where the wolves could do that tipping point there yeah i get because like colorado's elk are like in places their numbers are already crashing because of black bear predation on elk cows and then you get like development of winter range and then a huge amount of recreation like hiking and biking and and then you throw wolves on top of that and it's like You could look at it that way. You know, what's going to happen. I just look at what's going on in Montana where we've had wolves for 40 years. In Wyoming, they've had wolves for years. And elk numbers are higher than they've ever been.

So I don't know how, I mean, you could look at whatever end of the scale you want to look at. I'd like to kind of come to the middle. There'll be places where wolves can impact populations. Lions certainly have. Bears have. People have because we're building up into habitat that is absolutely critical for those ungulates in the winter. They don't have it anymore. So where do they go? They become victims to prey animals or they get hit on the roadway. My God, driving down from Livingston to Gardner in the winters, like slaloming through whitetail and elk everywhere. It's awful.

So we could pick whatever data set you want to use, but they've coexisted long before we were ever in the landscape. That's all I'm going to say. And before when Lewis and Clark came to this country down the, with the West. A lot of wolves. A lot of wolves and grizzlies.

And there was never more wildlife than there's ever been. Because we've changed everything and we have an expectation to have it perfect. You're never going to have that. When I encounter rabidly anti-wolf people, right? Yeah. And then they'll tell me how they want to go hunt in Alaska. Yeah. You wouldn't like it, buddy.

Because? Because it's 97% of historic wolf habitat is occupied by wolves. You wouldn't like it buddy because it's because it's 97 of historic wolf habitat is occupied by wolves you wouldn't like it there's no hunting there it's got wolves what's the hunt in alaska does that what you tell them yeah is that true no of course it's not true okay i'm demonstrating absurdity by being absurd thank you steve i'm shocked okay it's my favorite i mean i love it there's my favorite place to go that's good i'm shocked okay that's my favorite i mean i love it that's my favorite place to go that's good i'm just saying i point out to them like don't don't lay it on me that they're incompatible because tell that to right that's everybody dreams of

going hunting alaska it's like well let me tell you something while something moves there a couple years ago we'd watch how many did we see one night uh 15 all black pretty much every evening 15 to come through wow right so i'm just saying it that that perspective and every time like every time we talk about predators and every time we talk about wolves i always feel the need to clarify like my perspective on it yeah i think it is um i think it's immoral to remove native species from native habitat i just think it's like playing god in a way that that however you want to conceive of god it's playing god in a way that god would not agree with right it's like it's immoral i I think, to eliminate species from Earth.

I like seeing the tracks. I like hearing them. I like seeing them. I do not think they should be eradicated. I like to try to achieve a balance of holding a bunch of different people's interests in mind because it's the only way we're going to survive and live as humans. I think that what, as you said, I think that what's been achieved here in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, it's not perfect, but it's working. And I think you would alleviate a ton of the social stress in the upper Great Lakes if they were allowed to pursue a similar path with regulated hunting.

I don't know anybody. When wolves walked into Colorado, of the people I hang out with and associate with and hunt with and talk with all the time, wolves showed up in colorado i don't know anybody who said to me they ought to get down there with helicopters right now and find those wolves and kill them no one said that to me right with the reintroduction i've had people basically say that if they could do that they would do that it was like there's something about it that just burns people of course they It was like, there's something about it that just burns people. Of course. They don't want to be. There's something about it that burns people.

They don't want to forest on them. Because it's like, there's a way that we accept things that we perceive to be natural. And there's a way we accept, people accept things that perceive to be something getting shoved down their throat. Yep. And wolves walking into Colorado, people kind of had a, huh. Just like Montana. They had like a doctorate degree and pushing that shit down their throats down there i couldn't believe it when i read that stat of like grant county is where they released the first group right and i think that was one

of the few counties that overwhelmingly voted against it it was like a high 60s, maybe 70% against it. And that was the county they chose to, here you go. But they couldn't reintroduce him into Boulder and Denver. I mean, that's where the vote was. While we're on Colorado again, I think it'd be great. That's a great point, man. It'd be great to get your thoughts as, you know, just a biologist with so much experience on the ballot box biology that they're proposing

down there and just i guess in general what your thoughts are on ballot box biology and if you think that's going to be a and even you can leave the mountain lion band alone hunting band alone but just in general if that if you think that that works as a way to manage wildlife in our country well obviously you feel strongly one way that's a quite a loaded question but i the way you put it i you'll read in my book well the reason i'm interested is because i feel like you do sit in the middle and you connect with a lot of people that i would like to connect to and i feel that we would probably land somewhere on the in the middle and you connect with a lot of people that I would like to connect to. And I feel that we would probably land somewhere on the, in the, on the same end of the spectrum and, and want the same outcome. So I'd like to hear how you talk to people about this. So I've, I've never been in

favor of wolf introductions anywhere because they come back on their own and there, I feel strongly, we can never now test it because it's too late, but I feel strongly that there's a better social tolerance. Just what you're saying. If they come back on their own, like they have done most places in the world and in the Midwest. But now that they're here, you can't go backwards and wolves got to Oregon, Washington,

Utah, Colorado, California, through dispersal. But they were dispersed animals from a reintroduced population. So they will never be thought of as native either, which I think that's a shame. If we would have let natural recovery happen just like it did in Montana, like it started to do in Colorado,

like it's done in the Midwest, I think we would be further ahead politically. We'd have less wolves by this point in time. But how many years, I mean, they were introduced those wolves to almost 20, 30 years ago now. Would we be at the level we're at now? Probably pretty close because once wolves hit critical mass, they take off without the social baggage.

That's how I feel. You asked. That's how I feel. So I don't know if I answered your question or not. Well, I guess as someone that's worked with wolves, like did you like having in your toolbox, I don't know, did you ever consider yourself a manager of wolves? I'm not, was never up at the top level.'m I've managed I've done some going out and putting out propane cannons and hanging fladry yeah I've done some of that um but you advise people that sort of

set management strategies yes I have and I've come and asked to be a anonymous commentator on various federal plans yes so is it nice to have in your toolbox hunting as a way to manage these animals? I think socially you have to have it. I'm not a wolf hunter. I have no desire to ever have to kill a wolf. I don't. It's just not who I am. Is it a socially acceptable tool?

Does it create social tolerance? That's what people are pushing and believing. And I think with reintroductions that may be true i um it's a tough one like i said i don't want to shoot wolves and i tag lots of dead wolves on tailgates when i was working for fish wildlife parks they come in i tagged lions and otters and martins and wolves and i always ask the people the story how did you get the wolf tell me the story of how you hunted it that made a difference to me when i looked at it dead wolves of dead wolf but when i heard if somebody

said it was amazing i had an elk tag nose out and i heard the wolves howling and this wolf walked out and i thought my god that's a magnificent animal i really want to i really want to have it i want to have a pelt or whatever. I could understand that. And then people come and say, these hate these bastards. We should shoot every one of them in the state. That really was difficult. And when I think of that kind of management, that I feel doesn't do justice to us as hunters or biologists or to the wildlife itself. And I really think a big push we should have is working with the public on educating, I hate that term, on exchanging ideas with people what wolves are and are not.

I think there's not enough information out there for average person who wonders, well, how many elk does a wolf kill a year or are they impacting game? Put out all the information unbiased in a format that people can use. I don't care if it's Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation Bugle or Outdoor Life or whatever, Montana Magazine. But put it in a format that's available for people to read and understand. The Bitterroot Elk Study, they did. They put quite a bit of information out. But that fades away.

The wolves are still killing all the elk. It's like, wait a minute. Did you read the article? But people are biased because of their culture so i but i just think enough information helps helps calm down the flames on both ends i am a believer in that and i i hate the term edgy i hate it when he says we need to educate so and so about that it's like oh god can we you know that means that means i need to tell that person what I think. That's right. That's right.

But to exchange information. Yeah. That's what. Well, the public needs to be educated. No, I don't. I hate that term. And I heard agencies promote that all the time. But anyway.

Can I see your book? My book. I want to hold it up. Okay. Dr. Diane Boyd. I'm Dian Boyd. I'm teasing about Randall. Yeah, you don't have PhD written on there. Of course not, but it's in the back under the bio because I don't want people to see Dr. Dian Boyd and not buy it because of their biases.

They just see it's Dian Boyd. There you go. That's a bias. Definitely. They'd be like, oh, tell me about it. I definitely have a bias again. Tell me about it. Dr. Adler never lives that one down.

They'd be like some Berkeley egghead telling me about wolves. Exactly. Diane K. Boyd. Not a doctor. There you go. She's a doctor back here yeah diane k boyd a woman among wolves my journey through 40 years of wolf recovery i haven't read it uh i will read it i'll give you a personal copy um yeah i will read it i think i should read it and and again uh when we we talked before and i loved it um it's so good to hear your perspective on

these things um i think a lot of what you're saying i think you're gonna what you're saying is going to be is going to be very challenging to people no matter what how they look at wolves you're all you offer a very challenging perspective because it doesn't fall in line it's the middle finger yeah it doesn't fall in line with with the narratives that you would get depending on your culture it's like you're you're offering a really educated nuanced view of things that have come from being in the room for a lot of discussions over the year like i can't say that um you know i can't say that someone would be able to go and determine that everything you've said is exactly true or right but it's a challenging like you're offering

a challenging um pretty gracious highly educated perspective on how to think about predators. And I appreciate you coming with us and doing that. Well, thanks. And I hope people find your book and read it. Thanks. When I wrote it, I was not allowed to put in scientific references or footnotes. I have my list at the end of suggested readings. But I wrote it so that anybody can pick it up, whether you like wolves or don't like wolves or don't care,

regardless of your outdoor experience, anybody can pick that up and get something from it. And I don't preach. I tell through stories and I weave science and let the reader come to their own conclusions about certain aspects of wolves being on the landscape. So it's a different kind of a book, and I lived it.

I lived these wolves. This is my story, and then it morphs into present time in 2023. And if you just like a good adventure story, there's a lot of stories. I could read you a short 30-second paragraph if you want. Hell yeah. Let's close with that. Close with it. The opening introduction paragraph.

Yeah, we're going to close with this. So she's going to get done. You're going to go buy the book. We're just going to end the show. Phil's going to turn the machine off when it's done, but this will give you a taste of how it's written

and I'm looking forward to it. This is probably 35 years ago. My pickup banged and rattled along the potholed inside road in the northwest corner of Glacier National Park. Boxes of wolf trap and jars of bait

slid across the truck bed. I was in a hurry. My mind focused on the wolf caught in a trap somewhere ahead in the lodgepole pine forest. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed motion in my rearview mirror. I looked up to catch the glassy reflection

of vivid yellow eyes framed by a wolf's black face looking over my shoulder from the back seat. How did I get here? Opening paragraph. All right. Thank you, Diane. Thank you thank you you gotta keep your shoes on during this podcast I'm still recording. Good, that's the outro. Thank you. Beat the sun to breakfast and we'll lay it down to bed It's been all day in that windy hell Them cottonwood trees lost their leaves with every breeze Massive footsteps that I took

The only noise was white Like a librarian night Learned more from them trees Before they're bud That fever makes you shiver, that fever makes you sweat Wakes you up in the middle of the night when the birds ain't up just yet Sometimes you're burning up, sometimes you're cold and wet Cause you ain't heard the fever quite yet

Don't let you anger the fever quite yet Drove home through the plains Still combines bullet grains Yes, they're all out in them fields Use your mouth less than your eyes And you might just be surprised That old river bottomed in That fever makes you shiver That fever makes you shiver That fever makes you sweat

Wakes you up in midnight When birds ain't up just yet Sometimes you're burning up Sometimes you're cold and wet Cause you ain't heard a fever quite yet Go on and win Does he anger the fever? Why, yeah Don't think you anger the fever Why, yeah guitar solo

That fever makes you shiver That fever makes you sweat Wakes you up in the middle of the night When burns ain't up just yet Sometimes you're burning up Sometimes you're cold and wet Cause you anger't got a fever, cryin' Oh, and you ain't got a fever

You ain't got a fever You ain't got a fever, cryin' I said, you ain't got a fever Hey, folks. 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,

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