The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Pooping Magic Rocks, How We Ruined Bison, Common Cold Lies

Episode Date: October 9, 2019

Arielle Duhaime-Ross, host of Reset from Vox, joins us this week as a guest host! The weirdest things we learned ranged from dunking chickens in ice baths to magical stones from porcupine bellies. Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Click here to buy tickets for Weirdest Thing Live on October 31st! Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Claire Maldarelli: www.twitter.com/camaldarelli Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Before we get into the show, this is just your quick reminder that our next live performance is going to be at Caviot in New York City on Halloween. Yes, it's going to be super spooky and wonderful and weird Thursday, October 31st. Come, have some drinks, wear costumes, bonus. points if you get some inspiration from a weirdest thing episode, which I definitely have. And my costume's going to be really good. So bring it. Anyway, it would be super weird to do it without you. So we hope you'll buy your tickets soon. You can go to Caviots website or look for the ticket link at popsight.com slash weird. We always sell out. So get those tickets fast.

At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and heck stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we all also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of popular science. I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Claire Maldarelli. And I'm Ariel Dumas. Ariel, welcome. Thank you for having me. Ariel is one of my oldest and dearest friends, but also one of the best science writers in the business. And now host of a podcast of her own. Ariel, do you want to tell us a little bit about reset.

Now that you've made me incredibly shy. Sure, sure, sure. Yes, so I am launching a new podcast on October 15th called Reset that will cover technology with a sort of a sciencey angle to it and it'll be like a tech news podcast three times a week. Awesome. And that's through Vox, right? Yes, it is through Vox with a V, not Fox. Come up before a few times.

Yeah, yeah. Awesome. Well, we are super excited to check. that out at Weirdest Thing, and I bet a lot of our listeners will finally like it as well. So, thanks for coming on the show. Thank you so much for having me. I'm super excited. Yeah, I'm sure you have collected many strange stories in the course of your reporting. So you're a perfect weirdest thing guest. So on the weirdest thing, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, launching exciting new media ventures, et cetera, and decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first.

Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Claire, why don't you start with your teeth? Happy too. So, going outside with wet hair will probably not make you more susceptible. to the common cold. Intriguing. Yes, thank you. Grandmothers everywhere.

Yeah. There's more interesting facts in there. But, you know, I just, that was the best I had for the tease. So bear with me. That's the spirit there. Okay, my tease is about how the history of contract law involves people literally pooping rocks. Okay, that's a better tease than mine. I'm into that.

Ariel, what's your tease? My tease is essentially that the history of bison in the U.S. is a history of racism and land management issues. So many things are we find. It's true. Intriguing. What do we want to start with? Pooping rocks, I mean to come on. It's an obvious win.

Okay, all right. Most people have probably heard the phrase. caveat emptor, which is Latin for let the buyer beware. And basically, this is the legal principle that unless someone includes a warranty or guarantee when they sell you something, the buyers should not assume the product will do everything it's supposed to. This phrase was first used around like the 1500s, and it was as commerce was becoming less personal.

And so what was happening, you know, commerce is starting to become more of an actual, like, industry where people are traveling to sell things and there are large markets that people come to from their small villages. So the person selling you stuff is no longer inherently a neighbor or a family member. And so it starts to get difficult to track down people who have sold you ill gotten or spoiled or just disappointing goods. So there started to be more like official complaints to people of government and of governance being like, I need you to track down this crook. Basically, we were starting to have like the beginning of what would become common law courts. So there were, you know, by the 16th century, there were avenues for suing people.

But it was kind of a new thing for people to be showing up complaining about things they'd purchased. Can you imagine the novelty of suing people for the first time? Oh, my God. And now we're such a litigious society. But yeah, at the time, it was really new territory for courts to be dealing with people coming in being like, I have been swindled. And they were like, go punch you bad. That's what you get for buying something from someone who's not your cousin. That's how we get to 1603.

When this goldsmith named Chandler and some context, goldsmiths at the time, they were very important. It was a very rich trade. And understandably so, they were working with gold and precious gems. It was a very skilled trade. And they had guilds. So they were like, you know, unionized. And they often acted as bankers because they were handling and keeping ownership over a lot more gold and gems than other, like, working class people had caused to do. So he's a very rich and relatively powerful man, at least outside of the nobility.

And he's also very knowledgeable about stones. And then there's this man, Lopis, who's also a lot. occupation is totally unknown today, who bought something called a Bezoor stone from him for 100 pounds, which is equivalent to tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars today. Then he sued him before the king's bench when it held no magical powers. Oh, wow. Okay. So, wait, so what magical powers? What's a Bezor is the question. That was going to be my next question. It is a solid mass of indigestible material that accumulates in your digestive tract, sometimes causing a blockage. Oh, I know what these are. Oh my gosh. I really do. It's sometimes...

Personal experience. Please, Claire, please go on. I was reading once that you can get them if, like, certain medications have, like, this plastic, like, lining around them, and then they don't break down and pass into your small intestine, so they, like, collect in your stomach and people who get endoscopies, then they find the little Beazores, and then they just break them up, and then they pass. Yeah, exactly. That's so fun. Yeah, that is one way you can get them. The most common are from indigestible food fibers like celery or sunflower seed shells, and it's not really a stone in the same way that, like, Iraq you find outside would be.

But it's this buildup of hardened material. It can calcify a little bit, or it can just be like a giant, like, sattie lump of stuff. So, did this stone come from inside a person or was this accumulated elsewhere? We're getting there. Okay. I have so many questions. So they're not pleasant. They can cause a lack of appetite, nausea, vomiting, weight loss.

They can also, of course, lead to ulcers and other kinds of intestinal distress. And they can even cause tissue to start dying. And that's when they kill you. That is usually why. I was reading that they were benign. Wow. I must pass over, glanced over some things. I mean, like any other condition where it's about the buildup of material, like, most are going to stay small and the body is going to, like, break them down or a doctor's going to break them down.

But, like, they can just keep getting bigger and they can be fatal. There's also a third kind of Bezor, which is made of hair or hair-like fibers and causes what's called Rapunzel syndrome. So that dates back in the literature to 1968. There have been approximately 30 cases described since then, or at least as of this 2016 study I was reading. But this one case it was describing, it was a seven-pound mass of hair. Yeah. Well, and it's usually seen in young women because that's the biggest demographic of trichophagia, which is compulsive eating of hair. So that will not always happen by any means, but a small percentage of people who have a compulsion to pull their hair also eat it.

And a small percentage of the people who eat it will be at risk for developing. these masses, which can get very dangerous and have to be removed. God, that just sounds so terrible. Yeah, it really, really does. But the thing is that the word comes from the Arabic word, Adser, or the Persian word, Pudser, which mean antidote. So that tells you a little bit about their origins. Interesting.

I love this teaser. So you could either buy like a whole stone, like for protection, or it could be ground up to take as medicine. and they were used as antidotes to arsenic, which happened to be the poison most commonly used in European courts. So when physicians... Yeah, arsenic was all the rage back then. When physicians and scientists and traders came from Islamic regions

to sell their wares and share their knowledge, people were very excited about basers because they were like, we got a lot of arsenic trouble. Oh, my God. There's this really famous song in French culture called Le Pouding Al Arsenic. That comes from Asterix and Obelix. It's just like this,

and now I just have it stuck in my head, and I just want to sing it to you guys. Le Puding Al Arsenic. Anyways, I'm done. It sounds very cheery. It is very cheerful because it's somebody who's really excited about poisoning somebody else.

Oh, I get. I understand. That makes sense. So you would see them being mounted onto jewelry. A lot of kings owned multiple Beazors, but they were... High fashion. Yeah.

But they were often not from humans. Most of the ones that you see still like circulating around Curiosity Shops are from animals. Asian porcupines were a very common source. Though apparently counterfeits tended to contain highly toxic substances, presumably because they needed to do stuff to make the mass stick together. So, you know, buyer beware indeed. In the 1500s, this surgeon, Peret, tested the healing properties by basically a cook in the king's court had been caught stealing silver and was going to be ham. hanged. And he was like, what about if you take some poison and then we give you this magic gut rock and see if it will save you? And he was like, well, instead of being hanged, it was like

here are option A, option B. Yeah. Okay. And so he decided he would do it. And if it worked, he would be able to walk away. His life spared. Unfortunately, he only lived for seven hours. So they determined that at least it did not cure all poisons. But according to wildlife trafficking experts, And this is as of 2019, a lot of porcupines in Asia, Southeast Asia specifically, are at risk of becoming endangered. And it's primarily driven by a demand in Chinese medicine for their basars. So this continues. My only weird experience backpacking is with a pack of porcupines. Sorry.

I have more questions, just constant questions. What did they do? They apparently, I guess a lot of animals are attracted to salt, but they particularly are. So they ate like the gel pieces on our like hiking poles. And then apparently I sweat a lot. And so like my whole pack was like covered in my sweat. And they just were like gnawing and they had like bite marks all in my pack. I had to get a new pack.

And then it was raining. And so one of them wanted to get out of the rain. And so it crawled into the vestibule between. my rain cover and my tent, and I woke up sleeping next to it. Oh, my gosh. And then I jumped on my friend and she got angry at me. I feel like that's a reasonable response to... Did she forgive you once she found out the reason for this reaction?

No, she tells the story as my friend from the suburbs of New Jersey, and she is from New Mexico, grew up her whole life backpacking, was like, saw a porcupine and jumped on me. Okay, a porcupine sleeping next to you and waiting up and seeing it is not a shame and seeing a porcupine. Yeah. So I think I'm with you on that one, Claire. But yeah, I mean if porcupines are- If porcupines are out here gnawing on Claire's backpack, like, no wonder, they keep having strange little rocks from inside of them. So what happened with the magic rock case?

As you may guess, given its relationship to the phrase caveat emptor and contraband, law, it was determined that it was totally okay that the goldsmith, Chandler, had said this is a real Baylor and it's magic, even though he knew it wasn't a real one and or wasn't magic. And they decided it was okay that he lied because that fit into like a reasonable behavior for a salesman. Basically, they were saying that the buyers should have realized that this could all just be marketing talk and that if there had been no... Because marketing talk existed back then too. Oh, man.

They were like, as long as there was no written guarantee that this was a real Bezoor and that it would have magical healing properties. Even if the salesman said those things, saying them out loud is just hawking your wares. Right. And like you can't ask a salesman to not say the best possible thing. about their product. Is that where the phrase never put anything in writing comes from? Pretty much.

Because basically, you know, since the decision was like, if the buyer is deceived, then that's their fault. So buyer beware, like, think about what you're buying and what they're promising, do your research. But it was pretty unfair given that, like, the person selling it inherently has more information about it than you do. And of course, now, luckily, buyer beware is not the default law of the land. In the U.S., we created the Uniform Commercial Code in 1952, which includes the perfect tender rule,

which basically says that unless you use a phrase like as is to like invoke the idea of caveat MTOR in your sales pitch. So, you know, if you're like, as is, this house that costs $100,000 and looks like it's haunted, like, That language makes people understand that you're saying there are things they should beware of in what they're buying. But if you don't have a phrase like that, it's assumed that buyers can expect a product to conform to descriptions of that product and to reasonable standards for what their expectations of that product can be. So, like, if you buy a jacket and it's described as being rainproof, then you are allowed to assume that it will be rainproof. And, you know, if it's a jacket with a zipper, a reasonable expectation for you to have would be that, like, that zipper will keep working for more than two weeks. The thing is that companies can make it really difficult or annoying for you to exercise your right to, like, get that level of satisfaction out of a product. Right.

Because what does rainproof mean or waterproof mean? Does it mean 100% waterproof or just 90%? Right. Well, and then that's where the, like, reasonable expectation. thing would come in. But the thing is that a company can technically have allowances in place for people who feel misled by a product to get a refund, but they can make it like a not satisfying process so that most people will end up not getting that refund. And yeah, it's a reflection on how, you know, commerce did get more complicated. And that's why we needed something like caveat

emptor to be like, remember that you're not buying this from your brother who lives next door, like think, which at the time was like reasonable, though I do think that this case with the Porcupine Gut Rock was a mistrial. But then commerce got even more complicated. And so courts came to understand that the people selling the things had so much more power and information than the people buying them, that it was no longer reasonable to say like, you know, it's up to the buyer. now we have laws about like how much responsibility a company has for what they're selling. So that's my story about magical rocks and capitalism. I'm so glad it was a bazaar.

Gosh. Wow. Wow. Well, now I know what I'm getting you for Christmas this year. Okay, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be right back with more facts. Okay, we're back. And Claire, why don't you tell us about your fact? Yes, can't wait.

Let me just pull up my notes. All right. So I'll start with my little backstory on this. So I was doing a workout with my running team the other day. In the middle of the workout, it started downpouring. Everybody got soaked. And we ran back. We finished the workout.

And then we ran back to where we had left our bags. And then we were all sort of like changing or whatever. And I needed to rush home. So I just grabbed like my windbreaker that I had and put it on and was about to leave. and my coach was like, oh my god, Claire, you need to change out of your soaking wet clothes. You are going to get sick. And I was like, no, I am not. That is a myth.

I am a science writer. And she was like, okay, whatever, you are the science myth buster. I am not arguing with you right now. Anyway, to be honest, comfort-wise, she was right the entire, like, 45-minute subway ride home. I was quite chilly and freezing, and everyone else had their, like, awesome raincoats on. And I was like, well, I'm stupid. But not for the reasons she thought. Correct.

But I didn't get sick. So that was good. But I also kind of felt bad because I had told her that I was like, this is not true. It's fine. I've researched this or I've written an article about it or whatever. And then as I was falling asleep, I was like, I have not written an article about this. I just assumed that I had. So this is, I guess, a sorry.

to my coach. This is your redemption? My redemption slash sorry. I'll try harder next time. So I did my research. And now he have all these strange and interesting facts about the common cold that I will now share with you. So here we go. Doctors and researchers have been obsessed with what causes the common cold for centuries.

And it all started with Louis Pasteur. He took some chickens. And he noticed that these. chickens happened to be immune to anthrax. Now, why he had anthrax, I do not know. That is for another story, but anthrax was there. The chickens were there and he was like, let's make some magic happen. Right. He was like, these chickens are not getting anthrax. Why? And it just so happens that chickens have a really high body temperature. So they are typically at about 44 degrees Celsius, which is 111 degrees Fahrenheit.

Oh, yeah. We would be in like organ failure, but not the chickens. The chickens are just like thriving and surviving. So he had this theory that that was why they are not getting anthrax. And so he put the theory to the test in, this is all like in the late 1870s, 1878 about. And he basically exposed some chickens to anthrax, then dumped them in a bucket of ice water to chill their body temperature down to 30s. 7 degrees Celsius, which is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, which is the human body's typical body temperature. And sadly, the chickens got anthrax and died. Wow. And while being very cold.

Thanks for that reaction. That's like a miserable way to go. Yeah, it was really terrible. Just manhandled by pester, freezing. Correct. Full of anthrax. All correct. He even went further and tweaked his experiments and put a few chickens in an ice bath for a while, took them out, wrapped them in a blanket. There's just a lot of... The visual is just so terrible. A lot of like really hands-on contact with chickens involved in this study.

It sounds dangerous. I feel like he probably got pecked quite a bit. Correct. I hope so. Yes. Seems like he deserved it. Yeah. So then the blanketed chickens also got anthrax, but they recovered.

So they didn't die. And so he was like, this confirms all my suspicion. So that's cool. And then just years and decades go by, and many other people were intrigued by Pester's research. I don't know why. He did do some important germ theory. Right.

It was all good work. And so they were like, I want to test these experiments out on other animals. And so I couldn't find all of these specific studies. So in this one section, there was a New York Times article about this in two. 2003. And they apparently found that people had tried to chill monkeys and that made them more susceptible to polio. And mice and rabbits were more likely to succumb to pneumonia and other respiratory infections if they were also cold. Then starting in the 1910s, researchers kind of thought, well, so many people are getting what's known as they called it the common cold and they

are most likely getting it in the winter. And so they kind of wanted to figure out why and they sort of look back at this work by Pestor and all these other researchers. And they said, well, no one has tried looking at these effects on humans. Like, does it actually translate into humans? And so they started doing a bunch of basically correlational studies. One was from soldiers in World War I and others on like other people at the time, other groups of people. And they found really conflicting results.

Sometimes people who were more in cold temperatures more were more susceptible to the cold. and got it more and other correlational studies showed it not to be the case. And so it was very like flip-flop back and forth. And so by the 1940s, researchers were essentially like, we got to start putting some humans in some ice baths. So that's basically what happened. In the years following at World War II, a research institution popped up in England called the Common Cold Research Unit in Salisbury, and they did some really interesting work. The research essentially heavily recruited volunteers to, of course they paid them, to drip syringes of infected mucus with the common cold straight into their nostrils.

I don't like it. Then the 12, to be exact, volunteers were told to bathe in cold water in their bathing suits with their socks on. Okay. And they'll gently do. And then take laps around the research building with just their wet socks and their bathing suits on. for quote-unquote half an hour or as long as you can bear it according to the report. Now, I have some more things to say, but before I say that, I just want to quote some of the

flyers that were put out in the area to kind of recruit these 12 people. And they say, quote, how would you like a cheap and comfortable holiday, everything free and no expense, and even pay for your time? We have so much sunshine in summer that we have to warn visitors about getting burnt. is true, there is a one in three risk of catching a cold, but it is a very good cause, and our affections are usually minor and brief. Well, gosh. Yes.

With the pitch like that. Right. I would have just jumped right on it for science. I want to get a cold. And then once they got to the facility and they were doing the study, they had all of these, like, flyers about how to properly determine how you use a handkerchief and how often you use it. And so that was sort of to determine if they are having symptoms of the common cold. So they were very into their handkerchief use.

So it turns out that most did show a drop in their body temperature after they went in a freezing cold. I wonder why. Yeah. And then took laps with their cold socks on. Sounds so unpleasant. But they were no more likely to catch a cold than their fellow research participants. who also received the syringe of infected mucus, but did not take wet post-swim walking laps around the facility.

So that was neat. Of course, 12 subjects, you know, not really that big a deal. So not much you can say about it. So clearly, more cold research needed to be done. So in the 1950s, researchers back in the United States caught, you know, word of this study. So in Chicago, they did a very similar experiment, but which a much larger group of people, where they also walked around in their socks and underwear after a cold bath,

and then they had the people also stand in a large freezer with hats and gloves on after, of course, being infected with the common cold. That was over 200 participants, and they also found the same conclusions that they were no more likely to get the cold than their control group. So signs were pointing to no effect. So you would think, you know, this is good news. Another group of researchers in Texas did a similar experiment

that had basically the same conclusion. So you would think at this point that they would say, you know, this was just a myth. Pester started it all. Like, let's stop making people swim and then take laps in their underwear or swimsuits or whatever. But no, the experiments just keep going. And through the 80s, 90s and 2000s, people still continue to do these studies to try to figure out if you are more susceptible. to the common cold if you're walking around with wet hair, wet socks, wet bathing suits. Or if it's just like the winter, right? Because that's the general theory.

That's a great point that you just made. Let me get to that. So the latest study that I could find was a 2005 study where they wanted to see that maybe it was just the people's cold feet that were causing this. So they tested whether cold feet in particular would make you more susceptible to the common cold. so half the study subjects 180 in total were either given a foot chill or not. A fooch chill. Yeah, I should have looked up what exactly. I assume it's just like an ice bath for your feet. Yeah, yeah.

So just limited to your feet. And then also, of course, expose them to the common cold. And again, results show no statistical significance between the two groups. So they're still doing all this research, obviously, but everything is showing that you're not more susceptible to the common cold if you're in the cold. weather. So what you just alluded to Ariel. Meanwhile, in the middle of all this, researchers, particularly those at the Common Cold Research Unit and other places, we're finding some really interesting facts about the Common Cold through just routine laboratory work. Most importantly, they learned that it's not a single virus, but it's a multitude of them. So the rhinoviruses

are just like tons of viruses, which is why it's almost impossible to ever find a cure or even a vaccine for the common cold because there's just too many virus strains that we just would never be able to catch up or you would need just like millions of shots. And we wouldn't be able to determine them all for that year. So the rhinoviruses, which cause the majority of cases of the common cold, most commonly occur in the spring and the fall. And some researchers say that it is not the temperature, but the humidity that causes these colds. So the rhinoviruses thrive in humidity. And research from the 1970s showed that peak rhinovias season correlates with overcast weather. So wet spring and falls that keep people inside and then they'll spread the virus around.

Right. I'd also heard that when people have like central heating on, it makes the air drier and that makes your mucus memory and it's more likely to get irritated, which makes you more susceptible to any infection because like mucus is a big protective immune tool. It's, it's, it's, it's, That's also why your allergy is making you more likely to get a cold. Right. There's also, just so the idea that people tend to get more sick during the winter, I think there was also a recent study that came out that showed that diseases are more likely to spread in the hospital in the winter because the windows are closed. Oh, that makes sense.

And this isn't really virus-related, but the stuff gets stuck in ventilation systems, like the bad stuff and it just doesn't circulate as well. So that study found that if you open the windows, people getting sick within the hospital, those rates tend to go down. So some hospitals have started doing that even in the winter. And that tends to keep people a little bit healthier. Yeah. Well, when you also have like, you know, people are going back to school, people are traveling for holidays. Right. So there are a bunch of reasons that those kinds of like changes in season just leave people way more susceptible.

Yeah. So that's essentially the gist of it that I think I'm okay to suffer. on my subway ride home, although it was suffering because I was cold. So she was right, but... Not entirely right. We'll take a quick break, and then we'll be back with more intriguing facts. Okay, we're back, and it's time for Ariel's fact. Yes.

So, as I mentioned, my fact is about bison. A lot of people in this country call them buffalo, which is not right, but also not wrong. Is it not right? Well, so buffalo can largely also refer to like water buffalo. It's like a lot of things are called buffalo. And actually technically I think I think bison is actually like the only correct way. Because the species name is bison, bison, bison. Oh, I knew that.

So anyways, talking about bison, they are just some fun facts before I dive into the narrative. But they are the largest land mammal in North America. They're calves weigh between 30 to 70 pounds, and bulls, the males, can top 2,000 pounds and be six feet tall. Wow. That's horrifying. They're really, really big. I've seen them in Yellowstone National Park, which is a very big part of this story, and they are gigantic and a little terrifying. But very cute.

Right. So the scientific name is bison, bison, bison. They have these, like, weird quirks, so you can tell bison's mood. its tail if the tail shoots straight up, like run away. Run far away that is bad. I don't know anything and I can tell that's bad. And they can run really fast, 35 miles per hour. So you are screwed if they are barreling your way.

So don't try to scare them. Right. With my terrifying. I mean, honestly the rule is like stay away. Like there's a safe distance. Stay away. There are videos of bison going after cars in Yellowstone National Park. is impressive.

And they're vegetarians. They eat grass and leafy greens, and they're basically like, they're like these like gigantic, wild, way better versions of cows. So at my previous job, I was a climate change correspondent for Vice News Tonight, and I went to Yellowstone National Park

to cover a story about bison that never aired. And so this is how I got all of these facts. But so basically here's the thing. The really important thing to know is that Yellowstone National Park in Montana is the only place in the U.S. where bison have lived continuously since prehistoric times. Oh, wow. And on top of that, the bison that are in Yellowstone National Park are the only, I think there might be a few small exceptions, but they are the only pure descendants of early bison, meaning that their DNA is free of cattle DNA. So when you eat a bison burger is not actually pure bison. It is buffalo that has been, you know, sort of mated multiple times with cows. And they are like more docile. They're easier to handle. They're like very much like livestock. Whereas the bison that I'm talking about are wild. Yeah. Okay. So now with all that context, we can kind of sort of talk about the story that I'm going to dig into, which is the history of the bison in this country.

So basically, when the European settlers came to this country, they were trying to get indigenous people, Native Americans, out of the way, basically. So what they did is that the U.S. Army decided to tackle their food source. Right. The bison. So there were millions of bison in North America all over, and they systematically killed all of them. Wow. It is actually really, really brutal. And this is like recent history.

And the whole idea was if you kill the bison, then you get rid of the Native Americans food source and they have to move into reservations. So, like, that was the whole goal, right? So they can no longer sort of live off the land and therefore have to move. So horrifying in how, like, calculated. Extremely calculated. Yes. Yeah. So that was the whole campaign by the U.S. Army.

And so, and this, by the way, all of this information comes from actual U.S. government websites. So in case somebody wants to, like, send me an email about this and angrily, I got this from the government. So in 1870, according to U.S. fish and wildlife, two million bison, just that year, were killed on the southern plains. And most of their hides were turned into leather. Bison bones were, at the time, were to use to refine sugar or to make fertilizer. Fun fact. and bison bones brought between $2.50 or up to $15 a ton. So that was pretty expensive at the time? Yeah, pretty expensive.

I have this one thing that says, assuming about 100 skeletons were required to make one ton of bones, this represented the remains of more than 31 million bison. Wow. 1872 was also a pretty brutal year for the bison. During this year and the next two, an average of 5,000 bison were killed each day, every day of the year, as 10,000 hunters poured onto the plains. One railroad shipped over a million pounds of bison bones.

Bison hunting became a popular sport among the wealthy. So basically every single year, 1876, 3 to 4 million bison and southern plains are now dead. It just is just brutal year upon year upon year. It is so bad that by 1902, there are just 23 wild bison left in Yellowstone. National Park. Oh my goodness. There were private herds. Again, these are the herds that were sort of mixed with cattle. But 23 wild bison Yellowstone National Park. So if you go to Yellowstone National Park, there were some pure line cattle bison elsewhere where they bought them and sort of brought them to Yellowstone National Park. But most of the bison that are in Yellowstone National Park are descendants

of these 23 bison. Wow. That's crazy. And I'm just going to show you something. I think I can do that, Right? I know this is a podcast. But apparently there's this like single photo that helped save the bison. It was a photo from 1894 and it showed Yellowstone soldiers. I still don't know what that means posing with severed bison heads killed by poachers. And this photo was circulated in the press and people were outraged because they just couldn't believe it. So do you want to see severed bison. I would like to see it. Normally the answer would be no, but I do want to see this viral photo. Yes. It saved the bison, right? Yes. Well, so it's complicated because that was in like late 1800s. These gentlemen look so stern. Yes.

They're witnesses to a brutal and unkind history and their mustaches will haunt your dreams. Oh, boy. Oh, okay, yeah. Lots of heads and mustache. Mustaches for sure. bison heads, to be exact, as you noted, and some annoyingly proud men, it looks like? Who are these soldiers? I think these are the Yellowstone soldiers that caught the poachers.

Okay, okay, okay. Which is also confusing because, from what I understand, the U.S. Army was largely responsible for killing the bison. But then I guess at some point that sort of transitioned into an actual market, and so there were poachers. And by then, maybe people had sort of realized that, you know, actually we don't want to kill all of them. Right. So the poacher in this particular image, his name was Edgar Howell, and he had posed with eight of the confiscated bison heads as part of the picture. So I guess he's also in that picture. It's a little confusing.

Which mustache guy is. Yeah. Really hard to pick the villain out. There's a very homogenous group of men with those bison heads. Right. But that picture is really important because people used to hunt in Yellowstone. And that changed in 1894 because of this picture. extensive media coverage of Howells capture and sort of the resulting public outcry that followed led to the passage of the Lacey Act, which prohibited hunting, capturing, or killing wild animals in the park and gave the army the right to prosecute for criminal activity.

I think you can go to Yellowstone and actually hunt certain things. You just can't use a gun. So I've seen people fish in Yellowstone National Park. But, yeah, so the reason why you can't just go into Yellowstone with a gun and just do whatever is partially because of the bison. specifically. Wow. So that was fun. So at that point, by 1902, 23 bison, it's pretty terrible. And they, honestly, the people who worked for the park service think that this is it. Like, they are done, bison are gone. Right. 23 left. Yes, we are screwed. At the time they wrote, this herd is exceedingly wild and will probably never increase in size and may possibly die out completely. So pretty dire situations,

but then Teddy Roosevelt. Love him. Right. Is this the one where he like hunting? one to save them? Yeah, so he was a hunter. He definitely like hunted bison at one point, but I guess he kind of like fell in love with them or something. And he created the American Bison Society in 1905, which apparently helped in conservation efforts. And the bison, from that point, the herd grew in size.

But this story is way more complicated than just like these 23 bison because actually there's an ongoing controversy having to do with this particular. herd, which is that currently in Yellowstone National Park, basically, these animals are the only wild animals that are currently treated this way by the U.S. government. They are not allowed to leave Yellowstone National Park and some of the surrounding area. There are no gates. There's nothing stopping them from actually leaving, but if they do leave, they get shot. And sometimes their herd gets too big, they get shot. So they are the only wild animals that are sort of treated as though they are zoo animals. Wait, so why? Why did they get shot if they leave their certain area?

Thus, the land management issue. So there is this conflict going on between cattle ranchers and bison advocates in Montana. And the conflict is this. Basically, people who run Yellowstone National Park and the cattle ranchers say that the bison will transmit this bacterial disease called bruselosis. Bruselosis is transmitted by coming into contact with, God, what is that thing called when you give birth? Placenta. Yes. That. Placenta.

I don't know why I said it like that. So basically, as these, like, female bison are giving birth, if a cow comes along and, like, licks it, they could get sick. And it can have pretty terrible effects in that it causes stillbirths. Right, right. So cattle ranchers don't want that for their cows. And that is the general argument. There has actually never been a case of bison giving this disease to cows. Sure.

No documented case. Seems like a pretty specific scenario. Right. Sounds like it happened one time. Interrupting a bison in labor. Right. So that has never happened. But there have been cases of deer transmitting it to cows.

Right. Interestingly enough, the deer are not prevented from leaving Yellowstone National Park. Right. Right. So a little bit of a double standard there. Right. Which brings me to the advocates. What the advocates believe is that this is an effort by the ranchers to prevent the bison from grazing on the public lands that the cattle graze on. Because the bison are territorial and they would very much sort of box out the cattle.

I see. And therefore, the ranchers would no longer have the opportunity to let their cows on that land. They just don't want to compete with bison, which is free. It's public lands and ranchers just get to use them. So that is the like both sides of the argument. The federal government would very much say that this is an issue of brucellosis. The advocates would say that this is an issue of just basically just capitalism and ranchers wanting to make money. So because of that, the currently the population in Yellowstone National Park is at around 5,000.

Technically, they're only supposed to be at 3,000. And that's the whole point is that as the population gets bigger, they are more likely to wander outside of the park. And therefore, they have to do these things where they just, like, go in and just they will sometimes round them up within the park and kill them. And outside of the park, they will do the same thing and kill them and shoot them. Such a just a weird paradigm for the animal. Yeah. Well, what's interesting is that the bison or the buffalo, as one would talk about it in sort of this context, are an iconic American animal. And they are not treated like the bald eagle. They are not treated like wild horses.

Both these animals have incredible protections, and the bison do not. The bison are not listed under the Endangered Species Act. And people have tried to get them listed, and they have been unsuccessful. Even recently beginning of September, sort of an attempt to get them listed failed. Wow. There is something especially gross about the fact that, you know, these animals were driven nearly to extinction by, you know, the forefathers of America trying to, I mean, pretty much commit genocide. You know, of course, they said that they were trying to drive indigenous peoples to reservations,

but they clearly did not much care how that affected their livelihood or well-being. So the fact that then we started to see Bison as this like American symbol, but only, within the context of like staying within their national parks where they belong and not impeding the like growth of cattle ranching. It is just, it's a very icky situation. Yellowstone National Park makes a lot of money from the bison, right? People go there because that is the only place that they can see them. Yeah.

And it is really impressive and I totally recommend it to anyone. But when you are seeing bison in Yellowstone National Park, you are seeing them as a zoo animal. rather than a wild animal because they are not allowed to roam free. Wow. Sorry for the bummer-ender here. I could end on something a little bit lighter. I don't know if lighter is the right way, but brusillosis can be caught by humans. Oh, that's...

Do you want to know what it does? Yeah, please tell me. Yeah, I'm going to get it. So there is no vaccine for bruselosis. Great. People can get it if they come into contact with infected animals or animal products contaminated with the bacteria. The most common way to be infected is by eating or drinking unpasteurized raw dairy products. Bruce solicis cannot be contracted by eating cooked meat. And I looked at the CDC

website and the like symptoms of it. Yay. And the short term symptoms, the kind of gave me pause because something was a little weird. Short term symptoms mention sweating, fever, fatigue, and anorexia, which... Oh, I think that's like basically you just have a loss of appetite, so you just don't want to eat if you feel ill. Right, but I feel like they could have just written loss of appetite. I don't know. I see what you see. Like, I feel like they'd be better at this.

Right. That is it disappointing. I feel like that page needs to be updated. Long-term symptoms are arthritis, depression, chronic fatigue, swelling of the heart, and, fun fact, swelling of the testicle and scrotum area.

Great. Oh, dear. So should not go drink milk directly from a bison in Yellowstone. is my takeaway from this. For multiple reasons. Bad idea. But yes, I would say no, do not do that.

Okay, I'll have to find a new dream, I guess. Okay, well, on that lighter note, thank you, Ariel. Anytime. What was the weirdest thing we learned this week? Well, I feel bad for the animal. Yeah, I learned the most from Ariel. I learned a lot. I was going to vote for yours, Rachel.

Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. I also love. That was interesting. Plus, I always love it when you talk. to me about poop. Oh, thank you. It's one of your talents. Oh, thanks. Well, thank you again so much for being on, Ariel. And a reminder to all of our weirdos to check out reset in just a few days. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major

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