The Why Files: Operation Podcast - The Basement: Dan Flores | Ice Age Giants, Camels in America, and Coyote Resilience

Episode Date: September 7, 2026

-Discover how to move your IRA or 401k into physical gold and silver — with no taxes or penalties. Get your free portfolio review and free gold & silver guide from GoldenCrest Metals: visit https://GoldenCrestMetals.com/thewhyfiles or call [phone] now. -Head to https://superpower.com/basement for $50 off your membership. Get 150+ biomarkers tested every year plus a personalized health plan and on-demand care team. Detect early signs of 1,000+ conditions. #superpowerpod Dan Flores has spent his life chasing one animal: the one this country threw everything at and could not kill. Poison, bounties, half a billion dollars of taxpayer money, and today the coyote is in Central Park and closing in on South America. We get into wolves, mammoths, the footprints at White Sands, and the dire wolves Colossal brought back. Then Dan tells me about a chicken named Chickie. Stay for that one. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today I'm talking with Dan Flores. Dan is a historian of the American West, and he spent 40 years writing the biographies of North America's wild animals. Coyotes, bison, wild horses, wolves. 40 years writing biographies for animals that can't sue him for defamation. That's a smart business model, honestly. His most famous book is Coyote America, and the story it tells is hard to believe. For most of the last century, the federal government tried to erase one animal from the continent with poison, bounties, and money from Congress. The Coyote won.

Today we're covering that war and the two brothers who exposed it, the footprints at White Sands and the dire wolves. Real dire wolves? Finally, one that might outlive that's dark kid. There's a moment where Dan analyzes a set of 23,000-year-old footprints, like a witness statement,

a teenage girl, a toddler on her hip, a ground sloth rearing up when it catches her scent. That one, that one is a good story. Let's go down to the basement. I'm excited to talk to you, sir. Well, I'm excited to be here. Before we talk about animals, I want, this is a storytelling show, and you're a storyteller, so this is perfect.

Take me back to your junior in college, you're meeting with your creative writing professor, and something ends up in sports a field. What happened? Wow. I'm impressed. Let you know that. Yeah, so I was an English major as an undergraduate, and I had a creative writing professor who was quite good, and he published sort of Wild West kind of novels. And so I was impressed by the fact that, you know, he knew the publishing world and had an agent and all that sort of thing.

So he asked us to do a piece in his class. as if we were going to write it for a magazine. And so I sat down and Dooley wrote this piece and he read it. And I frankly don't remember exactly what sort of grade he gave me on it. Although one of the things I remember he did say to me was he said, so you've got a ready flow of words. And that's a good thing for a writer. So that's kind of almost the only memory I had of what exactly.

he said, but I did have the fun before the semester was over of going into his office, having sent that piece to Sports of Field magazine and had an editor there after taking a look at it, about a month later, sent me a letter, unofficial, letterhead, stationary Sportsafield, and said, we like your piece. It was about crows and ravens, and we're going to publish it. And so I got to go into my creative writing professor and show him a letter of acceptance from a national magazine for that piece I did. Did you get a check? I did get a check. No, your first gig. It was my first gig. It was, you know, they didn't, because I didn't have any illustrations for it. In fact, one of the things, this particular editor's name was David Pittsell. I've never forgotten him because he sort of

became, uh, he took me under his wing and sort of told me how to play the game and what he would be interested in and what to look at. And one of the things he told me was we're going to have to hire an illustrator to illustrate your piece because you don't have any illustrations. You don't have any photographs to go with it. Go and buy yourself a 35 millimeter camera. Get code of chrome film. Get yourself a 300 millimeter telephoto lens and follow the sort of photographs we published by a guy and one of their photographers named Edwin Bauer. Follow the kind of photographs he does. and when you submit things to us in the future, send me photographs and I can double your check.

Oh. But the original check for that piece was $300. That's good. That's kind of be good money. I mean, yeah, when you're, yeah, when you're, you know, a junior in college. And I mean, and more than that, I think what it gave me a sense of, I remember telling my mother, you know, shit, I think I can be a writer.

Of course. Yeah, I think I can be a writer. I just sold the first thing I ever wrote to a, National Magazine. So, yeah. And it's, it's funny because it's not really fair because you go to school as a jock. You went on a baseball scholarship? Was your dad semi-pro?

My dad played semi-pro baseball, yeah, and he wanted me to be a baseball player. Of course. Yeah, and so I did go to college on a baseball scholarship. What position? I played center field. She played center field. Yeah. A lot of legs, okay?

Yeah, I played center field. Oh, you're a runner. That makes sense. Yeah, and I'm still a runner. So, yeah, I've been running ever since. since, ever since chasing down fly ball. But yeah, dad wanted me to play baseball. And I played several sports in high school. But I was probably best at baseball. And so I played for a couple of years in college. And then I actually, the truth is, I got really interested in the subject matter

of a lot of the classes I was taking. And I was sort of drifting away from it. And it was one of my dad's great disappointments when I told him I didn't think I was going to keep doing it. So he was, did he ever come around? I mean, he saw you as a professional writer. He did, yes. And he certainly, you know, loved that. And he showed people, things that I wrote, books that I wrote, and articles that I wrote. So, yeah, I think I finally was able to win him over by being at least successful enough that he was able to show his friends, people he golfed with, and so forth.

that, you know, that his son published things. Which is great, but it's still not the same. No. My son is six foot six and left-handed. And I tried to put my slider into that arm. Instead, he became a musician. Well, I'm proud of him, but. Yeah, but you can understand my dad's position on all this.

It was my retirement fund. Yeah. And I don't think dad ever really got over the fact that I didn't continue with it. But that's okay. They're still proud of you. Yeah. So one of my favorite stories. that I've heard you tell is you're 13, you see a dead fox on the road, you go, you get the deer whistle, you're terrible at it, an animal comes out into the sunlight. What was that animal?

Yeah. So that's a pretty vivid memory, even though it goes back a long way. And you're right, I was 13. And so I had seen this fox and made my, make my parents, I mean, I couldn't drive yet, but I had made my parents stop. on the side of the road and I'd gotten out and looked at it because I was kind of fascinated with with with predators in particular for some reason they stopped were they like why they stopped yeah well because you know I was the I was the only child left at home and and they were willing to do that for me so they let me take a look at this animal and I've shot I had a little Polaroid camera that I shot pictures of it with and then I happened to be in a hardware store in our little town in Louisiana a few days later and I was telling this hardware store owner

about six fox and he said well we just got this little device in that I mean you might be able to see a live fox not one hit by a car if you take this out and this is supposed to be a dying it sounds like a dying rabbit and so just go out and blow it and see if a fox comes up and so I bought this thing

for a couple of dollars and I knew of an old deer stand that was out in the woods. And I rode my bicycle out to within about a quarter mile of this deer stand and walked out and climbed up in it one morning. It wasn't even really early in the morning. It was sort of mid-morning about 10 o'clock and set myself up in this deer stand and blew on this thing. I didn't really know what a dead or dying rabbit was supposed to sound like. So I just blew on it. It made squeaking sounds. And within about 30 or 40 seconds, this gorgeous animal comes running out of the woods into an opening directly toward this tree I was sitting in with his eyes, its eyes, fixed on the base of the tree. And so I didn't dare blow the thing again. I just sat there and

watched and it came loping up these beautiful, loping kind of movements. Did you expect that to work? No, of course not. Of course not. I mean, I had no idea what would happen, but what happened was a very definitely not what I was anticipating. But it really made an impact. There are some pretty big warning signs in the financial system right now. JPMorgan is telling clients gold could hit $6,000 an ounce. Citibank predicts silver could reach $90, and central banks just bought a record 289 tons of gold last quarter. At the same time, the national debt is approaching $40 trillion. And Treasury officials are talking about growing our way out of it. That could be more money entering the system and more pressure on the value of your dollars.

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And qualifying purchases can receive up to $25,000 in free silver. Go to why files loves gold.com right now or text files to metals. That's 638-257. Get the information and decide for yourself. It made a hell of an impact and what I think it was and it got within about 20 or 25 feet of the base of the tree and then I think it caught a whiff of scent of me and it turned and went back exactly on the same path that it had come towards me looking back over its shoulder at this tree as it was running away. And my memory of it was that it looked like it was walking on stilts.

It had these really long legs and these sort of yellowish eyes, pointed ears. Well, I went back home and sat down and immediately wrote a letter to Louisiana Parks and Wildlife and said, I think I've seen a wolf in Caddo Parish. As a sixth grader, you're writing the government. I wrote it. Yeah, absolutely. And so about two or three weeks passed and a letter showed up in the mailbox from Louisiana Parks and Wildlife. And it was from the division that was at the time. And there was, you know, I don't think, I'm certain I don't have this letter anymore. But there was a very famous guy who became one of the first directors of the Endangered Species Act, who was a Louisianaan and who was then, looking for remnant red wolves in Louisiana. And it may have been from him. But the letter basically said, you may have seen a wolf.

We think there probably are still some red wolves in your part of the state, in Caddo Parish. And that may have been what you saw. But more than likely what you saw was a coyote, because coyotes are starting to colonize. Louisiana now. And what did you know about coyotes then? Just cartoons? I knew about Wiley coyote and the Roadrunner. Sure. And of course from that what you get is an impression of coyotes being in the red rock deserts of the West. Yes. And I remember my first thought about that was what in the hell would a coyote be doing here in the bayous and swamps of Louisiana? I mean, it'd be like a moose coming to Louisiana.

So, I mean, I couldn't quite figure it out. And what I really think is that what I saw was a Red Wolf Coyote hybrid, because as I began to learn, I mean, this gave me, of course, a fixation on these wild predators as a young teenager. And so I started reading everything I could, everything I could lay my hands on about them. And they could interbreed? They can interbreed. And in fact, what was at the time the primary danger for the red wolf was genetic swamping by coyotes migrating into their range. Right. And I think what I saw was a hybrid animal.

Did you ever go back up to the deer stand and try again? No, I did. Yeah. But I never, never was able to lure one back in. He heard you, though. He heard me. And in fact, I had climbed up in a tree probably within 100 yards of. this animal. Sure.

For it to have appeared that quickly. It had to be right there. Every night for a year, it would have been out there. Yeah. Yeah, I was out there a lot. So your family is French, Louisiana, but your last name is Spanish. That's correct.

What happened there? Well, so the French founded Louisiana as a colony in 1714. and the primary town, the first town in what is now the state of Louisiana was not New Orleans, which was founded in 17, 18, four years later,

but a little town on the Red River in the central part of the state called Nakhadish. And the Red River at the time, all the colonial powers, and Thomas Jefferson later believed the same, the Red River, they thought, came from the Southern Rockies near Santa Fe,

this sort of legend, city of Santa Fe, this town of Santa Fe, that the Spanish had founded a century before. Sure. And by this point, in 1714, when Nacchadish on the Red River was founded by the French, the Spanish were beginning to settle in Texas. And they were very alarmed that the French had located a settlement and a new colony on a river that they thought would lead them directly to their capital of the northern provinces of Santa Fe. And so what Spain did was to plant a little presidio, a little post of 20 soldiers 10 miles to the west of Nakhash.

It's in a little town called Robillin, Louisiana now. And there's actually a Louisiana State Park there that commemorates this little, this little, Spanish settlement. But these young Spanish soldiers, all of them evidently were in their 20s. And of course, they were plunked down in a spot where there were, well, there were French girls 10 miles away. Oh, okay. And so. So this duty's not so bad after all. It's not so bad after all. And so, and there was also the only Catholic church was in Nacadish in the French city. that these Spanish soldiers were supposed to be blocking from going to the west. So if you wanted to do mass, you had to go over to the enemy and journey 10 miles into French Louisiana.

I mean, obviously 10 miles is not very far away. So the short of the story is my ancestor intermarried into the French families in Louisiana. And so I ended up all there was. That's all there was. So I ended up with a Spanish surname, but my family. is now 11 generations in Louisiana. And they primarily, I mean, my 23 and me indicates that the French ancestry is still about 25 or 30 percent of my ancestry. But we started marrying my family in Louisiana, started marrying into American families in the 1860s and 1870s.

So we kind of got like the Red Wolf. So we got genetically swamped by Anglo America. it's funny there's so there's a Spanish presidio guarding the river yeah and 300 years later you're the Flores who made it yeah I'm the one you're the one who made it and made it to Santa Fe yes that's right that's right um we talked a little bit about this before the show I was hoping maybe we can go into more detail it's August 1978 you're on the road and you rent that room and it was in the cocktail house yeah it's the uh Jean-Coctoe Theater.

Why? Why? Well, okay. So, you know, let me give a little bit of the background that we were talking about. I sound like your father now. Beforehand. Why? Yeah, why would you do that? Yeah. I think dad probably said the same thing. Why would you do that? Well, at the time, I had just gotten a Ph.D. in American history from a university in Texas. And 1978 was a particularly bad year for PhDs in history. And I had applied for a PhDs in history. and I had applied for something like about 15 jobs, and I had not gotten a single interview. Let me just say it was a good year for the Yankees.

It was a good year for the Yankees. Okay. Yeah, but it was not, you know, not a good year for having a PhD in American history. So I had not gotten a single interview with my PhD, which I had spent a lot of effort and time, obviously getting a lot of time in school. but I had going back to when I'd been an undergraduate, I had this background of writing for magazines. And so that first piece that I sold a sports to field, that was not the last one.

I continued to write for the outdoor magazines in particular all during these years. And so I kind of had the idea, okay, if I can't get a job at a university, maybe I can just, you know, I know some editors in New York. I know I was actually writing a column for outdoor life on conservation in their regional section of the so-called mid-south. They had this yellow insert of an outdoor life of various regions, and I was doing a column for them. You're making a living. On conservation, well, I was making a little bit of money.

Okay. So I had the idea. I'll just, I'll call on these editors that I know, and I'll see if I can't get more assignments. And so what I'll do is I'm going to move to the most interesting town that I have found in my travels around particularly the West. I wanted to go West because my ancestors in Louisiana. I had some of those French ancestors were Indian traders who had gone into the West. And I had sort of grown up with those stories. And I had seen a Western National Park when I was four years old and had been sort of just kind of intoxicated with the feel of the air in the West.

blue skies. I'm a believer in genetic memory. Yeah, well, you know, I don't, I don't know if that it was genetic. I think because I forgot about the trip and I had an aunt tell me like 25 years later, you know, I'm 30 years old and I'm trying to explain to her why I'm fascinated with being in the West and going to the West. And she said, well, maybe it has something to do with when you were four years old and we took you out to New Mexico on that National Park Tour. And I, kind of suddenly went, holy cow, you're right. You took me out when I was four. And then I began to remember something about it. But in all those years in between, that had faded away. And I couldn't, I sort of explained it the way I just did to you that I knew I had these ancestors who

had gone west. So anyway, Santa Fe, New Mexico was the town that as I had traveled around the west that I thought was the most compelling and interesting place. And so with no job, I just drove out to Santa Fe. And on the way out, I stopped at one of the universities that had had had a job that I had applied for. And just on a whim, basically went into the building that housed the history department and told the secretary there that I would like to talk to just meet the department chair. And I had walked in. I was wearing t-shirt and cut off Levi's and moccasins and she said, Dr. Barr, are you willing, you have time to talk to a student? He said, to his credit, sure, come on in.

And I said, well, Dr. Barr, actually, I'm not a student. I'm one of the people who applied for one of the jobs you have. And, you know, I was driving through. I thought I'd just come by and introduce myself. And he said, well, I really appreciate you doing that. But, you know, unfortunately, those jobs have been filled. So we're only like three weeks away from school starting, so I wish you luck, you know. And so I left.

I drove on to Santa Fe. And what I did was I went to this little movie theater, this little arts movie theater called the Jean-Cocktoe Theater. And they had some rooms to rent above the theater. And so I paid a down payment and two months rent on a little room, single occupancy room, really, right above the ticket booth, in fact, of theater. And as we were talking beforehand, and as you know, this was a movie theater that George R.R. Martin of Game of Thrones,

two years later, bought in Santa Fe. So if I had managed to live there, he would have been my landlord. But when I drove back to Texas to get everything to leave my apartment that I was in, while I was loading up my car the phone rang and I picked it up and this voice says so this is Dr. Holman Barr from this particular university are you this Dan? I said yes he said are you still interested in that job when you came by and talked to me I remember it a couple of weeks ago you didn't have a job and you were still interested and I said my first first thing I said was, but I've already ridded a room in Santa Fe. And then I thought, holy cow, I've gone this long.

Okay, when to classes start? And so I ended up giving up that room in Santa Fe and actually having a career that went for 36 years as a university professor. What is it about that theater? You know what's always frustrated me about the annual checkup? You wait forever to get an appointment, rearrange your schedule to actually go, get your lab tests done, and after all that, you spend 10 minutes with the doctor in here, everything looks normal. But I have questions. How are my hormones? Am I deficient in anything? Why is my energy different than it used to be? What can I be doing now to stay healthy as I get older? Everything looks normal doesn't really answer any of that. That's why I'm excited about

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And after you sign up, they'll ask you how you heard about superpower. Tell them the basement sent you. Well, I mean, it's still going. Right. And why did George buy, why is it so interesting? Well, it's, it was an arts theater. And, you know, I think he's got interest in, obviously, in film. And he did then.

I think he was already working on the Game of Thrones, the Song of Fire and Ice series. We're still waiting on that, George, if you're listening. No, I know. Yeah. He's a slow writer, which he readily concedes. But, yeah, I think he just, he probably had the thought even then that this is how he was not only going to publish the books, but this is how he was going to reach a larger audience with them, that he was ultimately going to try to sell these stories in Hollywood or somewhere so they could be made into films.

And, of course, ultimately, Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon, all the rest have been the result. But I think he was already interested in that then. And so having a movie theater was something that he could sort of call on, I think, every day and satisfy his fascination with film. And yeah, he still has it all these years later. That's a fun idea. I mean, Tarantino's Theater in L.A. is a lot of fun.

Yeah. Coyotes. Everyone asked you about coyotes. But everyone asked you about the natural side. But I think your book said natural and supernatural. It does, yeah. Tell me about the supernatural side of the coyote. The coyote.

I would argue after having written this book and done the research to put it together. And having also written other books about other animals, I've written about bison and wild horses and jaguars and pronghorn antelope and grizzly bears and wolves and a whole host of animals. but I'm convinced that the coyote is the most interesting, indeed fascinating animal in North America. And I don't think I'm alone in believing that. And my evidence for saying that is based on the fact that at least 10,000 years ago and maybe longer ago than that, probably during the time of the Pleistocene extinctions when Wullymanianian, and saber-tooth cats and step-lions and all these fantastic creatures are around, but disappearing,

if, you know, if one is at a particular stage of the Pleistocene, these are the animals that are around you, the way elephants and rhinos and hippos and lions and leopards are in Africa today. But at another stage of the Pleistocene, what you're seeing is those animals disappear. You maybe have a memory that your kinship line, your grandparents or something were the last to see a mammoth. And your uncle was the last to see. No one is seeing a saber-toothed cat sense. So there's this sense of disappearance too. And obviously by 10,000 years ago, 32 genera of animals in North America are gone.

But one of the animals that did not disappear. was this little jackal-sized wolf, the coyote. And I think that there was a fascination with that animal that prepared native people to assign it a very unusual role in their stories of who they were, how they had originated, how the world came to be. and that assignment was to make the coyote into coyote with a capital C. Of course, they would no doubt use a different word for the animal, but what we today refer to as the coyote avatar or semi-deity of Native American stories,

we usually designate with a capital C as opposed to the little animal that's trotting by as you're, you know, hearing about this. And that animal was given an enormous responsibility for making the world what it was. And coyote with a capital C became not only a sort of right-hand semi-deity, which I regard as supernatural, beyond the natural, as the emissary of the first cause, whatever that first cause was. And so in the Christian tradition, the best analogy you could use is, so there's a God and there's Jesus of Nazareth who comes down to earth.

The coyote is the figure out of the Paleolithic world in North America who does the actual work on North America. The first cause never shows up. Which tribes would have that legend? Almost every tribe that resided within the original range of coyotes in North America, and that was in the American West, basically from the Great Plains westward. Well, coyote's a Nahuatl word, isn't it?

Yes. So that's Mexico. That's Mexico. And the word that we use to designate the animal is from, yeah, From the know-what language, which is the Aztec language. So it's all over. It's all over. They were found from basically southern Mexico to probably the edges of present-day Saskatchewan and Alberta.

Coyotes did not range, and this is all based on paleontology and archaeology, because, of course, we don't know otherwise. But based on paleontology and archaeology, there are no remains of coyotes. for example, in the Pacific Northwest. And from essentially the central coast of California southward, you find evidence of coyotes in the paleontological sites, but not really up in the Bay Area and in Northern California. So the northern part of the coast didn't seem to have them, but east of the Cascades and the Sierras in the north

and then from the central coast of California southward, all the way to south of Mexico City, there were coyotes, and they extended, their range extended almost to the Mississippi River. And everywhere those animals were found, the local people treated them as this avatar semi-deity figure. What did the deity do, Derek? Well, he basically, and it's a he, by the way, there are some stories that refer to, I mean, in what I titled a chapter in Coyote America that's about, this is I call it old man America because I really think he's our oldest

literary figure in North America yeah all of our early stories that go of the farthest back in time or about coyote there are some stories about a female coyote but they're very few in number almost all the stories are about a male coyote but he he basically is the the act of creation he created the topography of North America. He makes the rivers flow the way they flow. He has the Columbia flow westward from the Rockies and the Missouri flow eastward. He also creates and locates humans in their various places in the west. And everything here is about the west because coyote does not range east of the Mississippi River where there are a host of other kind of

paleolithic figures who occupy a kind of a similar role. There's spider, there's rabbit, there are giant humans who do this. There's a host of different kind of figures, but coyote occupies by far the largest range of any of them. And so he creates topography of North America, the rivers he creates, he places people in their, I think the first cause is the creation of people, but coyote is responsible for placing them where they go on the landscape. He has to fight monsters that are in North America and get them out of the way so people won't be harmed by monsters. What monsters is he fighting?

Well, there's a great story from the Shoshones of his battle with a monster that's in the Northern Rockies in order to make the country around the Northern Rockies where the the Shoshones end up settling safe for the people to be there. And Coyote has to battle this monster and it's a very involved tale of all the kind of encounters that he and the monster have before Coyote prevails. Well, he'll give us a little taste of it. Well, he's in my blood, so I'm really interesting. Oh, yeah. He prevails largely through a trick. And it's been a while since I've read this particular story. But as we all know, Coyote is referred to, and a lot of the literature is a trickster figure, and so he manages to trick this particular monster into sacrificing itself.

And that's sort of the model for a lot of how these coyote trickster stories work, is you pull off a trick that basically preys on, and this is what I came to argue, and I will say I think I'm probably the first and maybe right now the only person to make this argument about the coyote stories. I argue in my book, having read a bunch of those stories, that what's important about the trick is not that it's a trick, not that the monster falls for a trick, but that the trick itself preys on the foibles of human nature. And so it's not the trick that's important.

It's why the trick works. And that's what the stories are really intended to convey to you. They're intended to convey, unlike, say, the Jesus of Nazareth stories, where Jesus is a perfect figure and your goal as a follower is to emulate that kind of perfection. The coyote is portrayed as being a figure who has good traits, but also lots of really bad traits. Like people. Exactly like people. And so the coyote's role is actually, to me, rather more useful in being able to say, okay, there are these attributes out there like gluttony and lust and being addicted to things

and being a narcissist and being an absolute buffoon. And all of those traits are used in these stories as part of the trick. And the people who fall, or this case the monster in the Shoshone story, who falls for the trick, falls for the trick because of one of the particular foibles of human nature. So the purpose of the stories, obviously, is to teach people about who we are. And they are very clever. They're very smart. they're often very, very funny.

And what coyote essentially comes across is, as, okay, he's this biological force that takes huge pleasure in life and in being alive and in sensuality and in sort of getting the most out of the moment. But he's also a narcissistic buffoon. Sure. And so you have to look at both sides of the human story, and that's how you learn about human nature. I mean, to me, that's a very sophisticated body of literature that teaches the people who hear those stories, and they are rendered orally, about themselves. That kind of answer is a question I was going to ask you is during this time you've got all these majestic animals, like the Peruvian tribes, they're worshipping jaguars, so you get it.

And why would the native tribes choose this little jackal? But maybe what they observed was this creature is mostly a lot like us, where a mammoth is just a... I think a lot of it had to do. I mean, you're right. And even, you know, the Mayans, the jaguar and the eagle are the two most sacred animals. But I think the reason the coyote was picked is because it was seen as a survivor. and it was a survivor that lived by its wits. And that, I think, people saw as admirable.

They were watching mammoths and saber-tooth cats and lions and horses and camels all go extinct. And the animal that was surviving all of it was this little small jackal-like wolf. And it was doing so by being smart. And I think that appealed to people. I mean, I've pointed out in Coyote America that the Coyote, Coyote has done this not just once with the Pleistocene, but did it at the end of the 19th century in the early 20th century when we Americans were engaged in the biggest destruction of wildlife and world history, really. I mean, we had reduced 30 million buffalo to fewer than 1,000 animals in the previous 80 years. We were about to wipe out the most numerous bird on earth, the passenger,

pigeon. Our wonderfully beautiful parrots, the Carolina parakeet, were going to be gone within about three decades of 1900. I mean, we had lost our northern hemisphere penguin, the great awk. I mean, we were just wiping things out right and left, and everybody who was paying attention noted that, I mean, wolves were disappearing. The one animal that was not disappearing was the coyote. And one of our great animal, uh, animal, writers, Ernest Thompson-Siton, wrote a piece, the lead piece in Scribner's magazine in 1900, coming up with kind of an apocryphal explanation for why that was. But everybody was noticing it.

All these animals are disappearing? For some reason, this one isn't. Well, that is a great transition to take a break. When we come back, maybe you can tell us about the Murray Brothers? Oh, yes, sure. The Muriel brothers, absolutely. Before we get to the Murys, just quickly, what is a coyote? How does it relate to dog, wolf?

Where is it in the branch? Well, it's the same genus, Canis. It's closely related. So there's an interesting story about wolves in America. Gray wolves are not the same animals as, Eastern wolves and red wolves. Eastern wolves, red wolves, and coyotes, and we've only known this really for about a dozen years

as a result of genetic work on their genomes, those all seem to be the canes that after the evolution of canes in North America some five million years ago, those three coyotes, eastern wolves, and red wolves seem to be the animals that remained in America and did not leave. And gray wolves represented a population of animals that actually migrated into Eurasia, spent a couple of million years, really, outside North America before they started returning in a series of waves about 30,000 years ago.

They left and came back. They left and came back. That's interesting. Yeah. And so they are different enough from coyotes that even in the years in the 1920s and 1930s, when wolves are being wiped out in the West, gray wolves were being wiped out. I mean, they were just small numbers of them left, and they're looking for mates. They, gray wolves found mates among ranch dogs rather than with coyotes that were all around them.

But, and this is the origin of the so-called coy wolf in the east. I was going to ask you about the coy wolf. Yeah, coyotes do not hybridize with gray wolves, but they readily hybridize with the two. kind of wolves that remained in North America along with them. Excuse me. And so red wolves and eastern wolves will both very readily hybridized with coyotes. And that's what's created this population of animals that we refer to these days as coy wolves. Huh.

Yeah, that are part wolf and part coyote. But that animal does not exist in the West because gray wolves and coyotes as a result of that long separation in time, they have behavioral, probably behavioral differences. that prevent them from. And I, you know, I had a interesting time once at the Predator Research Facility in Logan, Utah, when I was working on the coyote book, talking to the people there, they have about 100 coyotes in captive pans, and they're endlessly doing experiments with them trying to figure out, you know, various things about them, their individuality, for example.

But one of the things they attempted, they told me, was to impregnate a, you know, coyote with gray wolf with gray wolf seaman and this female coyote gave birth to a litter of puppies that were part gray wolf and part coyote and she immediately killed them all wow so it can work but they didn't want to do it yeah why do you think that is well as i said i think there are behavioral differences that prevent them from breeding but is that a competitive between species? They are very competitive. In fact, one of the things I wrote about in Coyote America was about this so-called fish infusion idea where one of the things that enables coyote success is that they are able to both exist as pack animals and as singles and pairs, which is called

fish infusion. And the argument about how they evolved that is that that came from co-existing with gray wolves that harassed them. And so when gray wolves basically were virtually gone, and it was humans who had replaced wolves as the harassers, coyotes still had this adaptability to function, even though we were trying to wipe them out. Sure. Yeah.

But that came from their relationship, their earlier relationship, and it was obviously, I mean, when wolves, for example, were reintroduced into Yellowstone, almost the first thing they did was to reduce the coyote population by about 60%. The wolves did? The wolves did. I mean, they attacked coyotes everywhere they could find them. They dug up their dens and killed their puppies. Wow. So that mother smelled that and said, nope. She smelled that and said, that's not going to happen. Yeah. I'm not going to raise animals. No. So, she killed those puppies. That's amazing. Yeah. All right. So the Murie brothers. Yeah. Science. A science agency becomes a killing agency to keep its funding.

Yeah. The Bureau of Biological Survey. It already sounds ominous. Yeah, which had been created in the 1890s, essentially to do a survey of what animals were left after, you know, this mayhem of the last years of the 19th century when we were killing so many animals. But by the early 20th century, a purely scientific agency like that was having trouble getting funding from Congress. And meanwhile, ranchers all over the country, especially the West, were complaining about wolves and coyotes and mountain lions and asking because the federal government by this point had set aside the national forest system. Right. And the ranchers were convinced that these public lands were becoming the breeding grounds for predators. No Teddy Roosevelt fans out there.

Yeah, no Teddy Roosevelt fans among that. particular group. And so they say, you did this to us. It's your responsibility feds to deal with this predator problem. And unable to get funding for a purely scientific mission, the Bureau of Biological Survey decided in about 1905, okay, that's what we'll do. Congress will give us money if we pledge to be the agency that solves the predator problem. And so the biological survey at that point began very steadily sort of redefining themselves as the solution to the existence of predators in America. And particularly under the leadership of a young man, a Minnesotan without a great deal of education. His name was Vernon Bailey.

But he was really good at trapping animals and really good at figuring out how to kill animals. and he began writing for the biological survey, these yearly reports advising forest service managers and national park managers, how to get rid of your predators. So what basically happens to get to the Muri brothers, which I know is where we want to go with this discussion, take your time.

Is that the biological survey operating under these old world mythologies about predators. I mean, in the old world, after all, you know, we've been herding stock animals for 8,000 years. We had been domesticating and herding cattle and sheep and goats and so forth for a very long time so that predators were kind of public enemy number one. Sure. And then brought that sentiment to America where the native people,

not for one thing, not having, not being razors of domesticated stock, had always looked at animals like coyotes and wolves as, I mean, these are, they teach us about hunting, they teach us about how to care for families, they are really dedicated to their mates and their packs and their pups and their, we name our clans after wolves and coyotes, we name our children after these animals. we seek them out as totem animals and as spiritual guides and vision quest. So there was this huge respect for predators and admiration for them among the native population. There's more money and cattle. And here come the Europeans with all their stock.

And of course, they want to make war. I mean, the first environmental act that Europeans pass in North American history in Plymouth Colony in 1632 is to put a bounty on wolves. Wow, I didn't know that. Yeah, that's the first environmental act that old worlders implement in America is to place a bounty on wolves to try to get rid of them.

I mean, England had, they had gotten rid of all their wolves by the 1400s. Yep. So, you know, these are people who have never been around wolves. They're kind of shocked that suddenly they are in a place

where wolves are very common and easily seen. seen. They're also shocked that with all these ideas they have from Europe about wolves being dangerous to people, that as these early settlers, particularly in New England, right, in fact, we've never known it yet for a wolf to ever set upon a man or a woman or a child. They don't seem to be aggressive at all towards people. All this is kind of worrisome, but it doesn't change the agenda that they're going to get rid of these animals. So this has been going on since the 1600s and now we have a federal agency that dedicates itself in order to get funding originally

to the idea of, okay, we're going to step in. We're going to replace all these old bounty systems that territories and states have set up. And we're going to be professional about this. And the way you professionally approach the so-called predator problem is you start hiring hunters to go out and they don't shoot wolves and coyotes. They basically spread poison bait across the landscape. Strychnine is the particular poison they use and start poisoning the predator populations into extinction. Don't you wish you could just hit skip on the worst parts of your life?

You know the same way you can skip an ad. I get it. I'm Siaya and I live in Ice Cove. I've made some questionable decisions that didn't end up the way I planned, and today I'm still figuring it out. Somehow things usually get worse before they get better. Apparently, that's how I roll. So bundle up and come along for the bumpy ride.

Stream a new episode of North of North Tuesdays on CBC Gem. Reaching your audience on Spotify with display ads is easy. Use your existing creative and launch your first campaign in minutes with Spotify Ads Manager. What take us to what happens when an animal ingest strychnine? Well, it's a, it's not a pretty sight. In fact, there was a, there was a term that these hunters used. They called it the strictine signature. And it was what you saw of an animal, what you saw in its body contortions that had been killed by ingesting strychnine.

It basically wrenched them so powerfully that it arched their spines and stuck their tails straight out as if the animal had been hit by a bolt of lightning and left this sort of, I mean, I describe it in one of my books as it's almost like seeing an animal shaped into a question mark with its body humped up. and its tail sticking straight out. And that was the characteristic strychnine signature of an animal that had been killed by this poison. And it's not a quick death. It's not a quick death. I mean, one of the stories I tell in Wildeerl is about Vernon Bailey, who I mentioned a minute ago,

who sort of becomes Teddy Roosevelt called him Wolf Bailey because he was the guy who knew how to get rid of these animals. Vernon Bailey writes his superior in Washington and says, so what would you say would be the correct dose of strychnine? When I put strychnine into these little base, they would sprinkle these little pieces of meat or suet around, usually a dead horse or something,

and they would soak them in strychnine. I said, what should be the proper dose to kill a wolf humanely? let's say in under three minutes. The response he got back was this. You had best go into a hospital that has a mental institution and have yourself checked in because no employee of ours in his right mind would ever ask such a question. The ranchers are not interested in any compassion, directed towards wolves or coyotes.

Oh my God. You kill them with as big a dose as you wish and don't think one more time about showing any kind of empathy for these animals. They, I mean, this is just one and going right down today when we are trying to recover wolves in America, we are still employing some of the cruelest, strategies for reducing their numbers or holding their numbers in check, as many of these state

governments in the West now call it, that you could possibly imagine and sort of approaches that we would never use, because sport hunting, of course, is supposed to be ethical and be all about fair chase. But with these animals, everything is basically legal. You can kill them in any possible way. And we do. I mean, we're killing them with wire snare traps now that basically snare a wolf or a coyote. And every time this panicked animal attempts to move, the wire snare tightens a little bit more until it finally completely strangles them. So that kind of cruelty is one of the features of this story. And one of the crazy things about this story is that by the 1920s, these hunters for the biological survey have spread more than three and a half million

poison baits across Western America. And one of the things they've learned how to do is they've realized that wolves in particular are so strongly committed to their packs and to their mates that, I mean, and I use a quote from one of the hunters that says this in Wild New World, if you kill one animal out of the pack and you bait all your subsequent strychnine tablets or pieces of suet with the scent of that animal, you can kill every single animal in the pack

because they will all be looking for the lost member of the pack and if you put that scent on the bait, you can kill every one of them. And that works? It worked so effectively that, I mean, I'll give you one example, in the state of Montana in 1899, Montana in that year, and they were still using the bounty system, this is before the federal government comes to play this role I'm describing. The state of Montana in 1899 bounted 21,000 wolves in the state.

when the Bureau of Biological Survey takes over the job and it gets permanent funding from the federal government in 1915, but it had been doing this for several years before that. But now it's getting well funded and it starts hiring a lot of people. They had more than 350 hunters going out in order to bait the West with strychnine by 1915. By 1920, Montana, which had killed 21,000. wolves in 1899. In the year, 1920, they killed 20 wolves in

Montana. That was how effective this strategy was. Only 20 because they were gone? They were gone. Wow. They were gone. So that by the middle of the 1920s, I mean,

there are still lingering animals when some of the sort of primary wolf hunters, a guy named Stanley Young and EA Goldman, who were a major players in the biological survey, which by the way, becomes the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In 1944, they publish a two-volume book. It's in every library in the country called the Wolves of North America. And it's basically a celebration of how we have wiped wolves off the

face of the continent. All the wolves are gone from east of the Mississippi River. I mean, there are none left, except for a few red wolves. They think. from Florida across to Texas, down along the Gulf Coast, all the other wolves are gone in Eastern America. And in Western America, west of the Mississippi River, all the Rocky Mountain states have only 100 wolves left. There are maybe 50 wolves left in California. There are about 150 Mexican wolves in Arizona and New Mexico and on down into Mexico proper. And the only wolves that are really left is there are some red wolves left, as I said, along the Gulf Coast, and there are a few wolves up around the Great Lakes still. But we have basically

wiped them out by 1945. Were they still dropping poison during this whole time? Absolutely. They're still dropping poison. Is it killing every... It's killing, yes. I mean, the collateral damage is enormous. What about like carrying birds and... Eagles, ravens, magpies. Oh, what a disaster. Everything. I mean, some of the stories that are told, and, you You know, and I mean, I feel obligated in these books I've done, like Coyote America and Wild New World, and American Serengety, too, to tell these stories because I think a lot of Americans don't really know this, and they're hard to listen to.

But one of the stories about this kind of thing is that you put poison baits out around, say, a horse that you've killed for this purpose to attract predators. And as these hunters start approaching this bait animal, a dead horse, about a quarter a mile away, they start encountering animals that have been killed by the poison around this bait animal. So they start finding raccoons, foxes, eagles, magpies, ravens, I mean, skunks, everything that's going to be possibly attracted to little pieces of meat or fat that's left out around this baited animal. So that, I mean, one of the hunters described it. He said it's like a spinning centrifuge that sprays dead animals out for a quarter of a mile all in a circle all around our bait.

And what we're really going for, of course, our wolves and coyotes, but we're just killing the shed out of all kinds of things. Can you imagine just a just a number of things? animals killed? It's, I mean, none of us has been able to make any kind of estimate. What we all know, though, at least those who have studied this story, is that the populations of animals, coyotes accepted, everything else is just crashing. I mean, we are losing animals in America like, I mean, you can hardly believe, with the

single exception of the things we want to hunt. And so we have state fish and wildlife agency set up to make sure that we have Bob White Quail and we introduce animals like Chinese pheasants and white-tailed deer we want to protect and elk we want to protect and grouse and turkeys and all those things that people want to hunt. But everything else and in part is because the government is telling people, look, the more of these predators we kill, the more. more stuff you're going to get to shoot, the easier it is you're going to make it possible to get your deer or your elk. And so sport hunters, you know, and of course the firearms manufacturers are all in on this too because the more game animals you have out there, you know, the more you're going to sell firearms and ammunition and all that. So the whole... I mean, they called it a buffalo rifle. Yes, they did. Absolutely. So the whole project,

convince the public that predators are evil, that they're the desperadoes of the animal world. They're, you know, like John Dillinger or something. And the biological survey actually has a marketing arm that publishes newspaper articles. I mean, I've read one of them when I was doing the research for these books. It was in the Washington Post about how the G-Men, the hunters, are going to go out and kill the desperadoes. of the animal world with all these photographs of mountain lions and bears and coyotes and wolves, just like they're saving us from, you know, John Dillinger and... Sure.

And Bonnie and Clyde. So it's good to throw a little anti-Mexican racism in the marketing as well. Why not? Of course. Yeah, why not? So we sort of are doing this based on these old world hatreds of predators of predators that have harassed domesticated stock for a long time in the old world. Plus, these kind of folklore mythologies of these animals as evil, and they'll attack

your children, and if they find you in the forest, a pack of wolves will drag. I mean, we still do movies showing scenes like that. Everyone knows Little Red Riding Hood. Absolutely. Everybody knows these stories. And so they play on all of this and sort of convince generally. generations of Americans that this is a reality and they do it all just finally going to get us to the mary brothers without having done a single frigging scientific study of the role that wolves or coyotes have

played in american natural history or ecology so kill with chemicals first do the study later that's that's america's that's their platform we've been doing that for a long time we've been doing it for a long time In the first studies, I mean, when the Muri, so Olaas and Adolf Muri are these brothers from the Upper Midwest who are trained ecologists. And this is one of the things, by the way, that begins to rescue the game. Indian ideas about all these animals, we just brushed aside. Of course. What do they know? But starting in 1915, coming out of the work of Charles Darwin and evolution, a new,

science called ecology, which is the study of the relationships of animals in the natural world and of botany and all the rest, emerged and the Ecological Society of America had its first meeting in 1915 with 300 members showing up. Among them were very famous figures like Aldo Leopold, for example, who's going to become a major player in this whole story. And it's the science of ecology that starts saying, look, before we go out and just kill all these animals and wipe them out, and I mean, the campaign to wipe them out in 1931 in an act called the Animal Damage Control Act manages to get Congress to promise $10 million to exterminate animals like wolves and coyotes completely off the continent. So Congress is pouring money in.

That's 31? 1931 the animal damage control act of that year that's yeah we can't afford that in that year yeah well right I mean it's you know the stock market has collapsed but there's money for this the great depression is but there's a million dollars a year for 10 years as the plan we're going to give the biological survey and the animal damage control unit within it a million dollars a year for the next 10 years from 1931 to 1941 to produce the extinction of these animals. All without doing any science. And so the ecologist, the ecologist like Aldo Leopold,

and a young man named Joseph Grinnell, who is George Bird Grinnell's nephew, who becomes a major player in the state of California and for the National Park Service in arguing things like, you know, we've got these national parks, and the people who go there are fascinating, in all the animals, and we're supposed to preserve these national parks in order to represent

American nature, why don't we let the predators stay? Joseph Cornell wrote an article for Science Magazine in 1915, proposing that. And of course, the National Park Service gets its Organic Act the next year. We finally have a National Park Service. So there are arguments by the ecologists that we need to let. these animals have some places where, and the parks seem to be the best place far, where we can see American nature actually enacted. Were they putting strict nine in the parks at any point?

Absolutely, they were. In fact, Vernon Bailey had gone to like Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks in the 19-teens to teach those park managers how to get rid of their predators. I mean, we killed the last wolf in Yellowstone National Park in 1927. And until 1995, when we reintroduce them, there are no wolves in Yellowstone. And I'll just add one other little bit before I finally do get to the Muriel Brothers, because that's where we're going. But another way of getting rid of wolves and coyotes, this came from the state of Montana,

you know, and I hate to keep ragging on Montana, but I lived there and taught in the university there for 22 years. And so I know a good bit about the Montana story here. And Montana, of course, is doing really egregious things with wolves these days. Yes. In 1905, the state of Montana actually passed an act that required state veterinarians who came across or were brought to their facilities a wild coyote or a wolf to infect that animal with sarcoph mange and then release it into the wild in order to spread mange to the wild populations.

Required. Required them to do so. And the manager, the first superintendent, I should say, of Glacier National Park, actually put in a request that he be delivered animals that had mange into the park so he could more expeditiously kill wolves. and coyotes in the park. Now, the National Park Service in Washington denied his request, but he actually entered in a request that he get mange-infected animals.

And even today, when you go to Yellowstone to look at wolves in places like the Lamar Valley, if you see five or six or ten wolves, you will almost certainly see an animal or two that has got mange. I mean, it's still in- still infects those populations. Yeah, more than 100 years later. What kind of statistics were available about wolf attacks in the parks? Were they going after visitors?

No, of course they weren't. Of course not. I mean, in fact, when Stanley Young and EA Goldman wrote there, these sort of leaders of the biological survey, wrote there the wolves of North America, they had a chapter, dedicated to trying to find evidence of wolf attacks of humans. And basically, I mean, I'll give them credit for their honesty. They had to say at the end of the chapter, we don't really have anything. I mean, there's, you know, they came up with one of the stories I remember from reading it that made me laugh is, there was a famous book written about the Great Plains in the 1840s.

and the author of this particular book had described at one point being bucked off his horse and losing his hat and it sort of knocked him unconscious and when he came to his hat was lying seven or eight feet away and a wolf was standing over it sniffing it and they used that in the wolves of north america as an example of possible wolf predation on a human This is the, did you die with COVID or of COVID? It's the same thing. Yeah, exactly. You know, you show me the wolf.

I'll show you the crime. So all this is happening and there's no science. Nobody has studied these animals. And so the biological survey and the National Park Service finally decide in the middle of the 1930s, okay, let's hire these Muri brothers, two of our best trained naturalists, to go out and demonstrate that they were referring to the coyote during those years as the arch enemy of our time. The arch of our time.

Yes, the arch predator of our time they were referring it to. So let's send Olaus Murie to Jackson Hole and Grand Tietas National Park. And let's have him study the coyotes of the. Grand Teton's so that we finally have evidence to buttress our endeavors of wiping these animals out. And let's send the National Park Service says, well, let's send his brother, Adolf Murie, to Yellowstone National Park. And let's do a study of the coyotes there. The wolves are gone from both places.

So let's do the coyotes there. And that'll finally give us all the evidence we need for this campaign we've embarked on really since 1620. Right. Since the time of the settlement of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. We've got a million a year coming in. We've got absolutely. So let's, we've got a million a year coming in. Let's send these guys out and we'll do the studies and we'll finally provide the scientific evidence to support our programs.

The only problem was these two scientists were dedicated to science and the truth. And when they began studying the coyotes of Jackson Hole and. the Grand Teton's and basically it was the winter elk range in Jackson Hole in particular that Olaus Bury was working on and Adolf I mean he spent five years doing

this study in Yellowstone I mean he really did a remarkably good study what they concluded was that coyotes actually it turns out

not only are not a threat to wildlife because what it looks like is that all the animals that they pray on, they've been praying on for a very, very long time. We don't know how far back, but evidently a really long time before we ever got here. And all those animals already have adapted to the predation by coyotes. So, I mean, in Yellowstone, Adolf Murray went down one animal after another mountain. Mountain goats, no reason to suspect that coyotes have any deleterious effect on mountain goat populations. Big horn sheep, same thing.

Mule deer, same thing. I mean, he just goes down the list. I've studied all of these. I've looked at the scat. I've observed coyotes and how they've interacted with the young and the old. And there's no evidence that they have any effect on wildlife populations other than to make them healthier because they tend to take out what predators tend to go for with the common. cost-benefit analysis, if I don't want to get kicked in the head, are stabbed with antlers,

they tend to go for the animals that are injured, that are old, that are very young. They don't go after the really healthy ones that are the breeding population. Right. So they put all of this in their studies. And one of the things they conclude, OAS in particular, said, as far as I can tell, 80% of what coyotes actually do is beneficial to humans. And the remaining 20% is neutral in its effects. What's the benefit?

Well, for example, he discovered the major prey of coyotes actually. It's not elk calves. It's not mule deer calves. It's mice and rats. And so they produce. a beneficial effect for agriculture because they go after the animals. So, yeah, 80% of what they do. So we finally have done the studies.

They're published by, in the Federal Register, copies are distributed to Congress. The Bureau of Biological Survey gets a copy from Olas's study because they had sent him and the National Park Service gets Adolf's study from Yellowstone. and what do we do? Throw those studies out the window and keep right on going. Of course we do. Of course we do. Yeah, we keep right on going.

What ever happened to the Murie brothers? Did they become activists? They did. They both actually resigned from the government agencies they were working for. And I mean, they did some really important things. They worked in what became and, in fact, suggested. that we set aside the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Olaas worked among the Caribou Herds in Alaska.

Adolf worked and recommended, and also in Alaska, and recommended among sheep, particularly, and recommended that we set aside the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which he did in the 1950s. Olas is the guy who basically he was sent by what was now the U.S. by a Fish and Wildlife Service to Montana to take a look at what has become the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge and they were thinking of just setting aside some small

piece of land up there and how would you, you know, maybe as a wintering waterfowl spot on the Missouri River and he recommends instead. a giant national wildlife refuge on the Missouri River. So they do that, but they both ultimately end up leaving the government service, and they work for the Wilderness Society for the Wilderness Society for most of the rest of their lives. I had never heard of them before reading your work, and I feel like more people should know about those guys. Oh, yeah. They're a very famous individuals.

They did a lot of work in Western Wyoming in Yellowstone and in Jackson Hole and are well known in places like that. They're well known in Alaska. Otherwise, a lot of people have never heard of them. But they were a couple, along with Aldo Leopold, a couple of our mid-20th century naturalist and ecologists who really did important work that helped get us over this hump to the point where we were starting to use ecology

and some sense of history to realize, we've got to stop this. This is crazy, this attempt to wipe these animals out. And what we have to do ultimately, which of course we end up doing when the Endangered Species Act has passed, is we've got to start recovering wolves. Coyotes are okay. Now, they're still being poisoned. And finally in 1972, Richard Nixon will end the public poisoning,

or the poisoning of coyotes on public lands. But nonetheless, the wolf issue was the one that they, because Adolf also went to Mount McKinley and did with his wolves of Mount McKinley that was released in 1945, he produced kind of the first of the modern wolf stories where he gets us a look at this animal that has been here for five million years. And finally we're beginning to realize something real about it. And we can begin to manage wolves on a basis of reality and science rather than this old world folklore. Well, it only takes like 20 or 30 years to wipe out the wolves.

Why did the coyotes survive? That was one of the really interesting stories of the 20th century war against these animals. The arch predator of our time, the coyotes were called after the wolves were basically gone. And there were a number of attempts to figure it out of what was happening. And one of the ones, I mentioned it earlier, and I'll go back to it and tell you this story because I think it's kind of a pretty great story in this whole narrative. Ernest Thompson Seton was a Canadian who ended up becoming a major player in the American Boy Scouts. He ended up, in fact, moving to Santa Fe and founding what's now called Seton Village.

I mean, he built several houses and became a major player in the American Boy Scout movement. But he was in his early years a predator hunter. And he had come to the West, especially to New Mexico, in the 1880s, to try to hunt down and kill a particular wolf, the lobo of Karumpa, it was called, that had eluded a whole host of other hunters. And Ernest Thompson Seton thought that he could pull this off. And so he did so, and he did so by using, he managed to kill this wolf, and he did it by using the tactic that I mentioned a few minutes ago

that the later federal hunters were used, where he realized that all of his attempts to set traps for Lobo were ineffective. This animal was too smart. It had learned too much about all the techniques that hunters were trying to use to kill it. But what made it vulnerable was its love for its mate. And so,

Seton managed to capture, capture Blanca, the mate of Lobo, and killed her. And then he baited his traps with her scent. And he did a double set where he put a set out that he thought Lobo would dig up with his front paws and then put a set about three or four feet away, two or three sets, in fact, that Lobo's back feet would get into. And he managed to catch this animal. And here's how he wrote, because he, within a few years, within about 20 years, he was no longer a predator hunter. He was now a writer of the Jack London ilk. In the beginning of the 20th century, there were a whole host of these writers about animal stories.

And John Burroughs was one. Jack London obviously was one. And Ernest Thompson Seton was one. and one of the stories he wrote was about Lobo and how he described the way this wolf died. He said they caught Lobo and they wanted to take Lobo alive so the ranchers could kind of gloat over this wolf finally being captured and they staked it out in a rancher's yard

and Seton said it lay on a rise with a chain around its neck looking off into the distance where it and its mate had roamed the countryside and starved itself to death. It wouldn't eat and basically died by starving itself to death. So he wrote that story. And then the story that I particularly have admired was his story to try to come to grips with, why are wolves disappearing? Why were we able to wipe out bison? why have 15 million pronghorn antelope shrunk to 5,000?

Why are passenger pigeons nearly gone? And coyotes are still here. No matter what we do to them, there seem to be as many as there ever were, if not more. So he writes this story that, as I said, was published in Scribner's in 1900, called Tito, the story of the little coyote who learned how. and it's this allegorical story about this coyote this little female coyote who is a pup is captured by a rancher

as he's killing the coyote's parents and the other pups in the litter he captures her he chains her up in his yard and she grows up as a captured animal that they throw scraps to but as she grows up she is able to observe all the strategies and techniques this ranching family is using to wipe out, as Seton describes it, the coyote kind. And they're using dogs, and they're using traps, and they're using guns, and they're using strychnine poison. And Tito is sitting in the yard, watching all of it. And at some point, after she's a couple of years old, she manages to get away.

And she goes out into nature, and she finds a mate. and as Ernest Thompson Seaton tells a story, she then has a litter of pups and she teaches her pups and all her pups offspring are going to learn the same lesson through basically coyote culture being handed down all the techniques

that people are using to try to wipe them out. And so they know now as a result of Tito all the strategies. And he says the human analog of this, and there is a human analog, is Moses. Moses. Moses, who as a young Jewish child is taken into an Egyptian family and raised in Egypt

Egypt among a people who are attempting to wipe out his people, and he learns all the ideas and all the techniques that they're going to use to do so. True. And then gets away and rescues his people. So that's the story that he tells in Scribner's magazine in 1900. And the native tribes are like, we told you. We told you that this, yeah. Of course, it's a great allegorical story.

But it's not the scientific version of how they do it. And we've already mentioned it. But it's what we don't find out about coyotes until we spend some $500 million of taxpayer money by the 1970s and have killed eight and a half million coyotes in America doing this. And not only are there just as many coyotes in the West as there always were, but now with wolves wiped out in the east, coyotes are spreading across the Mississippi River into Louisiana, where I was growing up, into upstate New York, and beginning to colonize all the eastern states. So they are being killed, but they're replacing themselves?

They are replacing themselves and spreading. And spreading. And spreading. They're going north into Canada, where they get all the way up into the Arctic. Is it possible if there was no strict nine program that they wouldn't have spread? I think two things were required. The strict nine program was one. But I think wiping out wolves in places like the,

east in particular. Now, the expansion of coyotes to the Arctic indicates that they were able to expand into country in Canada that still had wolf populations. But I think the elimination of the kind of predatory niche that wolves and coyotes fill in the east expedited their movement because they were going into places like Virginia and New York and Vermont and New Hampshire and Massachusetts where there was no competition from another predator. And also more people, more food, more rats. More people, more food, more rats, more mice. Deer populations that were beginning to, with no predators, of course,

deer populations are beginning to explode in states like Pennsylvania. So that was the pull and the push was the attempt on the part of federal governments and state governments and just individuals, because by now, I mean, there had been a story in Scientific American, for example, in 1920, that said, any red-blooded American who sees a coyote ought to shoot it on site. It's a patriotic act. It's not, and it's 1920, this reason I mentioned that date specifically, because this is right after the Russian Revolution.

This writer in Scientific American says you should shoot coyotes as a patriotic act, not because they have any value. they're not worth as much as the ammunition it takes to kill them, but because coyotes are, after all, the original North American Bolsheviks. They're communists, and so we need to kill them on site. So just ordinary people are shooting coyotes every time they see them.

The government is trying to poison them with strychnine, and by the 1940s, I mean, we've introduced a whole new host of poisons to use against them. I mean, it's part of the chemical revolution of World War II is we have things like, I mean, there is a particular poison. Let me see if I can remember the scientific name of it. In any case, it's a strict nine. Is it the 1080? 1080 is one.

I'm just trying to think of the scientific name for 1080. But 1080 is the most important one of the age because, and it's given that name because it takes 1,080 tries. on the part of the federal poison engineers to come up with this perfect poison. But we come up with four or five different poisons to kill coyotes, so we don't just use strychnine anymore. And as I said a minute ago, I mean, we've killed by the 1970s, we've killed eight and a half million of them, have spent $500 million trying to wipe them out,

and they're spreading across all of America. They get to Delaware, the last state, in the east they occupy in 2011. So you got them in Central Park. You got them in Chicago. Got them in Central Park. Yeah, we've got at least 400 of them in Chicago. Yeah.

400 coyotes are living in Chicago. And it's a, you know, it's one of the kind of great reverse, uh, nature, North American stories because what we always think of, and this was one of the reasons I've told people of the years I had so much fun writing this book. is because usually when you write about environmental stories in American history, you're writing, you know, about this, everything is just falling apart. And it's this sad kind of outcome. But with the coyote story, it's the reverse. It's like we throw everything we've got at them and we can't wipe them out.

And the thing that replaces ultimately the Tito, the story of the little coyote that learned how, is, a couple of scientists in the late 1950s doing a careful enough scientific study of coyotes to come to these conclusions, which they published in all the major journals, the journal of mammology, ecology, all the rest. This is why we're not able to wipe out coyotes. Coyotes have evolved in adaptation called fish infusion, which we've mentioned already, where they respond to harassment by breaking up their packs and scattering in singles and pairs. Whereas wolves, of course, would, if you baited your traps with the scent of another member of the pack, you'd eventually kill all the members of a wolf pack.

But coyotes won't go for that? Coyotes don't go for that. They respond to that kind of harassment by scattering. Wow. And the result of scattering is that they're also colonizing into new places. Sure. And so this is why the attempt to wipe them out in the West pushes them towards the east. And what they conclude is that you could wipe out, you could kill 70% of the coyote population

in a given area year after year after year, and you would not wipe. them out, that they would replace their populations with the numbers that were left because they would respond to this by recruiting larger litters, by having larger litters, and in an area where you're trying to wipe coyotes out, it's possible for coyotes to raise, say, a litter of six or seven or eight puppies to get them all up to adulthood. Whereas when the landscape has a healthy population of coyotes, they have a litter of maybe five, and only two or three survive to adulthood. But they respond that quickly.

They respond that quickly. Yeah. And this is how they're able to overcome our attempts. So what we finally get to, of course, is where we are now, and every city in America has a coyote management policy, and they're all following the same notion, which is we have to learn to coexist. with them. We've got to learn to live with them in our midst and learn not only how to coexist, so you don't feed them, you don't try to lure them in because if you feed them, that's what gets people bitten. That's what gets their pets snagged out of yards and things. I lived in the Hollywood

Hills for years, and that's when my cats became indoor cats is because I lost two to the coyotes. man absolutely yeah we saw them every day yeah and coyotes and great horned owls of course will i mean one of the reasons they do that coyotes in particular is because just as they do in rural areas and in wild areas in cities they establish territories and they regard animals like cats and dogs as competitor predators in their territories and so they will often attack a dog or a cat roaming out not because usually they They're hungry, but because this is a competitor that's invaded my territory. Yeah, my weren't eaten. They were just killed.

Yeah, that's usually what happens. I used to tell people when I do, when the book first came out and I was doing a ton of talks about it, if your animal is left lying on the ground, that's probably a coyote kill. If it's gone, that's likely a great horned owl kill, especially if it's a cat, because great horned owls haul cats off and, yeah, to a roost and eat them. Yeah, I was an outdoor cat guy for years, but no more. No, I know. So we have a cat, my wife and I in New Mexico, and that cat very definitely stays inside.

You know, and it's beneficial in every kind of way because roaming cats, as we all know now, take a huge toll on urban birds. And so one of the effects of coyote presence in urban areas with people keeping their cats inside is that the bird population is going up. So the coyotes now are, they're approaching the Dary and Gap, aren't they? They are approaching the Daring Gap. Yeah, that's one of the really fun and interesting things about the modern story. So tell us what is the Daring Gap for people who don't know?

Because it's an amazing place. Yeah, it's an amazing place. It's a very thick, dense jungle full of jaguars and mountain lions and monkeys. Impassable. And Impassable. If you watched Pluribus, that sci-fi show, he makes it through the Darying Gap barely. Yeah, barely. And so, yeah, it's almost impassable.

And it's the strip of land between Panama and Columbia, that tiny little strip that connects North and South America together. And one of the great stories about coyotes now, and this is a story I tell in the forward to the new version of the book, the 2026 version of Coyote America, is that coyotes in about the last seven or eight years have crossed the Panama Canal. They have colonized south of Mexico all the way through Central America to Panama. They've crossed the Panama Canal, which they did in 2018, and they are now on the northern edge of the Darien Gap, which is a big national park, and attempting to find their way through. And the biologists who are studying this

that we're tracking them, we're recording that the coyotes were going south at a rate of about 40 miles a year towards the Dairy and Gap. Now they've got to the Dary and Gap and Derry National Park and of course, everything has slowed down. But the notion is that

because coyotes are very individualistic and there are some of them that are epic explorers, there always have been, that there are going to be coyotes that make it through that enormous us jungle. And when they do and get on the Colombian side, they're going to get into open country

where the trees have been thin, where there are open grasslands and pastures for stock. And at that point, South America is going to become, in effect, sort of what is our planet B, Mars for us. South America is going to become planet B for coyotes. And they are going to fairly rapidly colonize. all of South America. Well, hang on a second. Let me ask you about that. Because while the coyotes are moving south, the crab-eating fox is moving north.

Oh, moving north. That's right. And they're almost at the Darien Gap. They are. So that will be the first time in three million years where these species are together again. That's right. What happens?

That's one of the great things about it. Well, my, you know, the coyotes are the bigger dogs. And so the coyotes will prevail in any kind of encounter with the foxes. But those two animals are about to become the, first mammals in three million years to cross between North America and South America. And coyotes, I think in any sort of face-to-face encounter are going to prevail and very likely will be aggressive towards the foxes. But they're going to be foxes, I think, that get through as well.

I think so too. Yeah. Because they eat kind of different things. It's going to be interesting to see what happens. Yeah. But it hadn't happened in three million years. Yeah. That's amazing.

This is a big story. Let's take a quick break, and when we come back, I want to talk about the Ice Age. Okay, let's do it. Your summer travels deserve an upgrade. With select Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, and Cadillac vehicles connected by OnStar, you can stream, game, and more on the go. Whether you're headed to a music festival or a cottage getaway, you can access hundreds of apps on Google Play right from your center display.

explore OnStar Tech today at OnStar.ca and discover how to take your summer to the next level. OnStar. Better never stops. Spotify Ads Manager makes it easy to create your first audio ad in minutes for free. Sign up today, launch a campaign, and start reaching your audience. Storytelling time. Put us on a lakeshore, white sands, New Mexico. 23,000 years ago. there's footprints in the mud.

What's happening? Well, it looks as if a young woman, who's probably in her teens, sets off on a walk along the lakeshore, and she's got a child on her hip. Of course, there's no way of telling whether it's her child or she's doing child care for someone else, but she's walking along with a child on her hip. and she walks it appears about at least judging from the number of steps that are preserved we don't

know exactly what happens on either end but she walks probably a hundred yards or more along this particular lake shore to a spot and then at some point probably on the same day she returns from where she's gone and goes back in the other direction. And in the interim, she puts down the child. I don't recall now from the study how many times, but she puts the child down at least enough to show that there are the footprints of a small child sort of walking around her footprints. And in the interim between walking on the outward journey and her return going back,

a mammoth, a woolly mammoth or a Colombian mammoth, and a dire wolf and a ground sloth all cross at right angles to her path. And the ground sloth, it appears, must encounter her, see her, because the ground sloth from its footprints, the interpretation is that the ground sloth rears up in alarm. These are large animals then, yes? These are very large animals, of course. You know, a dire wolf may be a wolf of 150, 160 pounds.

Mammoth is going to be the size of an African elephant. A ground sloth is essentially the size of a grizzly bear. Yeah. A very large animal. But it responds to apparently the presence of this young woman, by raring up on its hind legs and what the scholars who have tried to interpret its movements from its footprints, believe is probably alarm. And that's an interesting conclusion because what it implies is that a ground sloth is interpreting the presence of a human as a danger.

and that obviously could mean that humans have already begun to prey on the local ground sloths or the local animals of this particular spot. It's a, you know, a story that obviously we have to extrapolate a lot to be able to tell, but that seems to be sort of the gist of it at the moment. And, you know, I know that archaeologists are working to uncover more evidence from that site. And we've subsequently discovered another site in Utah, which I don't recall a great deal about, but there are some other early footprints that we think may relate to a similar period in human history, something before the height of the Wisconsin Ice Age.

And that's really pretty remarkable because what it implies is that there's no possibility of crossing the land bridge to get to America, to North America then. It means that humans must have come by boat along the shoreline. And where they came inland, we don't know, although there is a site on the Snake River in Idaho that seems to date from about 16,000. years ago. And that particular site has lithics that are very similar to the kind of lithics that have been discovered in Japan from that age. So there's... Really?

Yes. So there's some evidence then that coming by boat, following the kelp highway, going inland where it's possible to go inland. And we don't know exactly where across the... the western part of North America, people ended up. But southern New Mexico is obviously one of them. Yep. Possibly southern Utah is another.

And we think that somewhere in Idaho along Snake River is probably yet another. So do we think that the megafauna extinction was because of human migration there? Was it from overhunting? Is it settled? It's not entirely settled, but I would say, so I can't say with any kind of justification that the consensus is that humans are responsible. I think there's still a lot that we have to figure out. Where I think we are now is that every other suggestion, has not really panned out.

No. And we tried a bunch because just as with global climate change, we don't want to think that people were responsible. And so, and to me, there's an interesting convergence between the denial that humans were, are involved in climate change and the denial similarly that humans could have, you know, accomplished the extermination,

the extinction of large animals in North and South America. Well, you've got the footprints that are 23,000 years old. The megaphone extinction is 13,000 years ago. So you've got 10,000 years where humans are living with these large animals. Yes. Is it happen slowly or I thought the extinction is a little bit more rapid, isn't it? Yeah, it is more rapid. So, I mean, and you raise a very good point because if the incursion of humans in North America

23,000 years ago actually does produce a glitaphis. population of humans. So that's the question now. Does this produce some global population? So far we don't have evidence of that. What we've got evidence of is in two or three spots, there's evidence of an ancient human habitation, but we don't have anything like what happens when the Clovis people come, right?

Because when the Clovis people come, they spread from Atlantic to Pacific all the way to the tip of South America, and there is evidence all over the place. I mean, there are Clovis sites just everywhere. So it's very clear that there's a Clovisia America. 13,000 years ago, when those people arrive, they do sort of what Europeans do in North America 500 years ago and go from shore to shore. We don't have that for this 23,000-year-old occupation, or the 16,000-year-old one. And there, of course, are sites in South America that date back to 16,000 or so years. What we have of these really ancient sites are these little small spots. So that's the question. And it's an important question because one of the things that the arguments for Clovisia over

hunting really makes is that the animals are encountering. really professional and good predators in the human form for the first time. And they're unprepared. And so they're easy marks. I think that's probably true. I think it's, well, I actually think it's very likely true. And I sort of follow the line of argument that these early populations in North America did not become what Clovis became.

In other words, they didn't spread all across. North and South America. They were isolated into small spots. They may be lasted for a couple of hundred years. And one of the, as I think I mentioned earlier when we were talking about this, one of the reasons that some of the paleontologists and paleobiologists and archaeologists think this is because of the rapid expansion of the Clovis people as if they were passing across a continent and a landscape that was empty.

any kind of human blocks. Either there was nobody there, or if there was somebody there, there weren't very many of them, because the Clovis people just sort of sweep through both continents, as I said earlier, in 300 years. What do you think the impact? I don't mean to use a pun, but the younger dryas, the rapid climate change. We're warm, they were very cold, and they were warm again. Yeah.

Was there an impact? I think there was probably some impact and a lot of people certainly like to use the younger dryus as a possibility you know and it's based on the idea that about 12,000 years ago 11,800 years ago there is an impact probably the argument is by a comet

because we don't have any evidence for a meteoritic or asteroid kind of impact as we do for Chick-a-loop for example so for a comet that impacted probably North America because there's no evidence of extinctions anywhere else. So it's not a global thing like the Chick-Silloo impact. And that it produced two effects. One was probably what we refer to these days as kind of a nuclear winter where a lot of

debris went up and obscured the sun and may have had an impact on animals. That's what produced the cold. Right. And then the idea that there may have been why. widespread fires in the wake of the cold episode. I think there are two problems with it. And this is the reason why the serious scholars who I know and have talked to don't really think it's that good, an optional explanation anymore, although there are a lot of people

out in the world who like it. Sure, it's fun. Yeah, it's fun. But the reason the scholars I've talked to don't like it is they say there's two problems with it. One problem is that all these animals had lived through the height of the Wisconsin Ice Age. Yes. And so they're not likely having survived that to be taken out by a relatively minor coal snap around 11 or 12,000 years ago. And the other argument, of course, is one that people have used for a long time. The only evidence we have of animals that become extinct

are the big ones that people like to hunt. All the small animals all are fine. They're everywhere, and they survive everywhere. But what goes extinct are the very creatures that humans across Asia and finally into North and South America like to hunt. And those are the ones that we end up losing. So you've got animals that are big and slow, and then the big cats, I guess you'd hunt because they're dangerous.

or the fact, I mean, one of the arguments about the big cats, for example, is that if their prey base gets taken out, then they're unlikely to be able to shift to another prey base rapidly to survive. It's an argument that's not foolproof. I mean, we don't really quite have, you know, the ultimate, yes, this is what's happened. And it's one of the reasons I think that what we're probably, going to have to do is to look at animals one by one, look at species one by one, what happened to the horses. I mean, my God, that's right now a completely unanswerable one. Horses evolve in North America. They spread across the Bering Strait into Asia and Europe and

Africa where they survive. Yep. But they become extinct here. That's just a tough one. And camels the same thing. Right. The national animals. animal is the bison, but it should probably be the camel. Yeah, it should probably be the camel. They evolved here 45 million years ago and spread across, just as horses do, across the Bering straight, and survive elsewhere, but also become extinct here. And so it's, you know, it's hard to square that. The only thing you can kind of argue is that, and, you know, there was a very famous argument in about 2005 that maybe this is a possibility that as humans arrive, they're bringing new pathogens with them that are infecting some of these animal populations.

But we would see that. We would see it. And of course, the one thing about pathogens is that, you know, they don't kill everything. There are always some members of a species that are going to have some resistance. And if they survive, they'll pass their resistance down to subsequent generations. So right now we just don't have enough information to say for certain. I mean, although a lot of people will say it's pretty conclusive that we probably did take out the mammoths. The other animals I do suspect we may have driven into these separate populations where they couldn't exchange genes

because, of course, that's what happens to that last population of mammoths that gets on an island in the Bering Sea. That's right. And last down to 4,000 years ago. Yes. And then they finally go extinct because they don't have enough genetic diversity to continue to survive. So it's a, it's a story that I think remains to be told in its entirety and that somebody is probably going to, you know, become very, very famous by figuring out precisely what happened. But right now it looks like probably the best answer we have. is the arrival of humans

that unquestionably had some impact on these populations. My instinct tells me all that is right, but there's one thing that we're missing. Yeah, very likely. Because it's very strange. Yeah. Well, let's pretend that America is a haunted house of animals

and you're the medium. Because we have animals that have evolved to outrun big cats, but the big cats aren't here anymore. Yeah. So what other adaptations do we see that aren't really needed? Well, that one,

is one that I have always loved to tell, and that's the story of the pronghorn, of course. So there was, until fairly recently, really a kind of a mystery about prong horns, because their only predators are wolves and coyotes, neither of which can run more than about 40 miles an hour, and yet here we have prong horns that run 65 miles an hour. So why the overkill? Why 25 or 30 miles an hour faster than your predators can run? And why also do females among prong horns sort of put the males to a test to see which one is the fastest one? And that's the one they breed with. And why do they do what's called selfish herd grouping, which we know of basically from Africa and then biologists paying attention to prong chrars realize, wow, they do this too.

They do this thing where they group as a herd and they push the low status animals out to the edges of the herd. So if they're attacked by a predator, it's the low status animals that get taken out. And yet adult prongerons don't really have any predators. It's just the fauns that get predated. So the result of those mysteries produced our kind of, it's the, the ghosts of the Pleistocene story that what pronghorns have really preserved is an imagery of what it was like 10,000 years ago when they were being pursued really by fast hunting hyenas and by American cheetahs and that speed that they developed and that ability to inhale

huge gulps of air. Right. And those giant nostrils that they have and those big eyes that scan the horizon all the time, those are all adaptations to back in the Pleistocene when they were hunted by cheetahs. And they've managed to hang on to for 10,000 years. That's a pretty remarkable thing when you see pronghorns out in the natural world and know that story. Yeah. It changes the way you look at them.

It does. Yeah, boy, the coyotes and the wolves. Once they run, it's too bad, man. I know. And you know, wolves can outrun coyotes. So one of the things, of course, it happened when wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone and they started taking out coyotes is that they would run down individual animals. And there are actually YouTube scenes.

You can Google them. They're not very fun to watch where wolves will run coyotes down. And the coyote disappears in a kind of a mob scene of gray wool. Yeah, but they'll just make more. They'll make more. They absolutely will. They know how to do it. Don't you wish you could just hit skip on the worst parts of your life? You know, the same way you can skip an ad?

I get it. I'm Siaya and I live in Ice Cove. I've made some questionable decisions that didn't end up the way I planned. And today, I'm still figuring it out. Somehow things usually get worse before they get better. Apparently, that's how I roll. So bundle up and come along for the bumpy ride. Stream a new episode of North of North Tuesdays on CBC Gem.

Let's talk about Buffalo and Bison a little bit. Sure. So bison becomes the national animal, I guess. That was the Obama administration. Yeah, 2016. But there's not really a lot of true bison left are there. Well, bison is the correct scientific name. But of course, I think what you're referring to is the fact that we think most of

of the animals that we manage to preserve do carry cattle genes. Yes. And there's a story there. There's a bunch of stories. But so the bison, our national animal, and I, my heads off to Barack Obama for doing that. Because I think what that does is, and I think the same is true of the eagle as kind of a national bird and a symbol of America, it causes modern populations of us to look at those animals and wonder a bit about their stories. And of course, if you know much about eagles at all, I mean, so the eagle is a

very beautiful animal, and we have lots of them around. But by the early 1970s, American Eagles, bald eagles were almost gone. I remember. Yes. I mean, we barely rescued bald eagles. Our the symbol of the country, the avian symbol of the country, we barely rescued them. And we did it through the Endangered Species Act, and Bald Eagles kind of became the poster bird for the success of the Endangered Species Act. And the bison, I think, by Obama making it into the national mammal, it makes it possible to do the same thing where you, if you consider that animal as kind of this iconic American animal and you understand that, you know, in the cocktail party version of things, well, once upon a time,

wasn't there a whole lot of them and then there were almost none of them? If you can even get that far and ask the question, so why was that? Why did that happen? Why did something like that sort of simplification of our present-day national mammal happen? Then you can start grappling with the story of what we did with a lot of these magnificent creatures. And the bison's story, of course, is, uh, it's, it's one that I sometimes suspect in talking to people from other parts of the world, they know the bison's story better than a lot of Americans do. I mean, I talk to people from Australia and England and France who seem to know more about

it sometimes than many of the Americans. What are we getting wrong? Well, I think for one thing, often all we know is that at one point there were a lot of them and then there were almost none. Right. But if we do know more, I mean, one of the stories that got told early in the 20th century by a former buffalo hunter named John Cook, who wrote a book called The Border in the Buffalo in 1905, and who basically invented a bunch of stuff in order to convince. the American public at a time when Teddy Roosevelt was president, conservation was a big word, people were regretting that we had almost wiped out the buffalo.

This former buffalo hunter named John Cook writes a book and says, Buffalo hunters like me actually should be getting a national medal. Wow. Because we were just enacting the federal government, secret policy of wiping out buffalo deliberately in order to enable native people to be conquered and put on reservations? And this is a true story. It's a story.

He certainly tried to come up with a good argument for it. Right. Yeah. And to bring civilization to the West because wild animals like Buffalo and wolves could not be allowed to be present in a civilized country. So this is the story that for most of the 20th century, we basically told ourselves about Buffalo that the federal government had deliberately done this. We all grew up with the stories that they're being shot from trains and all of that.

Oh, they were definitely shot from trains. And they were shot down by the millions by basically by. people who also wiped out the passenger pigeons, who also wiped out pronghorn antelope and elk and big horn sheep and mule deer. I mean, all those animals were reduced to a tiny fraction because of capitalism directed at wild animal populations. I mean, we thought when we came over here and we started with beavers, of course, that all of North America was filled to the brim with wild animals and animal parts are a great kind of commodity item in the global market economy. Sure.

You can kill beavers and you can strip the pelts off of them and sell them all over the world. You can do the same thing with sea otters. You can do the same thing with seals. Sure. Foxes everything. Yeah. All of these. And so the truth is, and I mean, I'm one of the people who has tried to investigate the

earlier version I just told you, I've never been able to find any evidence that the federal government deliberately tried to do any of this. The truth is, the United States federal government never passed a law to regulate animals in North America until 1900. We stood back because we believed in capitalism and let capitalism work. This is the market economy. you simply let it work and see what happens. And if it wipes out Buffalo, if it wipes out pronghorns, if it wipes out passenger pigeons, that's just the way the market works.

That's the way it works. Yeah. So it took a whole group of sort of proto-conservationists. George Berg-Grenel, who was the editor of Forest and Stream magazine, was one of the first to begin writing editorials and arguing against this. and he talked Teddy Roosevelt into forming an organization called a Boone and Crockett Club that began to lobby to finally get the federal government to say, okay, which they did in 1900,

we're going to pass a law to end the market hunting and the shipment, the interstate shipment of animals killed for the market in the United States. Because federal government at the time, they believed that's the only thing they can do. We can regulate shipment between states, interstate commerce. We can't regulate anything else. Correct. So, yeah, this is what they tried to be.

It was very controversial, but it's the beginning of kind of what ultimately will lead to something like the Endangered Species Act in 1973. So I argue that while there were people in the government who understood that letting Buffalo be wiped out by the Buffalo hunt was going to disadvantage native people to be sure. There was no policy of doing it. What there was was a policy of standing back and letting it happen and see what the market and what capitalism was going to produce. And if it produced the benefit of having native people no longer be able to go out and leave their reservations and hunt, then that was a good thing.

but some of those native people would get it on the market. Oh, absolutely. They did. I mean, that's one of the sort of unfortunate stories of the whole native act and involvement in the global market economy was what native people learned from the very beginning of colonization was that in order to reap the benefit of this new metal technology that Europeans were bringing. to American shores. And that included not just firearms, but things like hose and rakes and metal arrowheads. All these things that were made of metal.

In order to trade for that, what the Europeans wanted, they wanted beaver pelts. They wanted buffalo robes. They wanted in the South, deer scans for the leather trade. And so the actual truth is, native people all over America. Like all the rest of us, and I've tried to couch it that way when I've written about this, I mean, they're humans just like us, and they're confronted with a time when for survival,

and in order to compete with your fellows, the only way to make it is to actually engage with these newcomers and this kind of trade. And unfortunately, to the detriment of American wildlife populations, they do so. And it makes perfect sense. Yeah. In talking about trapping and the market, everybody knows about the Lewis and Clark expedition, but you wrote a book about a different expedition that had twice the funding. And nobody has heard about it. Nobody has heard about it. Why not? Well, there's something, you know, called historical memory. Yes. And so there are things that we deliberately remember, especially as a part of a kind of a, national consciousness.

We have a story we tell ourselves. Absolutely. And there are things that we very deliberately do our best not to remember and in some cases even sweep under the rug. And this was my first book. It was called initially Jefferson and Southwestern Exploration.

And I wrote it because I had the luck of coming across this story that I knew very well there was almost no one even in the historical community that knew anything about this and particularly in that larger community of people who are fascinated with Lewis and Clark for example and that is a very large contingent of Americans

that my family has family legends about being part of that expedition well I mean you know I grew up in Louisiana romantic about the Lewis and Clark expedition. We were Missouri Charbonneaus. Yeah, well, I mean, there you go, man. So, yeah, you definitely were a part of the expedition then. So like so many other people, I was fascinated with this. And I happened to talk to an archivist one time about a project that I was working on.

And in the course of the conversation, she said, so you're really interested in the Lewis and Clark expedition. There's been a lot done on that, not a whole lot of room to do very much. But are you aware of Jefferson's other expedition? And of course, like everybody else, I said, what other expedition? I think I probably said, I may know enough history at the time. I may have said, you mean the pike expedition? And she said, oh, no, I'm not talking about the pike expedition.

that one wasn't even sent out by Jefferson anyway. That was sent out by James Wilkinson, American Military. No, Jefferson had another, a southern version of the Lewis and Clark expedition. And I said, well, my God, when? And so she told me, she said, I have a microfilm version of the official report from this expedition from 1806 and the leaders of it were a man named Thomas Freeman and a young naturalist named Peter Custis. Who?

Yeah, who? I never heard of any one of them. And with good reason, and anyone else has hardly heard of him. So I ended up becoming really fascinated with this because, I mean, obviously this was like, okay, there's another Lewis and Clark expedition. I mean, it's not led by Mary Weather Lewis and William Clark. It's led by two other people to another. And when I began doing the research on it, and I had the university where I was teaching at the time, acquire the Thomas Jefferson papers so I could look at sort of how this all began and all the things that Jefferson wrote about it.

And I had spent, you know, a lovely year and a half reading and his own handwriting Thomas Jefferson's lovely letters about all this. Your book is cinematic about this story. Yeah, it's, it is kind of cinematic. And I, you know, it is a, it's a story that it's like Apollo 13. It's one of those Apollo expeditions that you have great hopes for. Yeah. And it doesn't work. Freeman, we have a problem. Yes, we have a problem. And so that's in fact the, the kind of gist of this particular story. Tell us the story. Yeah, I'll summarize it pretty quickly for you. So Jefferson never. intended that Lewis and Clark was going to be the only part of he sent into the Louisiana territory. And if you think about it for a second, you realize, of course not. Of course not. You don't just send one up to the northern part. I mean, there's a huge amount of territory. So he plans this southern expedition that is going to go into the southwest. And he doesn't think of it in Lewis and Clark terms where it's going to go to the Pacific. Because, of course, Lewis and Clark

we're all about, we're going to do the old Northwest Passage. We're going to finally find a way through to Asia. This expedition was intended to map all the rivers of the southern Louisiana purchase that flowed into the Mississippi. And those rivers, Jefferson believed, all came out of the southern Rocky Mountains. And so initially what he planned for a second expedition that he hoped would leave like within six months or a year of Lewis and Clark going up the Missouri, is he was going to send an expedition up the Red River of the South. That's the river, if people don't know about it, that is the

boundary between Texas and Oklahoma today. He was going to send an expedition up that river, and he believed from maps that the famed geographer Alexander von Humboldt had given to Jefferson that the Red River had its sources and the Southern Rockies near Santa Fe. So this was finally going to be one of these expeditions to get out to Santa Fe. Back to Santa Fe. Back to Santa Fe. And then Jefferson, his initial plan was, I'm going to have the party cross over from the headwaters of the Red River

to the headwaters of the Arkansas River, the next river to the north that flows into the Mississippi, and come down the Arkansas. And so instead of going to the Pacific, it's going to go out to the Rockies and sort of do this loop out the Red River and back on the Arkansas River. Well, by the time he manages, Jefferson manages finally to find leaders for this expedition and to come up with all of the necessary scientific instruments for making it work. and as you mentioned at the outset, he gets an appropriation from Congress that's twice the size of that for the Lewis and Clark expedition.

And the party he organizes is going to be a much bigger party, exploration party than the Lewis and Clark party. Probably needs to. There's activity there. It needs to because of two things, really. one is that unlike the Missouri River Columbia stretch that Lewis and Clark traverse, this southern stretch is going to take you on the borders of Spain.

And Spain is not eager to have an American exploring party along its borders until the boundary, the southern boundary of the Louisiana purchase is determined. Right, because we bought that from France and Spain said, we own that. Spain says, Spain actually said, we own all the way up to the Missouri River. You get by that. Yeah, this is not yours. And France, having never really explored any of this country, was unable to say what the boundaries were. And Jefferson, for his part, published a tract in 1805 that said,

the United States believes the real grand is the southern boundary, which of course would have included. Texas and New Mexico. Of course. Yeah. So here we have the two countries, the United States, saying that the boundary is the Rio Grande and Spain saying the boundary is the Missouri, and in between is all this territory that the Red River flows through. And the other thing that makes it difficult to just do the original plan is that there is a hostile group of native people called the Osages along the Arkansas River who make it known that any Exploring expedition on our river is going to be intercepted. So to cut to the chase of this story, in 1805, in November of 1805, Jefferson believes he's

found his leader. So a young man named Thomas Freeman, who is an Irish immigrant, who had been a surveyor, who was a primary surveyor for laying out Washington, D.C., and was a very well-known surveyor an astronomer, although he was an adopted American who had been born in Ireland. That's why we don't know him. Yeah, it's one of the reasons we don't know him. Jefferson called him to Washington for a personal dinner in November of 1805, and Freeman and Jefferson sat down for three hours, and Jefferson presented Freeman a seven-page letter of exploring

instructions, eliminating the Arkansas River from the trip, sending him only up the Red River to its sources near Santa Fe, and also including this passage, which Jefferson had actually pulled out of the document that he gave Merriweather Lewis. And the passage said, if you are stopped or encountered by another force, either authorized or not authorized by a European nation, firmly resolute in turning you back from your expiration. I would prefer that you return with the information that you have gathered already than to risk the lives of American citizens in an aggressive confrontation. Do not engage. Yeah. Do not engage. So when Freeman left that meeting, He went home, wrote a letter to a friend of his, which I managed to find in the National Archives

a piece of. And in that letter, Freeman said, I have been given the assignment of exploring up the Red River to the vicinity of Santa Fe in the far country of northern Spain. How would you like to be my cashier? in that country. He says to his friend. And then he says, he concludes his letter with this line.

It's going to be a dangerous mission, but the more danger, the more honor. I will stick or go through. Wow. Yeah. Okay. So meanwhile,

Jefferson has settled on, which he never did for the Lewis and Clark expedition. He never got a scientific naturalist to add to that expedition. He has settled on a young man from Virginia who's completing a medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania named Peter Custis from a very famous Albemar County family. Martha Custis, some people will remember, was George Washington's wife. And Peter Custis is joined to the expedition after Jefferson tried to get a couple of more famous naturalists, William Bartram in particular, who was the most famous American naturalist of the time,

who had written a famous book called Travels in 1791, Jefferson approached first. But William Bartram was 65 years old, and he said, this is a little bit too arduous for me to take on. So Jefferson settles on Freeman. He adds a military expedition to the party under the command of a guy named Richard Sparks, Captain Richard Sparks, who was a good friend of Meriwether Lewis's. So the whole party, when they finally add French and Indian guides to it, comes up to almost 55 people. The Lewis and Clark party was in the low 40s.

And they started up the Red River in April of 1806, past the last settlement, which is Nackettish, the town that my family comes from in Louisiana. and above Nacadish extended the biggest log jam in North America. It was called the Great Raft and a lot of people argue that it was a

thousand years old, a thousand year old log jam that extended up the Red River for more than a hundred miles. And so to get around it, they had to go through swamps and little bayous out to the east, finally managed to get above the head of it,

headed on up the river. Peter Custis collecting plants and both Freeman and Custis writing journals of treating with the Indians and presenting excuse me American flags to the native people and they finally in early or late July right on the verge of August of 1806 having gone about 650 miles up the Red River they get basically about to the eastern border of Oklahoma and discover as they round a bend that there is a Spanish force of more than 200 troops are arrayed across the river. Spain has sent two different military contingents. Oh, they were sent. They were sent. Okay. From this, this one was the

Texas contingent sent from Nacadoches, which is a Spanish settlement in East Texas that had a Presidio. And an 800-man force from Santa Fe. Wow. Had been sent eastward in case the Texas his expedition wasn't able to stop these Americans. But when confronted by this Spanish force, Freeman consulted his letter that Jefferson had given him, and he turned around and basically went back. What happened to Honor? Well, yeah, Honor went out the window, and there are 200 Spaniards in front of you, all armed with arc buses and who knows what else. But the Americans decided to turn around and go back. And the real. reason, of course, that nobody in American history and among the public has ever heard of this

expedition is that while you want to celebrate a Lewis and Clark that goes all the way to the Pacific and comes back and is the toast of Washington, an expedition that comes back with its tail between his legs, having been turned around by another country, that's not the sort of thing that you want to remember. Now, I mean, I wrote a full book about it and found the journal the original journals of both Friedman and Custis and particular Custis' stuff on natural history was really terrific material. But there are all sorts of, you know, sort of unfortunate circumstances that even follow that because Jefferson hired a guy to write a redaction of the two journals combined into one.

This guy was named Nicholas King. And he wrote a version of the expedition that somehow, Either he couldn't read Peter Custis' handwriting, I'm not sure, but he not only combined the two journals into one, he mangled all the natural history work. So all these careful scientific binomials that Custis had used for all these plants and trees and animals he had seen end up going out to the American scientific community so mangled that anyone who saw them would have said,

Jefferson sent an idiot on this expedition. It reads like a movie. Someone should option it. It's just all these travails. It's a crazy story. And I have often thought of returning to it. I mean, one of the things I have done with it,

and one of the last of the, you know, as you probably know, I do a podcast or have been doing one. It's done finished now. But I've done a podcast called The American West. And a couple of the last episodes I did of it

was essentially a historical fiction of what would have happened. if the Spanish commander had said, okay, we're going to let you guys go ahead, but you have to stay on the north side of the Red River until we finally come up with the boundary between Spain. And so I need to listen to this. I did a historical fiction where Freeman and Custis get to continue on

into the southwest. Do you want to spoil it or no? Well, I'll say this. Okay. about it. And I certainly encourage people to take a look because a lot of research and personal exploration into the countryside went into

doing this. No, the story's so romantic. Yeah, well, it's, and the historical fiction version of it as well. I mean, I went into all the places they would have gone. But the truth of the matter is this. Alexander von Holmboldt was wrong. in his maps to Jefferson. Right.

The Red River did not come out of the southern Rockies near Santa Fe. The Red River has its sources on what's called the Yanowestikato Plateau in West Texas and eastern New Mexico. So it drains off the top of this gigantic plateau through a series of canyons, the most famous of which is Palo Duro Canyon in the Texas Panhandle. and Jefferson told Freeman specifically not only in person, but in the letter he gave him, I do not want you to go beyond the sources of the Red River. And so I'm working on a deal here. Yes. I'm working on a deal.

And so Freeman is going to get to the western edge of the Yanow Estacado Plateau in my historical version or my fictitious version of it with Santa Fe. Still 10 days away, the Southern Rocky Mountain still out of sight, and Jefferson has told him this is as far as I want you to go. So it still ends up being a failure because he's not able to get to Santa Fe as he knew probably the country wanted him to do. What they wanted to do, I think, is to start the Santa Fe trade, which, you know, in 1821, after Spain loses the southwest to Mexico. the new Republic of Mexico, Mexico opens up the trade between the United States and Santa Fe, and it becomes this very lucrative trade route. And I think that's what Jefferson had in mind was opening the Santa Fe trade.

I think you're right. I mean, the Floress were there guarding it for 100 years. Absolutely were. Hey, are you still advising colossal? I am advising colossal, although I'm going to miss their fall gathering. They're doing a September gathering in Dallas that will be the second of their big colossal bioengineering summits. I was at the one last summer, and I, in fact, was one of the first speakers for that summit. But they're doing one in September that I'm going to have to miss just because I've got, had already agreed to do a talk in Colorado right on top of it.

But yeah, I'm still on the advisory board or the conservation board. Yeah, I mean, I think they mostly do conservation, but they're known for, for de-extinction. What they're best known for because of the dire wolf story, of course, is de-extinction. How do they make a dire wolf? Well, they made a dire wolf, and this is sort of how de-extinction works. What you do is you try to find the existing animal that most closely resembles genetically the species you're interested in that became extinct. And so in the case of the dire wolf, that's, of course, the gray wolf. So what they did with the gray wolf genome,

and the gray wolf, its genome has been reconstructed. So we've got a very good genomic baseline for gray wolves, what colossal did was to go into the specimens collections around America. And the dire wolf is very specifically an American wolf. It's not found anywhere else in the world. So, you know, unfortunately for George R.R. Martin, there would have been no dire wolves in medieval Westeros, wherever Westeros was, which looks an awful lot like sort of Western Europe. But it does. Yeah.

But the dire wolves are actually American wolves. And what colossal did was to go into the museum specimens collections, and they found two skulls that they were able to extract enough DNA from to be able to recognize. And one of these skulls was 73,000 years old. Wow. And one of them was 13,000 years old. With viable DNA. viable DNA. And with that DNA signature from those two skulls,

they were able to recognize 28 different alils that were not found in the gray wolf genome that were distinctive to both of those thyr wolf skulls. And so what they did was to use CRISPR genetic engineering to engineer those 28 al-als into a gray wolf genome and produced puppies. Don't you wish you could just hit skip on the worst parts of your life? You know the same way you can skip an ad. I get it.

I'm Siaya and I live in Ice Cove. I've made some questionable decisions that didn't end up the way I planned. And today I'm still figuring it out. Somehow things usually get worse before they get better. Apparently, that's how I roll. So bundle up and come along for the bumpy ride. Stream a new episode of North of North Tuesdays on CBC Gem. Based on that genetic information, that as we all have seen, because of course this became a global story.

Gerolumulus and Remus and Colise. And Calisi. That's right. Have you seen them yet? I have not seen them. I've only seen... Because I don't think they're... No.

They don't release where they're... are. No, they do not release where they are. And although I have a strong idea where they are, I'm not at liberty to say either. No, don't. And I have not seen them, of course. And I have seen personal videos that people who are with them have taken of them. And they are, as we all know, because there have been plenty of release photos and some video, too. They are, and this actually was a surprise because the assumption was that Dyer Wolves were likely to be read it turns out that those genetic signatures from dire wolf genes produce pure white. Yes.

Animals. I mean, all these animals are gloriously white. And, of course, they are larger. They're approaching two years old now. So they are considerably larger than gray wolves. I don't know exactly how much the two males way. I know the female is slighter than the two males, but they are really remarkable animals. And here's what I would say about this.

Genetically, I think they represent something very close to Dyerwolves. But of course, we don't have Dyerwolf culture to teach them. Right. They don't have a mother. They don't have a mother. They don't have a legacy coming down from wild dire wolves that they can absorb. And one of the things we now know about wild animals, of course, is that they, just like us, they have culture.

They learn things. They have a Tito. They, I mean, with, particularly with canids, I mean, the sort of instruction period is very long. I mean, it's not as long as we instruct human infants and children, but it lasts for, a year or two anyway, and these wolves don't have that. So what we have are animals that we think probably look like dire wolves, but they can't be dire wolves because they don't exist in the wild and they have no dire wolf's cultural legacy to call on.

That's what I was going to ask you. Is that a real dire wolf? And it probably isn't. No, I think what a lot of, a lot of ecologists and biologists have argued, and I think they're probably right, is that without those critical aspects, I mean, what? what you have is an animal that may well look like a dire wolf. Its morphology may be dire wolf. But it can't be a dire wolf because it doesn't know how to be one.

Is there any ethical issue with the extinction? Well, yes, there are ethical issues, obviously, because what you don't want ultimately, and this is going to be the fate of these particular animals. I mean, and I think what Colossal had in mind here was they wanted to demonstrate because they were working and still are working on four or five different de-extinction. Yeah, we're waiting on the mammoth, right?

They're working on the mammoth. They're working on the dodo. They're working on the thylacine, the Tasmanian tiger. Yeah, so they're working on a lot of different things. The Dyer Wolf came first because it was the easiest one out of that group to do. Canids are relatively more easy than particularly than birds are. And there were also donors. A colossal is a, it's a for-profit company.

It's a multi-billion dollar company. Yes, it is. And there were donors who wanted to see a dire wolf. And so there was some of that happening. I have ethical concerns, but I want to see a mammoth. Yeah, I do too. And I want to see a thylacine. Sure.

So the issue, of course, is that these animals, these dire wolves, Romulus, and Kleecy, are not going to get to be anything other than caged animals. What you want ultimately, and this is one of the things, of course, that we talk about when we have our summits and our conferences and the conservation board assembles and we're able to offer our thoughts and our advice to Colossal and the people who are running Colossal is that what one ultimately wants to see is some way of releasing these animals into the wild. Oh, I've read this book, though.

Yeah. Well, yeah, you have read. And we've all seen the movie, too, of course. But it depends on acquiring some piece of ground. And, of course, before the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, the idea was we're going to get a Siberian Pleistocene Park. And this is where animals like this are going to go. Now that's become problematic because of the war. And it's difficult to come up with.

places that you can think of in northern Canada say are Alaska and Canada is probably not in a cooperative mood with the United States right now. So we've got Siberia eliminated as a result of the invasion of the Ukraine. We've got Canada pissed off and Alaska is about the only possibility and you know right now we're basically an administration hoping to drill all across the northern reaches of Canada, even offering bids in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. So finding a place for things has been the next problematic step. And if you have mammoths, if you have dire wolves, demonstrating that you can do it is one step, but you don't want to leave it. And then.

No. So that's kind of where colossal is at the moment. You think they could develop a culture over time? Yes, I think they probably could. I think if you have subsequent generations, but they have to be in the wild in order to do it. I mean, they can certainly develop a pen culture, but that's not the culture you want. Yeah, you want them to be in the wild and you want them to have the experience of being able to interact with prey. I mean, that's what's going to produce some kind of dire wolf culture. It may not be the dire wolf culture of the Pleistocene because all. the animals of the placocene are not going to be on hand.

Right. The prey isn't there. But it might be, you know, it's going to be something. But, yeah, this is the issue. I mean, you know, so that it doesn't just look like a stunt that we've finally been able to come up with the scientific ability to do. We have to think in terms of some kind of recovery. So one of the things that's happening in New Mexico and one of Ted Turner's ranches, for example, is the Bolson tortoise, which is an, an extinct or was it extinct, nearly extinct, a Placocene Tortus, is being recovered by colossal and is being released.

And that's an animal, of course, that you can release. Yes. And not really worry that people are going to go, holy shit. You mean, you've got a giant wolf that you've turned loose. Right. Yeah. Yeah, the tortoise is, you know, not going to scare anybody. But, yeah, it's that.

And as you said, I appreciate you saying this, too, what colossal. What colossal is most involved with is trying to prevent wildlife around the globe from going extinct and from using genetic engineering to assist in providing a healthier kind of diverse genetic possibility among the founding populations of those animals in order for them to succeed. I think this is a science that's going to stick around. Yeah, it is. There's no doubt about it. And they are, you know, and I haven't heard the latest in a few months, but the last time I did here, I mean, there are countries and governments and conservation organizations all over the world that are partnering with colossal to help with these kinds of things.

Yeah, they're doing great work. Last story that I'd want from you, if you don't mind, is if you can tell us about Chicky. Yeah, chicky. Okay. I have a reason for asking. Okay. So this is a story that I had never told before until I wrote While New World, except to personal friends and to my wife who's heard it. But it was a story that, you know, really kind of changed my way of thinking about the world, in part because,

It's the oldest memory I have. You know, a lot of people argue, psychologists of the human condition argue that usually your earliest memories are from about the age of four. And I was four years old. And I had my first little animal companion, which was a little yellow chicken of the kind that you can get at feed stores in the spring. A little fuzzy thing. Yeah, a little fuzzy thing.

And, you know, I'm four years old. so I'm not really imaginative with the name, and so I name it Chicky. And so Chicky and I was this first little animal companion that I really fell in love with, and I gave it water, and I fed it, and it slept with me as it was growing up, and I don't even remember how long I had it,

although I think it was probably in the nature of maybe a month or six weeks, not a really long time, because it was still a little small chicken when this happened. But it would, chicky and I would do these games of chase through the house. And we would run through the house and chicky would dart under the kitchen table

and I would go after chicky. And so I'm a little clumsy four-year-old and one day I'm chasing chicky and I accidentally step on chicky and kill my little pet chicken. So I'm traumatized, obviously. And my mother says, well let's go you know let's go bury chicky out in the backyard and she got a little box and we went out

and dug a little grave for chicky and put chicky in the box and i gave chicky some little pieces of food and a leaf and i don't remember what else but two or three things i put in with chicky i think probably my mother's urging who told me this is one of the things you do and close the box and and covered chicky up with dirt. And as we were doing it, of course, tears coming down my face, I turned to my mom and I said, so, Mom, I'm going to get to see chicky in heaven, right? And my mother, who was always this sort of, you know,

straight to the mark, honest kind of person, even if you were four years old, said, why no honey so you're a human and you have an everlasting soul and when humans die we get to go to heaven but animals don't

have souls they're just animals so when an animal dies it's just it's gone and the reason of course this is my earliest memory is because of the power of a story like that which is sort of

the classic Judeo-Christian story of humans are the only animals made in the image of God. We're the only ones with souls. Everything else is made for our use. And I think from the age of four, with that idea in my head that produced those books that are sitting over here. It did. Because that did not seem right to me. Not having known this little bird and love this little bird, that was not something I was willing to accept. And so many, many years later, I think that was the origin of books like Coyote America and Wild New World and American Syringtty. Well, I'm a pet guy. I'm an animal guy. Obviously, you are.

So when one of my boys goes, one of my cats, I get to see him again. Well, here's what I think is probably the truth. I think the truth is the soul as a distinction to make humans exceptional from all other creatures is a fiction. It's a nice fiction, but I think there are no souls for either humans or animals. and probably at the end, there's not much to look forward to, no matter if you're a cat, a human, or a little chicken. That's dark, but I guess I'm not going to care. I think if it happens that way, yeah, you're not going to care.

That's the end of things. But yeah, that's kind of, I've not been able to find any good evidence for being able to look forward to a kind of an afterlife that includes, me and all the animals that I've had throughout my life. And, you know, I mean, when I think of them now and some of the ones I've lost, I mean, my stomach goes into knots. Of course. Right now, for animals that I lost 50 years ago. I mean, I had an experience going for a run just about a month ago where I happened to think

of this dog that I had one time and what happened to him. a moment when he was still young. He was crazy about me and I was crazy about him and I lost him in a really stupid accident that I should have been able to avoid for him. What happened? He got run over on a street following me and what, I mean, it was a really stupid thing. I, it's going to turn my stomach in a notch just telling it. But I had, this young dog had followed me to a convenience store and he had waited for me at the door and I was inside the store buying something. When I came out, he was not there. And my assumption was that he had probably just turned around and went across the street

because the house was just a block or so on the other side of the street. And so thinking that he had gone home and stupidly not calling for him, I walked across the street and got home and he wasn't there. and about the time I turned around to go back, I heard tire screeching on the road. And he had been around the side of the building, finally realized I wasn't inside anymore, and it started home and had gone across the street

and got hit by a car. And I mean, man, I can't think of that one without really kind of being torn up about it. And I've had two or three. What was his name? His name was Gandhi. Gandhi. Gandhi.

Yeah. I think you're going to see Gandhi again. I'm going to stick with it. Yeah. If there are everlasting souls, I can guarantee you Gandhi has got one. Thanks for coming in today. This has been a pleasure. It's been my pleasure too.

It's been great fun. Anything you want to tell the folks where to find you? What books, websites? Well, I don't do social media. Smart. And I apologize for that. my wife does Sarah Dan is her name she's a former professor and a writer too and so whatever social media we need she usually does but I don't do social social media I don't have a website but my stuff is

easy to find it's in most bookstores and of course Amazon has an author site for me and so all the books are there and they're easily come by but most local bookstores have them too and I always am a great advocate for local bookstores. Same. Dan Flores was here. Here's the Gandhi. Man, no kidding. Thank you so much. Bye, everybody. That was Dan Flores. Let's start with the law I didn't believe. In 1905, Montana ordered its state pet to infect coyotes and wolves with mange and turned them loose to carry it home. I looked it up. It's a real law, real program. And Yellowstone wolves are still catching range today. Now, White Sands. In 2021, the year, US Geological Survey and a team of British geologists published dates for the footprints,

23,000 years old. Skeptics attacked the number, so the team ran it again, two more ways. The footprints won. Then there's the Buffalo. Dan says there was never a federal policy to exterminate them, just a government content to watch the market do it. Other historians point at the generals who cheered the slaughter on, but nobody's ever found an order. On the paper trail, Dan's right. Now, Chicky. Every book Dan is written goes back to the day his mother told a four-year-old that his chicken had no soul. Dan still thinks she was right, nothing waiting, not for chickens, or for us. Then he choked up over a dog he lost 50 years ago. I'll tell you what I told him. I think he's going to see Gandhi again.

Dan doesn't do social media, which might be why he's the happiest man to ever sit in that chair. Start with Coyote America at your local bookstore, and everything I mentioned is linked below. Until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated. A scenario 51, a secret code inside the Bible said I would. Love my UFOs and paranormal fun as well as music. So I'm singing the like I should. Now the conspiracy theory becomes the truth with my friends, and it never ends. No, it never ends.

With M. K. Outra. A being on with a shadow thought the smiling man. I'm dirt watcher. Reaching your audience on Spotify with display ads is easy. Use your existing creative and launch your first campaign in minutes with Spotify Ads Manager.