Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks - A Zebra Bit a Man’s Arm... Off? - News Stories including A Monkey Tearing Off Ears and Ripping Out Hair, Flaco the Eurasian Eagle-owl’s New York Escape, and More

Episode Date: April 3, 2023

The guys once again discuss some of the more notable recent animal attack headlines, covering the man whose arm was the target of an overly aggressive zebra, a Florida resident who was the unwitting host of an alligator on his doorstep, a fugitive owl's escapades in Central Park, and a mountain lion's assault on a hot tub in Colorado. ~~ To advertise on the show, contact us! ~~ Tooth & Claw is brought to you by QCODE. Support the show and get access to an extensive library of exclusive episodes like this by supporting the show on Patreon or joining the Grizzly Club on Apple Podcasts. For the latest updates on the show and all things wildlife, follow us at toothandclawpod.com and social:  Instagram: @ToothandClawPodcast Twitter: @ToothandClawPod Wes: @GrizKid Jeff: @jefe_larson Mike: @mikey3ds    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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We got Wes, number one podcaster in the world. That's me. And their biologist, wildlife expert. Yep, yep. We got Jeff, field tech, and koala brain. Okay. And we got Mike, who is kind of an avid gym goer recently. Ooh, back in the groove, huh?

If by gym, you mean my stationary bike downstairs, then yeah. I've been going hard on that little guy. Sure. I felt like you were getting back from the gym when I got here. No, I was just out on a walk, which, you know, nature is humanity's gym, you could say. Sure. Yeah, me and Mike are in the same house right now. I'm at Mike's house, and I, like, can hear him a little bit because we're in different rooms.

So I try not to spoil what he says if I hear it before you guys. Okay. Point two seconds before. You know what's crazy is Mike has like way more bear decorations than either of us. I doubt he has more than I have. I guarantee you he does. Really? Yeah.

I just went in the bathroom he never uses and counted at least eight different bear decorations. Wow. Who put those up, Mike? Your mom or your dad? I think it was my grandma. She always loved bears. She always named her dog's bear, even though they were not bears. I don't know where that started.

But yeah, there's just like a weird, almost obsessive fascination with bears. But like just looking around my room right now, there's like thousands of bears just everywhere you look. I remember once I went through my mom's house and took photos of all the bear decorations that she had, and it was like hundreds. It was definitely more than me. Yeah. Speaking of house guests, so you stayed at my house last week, and my new white towel had like a few brown spots on it. Care to comment? I think I used your red towel, to be honest.

I don't think I used the white one. Because like after you shower, there's not much that can make a towel brown. No. I don't, you know, to be completely honest with you here, Jeff, first of all, our listeners know I don't shy away from an embarrassing poop story, so they know that I'm being honest when I say this. I don't think it was me because I don't really dry my butt that well when I take a shower. It's like a weakness of mine that I find that often I like put my underwear on.

I'm like, I wish I would have dried myself off a little bit better. You know what just came to me because I was 100% convinced it as poop. Yeah. I'm guessing someone like rinse their hands on it. That could be it. Because like I don't really have like a hand towel that's like and it wasn't quite right for poop. Yeah. But I was thinking maybe West stuck my towel like way up his butt.

I can tell you this. personally. I remember coming out of the shower and not knowing which towel to use, and I used the red one because I was like, well, this one won't look dirty if it's not the one that I'm supposed to use. So you're going to have to search a little harder for that culprit there about. Also speaking of guests. It could be myself. I'll actually put a camera in my bathroom. That's smart. Yeah, right in the toilet so no one can see it.

It'll be a secret one. Lance Reddick. He died, guys. I know. I was really bummed out about that. And when you said the house guest, when you brought that up, Jeff, it reminded me of the movie The Guest. And he was in that. That's a great movie.

He's awesome. Who is he in that? He's like the responding deputy that goes out in the police squad car to like. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I know who he is. Yeah, that guy's cool. I'm going to go see John Wick tomorrow night in his honor. Oh, man.

You're going to have a great time. Oh, I thought you were going to see. that with me. I was, but then Mike saw it already, so I think I'm just going to see it. Because Mike's coming up, too. You really just wanted to see it with Mike. No, I wanted to see it with both of you, but there's no sense in us going to a movie that one of us has seen. Mike will go again. It's not like... Well, let's go see Dungeons and Dragons. It looks fine. Or Mario. It's not like it's like the sixth sense where like... Yeah, that's true. The first watch ruins it. Yeah, that's true. I don't want to see Mario.

Okay. I'll see whatever. I don't care. Let's go see ambulance again. Oh, that's not a theater. Deal. What was I going to say about, oh, have you seen that Twitter? It's like going on Twitter right now, this interview from Dan Stevens when he originally filmed the guest. He's like the British actor, but he played an American actor. And he's like on a morning show. He's like on a morning show and the morning show guest is like, hey, this is a big role for you and it's an American role. and she's like, you must have beat off a lot of American guys to get this role. He's like, excuse me? He just starts laughing. I must have what?

And she's like, beat off a lot of American guys. And he's like, uh, she doubled down. And then she's like, like, with the stick, with the stick. And he just like can't stop laughing and derails the interview. It's really funny. Oh, that's perfect. He's very charming. I really like Dan Stevens.

Yeah, he's great. Hey, if you're a listener, Dan, we'd love to have you on sometime. Yep. Yeah, probably not. What's his wildlife background? Exactly. Probably couldn't contribute much. Jake Jill and I still trying to get on.

We won't let him. Didn't he have a horse fall on him or something in Downton Abbey? Isn't that how he died? Is that how he got crippled? Oh, he died. Oh, shoot. Oh, that's a good, yeah, we could talk about that then. Yeah.

There you go. Well, should we get to our episode or what the heck should we do? Let's get to it, dude. All right. I'm ready. Are you ready, Mike? News stories. Hold on.

I got a great one. Let me do some tongue twist. You got tongue twisters, Mike? Well, you know how you get warmed up when you're doing, like, vocal exercises. Like the... We've been going for, like, six minutes. I know, I'm just feeling... I can't even, like, say tongue twisters the first time.

Like... Tongasters? It, like... Yeah, like, what's my... Like, say this five times fast. Like, Sally's sold sea shells by the seashore. Yeah. Like, people, like, normally say it five times and mess up and, like, I...

Sally's told seashells by the seashore. Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, I nominate West to go first. Okay. Well, before we go, I want to do a quick correction corner that a listener reminded me about a while ago. It's not really, it's something that I said very black and white that I just wanted to insert a little gray into, which was we were talking about sharks.

And I said that typically when a shark kills a person, they don't try and like catch that shark that's responsible just because it's really hard to know which shark was responsible. And that holds true. It is really hard to know what shark is responsible. often they don't catch the right shark, but sometimes certain countries will try and catch the shark. And so I want to make that clear that sometimes it still does happen, even though it's rare that they catch the right animal. Sometimes they will go and try at least. But the more, the more we learn about them, the more that's just kind of seems like a fool's errand, if you will. Oh, I have a correctional corner, too. What is it?

Last time my good news was that, like, we thought the Sierra Red Fox was extinct. and a listener emailed me and was like, my friend took a picture of one right here. And like my whole thing was this is the first picture anyone's taken of one in like 80 years. And it ended up, it's just a poorly worded article that I saw and it's like the first time someone had taken one in that area.

They're like in danger, but like people first, they're for sure not as dire as I made it out to be. That's always misleading, and I hate, like, there was a minute when there's all this news, probably five, ten years ago, where it was like, the Eastern Cougar is extinct. It's been declared extinct. And everyone was sharing it, everyone was like, this is so terrible. I can't believe we let this happen. And, like, the Eastern Cougar is the same animal as the Western Cougar.

It just means that, like, they weren't in the East anymore. They were out of the East. But using the word extinct carries a lot of weight, and it was, like, regionally extinct. but still doing great in other places. So you've got to be careful with that word. Yeah. All right. My first story I've titled Rees and Pieces in Oklahoma,

Rhesus spelled like Rhesus Macaque. Or is that macaque on your porch or are you just happy to see me? Which really doesn't make any sense. So wait. You have two, is it like, choose your own adventure titles? Just don't worry about it. Those are two titles that are options. I'm going to pick the second one.

No, I like the second one. Okay. All right, so I'm going to paint a little picture for you guys. That's going to take a while, and that's bad for a podcast. Yeah, it's actually a mental picture, so don't you worry? Perfect, actually. All right. Imagine you're a young mom.

It's an early March morning in Dixon, Oklahoma. You look outside, you can feel the approaching spring and warm weather. It's a really nice feeling, and you settle into a really relaxing morning with your son. When something outside catches your attention, that can't be. be, you think to yourself, not here in Oklahoma. But as you get closer, you realize that your eyes aren't playing tricks on you. There's a medium-sized monkey outside, and it's frantically trying to break into your house. Seems like a crazy story, right?

A fairy tale. This actually happened this month in Oklahoma. This is a situation that... It's a medium-sized monkey compared to a bus. Compared to a bus? It'd be like... I don't know. 150th?

I don't know. It's a recess. It's a recess macawks. So around 60 pounds is how big they get, but probably a little bit lighter than that. All right. So this is the situation that Brittany Parker found herself in the morning of March 12, 2003, excuse me. The monkey's banging around on her storm door. It's jumping off her railing and swinging around on her house, and it's on her porch,

and then it beelines for the door. And she runs over and grabs the handle, and this monkey is literally turning the handle trying to get into her house, and she's having to hold the door to keep it out. And while she's, yeah, while she's doing that, she gets. grabs her phone and she calls the police. And the police get there and as they get there in their truck, the monkey jumps on the rear of their patrol vehicle. And for whatever reason, I think in one of the articles I read, Brittany Parker said that

like it seemed like maybe the monkey was acting a little bit more normally now. So she leaves the house. That's like the monkey's in Jumanji. The first one. They take them on the cough car. Anyway, that's a good poll. She leaves the house because she's feeling a little bit more comfortable. her and her son leave the house to get a better look at what's going on with this monkey and the cops.

And as soon as she leaves the house, the monkey sees her, charges at her, runs up her back and latches onto the back of her head and then violently starts ripping out clobbs of her hair and then rips her ear almost completely off her head. Oh, wait. Almost everything. I read a bunch of articles about this. None of them clarified if it used its teeth or its hands to do this. But a rhesus macaque would be able to do that with its hands.

It would be strong enough probably that it could rip her ear with its hands. So I'm guessing it was probably its hands. There's no clarification of how this attack ended. I assume that after it she started screaming and it ripped her ear, it just ran off. But she was transported to Mercy Hospital in Ardmore, Oklahoma, before she was transferred to the OU Medical in Oklahoma City. She got stitches. She's going to need plastic surgery to repair her ear.

and after she was transferred to the hospital, the police officers went to the owner's house to talk to the owner. The owner tried to recover the monkey, wasn't able to. And Parker in the hospital, Brittany, she called a friend or like a family member or something. And that person went and tracked this monkey down and managed to shoot and kill it. But not before being slapped by this monkey and also having some of his hair pulled out as well. So the monkey was really on a, a tear.

I wonder if he, like, shot it while it was on his face. Yeah, I don't know. Like with a handgun or something. It would be so scary. I want to talk to this guy. But none of these articles said what type of monkey it was, but I looked at the photos. I'm 95% sure this was a rhesus macaque. It's an old world monkey.

You find them commonly in south, central, and southeast Asia. They're all over city centers in those places. So, like, in India, for example, both in Taiwan, and India. No, actually in Taiwan, there were Formosan rock macaques, which is fun to say. In India, they were... I try it. Yeah, you want to say it right now? Yeah.

What do it? McCox. Formosan rock macaque. Anyway, in India, these rhesus macaques are everywhere. Like, if you go to New Delhi, if you go to Jaipur, if you go to any of the big city centers, you see them just like all around. And they're really used to being around people. there's actually a really interesting history of them in the U.S. of feral populations.

So in 1938, there was a colony of Rhesus Macawks that was released around Silver Springs, Florida by a tour boat operator who wanted to, like, create a jungle cruise kind of experience. So he released all these monkeys to like be an exhibit on his jungle crews. And they did really well. They bred with each other. They're still there in, you know, in modern times. No way. They've thrived.

Florida is such a crazy place, dude. It is. Everything survives in Florida. Anyway, the majority of these monkeys now have herpes bee. It can be passed to humans. It's deadly if it is past to humans. It's not funny, Mike. So, as you would think, like, state wildlife officials started removing those monkeys from Florida.

And then when they did, there was this huge public uproar where people, like, no, we want these monkeys. And all these animal rights and, like, groups got involved. and it got so tricky that they stopped removing them in 2012. But they actually do a ton of damage. They eat a lot of bird eggs. There's another group in Puerto Rico that's wild there that are feral that they do as much as a million dollars in damage to agriculture every year. So they're like, they're not a great animal to have around.

Really quick before we move on. They're the ones with like, they're brown with red faces. Yeah. It's like they're very, if you ever see videos of like monkeys running around old, like historical temples and stuff in India or they kind of they okay are they the ones that like hot tub in the natural spring I was about to say they kind of look like those ones that's a Japanese species of that macaque macaque but um these are a lot of cox yeah yeah but these are rhesus macaques yeah but Mike said it like they weren't macaques I thought oh I was saying

after west said Japanese I was just going to finish his sentence that's how that's how tight we are as friends. And a lot of people do say macaque. I just, like, for whatever reason, I say macaque. Those are, like, people who just can't handle like any type of bad word. Yeah. Macac.

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Saturday, May 16th at 9 p.m. Eastern Center time, 6 p.m. Pacific time. Anyway, I did read up a bit and when I was in India I learned a bit about this too, about what you should do if you're confronted by an aggressive macaque. The main thing is you want to avoid eye contact with them, you don't want to get too close to them, and you want to avoid like smiling wide and bearing your teeth at them because they see all of those things as aggressive kind of things on your side. So number one, don't get too close to them. That's the main thing.

If you don't do that, they're probably not going to charge it you or do anything to you. If you do get too close and one kind of squares up on you, don't maintain eye contact and don't bear your teeth. I did once with one of like a little or one that kind of squared up and I looked at it just because I was curious if that was true. And it like jumped at me. and tried grabbing. Whoa.

Yeah. I have a little video of it, actually, that I'll share. Do those rules change it off? They're dressed in people clothes? Yeah, if they're dressed in people clothes, then you... Just give them a high five. Yeah, give them a high five. Give them a little nuggie.

Maybe let it right on your shoulders. Anyway, a lot of times, too, when they do come toward people, it's because the person's eating something or has something that they want. If you're in, like, an urban center and that's happening, I would advise just giving it, like throwing it and then getting out of there. You're not going to be food conditioning them. They're already food conditioned in those urban centers, but it'll stop it from wanting to come after you.

It probably depends on what I'm eating. Yeah. If Jeff's got a red and yellow starburst, he's keeping him to himself. Yeah, he's not throwing those. Yeah. All right, that's my first story, and I'm sticking to it. Do you know, whenever I hear an animal has like a transmittable disease, and it's phrased as they can pass it to humans.

What I see in my brain is like them balling up that STD and throwing it like a football to a human. Like a Dragon Ball Z. Yeah, Kameameh, I don't know why. This just makes me laugh when I hear that. Interesting. It's not funny though, right, Jeff? I wasn't really laughing, but I did zone out a little bit there.

To be honest. We'll go. I'll go next. How about that? Perfect. Zebra. We got a lot of people. writing in about this zebra frockis that occurred not too long ago.

You don't even like zebras. Oh, oh, Jeff, you're opening Pandora's box a little too soon. We're going to get to that. I love zebras. Zebras are so freaking sweet. Not this one though. Let's get into this story. So this was reported March 14th is what I saw mostly around on all of these news articles I was peeping around on.

Deputies were called out to a farmstead in Circleville, Ohio after getting Huh? Sorry. It's pie day. Oh, that's right. I was trying to think why March 14th is like a big day and I couldn't until you started telling the story. Yeah, I saw you, I saw you zone out again. It was kind of like when Homer like is trying to think of something and you see his brain working.

The thought bubble. Now while he's talking, I'm going to be thinking about dad's pies. Yeah. Okay. March 14th, pie day. Okay. The Deputies were called out to a farmstead in Circleville, Ohio, after getting a call from a 72-year-old man who said his arm had been bitten off by a zebra while he was out burning brush on his property. Liar.

We actually helped Wes not too long ago burn some brush out on his property. You did. Yeah. Yeah. Luckily, there weren't too many zebras out there. My neighbor just lit their entire yard on fire doing that, and like six fire trucks came and the news came and stuff. Yeah. Really?

Yeah. Isn't that like Jesse's biggest fear of your house? Yeah. Did you sneak behind the reporter and try to get on camera, like all those doofuses at sports games that are like waving and stuff? No, but I rode my motorcycle over to ask my neighbors if they needed any help. Okay. Anyway, the first deputy on the scene pulled up to see what he described as,

quote, a very hostile large male zebra charging his patrol vehicle. So he flipped on his air horn and sirens to scared away, just for long enough to get out and apply a tourniquet to the man's arms and get them loaded into the ambulance. All the while, though, this zebra was continuing to pace menacing around on the scene, just kind of like present but not really doing anything too egregious, so they are letting it be for the time. But a member of this man's family, the man who got attacked, said that if they need to, they should put the zebra down,

which is what I told you guys after the Chargers lost in the playoffs to do to me. that we could put you down if we needed to. Yeah. Yeah, every day. It was questionable if the public safety was in danger there for a little bit. Yeah. Body camera footage shows a man chasing the zebra away eventually with a large stick. But after about only a minute of keeping its distance from the group, the animal eventually began, quote, walking aggressively towards the deputies.

Huh. The stick stopped working. The stick doesn't work. They started shouting at it. That stopped working. It just was unfazed by the stick and by shouts. Yeah. And I'm not, again, I'm not, I don't want to pass any judgment because, like, an animal that can do damage that's walking at you.

It can be pretty frightening, you know? Yeah. Zebras are big. And they're, I mean, yeah, they can do a lot of damage. I had some friends that, I have some friends that worked at, like, a rescue place in Florida. And they said the animal they were, like, the least excited to ever enter in that seclosure or do anything with was their zebra. And they had, like, bears and a mountain lion and crocodile. and alligators and all sorts of stuff.

And they said the zebra was like the one that was just always pissed off at them, like all the time. Yeah. Yeah. I bet a zebra would smile at a macaque and not even think twice. Yeah. I think you're right. Just stare straight in the eyes. Yeah.

Where was I? Sorry. The zebra's approaching them. Yes. My guess is they're going to shoot it. Yes. That's what they do best. shouting at it proved to be completely ineffective at this point.

And so one of the deputies fired a shotgun at the zebra's head killing it. Yeah. In his words, the zebra didn't slow down and kept coming. So again, I don't know. I don't know how close it got, how dangerous the situation seemed to these people. I think that's justified, you know? Sure. Yeah.

So the man who originally was attacked, he was taken to Grant Hospital in Columbus. he's undergone a number of operations as of March 14th, and it sounded like he would still need several more. And the sheriff who's on the scene, he said that there was some damage to his arm, but we believe that we saved it. So that's a positive thing, because at first they thought that the zebra totally tore it off.

I was right when I called him a liar right at the start. Yeah. Well, sure. Yeah. Yeah, you can't. You know, if you ever get your arm ripped by something, don't say it ripped it off unless it's actually off right it's easy to tell yeah you know look at it and be like is this attached to me still sometimes people have a hard time with like phantom limb

you know i don't think that sets in immediately yeah so i don't know i've it's never happened to me i was thinking about pie at the very start this is in ohio right and he yes didn't know that there's a zebra like it wasn't his zebra it's just some random zebra like was Is he, like, shocked to see a zebra? Where did I have this? Really quick. Like, while you're looking that up, Ohio has some of the most lenient, exotic animal laws of any state. And at some point, we're going to do the story.

I think the city is called Zanesville. But there's a city in Ohio where this guy had, like, a menagerie. He had his own zoo. He had, like, hundreds of animals. And he killed himself. And before he did, he let all his animals go. And this was in, like, 2011 or something. And there was just, like, hundreds.

of exotic, like tigers, lions, like all sorts of animals, like, running around this town. And the cops all had to go, like, kill them pretty much. And it's a crazy story. But Ohio's known. Yeah, that story's crazy. Yeah. Outside of, like, Florida, Ohio's known for, like, some pretty wild, probably the craziest exotic animal stories.

Yeah. So, basically, this guy had zebra, zebras on his property as domesticated animals. I don't think he qualified quite as pets, but he knew that they were there. They were his. Like he lived on a farmstead. So it wasn't insane that a zebra was there. But it was atypical behavior from this zebra because there just had never been any issues like this before. Yeah, that it's atypical.

He's like, well, this has never happened before. This seems a little weird. Well, I don't know. This guy doesn't seem to know whether his arm gets bitten off or not all the way. He, like, has one arm, and he's like, this has never happened before. And he's like, oh, wait, actually, once it did happen. This is actually typical behavior. It's only the second time.

Yeah. So as we were referencing before, I wanted to get in to a little bit why I think zebras are way cooler than horses, if you'll allow me. Wait, can I tell my zebra thing real quick? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Go ahead. So mine's more just like. quick recap story, but there's a zebra with, it's one of those things where like the actual story is not too cool, so I'm just going to say what happened, but the pictures are awesome.

So the zebra escaped a wildlife thing in Seoul Korea. It might have been a zoo, but it escaped and was just like running through like traffic in Seoul Korea. And then like there's all these pictures of it running past people and like it goes in this like really narrow alleyway and it's just just like sprinting through it and like these people are just seeing a zebra in like one of the biggest cities in the world. Yeah. So I don't know. It's just like really funny pictures. And then I showed Mike the video and when they trinkalized it and the zebra like drunkenly fell over, he laughed way harder than I expected.

I just I just never have seen an animal that big get tranked in real time. And it was like, whoa, that really is just kind of knocked it off its feet. Yeah. It's really weird. both its parents died and it had been like acting like very abnormally or like very much more aggressively after that and just broke through his wooden fence and took a stroll through korea it reminds me james and the giant peach because isn't that how his parents died didn't like an escaped animal kill him like a rhino or something oh that is what happened that seems right

okay yeah i'll trust you on that one jeff all right oh that jess why zebras are better than Before you get into this just really quick, too, I just want people to know that, like, zebras aren't technically a wild horse. They're very closely related to horses, but the only wild horse is, shoot, what are they called? They live in, like, Mongolia and stuff, I think. No, they're called, um, uh, shoot, I'm drawn a blank.

Anyway, there's a wild species of horse that lives in that part of the world, but that's the only wild species, um, truly wild. It's, so zebras aren't technically a horse. Okay. What are they actually the wild ones in the U.S.? What are they called? Those are feral horses. Farrell.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like previously domesticated but then like moved back into, yeah, existing on the room. It's like Burowski's horses or something. I can't remember. Anyways, that's the wild one. Yeah.

So zebra, they're actually, zebras are more closely related to donkeys than horses. Right. Donkeys are also sweet. We can talk about that later. Less cool than zebras, but still cool. Donkeys are cool. So my first bullet point is they have mohawks. Some horses have mohawks.

Yeah, but I mean, not like as cool as zebras when they're all, they're still like the same striped coloration. Fair not. So cool. Point number two, they have stripes. And I know horses can have spots, which is pretty interesting. But stripes are like way cooler than spots. You never see like on race cars. They put like the speed stripe going across.

You don't see speed spots put on any cars. Do you have a favorite pop culture mohawk? I'll start. I like the one in Cobra Kai, Hawk. How he's kind of like a dorky kid and then like gives himself a mohawk and somehow grows like two inches of hair. And then he's like such a good character. I like Rufio's double mohawk in hook. Oh, that's a good one.

Yeah. I'll have to think. All I can think of is Jack from Tekken, but I don't know. It's like this weird metallic ridge. Pretty cool. Point number three, the word zebra is derived from an old Portuguese term zevra, which means wild ass, meaning these asses be violent. Okay. Okay.

So let's get into a little bit more biology. I don't want to, like, maybe we'll do zebras again later on. We can really dig deep. But I just wanted to go over a couple of things that I found really interesting about zebras. To survive in an environment with a ton of large predators, like lions, tiger. Oh, tigers. No tigers. Yeah.

No tigers. Lions, leopards, hyenas. Yeah. Cheetahs. Zebras. So they evolved into like this super alert and responsive animal. And they have these like really powerful kicks and bites. Which I saw reportedly, anecdotally, maybe I should say, are a lot more powerful than a horses.

Probably. I couldn't find anything like super scientific to back that up. So I'm not going to like report that as gospel. He read something that said they have the most powerful kicks in the of all animals. almost in the entire world. I don't know. It doesn't seem right. I mean, it could be like pound for pound, you know?

Right. That's what Jeff was saying. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. They also possess this hardwired into their brain. They have this ducking reflex that makes it like really hard to lasso them. Like just for whatever reason. Yeah, when the missed free throw, he ducks.

Yeah. A few listeners will get that one. Yeah. One for. them, you know. So a lot of this is attributed to just like early man's conflict with zebra back in like the hunter gather phase that zebras just kind of learned to like mistrust and dislike humans in general. It's good. And it's a good tactic. Yeah, they have like this weird instinctual duck that like you throw anything like a lasso at them. They're just like dodging. Well, part of that part of that's probably

that like when lions chase them down and stuff they go for their neck. Like a lion will try and get on a a zebra's neck to bite it through, you know, its neck and its windpipe. And so my guess is they're trying to protect their necks at all time. Like, this could be ignorant of me because I haven't really researched ever, but like, weren't they hunted with spears for a while by humans? Throwing spears at them? Probably. That would make sense.

That's like something easier to duck, too, than, like, what we hunt with now. So that could be part of it. It's hard to duck a bullet these days. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, if you're John Wick, you just like hold your suit up. Yeah. If the world were like a sleep number mattress, everything would adapt for your comfort.

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fight against it to the point where it just didn't even make sense to try. Oh, that's why you like them really over horses. Here's the conundrum. This is kind of an interesting thing. In terms of surviving as a species, being domesticated is worked out really well for horses. There's a global population of about 60 million horses worldwide, whereas zebras are numbered at just below 800,000 is kind of the best guess at this point. Yeah.

And there are, there's multiple species of zebra, too. not just one. And some of them, like, the Grevy's Mountain Zebra are a little bit more threatened than, like, some of the normal ones. So, yeah. Anyway. So what would you rather be the case? You sacrifice all your dignity and you're a generationally servitude to humans as a horse,

but you're growing in numbers. Or you could be, like, super sick and wild and free, but have to fight kind of what seems like a losing battle that humans are just kind of making worse. day by day, you know? Yeah. That's kind of like, this is like, it's obviously like I'm tongue in cheek here, but it's just interesting survival strategies,

if you can even call it that. Yeah. It's just an interesting branching path situation, you know? If like they switch places, zebra, like we were all just riding zebras and then like horses were still wild, then you would like horses more than zebras? Oh, probably. I'd respect them a lot more.

I think, you know, we all, All three of us would have the ability to go out and live in the wild if we wanted to, and we all live in relative domesticity. So I think we all got to say that we pick the horses. You make a compelling argument. It doesn't mean that I have to like respect myself compared to like wild. People like living out in the wild, I'm like, oh, man, that's cooler than what I'm doing. Okay.

Yeah. Like bear girls, that guy's cooler than me. Hands, Dan. For sure. He's richer than us, too. for sure all right well jeff you got another one are you done mike sorry yeah i just had one little last piece of research i didn't know where to put this in but i just wanted to say this word mostly so zebras and donkeys they can breed and their offspring are called zonky zonks oh it should be

zonky zonky is pretty good too all right zedonks it sounds germany all right to you you, Jeff. All right. So I'm going to talk about animals. Okay. Very well prepared. This is what we're here for. Now, I'm just pulling my note up. So I'm going to talk about Flacco the owl. West, do you know who that is? Yeah. It's a Eurasian eagle owl that got loose in Central Park. Yeah. So I talked to one of our longtime listeners, who's a birder. named Jeffrey Ward. Shout out, Jeff. We got another Jeff.

Jeffrey. He's a Jeffrey, which I respect. He's a fancy Jeff. He can join my Jeff Facebook group still, though. Yeah, and if he knows any other Jeffs, then we could really snowball this thing. But no, so he's a birder, and I follow him on Twitter, and like I had seen that he'd kind of been getting in some

debates over this owl. So I just found the whole thing fascinating, but it's like kind of a hot topic. Yeah, I've been following it too. Flacco, he's become like the most famous Flacco in New York for sure because their backup quarterback is Joe Flacco. But this owl has to have taken that spot. But anyways, so Jeffrey was telling me it's like the second biggest type of owl there is.

Yeah, they're huge. And like it's so cool. looking. If you just like Google, like right now, Google Flacco the Owl, and you'll see like some of the coolest pictures, unless you're driving, don't do it. Just wait. Just wait till you get home. Yeah. The zoo, someone broke in and like cut the cage open, or they didn't break into the zoo, but they cut the cage open and that's how the owl got out. And then it flew into Central Park and has been living there for months. Like several months it's been going on, which is just crazy that like

yeah i guess they're really like a zoo animal like that they just are letting live in the city now you know but if it's going to be anything and now it'll make sense and like geoffrey was telling me that it's really not that good because first of all we all know about invasive animals it's competing with native animals in the area and like it's such a huge owl that it's pretty good at hunting things second of all it's eating a lot of rodents in the area which like it's not going to be used to, especially like New York rodents have a lot of diseases so it could easily like catch diseases from that. And then just having an animal that should be in the zoo out in the wild. It's just never a great idea, right? Right.

But it has been really fun for like people in New York just to go outside and see like the second biggest owl in the world like in Central Park and like get these pictures. So it's become like a real sightseeing thing in Central Park. So the zoo obviously doesn't love this and is trying to get the owl back into captivity and into the zoo. So on Wikipedia, it says, soon after his escape, zoosaf began efforts to recapture Flacco, monitoring him around the clock for several days. Owls are generally difficult to capture. A typical strategy is to lure them with food, and zoo employees tried without success to bait Flacco with dead rats. I would have tried like ice cream sandwiches. Yeah.

The first attempt was with a, it's called a ball chatier trap. Yeah. So it's a baited. Yeah, go ahead. I forget, I've used these a lot when I worked with Hawkwatch. I actually forget the right pronunciation. It's like a little cage that you put a rodent in and then you string a bunch of little nooses from like fishing line or something and attach it to that cage.

So when the bird comes down and tries to grab the rodent inside, of the little metal cage and then pulls up, the little nooses like tighten on its talents and it gets stuck on the trap. They work really well. I like that cute little nooses. And it actually like worked. It was like placed in the park with zoo staff hidden nearby with nets

and says Flacco did go for the rat and briefly got one of the talons stuck but managed to free himself. Yeah. So this owl is like. Poudini. Loving his freedom. it feels like. The employees were instructed not to speak to the press,

but several anonymously expressed the frustration and exhaustion in, like, news reports. So like these zookeepers of, I mean, this was, some of this is a little bit more dated to February, but like they've been working real hard to catch this owl again and just can't get it, which is kind of crazy to me. But also it's like, yeah. Can you imagine just every day you're trying to catch this. freaking owl and it's in the news and everyone everyone knows that you can't catch it. I feel like I could catch that owl.

Like if someone didn't see the owl up in the tree and you just are like walking around with this huge net. Yeah. It lived in the zoo for 12 years and like now it's escaped. I feel like he's loving life because like you look at these pictures of him and he's posing for people. He's he's a beautiful owl. Flourishing. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

So that's my story. All right. And, yeah, I'm sticking to it like West said earlier. Okay. All right. I'm going to start my second story off with a knock, knock joke. So knock, knock. Who's there?

Gator. Gator who? It's actually a gator. Don't open your door. All right. It's terrible joke. I also titled this one, because this is another, nah, never mind. We're going to skip that.

It's another port story. You didn't have another. If you have another, it's dumb. Is that your gator? Are you just happy to see me? I was going to say that. Oh, dang. And I guessed it.

Jeff knows me too well. All right, this is a Florida man story. You know, if you're a Florida man, at some point you're going to get your moment to be in the news. And this moment was Scott Hollingsworth moment. He finally got to be a Florida man. And he was at home. It's hard to be the Florida man for your date. It's 15 minutes of fame.

It's a lot of competition. Until someone else is going to take it from you. All right. So he's at home in his Daytona Beach house on the night of March 5th. When he hears a sound at his door, and he thinks it was his son trying to sneak some of his friends into the house. So he goes to the door to investigate, opens up the door and just sees darkness.

He's looking out at the road. Nothing's going on. So he steps out a little further to turn on the light when suddenly something... It's like nighttime. Yeah, it's nighttime. It's 9.45 p.m. Something grabs him violently by his up. upper thigh in its mouth and start shaking violently.

And his first thought... His son's friends? Yeah. His first thought was that it was a large and aggressive dog, but he was wrong. It was a nine-foot alligator. I wonder when his mind would get to that point without seeing it. Yeah. You would think it would quickly because he had alligators pretty routinely in a pond in his

backyard. But anyway, he was lucky. The alligator quickly released his leg. it gave him time to retreat back into his house. He had a really large open gash on his upper thigh. He tried to put pressure on it and then was taken to the hospital where he was treated for non-life-threatening injuries. As I mentioned, gators were a common sight around the area, but he'd never had one on his porch before. But a little bit, just for people in Florida right now, it's starting to warm back up.

And as it warms up, the gators do tend to get a little bit more active. They're hunting a little bit more frequently. They're moving around a bit more. So you do have to be careful. Another thing just to... TikTokers doing like the doorbell ditch challenge now. Oh, that's a new thing. So just make sure it's not like a gator before you go chasing after him.

Yeah, I'd rather, honestly, I'd rather it be a gator than TikTokers on my doors. Me too. Gators are tricky because if you look through your little peephole, you wouldn't see it, you know? Yeah. That's true. Yeah. A lot of ring cameras would probably miss them too. So another thing, too, that I just wanted to bring up is that, uh,

Alligator attack is a very different thing on land like this than it would be in the water. In the water, you run a real risk of dying from the attack because the alligator might be trying to drag you under and feed on you. I'm hazarding a guess that this was not a predatory attack. It was more like the alligator wandered up onto his porch, maybe found a comfortable spot there to rest for a minute, and then he surprised it. So it attacked him defensively. Yeah, it sounds like he almost like stepped into its mouth. Right. And that's why you see this quick bite and then a release because it's not an alligator that's trying to drag this thing into the water and death roll and do all of that.

It's more just an alligator that's reacting defensively to something that shocked it. So that's kind of. Anyway, that's one that a lot of people sent us to. And that's it. That's all I got on it. You're going to stick to it? I'm sticking to it. Yeah.

I'm going to stick to all my stories tonight. It seems like if Home Alone movies go on long enough and Alligator's going to be involved in one. There probably was at some point. Probably. I think there's like six now or something. But there always seems to be a moment where the bad guys step into a room without looking down at their feet and they step on something. There's going to be like a moat with alligators in it. Yeah.

I feel like they skipped over alligator when they went to ghosts. Yeah. Wait, what? Ghosts involved now? In Home Alone six. the plot is like ghosts. Like he's like, are you kidding, man.

Ghosts. That's so dumb. I feel like there should be a medieval home alone. That would actually be a really fun movie. Oh, yeah. Like Castle alone. Yeah. And then he has a moat with alligators in it.

Yeah. They did it with like James Bond. Yeah. Skyfall. Yeah. It's true. All right, Mike, you want to go? Yep.

So we're doing a hot tub attack. Wait. It's a mountain lion attack in Colorado in a hot tub. A hot tub did not attack anybody. This was reported on March 21st. At around 8 p.m. on a Saturday evening, a man and his wife were sitting in an in-ground hot tub located away from the rental home they were staying at in Nathrop, Colorado. Which sounds terrible. What?

Wait. How can you breathe if you're in the ground in a hot tub? It doesn't make sense to me. Don't even give that the time that he's asking for. So according to a news, release, the man said that he suddenly felt something grab his head. If he had just read the headlines, he would have known that it was a mountain lion, but whatever. So both he and his wife screamed and splashed water at the animal, which they identified as a mountain lion after his wife

shone a flashlight on it. Due to the commotion being made, the mountain lion backed off about 20 feet, and when the couple continued to scream at it, it moved even farther away up to the top of a nearby hill where it continued to watch them. So this mountain line is just kind of like chilling at the top of the hill, still looking at these people. That's pretty crazy. Yeah. That's not obviously typical mountain line behavior. That's pretty wild.

I feel like it's funny that they splashed it with water. But then it's like, I would probably do that too. Yeah. But it'd be really funny if the mountain lion like splashed them back harder like you always do when you're in a pool. Yeah. I do wonder. So a quick thing that I wonder about, like I was talking to an alligator biologist once who told me that like sometimes. cut out biologists there and just have them.

An alligator. Sometimes alligators will, they think sometimes alligators will attack people in the water because when the alligator's head is above water and it sees your head above water, it thinks you're smaller than you actually are. And so it'll attack you even though it doesn't realize how big you are. So small alligators will attack people sometimes. And I do wonder if maybe that's, this is, I'm just like spitballing, that it saw their heads or their torsos above the water and was like,

oh, there's this medium-sized animal down there that I can... A tiny little head. Yeah, that I can bring down pretty easily. Especially where it's an in-ground hot tub. Right. Might have just seen like the head above the ground a little bit. Or just like shoulders. Yeah.

Yeah. You guys are like the Sherlock Holmes and Watson of the wild world, you know? You guys really got to the bottom of that one. Which is which. You're Sherlock, Jeff. Yeah, that's what I thought. Wes is like... I quit.

I quit. All right. So the couple quickly retreated. back into their home, the rental home where they're staying, where they got to work cleaning the wounds. He ended up having four pretty long scratches along the top of his head and by his right ear. And by the time the first responders in medical care had shown up to their place, they'd already patched up and kind of taken care of it. And I thought this is kind of funny.

They declined any further medical attention, which like I totally understand. Oh, yeah. Because once they whip out like a first aid kit, it's like you're on the hook for millions of dollars. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I'm always declining medical attention unless I absolutely need it. Okay, so there's an area wildlife.

There is an area wildlife manager based in the area. Sean Shepard, he said, we think it's likely the mountain lion saw the man's head, move in the darkness at ground level, but didn't recognize the people in the hot tub. Oh, wow. Which I think is kind of a funny way to, it's probably not that the mountain lion didn't recognize these people's like old family friends. or something, but didn't recognize that they were humans. So we were on the right track. Yeah.

I also like how you said an area biologist that was in the area. Did I? Yeah. I got to make sure you get these details right. Yeah. I want to reiterate that it was in the area. An out of time, an out of town area biologist. Yeah.

That was in the area at the time. Well, I'm glad they came up with the same idea that I did. All right. Yeah. I'd like to hear the mountain lions point. of you. Yeah, he's probably still at the top of that hill. They didn't really say he'd gone anywhere else. No, people are saying I didn't know who they were.

I knew who they were. They splashed me as water, and it was hot. Yeah. But oddly therapeutic. It probably wants to get back in there. He just wanted to get in. So Sean Shepard, he was further quoted to saying, although this victim had only minor injuries, we take this incident seriously.

We have alerted the neighbors and posted signs warning of lion activity, and we will continue to track the lion. its activity. So they never, never got a hold of it. I don't know what they would have done had they, but yeah, still still at large getting splashed by people all over the place, I can only assume. Some really sad mountain line news is Utah just passed a bill that allows for year-round permit-free mountain-line hunting. You can kill a mountain line without a permit in Utah now, which is really sad to me. Yeah, oh man. Yep. Anyway. That kind of, that sucks. It does suck. Yeah. If you're a Utah resident, you should call Spencer.

or Cox and let them know what you think of that bill. Because it does suck. All right. Well, who's up next? Is it Jeff? Is that your governor? Wait, is that your governor or you're just excited to see me? Yeah.

Cox. Oh, yeah. No, you go again, West, because I'm just doing a bunch of headlines next. Okay. I'm going to go on to one that got sent to us a lot in the early part of February. One that I saw, like, the day that I had. happened, someone sent it to me a friend of mine, Nate Housley, who I think both of you have met and Jeff knows. Anyway, it's, I'm just going to kind of...

I was calm, Greg. Yeah, sure. I'm going to sum it up. It's, I didn't really take down a lot of details to this one just because I've seen it a million times and I can kind of recite it for memory. But essentially, it's a video and it shows this couple driving in their car in the early morning in Anchorage, Alaska, and there's a moose running next to their car in between two snowdrifts. So it's on the sidewalk. There's big snowdrifts piled up. around it and they're they're straddling it and then all of a sudden they yell they're like hey watch out watch out it's coming for you and the moose tramples a woman and kicks her once and then runs off and the woman was walking her dog she ended up being fine but every article i read was like

kind of said like this couple was trying to warn her and they helped her and then like they pulled her into their car and took her off and i do want to just give an alternate hypothesis of what might have happened here from watching this video. I am somewhat convinced of it, but I welcome any kind of debate on this. I think these people were following this moose, not for very long, but they were recording it and following it with the car. And sometimes when you do that with an ungulate, the mousse, or the ungulate will, like, get faster and faster. And so then you speed up your car, too. And you're kind of doing this pushing thing where you're pushing it. And they were doing that, and then it collided with this woman because it was trying to get away from the car.

watching the video, it clearly looks like that to me. I could be wrong, but I would say that's the danger to ever, if you ever find yourself recording an animal and you feel like you're pushing it or making it run or do something, you're stressing it out, you need to stop, especially if it's a large animal, you're harassing it, and there's a chance that it could run into someone ahead of it on its path, and that person's going to suffer the consequences. So it is a good video in that it teaches us,

a really important lesson about how to ethically record wildlife. Yeah. And like I think you're right, but I also think like, like they shouldn't do that, but I can like see how that would happen. Like I wouldn't be too hard on them about doing that either. Totally. No, no, I'm not. Yeah, I don't like most people don't understand wildlife behavior very well.

And that's why I'm saying that. Like if you ever find that you're pushing an animal, just stop because you're creating kind of a dangerous situation for the animal and for anyone else that's a That moose had nowhere to go. So it knocked that lady over. I kind of saw a similar video recently of a rhino. Did you see the rhino footage where a car, like everyone was filming a rhino and it charged at them and it was like a Jeep backed over off the road.

Oh, yeah. The rhino didn't tip the car over, but it was like, it was one of those things where it's just like you're getting maybe a little too close and, you know, I don't know. But yeah, it's crazy the things that can happen. Really quickly, while we're on crazy video, One other one. This one was actually sent to me by my good friend Jesse Watson, who works at Hawkwatch. It shows a guy in Russia.

My neighbor. Yeah. A guy in Russia who's working at a children's camp, and he is hauling a bactrian camel around, which are the big two-humped, really woolly-looking camels. And he's hauling it, and it's like not obeying him, and he punches it. And then this camel, I showed this video to Mike and Jeff right before the episode. It knocks him down on the ground, grabs him by a... his arm with its teeth.

It looks like it almost rips his arm off, but we know that it didn't rip it off because it's still on his body, tosses him around, and then tramples him to death, which is pretty crazy. And I was watching this other video recently of people feeding camels out of their mouths, and I'm just like, and you got to be careful around camels. Camels are not to be trifled with. So anyway, that's another video that's off. Yeah, it's like crazy.

Like, if that guy, like, saw Mike Tyson. He wouldn't punch him in the face. Right, right. But then it's like a camel would kick Mike Tyson's ass. Exactly. You're going to just punch it in the face. Yeah, and they have teeth like a grizzly bear. I mean, you don't want to punch a camel.

Anyway. Do you remember Jeff in our camel episode, what the person ended up, where the person bit the camel in order to get away from it? Oh, the balls. Yeah, dude. The balls. Oh, he should have done that. Although, it's probably hard to bite balls when you're getting flung.

around. I was thinking of like the dude's decapitated head because there's stories in that one. Yeah. That guy didn't get away. He might have, yeah. He might have bit it. All right. Maybe it's like that one snake that bit the guy's hand 10 minutes after his head was gone.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. Who's next? I'll go. Okay. So I asked listeners for the first time to just send me little headlines on Instagram. Uh-huh.

So I'm just going to. to read the headlines. I'm not going to read all your guys names just because I think it'll be less entertaining for everyone if I do that. So I'm just going to go like headlines that listeners sent. Okay. Cool. And I looked all these up so if you have questions about any of them, go for it. Mountain line attack on the Salt River in Arizona. Ten rafters use paddles to fight. Yeah, I read that one. Yeah. And then there's like some 60-year-old guy who got hospitalized from it, but it sounded like most people help fight it off. This person says,

I sent a news restudy about foxes domesticating themselves. Wes has it. Yeah. Yeah, it's basically just saying like city foxes have like, especially in England, are starting to like really warm up to people and be friendly because they've just kind of learned that that's their best lesson for success. So now Mike's going to start hating them because they're not like zebras.

No, you got to stay wild. Stay wild. There's a grizzly in British Columbia, Canada, who broke into a senior's home and raided their freezer. Hmm. Wait, a what? A grizzly. It doesn't seem like they should be out yet, but maybe.

They are starting to pop out in Yellowstone. I looked it up and it said 20, 22 for that one. Okay. There's saltwater crocodiles in floodwaters in northern Australia. Not news, but I found out that there are wild hamsters, and I thought they were only pets. That is interesting. I will attack six people in Killery Park in Ontario, Canada.

Four of them went to the hospital. Lots of cougar sightings in Wichita, Kansas along the Arkansas River. I wonder if this is real or fake news. Baby zoo cheetahs get support dogs because they're shy. That one's true. They'll put a golden retriever in with cheetahs. Yeah, I love those pictures. Yeah, to like kind of help them get comfortable.

And then this one was crazy. Tigers on the loose in Georgia, tornadoes damaged their cages. Do you guys see that at all? No. Yeah, these tigers got out of like a wildlife exhibit in Florida. But it sounded that they were able to tranquilize them. Huh? You said Georgia and then Florida.

Which one was it? Oh, Georgia. Okay. But it was from like an animal safari, and they were able to tranquilize them and put them back. So those are listener headlines. All right. Thanks to listen. So I have two more things. I'll do one now and one after your next story, Wes.

Okay. So for coyotes be whiling, a listener wrote in, Jeff, coyotes really do bewhilin. I just had a surreal encounter with a big one in freaking suburbia in Nashville, Tennessee. I was walking my dog. She stopped and looked to the side, and there it was just looking at us from maybe 20 feet away. It was just watching us, but slowly continuing on it. its way. I froze, panic, thinking it's a wolf, a stray dog. Shit, it's a coyote. And then trying to remember what y'all say to do on the podcast. Avid fan since the beginning. Absolutely love y'all,

by the way. I couldn't remember at the moment, so we just decided to sprint for it to the house. Dang near had a heart attack inside. Then she wants to know what she should do in the situation. We always tell people a run away, right? Don't ever run. Don't. That's the one thing like I know when you guys have these kind of encounters you're going to have a hard time remembering what to do and just remember this like if it is an animal that could be predatory you never run sometimes from ungulates you want to run like a bison or a moose or something sometimes that's the best strategy but if it's like a coyote a dog cat bear anything like that never run and with coyotes you just want to be as aggressive as possible you want to start throwing

things you want to yell you want to run at it do whatever you can to just show it that you're not a source of food. In this situation, I feel like it might have been watching the dog more than the person, too. Right. So like maybe just pick the dog up. Yeah, you can pick your dog up, especially if it's a small dog. That is good advice, but definitely just be really aggressive with it. Yep.

Okay. Do you want me do my last thing or do you want to go? You can do one more if you want. Sure. Okay. It's a follow up to the story you told. last time. So with your muscox story from last news episode,

someone like lives in the community and reached out to me on Instagram and said that like it's actually kind of common for dogs to get gored by muscox in Alaska. Yeah. And no. So like we kind of theorized that, but we weren't sure. But he was like for sure going out to protect his dogs because he's like a sled. He goes and does that I did her odd. And that's where he ended up getting killed was like trying to protect his dogs from these musk oxen.

So Bridget Watkins just finished her first I did her odd and took her 11 days, 21 hours and 48 seconds with 11 dogs. And she did it with his ashes attached to the sled. Oh, that's nice. And like the whole town like met up and like the police. were all, like, putting their sirens. And it just seems like everyone in this community really loved. His name was Curtis Warland. Yeah.

They just, like, really loved this guy. He seemed like an awesome guy. So, like, the whole town, like, came out for him and watched this event happen. So, yeah, that's my update from the last one. And that's all I got. Cool. All right. Cool.

Mike, do you want to go next? Yeah, I'll just, I'll go over this one pretty quick. Ends in tragedy, sadly. But there is another elephant fatality. that happened recently. March 3rd, this was reported first. So Masee, Mussili, Masebe. He was a 72-year-old man from Iloconi village in Kenya's Kibwezi East constituency. He was trampled and killed by an elephant as he was walking home after running some errands,

which is just tragic. Yeah. And something that I can't, it's hard to imagine me just running to the grocery store to take care of some stuff. And like, he might get killed by an elephant. Yeah. Yeah. It's just something so foreign to. me.

Yeah. I'm not, I don't know, like, it's not, no judgment one way. It's not something like that. I'm just thinking that,

like, it's just a life. Like, I, I, in Yellowstone, like, during the elk rut or the bison rut, sometimes at night I would walk to the little corner store or to, like,

the lobby of the hotel or something and be really dark out. And it was the first time in my life, I think I'd ever really experienced that, like, around my home. Because I lived in, like, a little town. I lived in mammoth. And I'm just,

like, walking to the store. And it's like, oh, if I could, if I bumped into a bison or an elk or something right now, I could get killed, you know? Yeah. And it's kind of crazy to think that there are people, I mean, all around the world, that that's like a day in, day out kind of struggle.

And that actually, are you, is that it? Because that would segue perfectly into mine. Well, it's crazy that they can't kick as hard as a zebra elephants. Like, he's lucky it wasn't a zebra. Yeah. Yeah. We can end it there if you want. No, no, no.

You can keep going. Okay. So, well, so the notable thing about this story, other than the fact that tragically he passed away, but this wasn't his first altercation with a wild animal. Three years previously, he was protecting his herd of cows from some hyena when he got into it with one that just got a little bit too aggressive. And it sounded like it pretty significantly injured his hand. So, yeah, again, a life utterly unknown by me who tries not to go outside ever. Just can't imagine the fear that that would instill. But yeah, so he was trampled by this elephant.

It was in an area bordering the Savo East National Park. And his remains actually rested at the site where he died for most of that day and the next day because the residents were protesting. They're rioting collectively because of just like the lackluster response by the protective services that are supposed to be helping in these situations. And this has just been an ongoing issue with just not a lot of aid being either timely administered or administered at all. Yeah.

So it took him four hours for the first responders to arrive on the scene. And his body actually was removed after a couple of days, but only because the local police, they fired in tear gas and opened fire with firearms to scatter these locals and finally just be able to like take the body away, which is just like, that's just a standard for the US. Anyway, I, yeah, something I wanted to say really quick about that is like, I think elephants really, when it comes to human wildlife conflict in Africa, I think your brain would go to like lions or leopards or these predators. Elephants are really responsible for a lot of it.

And people, when it comes to like losses from agriculture, like direct injuries to people and deaths and stuff, elephants are one of the biggest threats out there for people that live in elephant habitat in Africa. And it's like a constant battle. And elephant biologists have a lot of, they are constantly working with. communities to decrease conflict. Yeah. Yeah. And they're another,

elephants or another victim, like all of us are of climate change, because with increasingly dry climates and these shortages and all kinds of adverse effects are just basically pushing elephants to take more risks, to get a little closer to humans, to indulge in their food and their water sources. And it's just, it just seems like it's only going to be exacerbated by the ongoing.

issues that aren't being fixed fast enough by anyone. Just a sad situation. So rest in peace, Musambi. You think Elon will bring elephants to Mars? Yeah. Once we all live on Mars. Yeah, hopefully he brings this elephant with him in his same spaceship. When you were talking about that, though, like people that have to live with constant, you know,

kind of awareness of their surroundings, of the natural world, it made me think of my last two, or actually these are just two quick ones than I have one more little story. But people in India, every time we do these episodes where we recap the news, I tend to do a search that says like tiger attack and then just hit news. And there's always a couple that are just like a few days old even. And there was a recent one where a man of a kid died, a teenager, was killed by a tiger. And then the next night his grandpa was killed by a tiger. And they think it was probably the same one.

And then the dad, like the other generation in between them, was also injured by a tiger. So pretty wild. And this was in, I think, Uttar Pradesh, India. No, sorry, that was the leopard story. There was also a leopard that broke into like a legal building in Udra Pradesh, India, and mauled four lawyers and then like a guy that was shining shoes, too. And there's video of it. Yeah, pretty, pretty weakly, Cape Fear.

Like where he's mad at his lawyer for not doing better for him. Oh. I don't remember that. I need to watch that again. It's probably, he's like mad at the lawyer for not, like, getting him less time. So maybe that's lawyers. He dresses up like his mom and then is like in the kitchen dressed up as his mom and then turns around and it's him.

And it's like incredibly startling when you're watching coffee. in like a really funny way. I don't think the leopard did that, but it did. Like there's videos of it in this building, like mauling people. And of course, every single article I read was like

bloodthirsty leopard, savages, you know, whatever, these people. And really what it was, I mean, I can almost guarantee this. I don't know for a fact

is that this leopard was, leopards do exist on like the fringes of big cities in India. And that's probably what it was doing was probably looking for some easy prey like dogs or cats or something like that. And then it likely got cornered and was forced to rush into this building trying to get away from people where then when they're cornered and there's lots there's lots of these videos out there of cornered leopards in India, they go on a tear. I mean, they really get a lot of people.

Kind of impressive. It is. All right. I got one more story with a little bit more detail. It's called rock throwing baboons, break hikers' legs. This story is about seven friends I wonder what this one's about. Seven friends were on a climbing trip

in a remote group of mountains in the western Cape area of South Africa. On the second day, the group was eating lunch in a bowl surrounded by cliffs and they noticed some Cape baboons on a ledge above them. And Cape baboons are a really large species of baboon. They'd seen them around before,

but these ones were acting pretty agitated. And it was surprised for them because they'd never seen them in this area before. A quote from one of the articles I read said one of the hikers said this. This was the third time I'd been down this cloof, and the first time I've seen or heard any baboons up there. Cloof, which is an absolutely new word to me. If you ever go to South Africa, they got a lot of weird names for stuff down there because of Afrikaans and stuff. That's true.

They continued on their way. It's a hot dog. It's a good point. You know what they call, they call traffic lights down there? Robots. What? That's awesome. But they say it, they say it, Robits.

All right. So they continue on their way. I don't know. Are traffic lights just considered robots? I guess. Like it was weird to me. It seems crazy. I know, exactly.

Now you're on board. Okay. So they continue on their way and two of the hikers were actually repelling down a waterfall when a 130-pound boulder comes crashing down on the ledge near them. The Boulder explodes. It sends shards of rock flying out, which breaks three of their legs, and then injures another hiker. The other hiker gets like gashes. So three people had broken legs. I don't know if that was like one person had two broken legs, the other one had one, but I'm pretty sure it was three people because there ended up being...

Three total broken legs were broken. Yeah, three people. Three people, each of them had a single broken leg. You think? I'm pretty sure because they ended up having to call a helicopter because more rocks came raining down, and they think it was these baboons that were pushing rocks at them. So they hit under a cliff. The helicopter had to airlift four people out. The other three people hiked out.

What the heck? The hikers actually said they think it might have just been the baboons disturbing rocks, and they fell below. But then there was some primatologists that were interviewed about this that were like, no, this very easily could have been these baboons really going for it, like trying to get these people.

Jeez. So, yeah. Mike, I wonder if that's how that Osprey felt when you're throwing rocks at it. You mean when I'd like dropped a rock off a ledge four miles away from an Osprey nest and then got fined? All right. All right, I think that's it. I hate Yellowstone. That's it for our for our stories, right?

Yep. You guys got anything else? I actually do. Pablo Escobar's hippos in Columbia. Oh, yeah. 75 of them are being relocated to India and Mexico. That's so weird. And they're going to be moved to like zoos in Mexico in New York.

Yeah. Okay. I know. When I first read that, I thought the exact same thing and then I kept reading it as like zoos. So yeah, they're going to relocate these hippos to zoos, which, you know, might not be quite as nice of a living space as just the entire country of Colombia. Yeah, probably not. It's probably better than like that Japanese lady who lived in a guy's closet for a year and just stuck out at night when he was gone. Yeah.

I've been thinking about that story more today. I don't think she had it that bad. Just hiding in a tiny spot in the closet? Yeah. I don't know. All right. Sounds nice. Well, since this is our news episode, we're probably just going to do some questions to wrap this thing up.

I got some patron questions lined up. up here. One of them I'm going to ask. I'm going to ask, yeah, okay. You know, patrons are listeners, Jeff. Well, I always, Instagram. All right. Yeah, it's like a square and a rectangle kind of.

This one I'm going to ask just, I wasn't, didn't necessarily have it on the docket, but I'm going to because this cat just appeared for a while. But Kara asks, can I please know more about Mike's cat? Thanks. Oh, yeah. You want to tell us a little bit about your cat? Yep. gray she's gray her name's Ellie she's about 15 years old and she's got little nicks in her ears

because she's kind of a she's like a street fighter when she was little uh since retired uh retired undefeated i'd like to think you guys have a unique relationship too about it i'm i'm over here right now and that cat like looked at me for like 10 seconds and mike acts like it stares at him all day all right here's another one this one's from veronica Veronica sorry we missed this this this question fell through the cracks and Veronica really wanted it answered. So we're going to answer it. If you had to transform into a tree, where would you want to be as a tree until you died? So you're turning into a tree and you have to stay there for the rest of your life until it dies.

What spot would you pick, essentially? Maybe like a drive-in movie theater. Oh, that's a great pick. That is like I was trying to think of something good. and that just, that's my pick too. Yeah. Yeah. All right.

Maybe a palm tree at a, like, a nude beach. I'll be like a little like bonzai tree in like a strip club or something. All right. Yeah. Like a high class. Very, very horny answers from both of you. Let's go like a low end one just because like I feel like there'll be a lot of like behind the scenes interesting stuff going on. That seems like the most depressing place that you could possibly.

be a tree for the rest of your existence. I'm taking, I like the, I like the drive-in theater. I'm taking that one. Yeah, have fun watching Mario Bros. For a month straight. Eight times a day.

I'll just close my, I'll close my tree eyes during the, you know, and I'll just watch, all people watch during those times. All right, great question. I'm going to do one more patron question. This one's for Mary. I thought this was a great question. For all hosts,

say you live on the coast. How many seagulls would you have to find in your house before you start to get suspicious someone was putting them there? I would say three. I'd say at three, I'm like, something's off here. The second seagull, I'm like,

huh, that's weird. I had two seagulls come into my house. On the third seagull, I'd be like, there might be some foul play here. Fowl play? Wes, you were funny right there. I think actually, like, the only number is two for me.

The only number. Yeah. At two I'll be like, that's kind of weird. But if it's like six of them, I'll be like, yeah, they told their friends that this is like a sweet place to hang out. Kind of a good place to find bread. Yeah, they're like all talking about all the food I got in here and stuff. Yeah.

I used to live not too far away from the coast up in Washington. And Seagulls, they were all over the place. So I don't know. I don't think one ever got into our house. But if it did, it wouldn't have been like super shocking. It would be probably like five. Okay. That's it for patron questions.

Jeff, you got some questions from Instagram? Uh, yeah. You bet you butt. Just regular old-ass listeners. Well, some of them might be subscribers, honestly. That's true. They still ride in. That's true.

Some might be young. So from, oh, because West Cauda Mold. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Rene Pavilich says, pretty sure Jeff just glossed over how much he can bench in the last episode. Oh, God. This was a while ago, so it wasn't the last one.

Are we going to do this again? Yeah. All right. So when we talked about it, I was, like, curious because, like, I haven't really tried. And I went to the gym, and I've always wanted to bench 200 pounds. So I went, and I was doing, like, 170 or something, and, like, 175, because it always goes by fives. And this guy was like, I think you could do more, dude. And so I was like, like, my goal is to get to 200.

And he's like, well, let's just try it. And he's a great hype man for me. And he's like, trying to put on 205. I was like, no, dude, like, 200 even. We're putting on, like, the tiny little two and a half pound ones because, like, that's all I care about. And I did one rep. And I just felt like the strongest person on earth. I just, so I was on such a high.

So yeah, I got to 200 exactly. Dude, you're ripped. It shows. We'll check back in in a month or two. Yeah. I mean, last time I didn't give an answer. This time I got an answer. You didn't give an answer, didn't you?

I was like, I don't really know. Not an exact one. Yeah. Seth R. Hall wants to know Mount Rushmore of podcast guests. Hmm. Of guests? My number one has to be David Atman. Burrow.

Oh, yeah. And then how many people are on, how many people are on there? Four of them. It'd be really fun to have Quinn Tarantino on just because I feel like it'd be so chaotic. And I just like, it'd be crazy. So maybe him. Timothy Treadwell? He's a ghost.

He's a ghost. Timothy Treadwell's ghost would be a great guest. Yeah. Christopher McCanness. Let's do one more. Can we have two ghosts or just one? one. Let's have Steve Irwin's son then. Yeah, I'd love to have him on. Yeah. This one we've answered a bunch, but I feel like it's a good one just to kind of like remind people, because I always forget.

M. Talen wants to know, how do you tell the difference between brown and black bears, especially for a bear noob? Yeah, it's a great question. The first thing that you should think about is where you are. So if you're anywhere in the lower 48 and you're not in Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, or Washington, it's not a grizzly bear. It's 100% going to be a black bear if you're seeing it. The main ways that you tell just by looking at them is they have a very different facial structure, and that's the way that I always tell them apart. Black bears have a very straight nose profile.

It doesn't curve in nearly as much as a grizzly bear's face does. And grizzly bears tend to have more of a dish-shaped. face as well, whereas black bears kind of look more like a dog. They have a straight profile and like not quite as a round as a face sometimes. Black bears tend to have longer, pointier ears whereas grizzly bear ears are closer to their head and a little bit more rounded. Cuter. Yeah. Yeah.

Grizzly bears, it's hard to say, you know, eye of the beholder. Grizzly bears often have a big hump of muscle on their back that they use for digging, but that's a hard way to tell them apart because sometimes it'll look like black bears have that hump too. Grizzly bears have really long straight claws. Black bears have short curved claws. But really, honestly, like, the best way to tell them apart is by learning how their faces look different.

So I would just say, look at 100 pictures of black bears and then 100 pictures of grizzly bears, and you start to kind of get the feel for how they look different. Every day. Do it every single day. Yeah, it should be the first thing you do in the morning, the last thing you do. Another headline that popped into my mind when you said, Black bears kind of have more of a dog-shaped face. Yeah.

Is that headline of like a family who adopted a dog they found that like two years later they found out was a bear? Yeah. You've seen that headline ever? I have. Yeah, it was like in China, I think. It seems like that can't be true. Sometimes there's a fake one that goes around two where they're like, they thought this was a dog and it was a bear and it's a dog. Like when they show the photo, it's 100% a dog.

But it looks kind of like a bear. Anyway, I like that Yeah Man, these Instagram names So Nicole Benzes, Jan That's close enough That's a really good question

For Mike How does Mike feel About 70% of Lord of the Rings movies Just having Gandalf Writing Shadow Facts How much time In movie time Compared to like real time

Would he have been on that horse Because he spends a lot of time We just don't see it on camera You know I feel pretty bad about it. Okay. But you love the movies. Oh, yeah.

It's a good horse. It's an unsightly blemish on an otherwise pristine package. If you just painted a few black stripes on it, you'd be stowed. Actually, you know what? Other scene always kind of bugs me that I'm always just a little bit out on is at the end of Return of the King when Aeomere is like screaming his lungs out because he's on the battlefield. and I think he finds Aowin, who he thinks is dead. He's overacting a little bit there. Yeah, you know, Carl Obrin goes hard.

He's just overacting, just he goes hard. Carl's going a little bit hard there. I'm just like, dial it back 25%. We'll be good. You wish he is more like Judge Dred in that scene. Yeah, I wish he was just frowning. It's like, mm-hmm. Matthew Ord.

Jeff, since you have to rob a convenience store, which animal would you bring to help? Ooh. So, yeah, we did a bet where I have to rob a convenience store now. For sure, a kangaroo. Just put it on the pouch. Oh, that's a good idea. It's got a built-in bag.

Like, I hold the gun at him, get the money out of the register, put it straight in the pouch, hop off. Yeah, I like that. I'd pick the predator. You can go invisible. Yeah, since Danielle picked them as, like, what, her favorite attack scene or something. Yeah. I like how she was so excited for that category. Aliens or animals.

So awesome. Jamie White, Jeff, is Tony Hawk an actual toothy? So I did an Instagram story of Sean White saying he asked me for a picture with him and then didn't post a picture of us together. And I said, like, he told me he's a toothy and asked me for a picture. I was lying. I was just making it. He didn't ask me for a picture. I remember one more patron one I wanted to read, can I?

Yeah. All right, this is from another Mary. Given everything going on in the world today, we are headed for disaster. Hypothetically speaking, we're all about to die in one of three ways. The aliens attack us and annihilate the planet, or we go into World War III and the whole world gets nuked in the process, or AI robots take over and erase us from existence. Which fate are you choosing? So either aliens, nuclear war, or AI. I'm picking the aliens.

Right. Because humanity, like, gets to get together. and fights together. Like, sounds really fun to me. I think AI, computers, robots taking over would be better in the long term for, like, the world itself. Because I think you would take care of all of the nature and all that stuff in order to, like, keep things running smoothly and keep itself online, you know?

Because if it just destroys the world, then what's it? You think it's just going to kill humans and not anything else? Yeah, I do. How can you say that after reading? It's going to be smart enough to recognize. After reading, I have no mouth and I must scream. That's why I'm saying it, man. All right.

You just want to be a blob of jello for the rest of existence. I don't want to be that guy. I just, right. Okay, that's it for Patreon questions. Rie King wants to know our top five movies of all time. Oh, I don't know if I can answer that. Top five. What do you mean?

We just ranked it. Yeah, but mine are constantly changing. Like, those are my top 20 right now. I don't know if, and mine weren't necessarily in order. They weren't? No, I can, okay, there's a couple that I can, We can count Lord of the Rings as one. It's one.

I'm counting it as one. If I'm doing it as three, they're all in there. Yeah, I would agree with that. If I'm counting it as one, Lord of the Rings, Jurassic Park. Right now I'm really high on Django Unchained. And then I'd probably put Matrix in there. Okay. Maybe point break.

Wow. The Matrix? Really? What? I just never knew that about you. I had no idea. that that was like such a big movie for you. Oh yeah. That's like an all-time.

Matrix is number one for me. Okay. Really? Wow. Yeah. Jurassic Park number two. Number three, what's up, Doc? Number four, it's a mad, bad, mad, mad world.

Number five, it's between charade and Raising Arizona. I think I'm going to go charade. Okay. I just got to get my guy, Carrie Grant, in there. I'm just going to say five. I'm not going to rank them because I have a hard time doing that. But I'm going to say Jurassic Park, Lord of the Rings. Rings trilogy,

Indiana Jones trilogy, or the first and the third one, counting as one, which is cheating, I know. Okay. Jaws, I just can't pick between those two.

And probably, my fifth spot would probably be alien, maybe the thing. It'd be one of those two. But yeah, those are my top five slash, like nine. All right.

Motatoes. Motato's. Yeah. Favorite dinosaur from Jurassic World domination. Oh, that was the last one, huh? The giga-gigantic jumbosaurus. What's that its name? Giganodosaurus.

Yeah. That was a real dinosaur. That was like the only one, right? I was really happy. Just like four dinosaurs. I was really happy to have Dilophosaurus back, because I think Dilophosaurus was like probably my favorite from the original movie. T-Rex was my favorite, but then Dolophosaurus.

So I was really happy to see Dilafsaurus in the last movie. That was like the one bright spot for me in a really terrible movie. I like the one that makes the Army automatically the most powerful army if they have it. And all you do is point a laser on someone and it chases them. The atroes directors. Yeah. Wait, you could just have a gun and chew them if you're pointing something at them. Right.

All right. One more. Young Sanbino. So you have to eat one bite of animal poop. What animals poop are you eating? Why? Oh, that one that gets turned into coffee, right? Isn't there like a little rodent or something in Africa?

They like use the poop to turn into coffee or something. I don't know. That one. I'm eating a giant pandas poop because it's bright green and it's like almost all bamboo. And it's just like seems very fancy to eat a giant pandas poop. Fancy is a word. Yeah. Yeah, I think I'm going with the rhino just because the babies eat their mom's poops.

I might as well. Sure. All right. Great. Did we want to like talk about the bracket at all? I just wanted to point out one thing. The closest battle yet was Mountain Goat versus Mountain Lion. And they both had like 2,200-something votes.

Really? And Mountain Goat won by three votes. Wow. No way. recount. Mountain goat, I said, right? Yeah. Okay.

That's crazy. Thanks everyone out there for voting, too. Like, it's really fun doing these brackets, and this one I feel like people got especially stoked for. So, um, thanks for filling a mountain for having fun with us. Mountain goat 2,230, Mountain Lion, 2227. That's wild. Huh?

Get wrecked Mountain lions. And then I just want to say to, like, that emperor pink, when picture I found that is immediately like Wes was so wrong when he chose I was thinking of them when they get a little bit older

and they're like brown when they are that little they are really cute yeah the teenage phase is a little rough just like all of us I had sloth winning my bracket and somehow I

couldn't not pick Emperor Penguin versus sloth like I'd picked it well that's all I got really quick I one more tiny thing I want to say. This week in Missoula, the Humane Society, they paid for all the adoption fees for all their dogs in an effort to get all their dogs homes. And it just made me think something I haven't really ever talked about on the podcast, but I've become a really big proponent

of rescuing dogs rather than getting them from breeders or anything like that. And I do think, if you're looking for a new pet, just remember there's lots of dogs out there that need homes. and it's pretty common that this kind of stuff happens where they'll waive adoption fees. So go check out your local Humane Society and before you get a dog from somewhere else, really see if there's a dog that could use a home there. So anyway.

Buy one for your parents. Just surprise them. Yeah, just get an adopt dog for your parents. Sure. Maybe not. All right. Anyway, that was my last little thing. Thanks, guys.

This was fun. And we'll be back soon with regular, regular programs. and whatever that is. All right. See you then. Love you guys. Love you. Bye.