Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks - Bear 399 - Wes's Wildest Night with 399's Cubs

Episode Date: November 4, 2024

In memory of Bear 399, Wes shares some of experiences working with her and her cubs, including one of the most intense nights of his life. ~~ 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

Hello everyone. Welcome back to Tooth and Claw podcast. We have our wildlife biologist and fashion model, Wes Larson. Nope. You're running out of things to say about me. I know. There's only two things of note. I want to say Dior. Yeah, you can't do it. I couldn't do it. I'll do better next time. I'll start thinking about it right now. We got Mike Smith, our producer, and I'm Jeff Larson. and we're a podcast that focuses on animals, animal attacks.

We love animals, so we kind of just give the perspective of why the animal behaved the way it did and what the human could have done to avoid the attack. And sometimes we talk about other stuff too. We often talk about other stuff. That little coda really carries a lot of weight. Sometimes we talk about other stuff too. And that really opens the door for anything. Well, I should ask you, Mike.

Like, you send us a text that you love Cologne commercials. Is that true? Oh, dude, it's like my favorite content these days. They are so right. West was just in Utah, and Mike showed us a Channing Tatum, Cologne commercial where I can't tell if he shoots the arrow or if he's just running to catch an arrow, but he runs. No, he shoots the arrow, right? I'm pretty sure.

But I was like all set up to run when an arrow gets shot. You're asking the Cologne commercial to make sense. None of them ever have. Yeah. Yeah. Do yourself a favorite. Watch the Channing Tatum Versace one. Because it really is one of the better Cologne commercials have ever seen in my life.

It's so funny. Yeah. I was just in Utah. It was fun. We got to hang out a bit. We went up to the cabin, watched some scary movies, ate some treats. Had a good time. Thanks for coming.

And as Jeff mentioned, we talk about animal conflicts on this podcast, attacks, all sorts of different things. And I think today's subject is kind of a combination of a lot. of the different things that we talk about. I think we're going to highlight some of the problems surrounding news media and wildlife, some of the problems around habituation, a lot of different things that we talk about a lot on this podcast. We kind of get to go over it all in this one story, which I really like. It's going to be kind of a different episode than normal in that I'm going to be sharing some personal stories about this particular animal, and it's not going to be so much one attack and then some biology as much as kind of a life history of this animal and

some of the problems surrounding it. All right? Let's do it. So today we are going to be talking about a very famous grizzly bear that recently passed away. We're going to be talking about Bear 399. All right. Rest and peace. Sad news. Well, yeah, we'll get into it. Yeah, I want to hear your perspective. Okay. Well, sometime in the second half of the 90s, probably around 1996, a female grizzly bear was born somewhere in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. That bear would spend her first couple years like all North American grizzly bears, close to her mom while they spent their spring, summer, and fall looking for food, avoiding male bears, and then their winters curled up in a den.

Then she set out on her own, and she came solely responsible for her own survival and well-being, and in 2001, when she was about five years old, she encountered something new. It was a large metal tube with a big chunk of tempting meat. in the back of it. This tube was probably really foreign and kind of scary to her, but this free meat in the back of it was too appealing to turn down, and this young female grizzly bear entered a culvert trap and was caught by grizzly bear researchers for the first time. And like all bears that are captured for the first time in that ecosystem, she was assigned a number, and later that day, Bear 399 left that trap. So that's how she got her number, in case

anyone out there is wondered. The first bear that was caught in Yellowstone was Bear 1. She was Bear 399. Yep. What are some other bears of note? Are there other like, because even I knew about $3.99, are there other numbers that would be kind of big in the... Another famous one was... 609.

Bear 610 was one of her cubs. And it was kind of a well-known bear, too. But she's definitely like the only bear in that ecosystem that I think became globally. famous with her identification number, you know. So she would go on to become probably the most famous bear in the ecosystem and probably the most famous grizzly ever in the world. A big part of her notoriety. Fat bear week would have a word with you.

I would argue it with them. I don't think any of those bears are individually as famous as she was. You'd argue it with the bears? With fat bear weak. Not the bears. I don't want to argue with those bears. They're trying to eat. They are.

They're trying to get fat. The train of famous. Yeah. A big part. A big part. 10 had a leg up. Nepo, baby. I don't know. A big part of the notoriety behind 399 and the fact that she became so famous was that she was especially successful at birthing large litters of cubs and raising those cubs to independence.

So I'm going to keep saying that throughout this, like raising cubs to independence. What that basically means is with grizzly bears, that's typically at two and a half years. years, they kick those cubs off to live their own lives. And that's usually because a male bear comes in, wants to mate with mom. So she and that bear will kind of chase her cubs off and then they're alone. If we could do that, I would have kids. If you could just kick them off at two and a half. Yeah.

Hey, you're free. I got to mate with someone else. Get out of here. Yeah, I probably would too. We could. You could do it if you wanted. You'd probably go to jail. Anyways, that's what made a really famous.

and she was really good at raising these cubs to that point. That's a good age to kick him out of the house because that's right when they start understanding what you're telling them. Talking all the time. Yeah, they start kind of have like the core memory. Their first core memory is getting thrown out. Yeah, you know. Black bears do it at one and a half, which is too young.

That's too young. For people. So grizzly bear cubs in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem face a number of challenges. Anything from male bears, flooded rivers, wolves, cars, a lot of other things can lead to mortality or deaths. And while exact mortality rates aren't completely known, the most recent figure I saw is that only about 30% of grizzly bear cubs survive to independence

or their first two and a half years. So about one and three grizzly cubs will live to become independent of its mom. What would you say their number one threat of dying is? Other bears, male bears. So for a grizzly 399, for her to have 18 different. cubs over her years and then 13 of those cubs make it to independence, at least 13, there might be 14, and I'll explain why I say that later. That's a really good success rate.

14 out of 18 cubs, like getting them to that point, two and a half years, is really good for a female grizzly bear. That's like, you know, much, much more successful than a typical mother bear will be. So that's a big part of the reason why she was so famous. And I think there's a few different reasons why that might have happened. but in my opinion, the number one reason why she was so good at raising Cubs to that point is because she was willing to habituate them to humans near roads in Grand Teton National Park. So, we've talked a bit about habituation versus food conditioning on this podcast.

Can either of you explain the difference between those two terms? Habituated means that they're like used to people. People's presence doesn't make them behave the way they normally would behave. With a person's presence, they're, like, more used to it. And food condition means they're, like, relying on humans to be fed. Yeah, your habituation one, perfect, exactly how I'd explain it. Food conditioning, I would just say, like, they're not completely relying on it, but they're starting to access human foods as, like, a source of food.

So, yeah, great. So we've talked about it quite a bit on this podcast, but habituation for 399 was most often in roadside meadows where bears are going to spend a lot of time grazing and foraging. So in Yellowstone and Grand Teton, especially in like the late spring, you spend enough time just driving around. You're going to stumble on a grizzly bear in a meadow, eating, and there's going to be a lot of other cars and people there watching it.

It's very common these days to see that in the park. And there's a lot of bears that have adapted that strategy. There's a couple reasons why they might be doing that. And one of those is that they spend, if they're like constantly running from people, especially in a place like Yellowstone or Grand Teton, it's a lot of energy that they're wasting, getting away from something that isn't ever actually harming them. So they're conserving energy by becoming habituated. And then they're also able to access this really high quality food and have some protection from other bears. Say you're a female like $3.99, you have cubs with you. You're eating in this meadow and there's, 200 people gathered on the side of the road watching you. For a really wild male bear that might want to come in and kill those cubs and mate with her, that's like an intimidating prospect. There's a lot of people around.

It's just not a situation they might necessarily want to get into. So she kind of, in my opinion, used people as a shield as she was raising her cubs. I think she used those roadside meadows so heavily, and that really helped her be a successful mom, because not many of her cubs got killed by bears. Actually, I don't know if any of them got killed by other bears, which is pretty crazy. Really? Yeah.

So I think that's really the main reason she was able to raise so many. And it can be a really beneficial strategy, especially in places like Grand Teton or Yellowstone, where you also have park personnel that are there to, like, manage people and make sure no one gets out of line around those bears. Also, I mean, I've seen a lot of pictures at $3.99. And, like, for a bear, she was, like, very hot. Beautiful bear, super hot. She probably had. So I'm sure like it wasn't a hard for to mate, you know.

Yeah. What website are you looking at these pictures on? No, she must have been a hot bear because she constantly had males chasing her around. When a hot bear. When a cub is raised to independence, is that the phrase we're using? That's what I'm using for this episode, just to make it clear for people. Yeah. Do, does the mother bear and the offspring after that point, do they ever establish meaningful contact?

again in their lives or are they just... It's a perfect question for what I was about to tell you. Okay. So another really interesting story about $3.99 was in 2011. She came out of the den with three cubs. Her offspring, 610, who we talked about a little earlier, came out of the den with two of her own cubs. So that's 399's daughter had two of her own cubs.

At some point during that season, people saw 610 with three cubs and two-night or in 399 with only two. And so they switched. One of 399's cubs was adopted by 610. And there's really like, we don't know exactly why that happens. They think it's something traumatic that probably happened. Like those cubs got separated or like, you know, a bear came in. Or there's something that happened that caused them to become separated from their mom

and picked up by the other bear. but it really only happens within familial relationships, a mother-daughter that will adopt each other's cubs or something like that. So that speaks to what you just asked, Mike, because they were probably in the same general area, and 6-10 kind of like inherently knew that was her step-sister and adopted her, or adopted that cub. Yeah.

That's interesting. Which is really cool. And they did, they set out hair snares to like verify. that that was indeed what happened and it was. And that's happened in Yellowstone. It's happened in Cap Mai. It's a really fascinating thing that bears will do. And they think they kind of do it altruistically,

knowing that it's just good for grizzly bears in general if they also raise that cub. What do you mean, Harris, Knows? What they do is they'll put out like a bait and then they put like barb wire, a barbed wire kind of fence around that bait, but enough that a bear can slip under the barb wire or crawl over it. And so the bear will go in on the bait

and it leaves some hair behind on that barbed wire, and then they'll test it. And they'll also have cameras so they know what bears were in there. And that's how they, like, get genetic information about grizzly bears. Usually that bait is just like a scent bait, not an actual reward. So now the bears are in the 21 and me. They are logs, just like all of us that got tricked into it. Are you in 21 in me?

Because the rest of us are in 23 in me. Yeah, what would that be if he's missing? chromosomes. Yeah. Probably some sort of syndrome. You're a chimpanzee. Yeah. So they're just using the bears information.

They're going to sell their genetics. Yeah. Those bears can't ever become serial killers. Targeted ads. They'll start putting up billboards for like honey pots and stuff. All right. So over the years, countless people had seen her from the roads in Grand Teton. They admired her and her cubs.

They'd do everything from play together to hunt for elk calves. and all of that attention really made her a celebrity bear. And a lot of people formed a connection to her. She had like multiple Facebook pages, books that were written about her, like stickers, all sorts of stuff about $3.99. And I think this really hit a peak in 2020 because in 2020 she came out of her den with four cubs. That's impossible. It's not likely. It's not something that happens very often.

It's actually in that ecosystem. It's only been documented 14 times since 1959. But she came out with four cups and everyone lost their collective minds. Lots of photographers went to the area. People really started anthropomorphizing her to a really large degree, kind of disnifying her life. And it made her even more famous. It made some people a lot of money.

A lot of people really capitalized on this bear. And in my opinion, it got a little out of hand. Like just getting good pictures of her? Pictures, like selling stuff about her, like selling books, selling little trinkets. You could license $3.99 stuff. Like there wasn't any kind of copyright or trademark on her. So anyone that wanted to could like sell $399 merch or gear. And a lot of people did.

And a lot of people made some really good money. Lots of money and bears. Yeah, that's what I thought. This episode is brought to you by Netflix. Most valuable promotions in Netflix are hosting a blockbuster triple headliner Saturday, May 16th. Rhonda Rousey returns to face fellow woman's MMA pioneer Gina Carano in the main event. Plus co-main's Nate Diaz versus Mike Perry. And the best heavyweight in the world, Frances Nganoe versus Felipe Lins.

Watch Rhonda Rousey versus Gina Carrano, live only on Netflix. Saturday, May 16th at 9 p.m. Eastern Center time, 6 p.m. Pacific time. Anyway, I'm not necessarily like saying that's right or wrong, but I do think her celebrity reached a point where it started causing some problems. We're going to get into those a little bit later. Paparazzi. Yeah, the Barrazi. Yeah, which honestly, like she had that.

There was like a 399 poplots. When she would be out in the open, there was just like tons of people taking pictures. Pandemonium. Like, Jeff, we waited for her once. I don't know if you remember this. Like she wasn't even there and she had a crowd. just like waiting to see if she might go. Hundreds of vehicles, probably like 500 people,

just waiting, hoping she would come out. So it was crazy. And the thing that was really important to remember here is that she wasn't a tame bear. She wasn't a Disney bear. She was a wild grizzly bear. And like all wild grizzly bears, she could be unpredictable and she could be dangerous,

which is a lesson that a school teacher on a walk in 2007 learn the hard way. So Dennis Van DeBos was a school teacher from Lander, Wyoming, and he was enjoying some time in Grand Teton National Park in 2007. He'd gotten up early on the morning of June 13th, 2007, and was walking the wagon road near Jackson Lake Lodge around 6 a.m. Jackson Lake Lodge, have either of you been there? Are you familiar with it?

No. Been to Jackson Hole. Is that kind of... No, this is in Grand Teton. Well, I have no idea then. Yeah, I've stayed there. It's this really beautiful lodge on the shore of Jackson Lake, essentially, not right on the shore, but close enough. It's got this amazing view of the Teton's.

It's probably one of the most beautiful buildings I've ever been, and probably the one with the most beautiful view. And it's pretty close to the main highway. You're pretty rich. We can't all do that. I'm not. The only reason I got to stay there. The only reason I got to stay there is because I was invited to speak on a panel at a wildlife filmmaker conference. So I felt like I was living What, they pay you $100,000 to do that?

They didn't pay me a single cent, but they let me stay in the Jackson Lake Lodge, which was great. Anyway, the reason I make this kind of, I'm painting this picture, it's really close to the highway in the park. It's like, this is a pretty well-used part of Grand Teton. This isn't a place where you would necessarily think you would encounter a bear. You know, it'd be like if you were at, like in mammoth in Yellowstone or something.

Like it's not somewhere where you're necessarily think you're going to run into a grizzly bear But it is important that anywhere in the greater yellowstone You can run into a grizzly bear And little did Dennis know That 399 and her three cubs Had just managed to kill an elk Right by that exact same road that he was walking on

And the four bears were starting to feed On the still steaming elk body When he rounded a corner and found himself About 10 feet away from this grizzly bear family Oh no So it was too close. And rather than run, 399 turned and started heading toward Dennis. He yelled, but she kept coming.

And he had this moment of clarity where he saw, like, her first standing on end, super pissed, these three smaller bears running around. And he started backpedaling and, like, yelling and waving his arms. And then he stumbled. And when he looked up, she was eye level with him. Wow. Yeah. So he dove down and he put his arms.

behind his head and just kind of braced himself. He didn't have bear spray as far as I could tell. And she came in and started biting him on his back while he was trying to play dead. And then she clamped her teeth into his butt. And he's now pinned to the ground. She's standing on him. He felt a bear paw, grab his left calf, and then she bit into his butt again. And then suddenly he heard.

You can just say ate ass. She ate his ass. She ate his ass. She didn't do that. I don't think that's what that is. All right. You're probably saying it at the better way then. Well, yeah. Even in human terms, biting butts is not eating ass.

All right. Luckily, he's pinned down and a moment later he hears someone yell out. And all of a sudden this pressure lifts off of him. And there had been a cook and a wrangler who were in these corrals nearby that had seen this group of bears. and they saw what was happening and they yelled out and it was enough to scare $3.99 off and she walked away with the cups. She didn't eat her elk?

I don't know if she came back to it or not, but she definitely didn't do it right then and there. So this was pretty quick. It wasn't a super intense mauling. He was transported to Jackson for treatment on the way to the hospital. He said, hey, don't do anything to those bears. It wasn't their fault.

And ultimately, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service came up with the same conclusion. They said, you know what? this was a bear acting naturally. She's protecting your cubs. She's protecting a food source. We're not going to do anything to her. Had they, her legacy would have ended a lot earlier than it did, but she was spared.

I think, and this is where I'm going to put on my kind of tinfoil hat here, I think Shane, who we talked to in, like, this summer, he got mauled in Grand Teton in May. I think he got mauled by $3.99. No way. I think you brought that up in our interview. Yeah. Oh, really? Hmm.

Yeah. The bear that mauled him. I'll go out of us that closely. So I don't remember that detail. We did talk about it. The bear that mauled him had a yearling cub. She had a yearling cub this summer. He was in her general kind of area.

And it seemed like the park never released any kind of details on the bear that got him. And they usually at least tell, like, the bear community. And they didn't even tell other bear experts in the area. Which made me think it was her. Well, and, like, he was saying he was getting hate online from, like, people in the Teton's, and that's just because they are so defensive of Bear 399. Yeah. It's like Swifties, if you ever, like, say something bad about Taylor Swift.

You'll hear it online, and that's $3.99. He got the brunt of that. For the record, Swifties, we, oh, boy, do we love Taylor Swift. Oh, man. Her music is very exciting and good to listen to. Um, did Shane get bit? Did his butt have any bite marks? Because that's a clue.

Should we call him up? Yeah, we should ask him. Hey, how's your ass, Shane? Yeah. Did he eat it? Well, I think once it got him face first, it bit the bears. She bit the bear spray before. Yeah.

He got mauled, though. He got mauled pretty good. But yeah. Yeah. Maybe she was going for it. She's trying to flip him over to get at his butt. He should have the bear spray on his butt. It's a good strategy.

All of this goes to say that even a. really heavily habituated bear can be dangerous. And one thing to remember is their habituation is often really site specific. So like a grizzly bear that's really habituated to roadside meadows, you could bump into that bear in the backcountry and she's going to act very differently than she did in that meadow. Like if she's in the meadow, there might be people standing 50 yards away by their cars and she doesn't even care. But if those people are 50 yards from her in the back country, she might be very different, you know, so that habituation can be very sight-specific. Okay, as we mentioned, 399 mania hit fever pitch when she came out of their den in

2020 with four cubs. The internet's just flooded with photos of her in these four tiny cubs, and it was crazy that she managed to raise them into the fall of 2021. All four of them were still with her, and at this point, they're like big grizzly bears. And unfortunately, they were starting to get into trouble. As teenagers will do. So they're all still together. It's the early fall of 2021, and she is starting to show up with these four large cubs in and around Jackson, Wyoming. And Jackson's like a fairly decent-sized city as far as Wyoming standards go.

And this is like five big intimidating grizzly bears in town. Just running that's town. Yeah. Pain the town brown. Running for offense. Because they're brown bears. Yeah, I got it. I got it. It's good. They're finding foods that they shouldn't be eating, so they're rating chicken coops. They're getting into chicken food, into apiaries or beehives, other human sources of food in communities surrounding Jackson and in Jackson itself.

Spray painting houses. Yeah, really causing. Egging, toilet papering. There was a video, I was working in Yellowstone that fall, and there was a video. circulating of her by the dumpster at Albertsons in downtown Jackson. So like she was really, it was starting to get pretty dicey. No, at night. But I mean, this would be as soon as it would get dark sometimes she would show up.

And there's still people walking around. This is five grizzly bears. Things were getting scared. Yeah, that's crazy. I remember that feeling of a pressure cooker that whole summer. And everyone just kind of knowing that something bad was probably going to happen with this bear family. and Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,

they're ultimately in charge of decisions for grizzly bears because grizzly bears are a protected species. So I think at this point, there was a lot of pressure on them to kill this bear family. I think Wyoming had had enough of them. I think there was just a lot of pressure to get rid of them because everyone was worried something was going to happen. But at this point, she's such a celebrity that if you decide to kill her, you're going to have people showing up with like pitchforks and torches trying to kill people.

You know? Matter of Taylor Swift got killed by Wyoming. Let's continue making that comparison for the entire episode. Wyoming decided to kill Taylor Swift. People be pissed. They're like, listen. We'd be back down to 49 states. This has gone far enough.

She's in the dumpsters at Albertsons. We got to kill her. So this was turning into this really complicated situation. US Fish and Wildlife Service has to make some really hard decisions. And I was kind of privy to some of these conversations. And I know they were thinking of a lot of different things. They didn't want a killer, but they were thinking of moving or somewhere else, possibly like separating the family and hoping the Cubs would just be okay at this point,

which they probably would have been. There's a lot of things being talked about. ultimately what they decided on was something kind of crazy and unprecedented and I don't think it's ever really happened before and we'll see if it ever happens again but basically they put together a team so like cue the yeah cue the like putting together a team yeah music magruber yeah but they assembled a team of bear experts and I was lucky enough to be on that team. It consisted of... You were on the A team for Bears? I was on 18. How big was the team? That's so cool. There's probably, I would say, like 10 to 15 people total on this team. It consisted of people from

National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Geological Service, and U.S. Forest Service. Was it like Oceans 11 where you all had like your special skill? You were probably like the little ninja guy who could fit in this tight spot and stuff? No, that's what I was about to say. I will say, like, this team consisted of a large number of people. I was lucky in that my specialty was, like, on the ground work with bears. So I got to be, like, very... How many on the ground people were in the team?

There's probably, like, four or five of us. When they invited you on, did you do the handshake where you flex your bicep and, like, black hands really left? Yeah. We, like, grabbed four arms. Dylan. Dylan. I mean, Dylan.

Yeah. The whole objective of this team was to keep $399 and her four cubs out of trouble. The thought was that if we could prevent them from getting into anthropogenic foods long enough, if we could haze them when they were getting into trouble, that she might get tired of trying and just move back up into Grand Teton where she knew she had reliable food and closer to her death. You're Taylor Swift's bodyguard team. Yeah, exactly. This pretty much started November of 2021.

she is a historically late den enterer. Generally bears... She gets some extra food. Yeah. They generally go into their dens in like early November. The year previous to this, she didn't go into her den until January. So, yeah, pretty tricky,

and we were really just hoping that she would go into her den early, but she didn't. She stayed down by Jackson. She's getting into a lot of trouble. My job was to go to the places where she and her cubs had most recently been seen during the day and we talked to the people that had had run-ins with her.

We do our best to help them protect the different food attractants that they might have, secure them. And then during the night, we would go out and actually look for these bears. Like, we were trying to stay a step ahead of her and keep her out of trouble. And this is something that, like, me and my colleague from Yellowstone were in large part responsible for, and we would just trade off shifts, each of us alone, trying to find her. And she was a step ahead of us. Every night, my first little bit of that, I would be like literally one step behind her.

The people would be like she was here 10 minutes ago and now she's gone. Like it was kind of uncanny how good she was and how smart she was. And she would never, it's like she knew the line that she couldn't cross to where the state would just be finally like, we got to kill her. Once they start breaking into things or getting into like trash, they would probably kill her. But she never did that. And it was amazing. So she was just staying one step ahead of us until one night I finally caught her and her cubs in someone's yard

I had a pretty crazy encounter with her and some people that were in a hot springs And that's actually a story that I'm going to save just for like Timing on this but I am going to tell it I think in a subscription episode coming up quick But I have another story I'm going to tell on this episode kind of a bigger one I got a subscribe Yeah So that was a crazy night I managed to find her haze her in the cubs, but we weren't having a lot of success.

So we came up with the new plan. And what that plan was is that we were going to do our best to collar her and maybe some of her cubs. And with those callers on, we'd be able to kind of stay one step ahead of her instead of the opposite. And ideally, if we could color all five of them, if we could get all five of them in traps, we would just move them back up to Grand Teton. We'd sedate them, put them on trailers, and ship them back up to the park. and then do our best just to keep them in the park the rest of the season. Her fan base would probably be kind of mad about that, right?

That's what I was about to ask. People were really mad. When people caught wind that we were trying to collar her, they thought we were trying to kill her. And there was protests. There were like whole big demonstrations. We were legitimately worried about our safety at times because of like her fans.

There was like a couple really prominent local photographers that were kind of docked. us and everything. Part of that was the fault of some of these agencies that were in charge of this where they weren't really releasing enough information to the public. And they finally did, and it really calmed things down quite a bit. But when people caught wind of the collaring stuff, they were not happy. They thought we were trying to kill them. So what happened, though, I'm just going to kind of go into storytelling mode here. We found this spot where Wyoming Department of Transportation had been throwing roadkill deer and elk. And it was just like,

like full of grizzly bear prints. There was just like tracks everywhere. And so we were like, oh, we should put our traps here. So we did. We put five traps down. I helped install those traps. It was like a whole full day of work. And that night, we caught three of her cubs. She and the the remaining cub in the morning were kind of just pacing back and forth. We tried really hard to get a dart into her and the other cub and then we would have all five of them and we could just take them up into teetan that wasn't safe there wasn't really a good way to do it so what we ended up doing is just watching her walk up onto the hillside she laid down under some sagebrush with her cub and we worked these other three bears two of them were a bit bigger like 250 pounds so they got

collars and the third one didn't get a collar so we put collars on two of these bears and there was like a really spooky moment for me. I wasn't in the collaring team. I was watching 399 in her cub, but that night when we let the cubs out of the traps, it was like dark. And I was on the team to let them out. And to do that, you have to like flip a switch on the lock of these traps. And I had to like sneak out of the truck in the dark, go over the trap and unlock it. And meanwhile, she's just 30 feet away patrolling. And I can see her. I can see her. eyes like reflecting in the headlight and I'm messing with their cub and it was really scary. But we managed to get them all released.

They all joined back up with her. And then we had a radio signal so we could actually hear their callers beeping and kind of have a better idea of where they were. And that made our jobs a bit easier. But we're coming to my main story here. Probably the craziest night of my life. So our main kind of directive from our bosses on this job. was if she's ever near Jackson, it's all hands on deck.

So one day I'm following her during the day, and I'm just hearing her up in the mountains above Jackson, but she's a fair distance away. And when I turn over the reins to my colleague, I told him where they were, and I was just kind of like, good luck, you know, and went to bed. And at like 11 p.m. that night, he busts into my room and just yells, they're in downtown Jackson.

and so he had been listening to them and he couldn't really figure out where they were and then all of a sudden he's in Jackson and the thing's just like pinging loud like they're right in town and then someone reports seeing them in their yard in like a suburb of Jackson. I'm talking like cookie cutter houses green lawns and there's just five grizzly bears in their front lawn. So he wakes me up and already there's like blockades on the road. roads. The cops aren't letting anyone into town. And it's like me and him in our trucks and probably 10 different police cruisers. And we're all just looking for these bears. We've got the antennas out.

We're listening to their beeps. We got flashlights. And I finally am like, there they are. I see all their eyes shine in someone's yard. And so we chase them a bit and they disappear again. And so we're just driving around these streets in Jackson. And me and my friend drive by a hotel And like, you know those hotels where there's a central plaza kind of? Oh, yeah, yeah. Three different walls and they all face the middle and all the rooms face the middle. We drive by one of those and all five of them are standing in the middle of this hotel plaza. What?

And I'm just thinking to myself, like, if anyone comes out of their room right now, they're going to be 15 feet away from five grizzly bears. Oh, man. And what we wanted to do was drive in there and like push him with the truck, but there wasn't a good place to push them to or a place we could drive the truck through. So I just say to my partner, I said, give me the paintball gun. And he hands me the paintball gun. And I just hop out and run into the plaza and just start like firing paintballs like crazy at these five grizzly bears, hoping that they'll go out the other end. And they do. And so I'm following them, just running behind them on foot, probably 50 feet away, firing paintballs at them in the dark. And I didn't know this, but there's a cop coming

up on the other side. And I was like, I was just pushing them at just the right pace that I wanted. They were like running from me, but not like full on sprint. I was moving them like pretty well. My friend was coming back to pick me up in the truck. And this cop just peels into this parking lot they were in going like 80, siren blaring and just make some sprint. And something that I didn't realize is that one of the USGS guys was standing in a trailer park,

far away. And this cop pushes him right into him. And I have this image of him standing, like holding his shoulders and five grizzly bears run around him like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. Yeah. Gallimus. Yeah. It was crazy. Anyway, this cop really spooks him and they run into this alleyway behind a hotel right on the main drag in Jackson. And we lose them. And none of us can find them and there's all this kind of metal stuff in there that's scrambling their signal on the radio and so there's a ton of us at this point there's probably like 10 different people from the team 50 different police officers we're all searching for these bears and no one can find them did you like tell the police like you got calm down when you yeah oh yeah these cops are like

shaky you can see their eyes are big and they're kind of like way outside of their element here yeah and so we're just looking I'm on foot still just searching and I have my flashlight and there's someone in this trailer park kind of right by this hotel and they're like, I see some eye shine. And they pointed out where it was and I shine my flashlight and probably 12 inches off the ground, there's some eye shine. And I'm thinking, okay, there's no way that's a grizzly bear. It's way too close to the ground.

Like that's probably a fox or something. And I tell the guy, I think that's just a fox. Keep looking. And then I go back and I shine there again and I see. 10 eyes looking at me. Then they're all shining back. And I was like, holy shit. And what it was is all five of them were laying on top of each other in a ditch in this alley behind a hotel.

And there's all this scrub brush in there that's like concealing them. So all we can see is their eyes shining through. So I honestly, like, I'm not going to toot my own horn too much here. But like, I think this was probably the scariest thing I've ever done in my life. Aside from probably the den that me and Jeff went into, second scariest. What I did at that point is that alleyway led to the northern part of town. And if we could just push them that direction, they would go up and over the hill and they would be out of Jackson. So we were like so close to getting them out of town.

And all we had to do was push him down that alleyway. And so I got in the brush on the south side of them. I couldn't see him. All I could see was this bush they were in. And I'm on the other side of that bush. And I have like three cops behind me. And they all have shotguns that are like loaded and ready to go. And I'm like, okay, I'm just going to start firing paintballs into this bush.

And they're either going to run north and leave town or they're going to run south and run right into us. So I was like, you guys got to be ready. And they're like, okay. They're clutching their guns just ready to go. And I start firing paintballs in the bush. And the bush explodes with grizzly bears. and they run north across the highway, up over the hill and out of town. Nice.

So, yeah, it was crazy. Like, craziest night of my life, without a doubt, chasing grizzly bears on foot through Jackson. The next night I caught back up with them, was able to push them even further north. A lot of my colleagues had nights where they pushed them. And we got them back into Grand Teton. Mission accomplished. We're able to keep them there the rest of the season. And they dend.

And there's no more conflicts after that point, which was, great. She had gone into Jackson like a few times in the fall, right? She had. Yeah. This was like becoming a pattern for her. Like she knew she could find better food in the fall in Jackson area or something. Yeah. And I think for her too, just having like four big bears to feed at this point that she was kind of responsible for, the natural food sources just weren't cutting it. And she knew that she could get really high quality food in Jackson and like some of these communities south of Jackson. So all four of those cubs did survive to independence. She was seen without them the next summer in 2022.

She's being courted by a large male grizzly, and at that point she's like 26 or 27. And that's past the point that grizzly bears in this ecosystem typically would have cubs. But if anyone was going to have a geriatric cub, everyone knew that it was probably going to be her. And sure enough, in the spring of 2023, she emerged from her den with a cub.

And she was 27 at that point. So she was the oldest bear on record in the greater Yellowstone to ever successfully have a cub. Nice. Yeah, she's pretty impressive. Like she had so many cubs. She had a four litter. She had an adoption. And now she's been the oldest when she had a cub.

Like she was a standout bear without a doubt. The goat. Yeah. She was with that cub until her life came to an end a couple weeks ago, not far from when I first saw. her and her cubs in 2021. So on October 22nd of this year, 399 and this yearling cub were once again south of Jackson. They're once again getting into trouble and once again fish and wildlife service is trying really hard to figure out what to do.

But in this late October, they knew that she had been in the Snake River Canyon, which is the, it's on Highway 89. It leads to Jackson. It's kind of this windy canyon along the Snake River. really beautiful, but a really windy highway. And they knew that she had been feeding on an elk carcass in that canyon, one that had been hit by a car. So on the night of October 22nd, she's still in that general area. She stepped out onto the road at the exact same time that a car came around a corner at night. That car struck her, killed her, and it ended her 28-year-old life.

The news hit the next day. Tons of people expressed their sadness, their anger, their grief. and I just really wanted to say when it comes to anger, this person didn't really do anything wrong, the hitter. They weren't speeding. They weren't distracted. A grizzly bear is a dark animal in a dark night in a dark canyon.

If one steps out on the road, they're pretty hard to avoid. And it could happen to anyone. I know there's been death threats lobbied against this person. There's been all sorts of craziness. This wasn't this driver's fault. This could have happened to anyone.

If anything, the fault should, and I don't even want to say fault, like, the problem here was that there was an L carcass too near the road. And one thing that we could do better in general in the States is like pulling carcasses away from roads, because that does lead to a lot of animal mortalities. Like eagles, bears, all sorts of stuff get hit by cars because they're feeding on animals right by the road. All right. Yeah. But that's something, again, like you said, yeah, you see dead animal carcasses like everywhere you go, basically. It's like hard. to stay on top of that.

It is. No one's fault, just to unlucky. No, and then another... It's an elk's fault in my opinion. That is true. Another thing just to point out here is like, this is a bear that was heavily habituated to roads. She was used to being on roads.

I've seen a lot of photos of her just like walking down the road and she was allowed to do that. And I know that Grand Teton was trying to kind of break her that behavior, but it was a little bit too late that they probably tried to do that. In Yellowstone, we really focused on that. When I was on Yellowstone Bear Management, I'd be watching a grizzly.

It would be doing its thing or a black bear, and I wouldn't haze it, but the second it stepped foot on a road, I would haze it. And the whole idea there was to create a negative association with roads. We don't want them comfortable on roads, and she was very comfortable on roads. So I do think that could have played a part in her death.

To just make our roads electric so we can shock them when they walk on it. That's a good idea. And they can charge our electric cars while we drive too. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's a great idea, Jeff. Do you think if Taylor Swift would have stepped out onto that road,

do you think she would have gotten hit? Like on a windy road. She doesn't usually feed on elk carcasses on the side of roads either. She might be easier to see just because she's taller, blonde hair. Yeah. It sounds like it's hard to stop in time. Yeah, that's true. I think the people would be equally mad at the driver, though.

Equally, you should probably be mad at those tears. Oh, man. I don't know, because if Taylor Swift was just, like, on a mountain road, they'd kind of be like, well, you turned up in walking on the road. In the night in Wyoming. And I will say, just for people that are really upset about this, 28 years old is, like, a ripe old age for a grizzly bear. Like, a lot of these bears.

The max she could have lived. A little older than 30. I mean, I want to say average is late 20s that they die. So she's right in the average. I mean, she was an amazing bear, but 28 isn't, isn't, like, young for a grizzly bear to die. Maybe she did it on purpose. She had some, like, arthritis. Yeah.

Maybe this last cub she had was just really annoying, and she's just like, I'm done. Yeah, take me out. As far as that... Well, whatever. Arthritis just wouldn't drive an animal to suicide, I don't think. Is that what you're inferring? Anything would drive an animal to suicide. Arthritis hurts, right?

Old people. Most people hate having arthritis. And they're allowed to just sit on the couch all day, but, like, bears, they can't. They gotta keep going. Yeah. She's still at a mouth to feed. Yeah. As far as that cubs concerned,

It was a yearling cub, so at this point this cub is like almost two years old, it is probably going to be fine. I don't think anyone has seen it since they tend to be okay at that age when they're separated from their moms. So I think this cub will be okay. But that is why earlier I said she's raised 13, possibly 14 cubs to independence because who knows what's going to happen with this one. Maybe the arthritis is why she couldn't get out of the way fast enough. in her younger years, she would have like back flipped off the road because she was incredible like that. Yeah. I love that we've added arthritis to her lore at this point.

So U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has her remains. I don't think they really know what they're going to do with them. There's been a lot of public saying like we can make a really good Halloween decoration. A lot of people are saying they don't want her to be mounted like in taxidermy that they want her to be like. placed out in the ecosystem and to go back into Teeton. Whose decision ultimately is that? The coordinator for Grizzly Bear Recovery. So right now that person's name is Hillary Cooney.

She was my boss on that. Just a single person will be able to like. Yeah. I mean, she has a whole team that she'll consult and stuff. But I do think that will ultimately be her decision. She listens to the public. Yeah, she's great. I loved working for her.

And I think she's the right kind of person for this job because it's a very complicated I would suggest to her to put animatronics in the bear carcass and then have like a big Halloween bowl of candy. And when kids try to take candy, the paws come down over the top of the bowl. I'll email her and let her know that that's what you think should happen. Lots of places can expose you to identity theft. Oh, no. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity, which is way more than anyone can do on their own.

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candidly about on that subscription episode I'm going to do. She had 18 cubs, 14 of which survived to independence, but six of those 14 ended up getting killed as subadults or adults, and five of those were from management removals. So management removals means they were like causing trouble. They were killing livestock. They were breaking into property. And that's a pretty high number for her legacy. Like, that's a lot of her cubs.

She taught them some bad habits. Yes, that ended up being conflict bears. So I do think while she was a really good mom and really good at raising her cubs to that point where she could kick them off, she taught him a lot of bad habits. And I don't blame her for that. I think it's just the environment she grew up in. I think she was really smart and she took advantage of that. But I think some of her cubs weren't quite as smart and ended up getting into trouble. So she was great at...

That is passing on. Because those dumb bears are going to survive. they're going to pass down their stupid genetics to their cubs. We're just going to be overrun by dumb bears. Well, she has some really smart cubs too. It's kind of the opposite. A bunch of winning poos all over the place. It's not an idioticry thing with bears.

The smart ones tend to live. The dumb ones tend to get killed. But I do think there's something that we should talk about in that regard. Like outside of conflict bears, doing individual things that cause problems, I think the biggest problem with the conflict bear is the perception that they give people about grizzly bears, especially people in these communities where it really matters. Because if you live outside of Jackson and you constantly have grizzly bears, you know, destroying stuff at your house or raiding your chicken coop or whatever,

you start to really hate grizzly bears. Those are the people that will end up shooting them. Those are the people that will like push really hard against grizzly bear conservation. and expansion. So conflict bears can do a lot of damage to the overall perception of grizzly bears in the places where it really matters a lot. That is why sometimes when you hear like,

oh, those bears were removed, it sounds really callous and kind of mean that we're like killing bears that are just trying to get food. But ultimately that's doing the whole population of favor because you're showing people that you're taking that stuff seriously and you're not allowing those bears

to continue making bad kind of perceptions in people, you know? So one other thing I wanted to talk about that's kind of, I think, a little bit negative before we get into the really positive stuff and the more flowery stuff is this kind of celebrity aspect to an animal. I personally saw how that can be kind of dangerous, how passionate people got about this one bear. It was frustrating.

As someone who was like a scientist and in charge of trying to, I've tried. trying to safeguard that bear for a couple months or a few weeks. Having people that were like her fans opposed to me really felt crazy. Like it felt insane that that was happening when I was like, my job was to protect her, you know? And I just think when you're doing that with one animal, you focus on the individual instead of the population. And to me, as a biologist, that just feels kind of backwards.

So I do think we should be really careful about that. But that's just kind of something I wanted to say before I got into the good stuff that she did. Because I think she did a lot of good. As far as the good is concerned, I think it far outweighs the bad. This was a bear that inspired millions of people. I mean, there was thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people that saw her. And I personally think you can't see like a female grizzly bear playing with her cubs in a mountain meadow. and walk away from that unchanged.

It changes you. It makes you care about that animal on a level that you would never care about them if you weren't able to actually see it, you know? Mike might push back on that. Yeah, he might, but I honestly think, I've seen Mike now see animals in the wild that he's never seen, and it does change you.

Like, you can't tell me that you both don't feel differently about orangutanans after watching one come down out of a tree holding its baby in the middle of the Bornean rainforest. It made me care about them on a level that I didn't before. And Mike, you have to, at least a little bit. Yeah, for sure a little bit, definitely. I respond very strongly for whatever reason to sea life, a lot stronger to sea life than terrestrial type stuff.

But no, you're right. Seeing animals out in the wild, it always clicks in my brain that there's no one really out here. I mean, there's people like U.S., but there's not a zoo. that's feeding them every day. There aren't fences protecting it from predators. They're just like surviving. They're part of the natural world and it's just so, it's like very miraculous in a lot of ways that we have such a delicately balanced ecosystem in every part of the world that can support life like that. Yeah. And like there's obviously a spectrum to the amount of change that impacts on a person. But like, I do think it does affect just about everyone that sees that

sort of thing. And even if they just see it in photos or video, when I first saw her with their four cubs, I was just like, holy shit, I have to go see this. Like, I really want to see her with these cubs. And she gave people a window into the lives of grizzly bears. Like, people got to see her do just about everything that a grizzly bear does throughout its life. And I think that's really special. I think she was a really incredible ambassador for the whole species and just inspired tons of people to care more about grizzly bears than they ever would have had they not known her story. And I do think that's something that far outweighs the negative stuff that she kind of brought. We should have made our politicians all go look at a grizzly bear in the meadow.

That's a great idea. Yeah. Like all of our politicians just have this one soft spot and it's for grizzly bears. I would love that. So a couple just kind of parting thoughts, some hopes that I have some things that we can learn from her legacy. I really hope that people see her as a symbol of the population as a whole and not just a single animal. I hope they can see that like this bear is kind of this symbol of the fact that we've done a really good job conserving grizzly bears in this ecosystem, that they're back up to a healthy population, that Teton and Yellowstone now represent a place where people can go and see grizzly bears in the wild. And I think that's really special because it wasn't always that way.

And she's a success story, you know. She had a lot of cubs. She lived to 28. She showed people how grizzly bears and humans can coexist. And I think she also kind of pointed out some weaknesses that we have in kind of preventing conflict. And I'm going to get into those during conservation. Yeah, I think she was a special bear. I do.

I get why people got so fanatic about her. But I also think we need to be careful about that. All right, you guys got any thoughts before we get into categories? Like a never meet your heroes kind of thing. They'll kill you in some of these instances. Yeah, I would just say, I feel like the super fans are like, I don't know, too much. Like, you shouldn't get even wanting to spend a whole summer just like trying to see the bear. But like, at some point, like, you got to realize you're kind of the problem for this bear.

Like, you're the one that's like, causing it to like have a harder life. Habituating or... If you're just like trying to find it every single day. Have your moments with it and then go watch TV or something. Yeah, be normal like the rest of us and just listen to Taylor Swift. I will say in a way those people did save $399's life in 2021 when they decided not to kill her.

But also like a downside to her celebrity is a lot of money was spent on keeping this one bear family alive that could have been used. used much better in preserving a lot more bears and going toward underpasses or different things that would be used for perpetuity in helping the population. Instead, probably tens of thousands of dollars were spent on keeping her and these cubs alive. So it, you know, that is kind of a, you can view it either way as an upside or downsides. I did not.

I made very little money on that job. Man, you've made so much money throughout this whole story. You want to hear a funny thing about that actually. When they decided to hire me, the Fish and Wildlife Service called my boss at Yellowstone to ask, they were just going to like pay me my Yellowstone rate. And they asked him what he was paying us. And he didn't know. So he just like said something from like the mid-2010s or something. So I got paid like less than I did at Yellowstone on this like high profile job.

So. Okay. So let's get into our category. Our first one is going to be she was often known as the queen of the titans I was really circling doing like your favorite car strikes in pop culture but I decided it's too soon so that might be a fun one me Joe black I think we'd all do meet Joe black I might do final destination the first one oh yeah the bus yeah sure okay we did it we did it anyways all right we're also going to do

favorite queen and pop culture. What do you guys think? You got any answers for that one? Not a good one. The first thing I thought of in the first Mario Galaxy game, there's this big queen bee character and you can climb around on her fuzzy body. And for some reason, it just seems like the most pleasant and comfortable place to clamber around. So I'm going to go with that.

I don't even know her name, but it just looks like a cozy place to curl up and sleep, just on top of a queen bee. Cool. I like it. I'm going to go with Sansa Stark. I liked in Game of Thrones how, like, her progression as a character was one of my favorites throughout the series. And I liked how she was just kind of at the end, like, you know what? The North's going to be her own thing. I don't like my brother.

Yeah. I don't trust my brother that just, like, wargs into other animals and stuff. Everyone just decided to do whatever they wanted. I'll go the other end on that. I like De Nereus the best. I thought she's such a good queen. Those dragons are so good. It's burning up the city.

I would have followed her even after she killed all those people. Like gray worm. Yeah. All right. Okay. This next question I kind of need to explain. While I was doing that 399 job, I was listening to an audiobook. And I think it was the best audio book I've ever listened to.

So I wanted to ask you guys, what's the best audio book? what's the best audio book you've ever listened to. Mine was the three-body problem, which I was listening to while I was doing that job. I really liked listening to the girl with the dragon tattoo. Oh. Because I hadn't seen the movie, and I just saw it as, like, a really good audio book.

Yeah. I listened to William Gibson read his own book, Neuromancer. and I always really like when authors themselves do the reading because they kind of do the intonation that they heard in their head when they were writing it. And it's kind of, it's funny because he's not like an awesome voice actor, but it just gives it such an authentic feel. And for a story like that,

it just kind of makes sense to have it be a little rough and kind of grimy and low-fi. But I mean, I love that book too. So that was just my favorite experience with an audiobook. I'm going to do a shout out to, the Stephen Fry narrated Harry Potter's because I really like those a lot. Our next category is going to be, we're Mike and Jeff paying attention. I got three questions for each of you and then a bonus question. What's on the line?

On the line is going to be a souvenir from Ecuador because I'm going to Ecuador this week. Cool, okay. Lock in. Okay, who wants to go first? Mike's going first. Mike, in what year was 399 first captured? Uh, 1999. Incorrect.

Jeff, would you like to steal? 2007? Incorrect. 2001. Oh. Jeff, in what year was she first seen with four Cubs? 2000. I'm sorry.

20, 2020. Correct. Two, 2020. That's one point, Jeff. What? I had it in my brain, 20, 21. He corrected himself before I could say wrong. I thought he was wrong already.

Mike. I don't know why I said. There's like twos and zeros in my brain. I just $16,000. Yeah, right, okay. Mike, how many total cubs did $3.99 have throughout her years? Oh, dude. What?

18? 18, correct. Oh. Jeff. You each have one right now? That one's worth 18 points. What was the profession of the man that she mauled? That one was worth 18 points?

Yeah, dude. No, it wasn't. So awesome. What was the profession school teacher? Correct. Points don't matter anyway. Wes always does for all the marbles. No, this time they're going to matter.

I'm not doing all the marbles. Mike, how many of our cubs were killed after being kicked off on their own? Zero. wrong Jeff how many of her cubs were killed after being kicked off on their own don't guess zero two guesses and when I say yeah when I say killed I mean killed

two guesses why is by people like not killed naturally or no sorry this is after being kicked off on their own regardless they're all killed by people no uh well what's the second guess five it's six it's six yeah huh okay so what's

What's the score right now? It's 2-1, Jeff still? Jeff, in what year was the man that she mauled, mauled? Well, if you count in Shane as this year. We're not counting Shane, I mean the other one. 2007. Correct. 3-1, Jeff.

All right, this bonus question is, I don't think you can win at this point, Mike, but I'm still going to, I'll say if you get it. Yeah, I want it. too. Shoot. Mike, if you get this before Jeff does, I will bring you a souvenir as well. Hey. But Jeff already got his.

Okay. What grocery store was she seen near? Pigley Wigley. Albertson. Alversons. Dang. Just Jeff gets the souvenir. Jeff gets two souvenirs now.

All right. Jeff, do you have some listener questions for us? You know, I got a couple patron ones before you do that. Oh, man. And you really faked me? Yeah, I did the real, the old bait and switch. Okay, this one's from S.J. Valiquette. They say if you could experience an animal attack through some advanced sort of VR with full sensation,

but knowing you'd be able to take off the headset and be fine at the end, would you? And if yes, what animal would you choose? So, like, you feel the pain and everything? Yeah, full sensation, animal attack. Would you do it and what animal would you choose? I mean, maybe just for research for like our career, you know? Yeah. And then I could like to help you like, oh, no, like when they say it feels like you get hit by a truck, they're right actually.

Ragdoll sensations. I think the one I'm most curious about would be like a venomous snake bite because I'm just curious about feeling that venom spread through you and like the effects. So I might pick that, a rattlesnake bite or a black mama bite or something. I'd be a lot more interested in, like, fighting animals in VR and seeing, like, what I could beat. Yeah, I like that. Yeah. How about, how about, here's a follow-up question for me then. You get that VR headset where you're able to fight them, but if you lose, you never get to play again.

So what animal would you pick? Oh, well. I'm going 100. I'm going a hundred pound chin I want that fight You're just going for it Yeah I think that's the right choice for Jeff

I like that too Yeah I want to keep playing So I'm gonna pick like a mouse or something Yeah Spider just stomp it Yeah see you tomorrow I think I pick another spider

A mountain lion Yeah Mike would you do the attack thing I don't think you ever answered I think I might do Like a constrictor Or something I don't know

Okay. Because my knee-jerk reaction would be to go with something like a mountain lion where it's just like a quick chomp to the vertebrae. I don't know. That probably doesn't kill you. I'd want it to be over quick, but. Oh, you'd love to get suffocated, you a freak. And choked out. Constricted by a freaking Anaconda, you'd love that so much.

Dude, some people, like, do the whole choking thing to heighten the experience. Yeah. I don't know. Well, now after this episode. But then you need to be completely constricted every time you have sex after that. Right. Now after this episode, he probably wants a grizzly bear,

so it will eat his ass. All right. That's a good thought. This one's from Bella. Bella says, I have a question for Wes and possibly Jeff. In the time you've spent in Central and South America, have you ever seen a kinkajoo? What do you think about them as an animal,

and how do you feel about people who keep them as pets? You ever see a kinkajoo, Jeff? No, I was in Guatemala, but and some in Mexico, but I've never been to South America. Yeah, I think they exist in Guatemala, at least. I've seen one, and it's kind of a funny story. It was in Ecuador where I'm going, and I was staying in this rainforest lodge, and the power went out, and we were all kind of standing around in the dark at dinner, and all of a sudden there's, like, something moving by my feet, and we were all just like, what the hell is that?

And right as we, like, look down, someone turned on a flashlight and there's a kinkajoo standing by our feet. And then it, like, crawled up the side of the lodge. And it was just really cool. I love them. I think they're, like, a cool little critter. I don't think they should be pets. People have them as pets. Yeah, like Paris Hilton had one for a little bit.

Oh, man. She should be dead. Why? Just because she owned one of those kinkajus? By her own rules. There's, like, one time she did the whole voter die. and then she didn't vote. And I just feel like she should follow her.

Yeah, you can't tell people that and not follow it. It's not her fault. It's up to the... I think it's her fault, yeah. Well, that's what I'm saying. Because I feel like it's maybe the people working at the voting booth should go get her. Just like the day after voting's finished, one of them looks at each other and like, did she vote? And they're like, no, they just cock a shotgun and walk away.

Yeah, the next purge movie. All right, this one's from Campbell. A question for me and then for both of you. I think the one for both of you is really interesting. Both of us? Yeah, both. Both of us? It's good too.

It says, Wes, why did you choose to study bears over sharks? Did you ever consider doing sharks instead? It wasn't so much like a choice for me as I just kind of lucked out into bears. Usually students don't really get to pick what they're studying and especially these more charismatic animals. you have to get pretty lucky to get into a program to work with them. So I feel really lucky that I got to work with bears. But I would have loved to have studied sharks. And then the question for Jeff and Mike,

if you were to be wildlife biologist, what animal would you want to specialize in? Yeah, I don't know. I'd want it to, like, bears is honestly a really high choice. I also, like, have gotten really into insects, so, like, entomology. Just like, I think it'd be cool to just know, like, every type beetle I see or something.

It's almost like birding where you can find different types of insects and get really excited that you like found this insect. That's true. Entomologists are never bored. With insects I probably have the best chance of like being able to name a species Jeff. Like with bears I won't be able to name a species of bear Jeff. No, we found all the bears.

Mike? I don't know what specific species or animal. I would want to study, but something deep sea related, just go down in one of those submarines in complete darkness and just search around with a light, trying to see cool weird stuff down there. That'd be fun. Yeah, you can name new stuff down there too.

Lots of new stuff. It is weird when you see videos of some of those alien-looking squid and stuff down there. It's like, this is crazy that we have this stuff on our planet. And it makes me feel like we shouldn't be down there. Like, no. Like, this is stuff we shouldn't be looking at almost. Do you know what the cool thing about that job would be, too, is that you're probably

not expected to be making, like, groundbreaking discoveries every day. So you can just kind of, like, chill out and take a nap for like a whole work day. Hey, we saw something today. Yeah. Sorry, we struck out. Jeff, you got any listener questions for us? Yeah. Molly Powell 3 asked, do bears have a good memory?

Are they able to remember bears and people from years before? I think they do. And the reason I say that is because if there was ever a bear that I, for whatever reason, needed to haze a lot, they got to where they knew my specific truck. Like, they knew my white truck over other white trucks. So, like, if someone in a white pickup pulled up, the bear wouldn't run away. But if my white pickup pulled up, they would. So I do think they're pretty smart and they have pretty good memories. Didn't you say during our Night of the Grizzly, it was one of the first or second episode that the bears could even recognize the specific sound of,

motors like i i think they can a car that they associated with trouble they could identify that's so cool yeah i don't know if there's a study out there that proves that but i do think they can do it just for my experience i bet you they could paint like elephants get all the height for painting but i bet you a grizzly bear could paint just as good as an elephant for sure they can they can play hockey of course they can paint sincerely modesty asks when camping in bear country at a campground, is it safe to run to the bathroom at night? To run to the bathroom at night? That's a question, yeah?

Yeah, probably. Don't run. I mean, you shouldn't run if you see a bear, but the chances of there being a bear in your campsite aren't very high. If you are in bear country, like, what should you do when you go to a bathroom? Take bear spray and like a flashlight. Yeah, take bear spray and a flashlight and just don't go far from your tent, you know. Like, don't just go like,

tramping through the woods at night on your own. Yeah, but you can run, but just take like three steps, three running steps, and then go to the bathroom. I do think people have in their mind that the woods are like full of bears at night. And it's like your chances of running into a bear, stumbling away from your tent at night are the same as they would be probably during the day. So I wouldn't be too worried. And like, yeah.

If a bear's in your campground, like it might go to your tent. It's not like you can't go to the bathroom. It's like more just about the bear going into your campground. Yeah. But yeah, maybe do a quick check before you run to the bathroom. Sure. Yeah. Samcat 821 asks, what are you all dressing up for as Halloween this year?

Jeff, what do we dress up as? Yeah, so Wes was hanging out and he bought a Bronosaurus costume. And I was like, oh, really? I'm John Hammond. He's like, oh, that's perfect. So we went to a party, and I was John Hammond. and he was a bronosaurus. I finally got the right size cane.

Yeah. Your John Hammond outfit was good. Like I, yeah. When you kind of told me about it, I was like, man, the cane's going to be the only thing that's really good here. I just kind of thought you were phoning in the rest. Yeah. And then when I saw you, I was like, whoa, Jeff went for it.

And I sent a photo to Jesse and she was like, holy shit, that's really good. That's great. Yeah, my brannosaurus was a lot better than I thought it'd be since I just ordered it off the internet. Yeah, no, this is fun. Mike, are you going to dress up at all? Do you get trick or cheaters at your house? Oh, no, I turn off all the lights and don't even put candy. Yeah.

I keep it all for myself. I'm going to egg your house if you don't open it up. I mean, what am I going to free eggs, I guess, if one doesn't break? Eggs are through the roof right now, too. They're so expensive. Post a photo of me and Jeff's costume on like this post or whatever. Mike made me feel real self-conscious when I sent it to him because he said that I painted my entire face. Yeah.

Which I kind of did with my beard and then my hair. I did like white spray paint, but it didn't turn it as white as I was hoping. Yeah. But then he thought I put on like tanning, I think, and had like a Trump look going on. Yeah. Well, the white spray paint. made like kind of a ring around his hairline. Jesse thought that too.

Yeah, so it just looked like, because you know how Trump does like the weird. Yeah. Orange bronzer, but like misses parts on the side of his face. Yeah. Yeah.

It was a great costume. One of your better ones. It was fun. Yeah. I'm glad I have that cane too. I'm going to just use a cane now. Yeah. Why not have that?

Oh yeah, I do have another one. Glenn DeRoach asks, you're all in the Hunger Games, but you each get to take one animal as your partner. A blue whale that I'm just gonna hide behind.

Inside of? It's start to smell kind of bad. Yeah. No, I would pick, is it like a well-trained animal? Like, I guess I need some more parameters on this. I mean, okay.

It's like an attack animal. The tiger guy and walking dead, I want like a tiger like that guy had. Yeah, that's a good pick. Sure. It's hard to beat a tiger. I'm just going to say a trained polar bear, though. I like we I went to the zoo with Jeff while I was in Utah no you weren't with me sorry I went to the school with the zoo with some friends while I was in Utah and the big male polar bear was out of the water like standing right by the water and I just remember thinking like I can't nothing beats this outside of like an orca you know like it was that bear is so big so I think I'd pick a polar bear I'll go with a venomous snake if it's really well to be

trained because then I'll just have it sneak around and bite people. That's a great pick. You can just go pita style and hide while it bites everyone. When I get tired, I can just write it around. Are you good at decorating cakes, Mike? Because if you are, you can also do realistic camouflage. Shea Evers wants to know Wes why you don't like Shrek. I don't know.

I just like Shrek was always too tongue and cheek, pop culture references. Too many things, like the Matrix references and all of that kind of stuff. And I kind of hate that in animated movies. I hate when they're constantly kind of trying to talk about stuff that's like modern.

And that really bugged me about it. And then I just kind of I have always thought Shrek was kind of corny. I like that people, there's like this renaissance of Shrek now and like Gen Z love Shrek. And I appreciate that. Yeah. I like

the ironic Shrek love and I think that's really funny but I actually don't enjoy the movie I don't think it's like a good of a movie Al Pacino was just in a video and he's like a hundred years old and his phone background was just Shrek his phone

case or his case yeah yeah there's a subcategory of movies that for some reason it like conjures up memories of a bad scent and Shrek is one of those movies a Christmas story is one of those movies for me.

Yeah, I don't really like a Christmas story. For some reason, they just seem like movies that smell bad to me. And I know that doesn't make sense, but the dark crystal. Yeah, it's a little musty. I went on a date with a girl who I really liked, who she loves Shrek and we watch Shrek. So I like Shrek. You got good feelings about Shrek. All right, last one.

Maggie Hogan 7 wants to know the top three Mudang memes. So this is our Mudang corner. Yeah. You're a Moodang expert. Nothing to contribute to this one. Yeah, you're going to have to do this one on your own. My favorite one was Moudang is like King Kong and he's like fighting Godzilla and like taking out of town. That one was amazing.

Godzilla would kick his ass. I don't know. I can't really remember the other. That's our top one Moodang meeting. Yeah, that's my favorite. There you go. I do like a hippo kaiju movie. We need to get on that.

That sounds pretty fun. I like the one that you sent us where it was just a bunch of Moudang expressions. And it was like, which Moodang are you today? I did like that one. Yeah. I was happy you answered that. Yeah. You gave me it, which one you were.

All right, that's it for questions. Okay. I want to do a quick conservation corner. A few things that we learn from $3.99. I think there's some things that in the Mountain West especially we need to be better about, those things are securing attractants so everything from like chicken feed and your coops to road killed elk and deer

anything that if you live in bear country anything that might be tempting to a bear if you can properly secure those things it prevents them from getting into conflict and prevents kind of this cascade of problems that come from that I think there are things that we could do that we'd be better for strategies

for preventing vehicle collisions whether that's just like simple signage in places where there might be bears on the road or other animals on the road moving roadkill and then in some places overpasses and underpasses. Which I know some people got saying like people

were saying oh there should have been overpasses and underpasses for $3.99. It really wouldn't have made a difference here because she was feeding on road killed carcass. So it's kind of a moot point in this situation. But that those kind of things can be really effective.

Another thing that I think we learned just from grizzly bears like her is the really just the importance of habitat connectivity. These bears are often, they often travel large distances to look for food. And if you have really good habitat for them to travel through, then they spread their genes to other parts of the range. They can go populate new areas. If you have that kind of wilderness connectivity, you're going to have much healthier populations of grizzly bears and better human wildlife coexistence. And there are nonprofits that that is their sole focus is improving connectivity. One that I really like is vital ground.

They're based out of Montana and they do a lot of work with connectivity. So if we just get rid of Jackson Hole, it probably help them a lot. Give it back to theirs. Yeah. Like Jackson is kind of right smack dab in the middle of Grizzly Bear Range. Instead of letting a bunch of rich people like you just sit at resorts all day, giving speeches. But I mean, so Missoula would. be that too. There's a lot of places that. Oh, get rid of Missoula and Jackson. And plenty of other

spots too. Sacrifice I'm willing to make. That'd be great for bears. Ultimately, bears in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem are doing really well. There was, you know, a period in time where there was only 130-something of these bears left. Now we're to like over a thousand bears in the whole ecosystem. They're doing great, but this was actually a pretty rough year for them as far as mortality. are concerned. There's a lot of conflict that led to a lot of dead bears, a fair amount of vehicle strikes. I think there's already been more than 60 bear mortalities from anthropogenic sources this year. So that's vehicle strikes. That's hunters killing bears because they feel threatened by them. There's a lot of different things that can happen. Livestock depredations,

management decisions. So there's been a lot. And I think the political environment for them in the West right now is kind of scary too. There's a lot of pressure. against predators right now. We've seen it with wolves. We're starting to see it with grizzly bears. Some pretty, like, staunch right-wing governors that really would be happy if there was far less predators in the West.

So that is kind of a scary thing facing grizzly bears, especially in the Greater Yellowstone. Our last category, how much do we like Bear 399? We're going to give her claws. I'll go last. Just her? Yeah, this particular bear. How much do we like her?

Yeah, I'll give her a 10. She's a great job. I love grizzly bears. She's one of the best grizzly bears. Okay. Hot. 10 claws. Yeah.

Yeah. Very attractive. I'll need to see a picture before I can give my exact rating. Her, dude. You think, like, Beyonce has big ass? You got to see this, grizzly bears. Do I think that? I don't, I would assume you would.

I don't remember expressing that to you. I think I'm just saying that. Because she's been in a Levi's commercial where she takes her jeans off and washes them. Ooh. Yeah, very attractive bear. I'm going to give her a nine. Great looking bear. I think she could have done maybe a little better raising her kids as far as, you know, instilling good habits.

But, you know, you can't hold that against her that much. So nine and a half. How about that? Okay. My feelings about her really complicated. But I'm going to give her 10 claws because I think she was the smartest grizzly. bear I've ever been around. I think she was like such a beautiful grizzly bear.

Like she's really pretty. She's a great mom. And I think she just inspired so many people. So I would say like if I had to pick a favorite bear from the greater Yellowstone, it might be her. So I'm going to give her 10 out of 10 claws. Beyonce is my favorite queen. Let's go back and do that category again.

All right. Jeff just showed me a picture of Beyonce and Levi's. It's a good queen, queen B. Yeah, she's a 10 claw bear for me. So, you know, RIP 399. If you're really upset or, you know, grieving the loss of her, I would just say, there's lots of other grizzly bears out there that are doing the exact same thing she did. And, you know, let's focus on the population, not individuals, but she was a really cool bear.

Your favorite grizzly bear experience with her? It might be. Yeah, that night chasing her through Jackson's, like, probably the one. one that I think about the most. It was just like the wildest night of my life. So really crazy. Yeah. All right.

Well, that's it for my, for our 399 episode. And thanks for listening. I do think I might just record like a little solo 399 story and like some thoughts for maybe a subscription bonus episode or just a subscription episode. So if you're, if you're looking for more content. Our Patreon and our Apple Grizz Club are a great place to find it. We put out at least two episodes a month on there. And we really love our subscription community.

So give us a look. Patreon, too, like, we're able to do a little bit more interaction than Apple subscription. If you're, like, deciding between them, too, we love our Apple subscribers, but it's just harder. Like, if we did too much, it would make our Apple feed very messy. So on Patreon, we're allowed to have a little bit more fun. Yeah, but I do think if you're an Apple listener and you're just looking for a convenient way

to get our bonus episodes, Apple is a great option for that. Yep. Okay. All right. You like how I said, yep, Jeff? Yep. You're making fun of me earlier for just saying, yeah. Mike was all like, yep.

I don't get the joke. So Jeff will maybe, I don't know, make a TikTok about that later or something. texted at us and you're all like, yep. That doesn't seem strange to me. Speaking of Jeff on TikTok, go follow him over there. Oh, God, dude, I want to quit. Sick content. Well, maybe I'll just look at this section.

I have 91 animals left. Just takes more out of all. Dressed at. I don't know. I don't even know if I can name 100 animals. You'll figure it out. I mean, you threw Shoe Bill Stork in there. Just go on Wikipedia.

You'll be good. I'm sure they have all kinds of animals on there. Just like my Google search is like, what are types of animals? Yeah. Tell me 100 animals. List of the best 100 animals. Top 100 animals, yeah. Watch mojo.

Love you guys. We'll see you later. No, I got it. I'm down. All right. Love you guys.