Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks - Brown Bear Attack - Death and the Guilt of the One Left Behind

Episode Date: March 24, 2025

Wes shares the horrifying story of Katie Evans' violent encounter with a brown bear in the Carpathian Mountains and just how heavy the guilt can be for those who live on. For more information on the attack, read Young Widower: A Memoir by John W. Evans. Watch here: https://youtu.be/uvv9LeVBYxY ~~ 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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Register today at Richfield, Utah.com. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Tooth and Claw Podcast. We have our wildlife biologist. He's on a grizzly bear board for all the grizzly bears. Yeah. For all the grizzly bears. He's on that board. He's on a board with bears. Sit on the board. And then I'm his little brother, Jeff. I've had one ass surgery and a few other surgeries. And we have our tech guy Mike. Ten game winning streak, baby. He labeled himself tech guy. 10 game winning streak. A little joke. Yeah, I feel like the past 10 episodes I've really been doing great work.

Oh, yeah. Sure. Jeff, are you wearing, is that shirt of a fan shirt for me? Not really, no. What? Is your shirt a fan shirt for me? Gris. Yeah.

Gris kid. We need some Gris kid merch. Have you two who's had the most surgeries? I would put money on me. Jeff clears pretty easily. Yeah. I haven't had that many. I had my ankle.

I had. I had that same ankle surgery. Appendectomy. Does wisdom teeth? Do those count? Sure. So that's like eight. I don't know.

How many wisdom teeth do you have? Like eight? He doesn't count each of one. So I might be winning. Jeff had his too, though. I've only had my wrist outside of my wisdom teeth. Too much wanking. Yeah.

Yeah. I just broke my wrist. We were in a really strict religious family, so that's the only way we could get him to stop. He didn't, there was nothing wrong with it. We just did the surgery. The corn flakes failed. Your parents tried giving you corn flakes, which is supposed to stop you. Or no, was it graham crackers?

I forget which. One of those products was designs. It was corn flakes. Yeah, we talked about this not long ago. That's right. Well, Jeff, I'm glad that you're kind of out of the woods on your surgery for the most part. Yeah, we'll see. They told me it was like a 50-50 chance that I have to get another surgery.

from coming in bed. I was like, that's kind of I. I like those odds. No, I don't like that at all. Yeah, that's not great. But yeah, you know what? I'm in a much better mood than I've been in for a while. Great.

Maybe we won't fight as much this episode. I wouldn't count. I'm still not in a good move. I'm still ready to rumble. Well, I love you both dearly. Yeah. All right. Well, I think we're just going to get into it this week.

You don't love me. I do. I probably love you more than just, about anyone else in this world. Nope. I don't know. I think I do. Are you saying that no one loves Jeff like you love him or you love Jeff more than you love

anyone else? I love Jeff as much as I love anyone else. So tied for first. That's not bad. I would say it's tight for first. I'm going to argue it. That's it. Mike, you're up there too.

You're top five. I'll take that. Yeah. Well, it's a good thing we're talking about love because today's story really gets into some interesting quandaries when it comes to loving a person and what you would do for love. And it's kind of a tough story. It's maybe the one that I've read where I think the most mistakes were made. And I'm going to do my best to be.

We've had some big mistakes. Lions are saw, though. They definitely should have killed those lions. Yeah. You know, I should quantify it for a bear story. This is the one where there's been the most mistakes, maybe. I'm going to say rubbing a jellyfish on your 9-year-old boy is a mistake. But that's just one mistake, I guess.

Bear story, bear story. Well, I was going to say Timothy Treadwell. If you count like every bear he touched, that's a lot of mistakes. That one's like in a different league almost. I think this one's more kind of just mistakes that were made because the people didn't have any education. I'm not letting you say anything without pushback this episode. Okay, that's fair. And I'm not going to argue at all.

with your pushback this time. I'm just going to be super placid and agree. That's just not true. I think this is a good story, though, because it's one that's going to help people learn from these mistakes. And I do want to quote my sources before we get started. One of them is an article in Slate that was written by John Evans, who's our main person in this story.

It was adapted from his book called Young Widower, a memoir. There's a Wondery podcast called This Is Actually Happening, where he was interviewed? Is that in the title of that memoir? It's not. I added that. Yeah. Okay. You guys are really going to challenge my patience today. A Wondery podcast.

This is actually happening where he was interviewed. I recommend that podcast if you want more on this story, especially if you really want to get into his feelings and what this whole event did to him mentally. And then I found a lot of little articles, too, that were just kind of one paragraph articles about the incident. Dude, do you know what I've been thinking? So you're a published writer. You've written papers, peer-reviewed, published. You're a scientist. That means you could quote yourself, and no one would be able to really take exception to that.

I think you should start doing that. It's generally not like great practice in the scientific community to be citing yourself a lot. But there's some scientists where they can't help it because they're so prolific. I was so, I watched the movie Ipman 2, starring Donnie Yen. You know, at the end of the movie, he's losing to the boxer, like the Western. Hemisphere Boxer guy. Okay. And he inspires himself by recalling a speech that he himself gave to somebody else.

That's sick. That's a good move. It's awesome. I think you should start doing that. Yeah. Speaking of love, I love your sweater that you're wearing right now, Mike. Oh, thanks. It looks very cozy and nice.

It's super, super cozy. Yeah. I'm entering my cozy arc. I love that. Weird time of year to be doing that in spring, you know? It's more of a fall. A fall thing for most people. but you always march to the beat of your own drum.

All right, you guys ready for the story? Yes. Yeah. Okay. All right, so John Evans spent his earliest years in Overland Park, Kansas, which is a small suburb of Kansas City. And like a lot of kids that grew up in the Midwest, in the 80s and 90s, he grew up with a big, loving family.

They played a lot of games together. They watched movies as a family. They went to church together every Sunday. Jeff sounds pretty similar to our family, Mike, probably yours too. aside from that we weren't in the Midwest. Yeah, we had a pretty big dad. A big dad. Yeah, sure. He always seemed big. He said his big, big loving family. Yeah, like a large family with more members than average probably. I mean, you weren't that big. No, I'm the smallest of the boys in our family, without a doubt.

All right. John went to Catholic school. He loved sports, which came pretty naturally to him because he was big for his age and he was highly competitive. He was confident and happy in his life at Overland Park, but when he was 14, his dad got a job in New York City, and his family moved to the suburbs just outside of New York. It's a pretty big change for John. He lost a lot of his confidence. He felt like this huge corn-fed country boy in the big city, and he did everything he could to fit in.

He wore a magnetic earring. He styled his hair like Zach Morris from, say, by the bell. Sweet. Yeah, but ultimately he felt like a fish out of water. And I had a magnetic earring for a couple weeks in fourth grade. And they're pretty sick. Mine was just like a metal stud. I think it's a good way to decide if you want an earring or not.

I didn't want one afterward. Yeah. I wholly encourage it. You would have done great in New York City. I think so. I think in Missoula it was a bit much for all my friends. John really did lean into this lifestyle in New York, though. He got into theater, jazz band, cross-country, just really worked on reinventing himself.

But was pretty hard and he felt really alone. So then rather than trying to. fit in, he started trying to just fit in the least possible. Like push against the flow as hard as he possibly could. That's a good move. Yeah, he wore a trench coat and a fedora to school.

Trenchcoes to the... It's tough. What year was this? I'm not sure. I think it was like probably early 90s. Okay. Then we're still in the safe trench coat. Yeah. Dude, a fedora if you can pull it off. Like,

That's true. Most people can go. It can go both ways, but man, when it's good, it's good. If it has safari flaps on it is when it's the best. He's the only guy who could pull it off. So John's feeling a lot of feelings, especially in high school. He's desperate also to have a girlfriend. But whenever someone would try to get close to him, he would find reasons not to like them.

Does this sound familiar to either of you? That does sound very familiar. Yeah. I think both of you can probably relate with that quite a bit. Yeah. All of this led to a feeling that followed John throughout his adolescence where he just wished he was someone else. And when he got to college,

he discovered creative writing and it really changed his life. Poetry hit especially hard for him. And when he left his undergrad, he was determined to get an MFA, which is a master of fine arts and poetry. As he was leaving college, a trusted advisor pretty much told him that as soon as he got his MFA,

he'd be chained to academia forever and that he should go live his life first and experience the world. So John joined the Peace Corps. I think that's pretty good advice probably. I do too. Kayak gets my flight, hotel, and rental car right, so I can tune out travel advice that's just plain wrong. Bro, Skycoin, way better than points.

Never fly during a Scorpio full moon. Just tell the manager you'll sue. Instant room upgrade. Stop taking bad travel advice. comparing hundreds of sites with kayak and get your trip right. Kayak, got that right. So John decides to join the Peace Corps. You know, we've all been there, right?

No, literally. I don't think any of us have. In June of 2000, he leaves for Bangladesh, and he immediately finds a lot of kindred spirits in the Peace Corps. However, he's 6'6, and he's one of the only white people in his village. So once again, he does feel like he really sticks out, and he's kind of isolated and alone during his time in Bangladesh. But he thrives professionally in the Peace Corps.

And during this time, there's a really big bright spot. And that was Katie LaPlante. John had always thought to choose. I thought you were going to say the sun. Which wouldn't be a bright spot for you. It'd be a terrible. Well, it'd be bright, I guess. Yeah.

I really walked into that one. I walked into that trap. Yeah. So John had always thought Katie was really cute and fun. and when she came up to him drunkenly finally at a party about a year into their assignment, she asked him why they had never gotten together. And then within a few months, the two of them are dating, mostly because Katie was pretty aggressive about letting John know she was interested.

And then, in fall of 2001, something pretty crazy happened. Jeff, what was it? Fall 2001? Yeah, that was when Timothy Treadwell died, right? It's not. September 11 happened. fall of 2001 and John and Katie had to go home. They traveled through Asia for a bit first and then they went back to the U.S.

and they moved together, moved in together in Chicago. And Katie was really the perfect match for John in a lot of ways. She was really fun and beautiful but also incredibly kind. And she was one of those people that always was taking care of like the misfits. If you went to it, he said if you'd go to a party and there'd be someone that wasn't talking to anyone, Katie would go talk to them and not just for like a couple minutes. she would spend a lot of time talking to them. Like if Glenn Danzig were at the party, she'd just be with him all night.

Oh, yeah. She would love Glenn Dancers. Sure. Miss fit. Hanging out of the Misfits. Yeah. The band? Yeah.

I gotcha. So the other thing that I thought was really endearing about her is when people would ask her what she wanted to be when she grew up. She would always just say, I want to be happy. And I really like that. I think that's like a nice thing to want to be when you grow up. I don't know. You don't think so I have more than thinking of a better answer

It's vaguely aspirational But it's like make some bullet points On how you're gonna attain that goal Kind of thing, you know? Fair enough. Yeah, I mean, and like to be honest Whenever I like meet someone Who's just always happy nowadays

Yeah, I'm just kind of like There's something wrong with this guy Yeah, what's going on? There's something wrong with this person. Yeah, something wrong or they're lying. They're pretending. No, you're just kind of like, there's something wrong. You're right. That's a good, that's a good thing to say.

He also just talks about how great she was at living in the present, which is something that I wish I could do a lot better, just being really present instead of always thinking about what comes next. I am. So they end up getting engaged in 2003 and then married in 2004, and they moved to Florida and go to graduate school. Katie gets an internship in Romania, and they end up moving then to Romania.

And John's teaching English in Bucharest, Romania. I forget what Katie was doing. I think something in health, but they both love Romania. For them, it's like their favorite country they've ever been to or lived in, and they're really thriving on weekends. I just said, that's cool.

Yeah, it is cool. It's a country I'd love that. What would you guess this story's going towards, Mike? Dracula, right? Vampires. That's what I would say. Yeah, just wait. Maybe some, like, Coliseum battles.

That happened in Rome, right? We're not talking Rome. We're talking Rome. Rome mania. What? Rome mania. Is that just like Roman. That's like Roman steroids, right? Like mania. Like Romania. Yeah. Right. That's for like when people were asked how often they thought about the Roman Empire and it's like every day. They have Rome. Romania. All right. How much juice do we have left in this joke?

We started at zero. All right. Failure launch. On the weekends, a thing they would do is they'd travel to different parts of the country and just explore, go on hikes, do different cultural things. They just really loved seeing every corner of Romania. And that's what they were doing on June 23rd, 2007. So they got up early that Saturday. They met their good friend Sarah at the train station, and they took a train to the city of Bouchden in the Carpathian Mountains, which is where Dracula lives in the Carpathian Mountains. Their plan was to take a cable car to the top of a mountain and stay in a hostel or a guest house where they had made reservations. But when they got off the train, it was pouring rain and the cable cars had closed as a result.

They weren't running. There was another couple there. It was a doctor and her husband as well as a Romanian guy. And all six of them were trying to figure out what they could do because they're all going to these guest houses at the top of the mountain. So John has an idea. He says, why don't we just hike up there? It's not that far.

We can do it. We're all looking pretty healthy, and surely it wouldn't be that bad of a hike. So they all agree, and they start off in the rain. And it ends up being a really beautiful hike. They hike through this Carpathian forest, which is just really dense, beautiful pine forest. And then the trees thin out, and they get up into this more alpine area, and it's just these wide open vistas, really beautiful. And they get to the end of the trail into this first guest house, the one where they're hoping to stay. But because this cable car wasn't working, the people at the top also couldn't get down to the bottom.

And they had all just kind of rebooked their rooms for the night. So there weren't any rooms for John, Katie, Sarah, this couple, and the Romanian guy. Oh, I know another story that started this way. No room at the inn. Yep, yep. So they ended up giving birth to Jesus. The Immaculate Conception Part 2. That's the end of the story.

That happened in Rome. Here we go. We're back on it. It's in Romania. We squeeze it some more. So all the rooms are full. And the people of this first guest house say, listen, you guys can sleep on the floor if you want,

but we really don't have any food. So go up to this other guest house that's just like a kilometer away. And they have a full kitchen. They're a bit bigger. They might have rooms for you. At the very least, you can eat dinner there. And then come back here and sleep on the floor. floor. So they decided to do it. On the way to the second guest house, they run into some other hikers,

and one of them was actually a student that John had taught in Bucharest. And they're really excited to see these other hikers, but that excitement quickly turned to anxiety when these hikers told them that they needed to be very careful. And the reason they had to be careful was because earlier that day they'd seen a large bear on the trail. Oh, what type of bears do they have in Romania? So they have brown bears in Romania and we're going to do a little bit of biology. So it's like a hundred percent going to be a brown bear. Yes. This is Ursus Arctos.

This is the same animal as our grizzly bear. The subspecies over there is the Eurasian brown bear, which is Ursus Arctos Arctos. But really it's just, it's the same animal. If you were to put this bear in a cage with our bear, you'd have a hard time telling them apart and they could mate if they wanted to. Oh, they would have sex. But I mean, polar bears and grizzly bears have sex

Yeah, because they're also closely related But these two That doesn't happen that often These two, if it was like male-female and they were feeling it You know, there'd be nothing weird about it Yeah, I'm just now deciding There's nothing weird about it, Mike, okay? Would they let us watch?

Probably. Me and Jeff watched some bears hump for a while No shame. Yeah. Is it like if we went to Romanian had sex with a Romanian? Yeah, exactly. It's exactly like that. Nothing weird about that unless, you know, you make it weird. Yeah. Okay. Why would they make it weird? I don't know, dude. I don't know why you would, but. Weird's not

necessarily bad either. I'll just say that. Yeah. I'm realizing now, the term Eurasian is pretty interesting to me. It's just like the two continents. Yeah. Why don't you get a little more geologically specific, you know, it's like. I think the reason, I think that's a great question, but I think the reason they use that term with wildlife quite a bit is because often these species are found throughout both continents like the same exact genus and stuff yeah i've actually always had a problem with those being separate continents because each of the other continents are like more divided you know yeah this one where do you draw the line yeah they just made and romania romania is pretty close to asia i mean you're right on the boundary russia is like half they're like european but

they're also in asia you know No, it doesn't make any sense. Sure. What the heck? But yeah, I think the reason, Mike... What the heck, Putin? Like, we saw Eurasian links. I hate that guy.

I was just going to come right out and say it. We saw Eurasian links in India, in Asia. Yeah, right. But you could see that exact same animal in like Sweden or Finland. That same one? Not that same individual, but the same species. Way to keep me on my toes. All right.

There's a lot of brown bears in Romania. I think I just broke my winning streak. I think I'm losing this one. You're 10 and 1 now. The actual number of brown bears in Romania is a point of some contention. The ministry and the environment in Romania says there's around 8,000 bears, which is a lot. But lots of bear biologists and environmental organizations claim that the methods they use for these population estimates are flawed, and the number is much lower. And honestly, just based on ecological carrying capacity, I think it's pretty impossible that Romania would have that many bears.

You think they counted the same bears a few times? That's honestly part of their flaw is they recounted bears a lot. Like, they would count it and then they would. It honestly is exactly that. That's a Mario Party game. You have to count the shy guys, but they like mix and match and stuff. It's hard, yep. So I think it's probably like more on the order of 4,000 to 6,000 bears.

How much does the lower 48 have? Great question. We're going to get to that in just second. That's perfect timing. We're not quite there yet. All right. So pin that, Jeff. You got a pin in that?

Okay. Pinned. The tiny noise you just heard was Jeff pinning it. Tooth and Claw is. LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot make your email response time. faster. We can help you sell market and hire in one place. We cannot help you find space for your three desk drinks. Why do you have three? And while we can't help you find the perfect volume for your

presentation video, LinkedIn can help you find the perfect audience for your business. Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at LinkedIn.com slash small business. So we're going to say there's 6,000 bears in Romania. They probably know, do they know you? Do they know you? your Dior model? I, they must if they listen to our podcast because you bring it up every episode. All right. So 6,000 bears.

If that many really are in Romania, they have one of the highest densities of brown bear anywhere in their range, with roughly 67 bears per thousand kilometers squared. That's about three times higher than the brown bear density in Alaska. They're built very similar to our grizzly bears in the lower 48. So when we talk about brown bears, there's a big kind of variation in how they look and how big they are. So like a coastal brown bear in Alaska, you know, often is kind of a uniform color and very large.

These ones look similar to a grizzly bear in Montana. They have that kind of grizzled, beautiful coloration of their fur. They weigh generally between 250 and 700 pounds. And they have really similar behaviors in interior grizzlies too, and that they don't have a super plentiful food source like salmon. And they have to be a little bit more territorial and a grisly. in their search for food. That's like the range your mom, Wade, right?

My mom? Given time, Mike. 250 to 700? She's a big, beautiful woman, Mike. Yeah, what's the acronym? That's like a popular acronym I've heard on certain websites. I don't know. She honestly, she was really small.

Okay. She would hive and age. She would lose a lot of it. She was 18 inches tall. In the spring, she was tiny. But in the fall, boy, was she big. All right. So there's a study I love.

I've consulted it a lot for episodes on brown bears. And it's called Brown Bear Attacks on Humans, a worldwide perspective. And it's an analysis of all the Brown Bear attacks on people from 2000 to 2015. It's this really big collaborative work between dozens of bear biologists. And it's one of the more complete data sets that shows trends among Brown Bear attacks. Was your professor Tom Smith on there? He wasn't. But a lot of the, a lot of the Brown Bear Biologists.

that I really respect were on this one. I do wish Tom was on it because he is one of the leading voices and attacks. But one of the things that they highlight in this paper is attack rate by country. And all of the countries with brown bear attacks, Romania had the most. And I'm not even talking per capita. They had the highest number of attacks. So Jeff, earlier you asked about how many bears they are per country. Yeah.

Russia is definitely the most. They have like roughly 100,000 of the 200,000 brown bears. After that, I think it's North America with around 50,000, and then I'm not sure. But what we are going to get into, what I am sure about is how many attacks there are by country. But I, if we're unpinning my question, are we unpending it? Yeah. I said lower 48, because Alaska has a ton of ours. Yeah, so lower 48, there's like maybe 2,500 bears.

Okay, so Romania has more than the United States. States without Alaska. Without a doubt, by good margin. Okay, but now we're going to look at... Without Alaska and Hawaii. Yeah, yeah, you can also keep Hawaii out of that. We're going to look at attacks by country and between 2000 and 2015. So this gives you a good kind of look at what these attack rates look like.

So Romania had 131 attacks during that 15-year window, which is the highest of any country. Yeah, that's a lot. The U.S. was next with 113. And then I'm curious if you guys can guess. We're not first in anything. We're not. We're losing our way. Aren't we doing...

We're pretty good with obesity, right? Yeah, we're good at obesity, probably suicide. Gun violence. Gun violence, without a doubt. Number one, baby. No medical coverage. Costing medical coverage. Yeah.

Hell yeah. Olympics. We won the Olympics. Yeah. All right. So now I want you guys to guess the next. four countries. And if you get some in order, I'll donate some money. I didn't really plan. I'll donate for every country you get right of these next four.

I'll donate $20 to the Grizzly Bear Foundation. For every country you get right and in the right order, I'll donate 50. Holy mackerel. This is not per capita, right? No. So this is the number of attacks between 2000 and 2015, Romania was number one with 131, U.S. number two with 113. What do you think is number three? Can I guess? Yep.

Canada. Mike, what do you guess? If either of you get it right, I'll donate the money. Oh, that's such a good guess. I'll go with Japan. Both of you are wrong. Number three was Russia with 111.

Oh, yeah. What do you think number four is? I know Canada's going to be on. It's got to be, right? For brown bears, Mike, Japan doesn't have brown bears, I don't think. They do up north. They do. I was thinking they have a lot of black bear attacks.

I confused this. You know what? I'm wrong. You're right. Okay, so number four, what do you get, what are you guessing? I'll guess Canada this time. You got it. Jeff, you don't have to guess.

Mike got it. $50 to Brown Bear or Grizzly Bear Foundation. What do you think number five is? What's the time period? This is between 2000 and 2015. I don't. think you're going to get five or six. I'm going to say Slovenia.

No. Bulgaria? No. Slovakia is number five. That's what Jeff meant that. That's what you meant. And number six, I'll give you a hint. You haven't named this country yet.

Italy? It's not Italy. I want to give you one more hint, Jeff. This is another country that part of it is in Europe and part of it is in Asia. China? Think about that answer. That's in Asia. Yeah.

I'm going to give you one more try. Ukraine, that's all the way in Europe, I feel like. Mongolia? No. Turkey. Turkey is the last one. All right. So $50 to Grizzly Bear Foundation.

You know what? You know what Turkey's most famous for? What? Hair transplant. Yeah. Also, bear attacks. Okay. So let's get back to our story.

All right. John, Katie, Sarah, the doctor. her husband and the Romanian guy arrive at this nicer guest house where they eat a nice meal but they're told there's no extra rooms and that they would have to return to this other one and sleep on the floor. These guest houses aren't that far from each other a kilometer or two, so it's not that bad of a walk. But it is starting to get dark and they wanted to get back to where they'd be sleeping as quickly as possible. So they leave in a hurry. Now all three of us have had some ankle problems, right? Yes. And what happens when you sprain your ankle a couple

couple times. Oh, those ligaments get all loose. Yep. They get super weak and loose and it sprains really easily. You kind of just start having a bad ankle. Katie had a weak ankle. And as they were leaving the second guest house, she rolls it really badly. She sits down, she's crying, she's struggling to move on.

And as she's doing this, it's getting darker and darker. This doctor and her husband are starting to get a little worried. They don't want to hike back in the pitch dark. So they tell the rest of the group that they're going to keep on hiking and at least get closer to this first guest house. Well, and that bear can probably smell the extra blood in her ankle. It definitely can't. Without a doubt, it can't.

I shouldn't say without a doubt, but it can't. So Katie tells John to go ahead and go with this doctor and her husband, and that Sarah and the Romanian guy would stay back with her, and they would catch up when the pain in her ankle had subsided. So John leaves with this couple. He leaves his wife behind, goes down the trail with her. this couple and they start getting pretty close to the guest house where they hit this stream that they decide they should all cross as a group so they decide they're going to wait there

for katie sarah and the Romanian guy they're really close to the guest house they can see the light and everything and they're like we'll wait here we'll wait for them to catch up and they wait and wait and wait and no one shows up what had happened was back near the second guest house where katie had been heard they were starting to move they're passing a small lake when suddenly a dark shape moving along the trail on the side of the lake makes them freeze. It's the bear. The bear's there. It's moving slowly but confidently in their direction.

And that's when they make another mistake. So I think their first mistake was separating. Here's where they make their second big mistake. Katie tells them that the bear isn't interested in them. It just wants food. They throw all their packs to kind of try and distract the bear. And then she says they should lay down and play dead. It's not a good device.

That's about as bad as you can do. Especially with three people. You have enough people to discourage this bear, but instead they kind of separate, they throw their packs, and they all three lay down. They kind of bait it. Yeah, I feel like they throw their bags and bait the bears in and then...

It's never a good idea to throw your bag. Yeah. The reason being is that if say this bear does make contact with you, it's helpful to have that bag on your back. to give the bear something to tear into. Maybe if you're being mauled and you can leave your bag and then get out of there, that's an option, but you don't want to throw your bag. The bear was not at all interested in their bags.

They threw them, they laid down, and it just walked right up to them. Didn't touch their bags. No. Sorry, go ahead, Mike. No, I was just wondering, like, if they did have food in their, it's not, this is not ideal action to be taking. But if they did have something to eat that would attract the bear, Is that absolutely the worst thing you could do?

If you know that that's what the bear wants, then no, it's not the worst thing you could do. But you don't know that. Most people aren't going to know that. Yeah, that's true. You know? And if it's not what it wants and then it does go and eat that, you've just food conditioned a bear. You've taught that bear, though, when it approaches people, they throw food out for it. And maybe it was just going to walk right past you.

And you've essentially killed that bear at that point. You've taught it a lesson that it's not going to be able to forget. Right. So it's not a good idea. and a worse idea is just to simply lay down when a bear's approaching you. It's a very, very bad idea. We've talked about this a lot on the podcast. At the end of the story, I'm going to get into like a bullet point list of everything

they did wrong, but for now we're just going to move past it. Hearing this, I know you always say like the worst thing you can do is run away. Yeah. But like I kind of feel like they did the worst thing they could have done by just laying down and inviting the bear in. Yeah. So I couldn't find a good account or something. transcript of exactly what happened in that next moment. But I know the bear jumps on the

Romanian guy. It bites him once in the thigh. He fights back. He kicks at the bear. He punches it. And then it surprises the bear enough to where he has room to get up. And when he does, he runs. The bear changes its attention to Sarah. She's starting to get up to also run and it knocks her down. But then it's almost immediately distracted by large rocks that are hitting its body. Katie, who's still injured, the least mobile of all these people, is standing alone, throwing rocks at the bear in a desperate attempt to stop it from killing her friend. Once again, the bear changes direction and charges at Katie, knocks her down, and immediately begins jumping on her. Her screams cut through the dark mountain air, and these other two people run to the guest house in a blind panic. Meanwhile, John's getting a little irritated that Katie and Sarah are taking so long, calls out to both of them, calls them on their phone,

He leaves voicemails for them. There's no answer. They'd only walked a few hundred yards away from them, so they definitely should have caught up by now. And he's just thinking, Katie's being Katie, she's taking her time, and they just need to catch up with us. So he decides to walk back up on the trail to where he left them. And as he's walking, he's realizing it's really dark.

I can't see anything. I don't see them anywhere. But then he does see something that makes his irritation immediately turned to fear. And what that is is on the ground, he sees what looks like a clump of white feathers. But when he gets closer, he realizes it's actually the lonely planet guidebook that they had been carrying. And pages were ripped out of it. And the book was in tatters and just kind of scattered to the wind.

So he knows something's really wrong. He starts yelling for Katie. And finally he gets an answer. And that answer was a shrill scream that's cutting through the air. And she screams that she's being attacked by a bear that he shouldn't come any closer. He needed to get help and get a gun. So he runs back to the first guest house, the one that told them they could sleep on the floor. And to be completely honest, like, I'm just saying what he said.

He's having some pretty selfish thoughts as he runs back. He's feeling tired. He's talking about his feet hurt. He's thinking about how bad it's going to suck to call Katie's mom to tell her that her daughter died. And then he realizes, like, this is not what I should be thinking about. He snaps out of it and starts running as fast as he can back to the guest house. He was like slowing down because he was so tired. Yeah.

It reminds, so when Jeff and I were in Rome together, he accidentally locked himself out of his room one night. And I honestly got, I was so annoyed. I was like more annoyed than he was that he had done this. It's just reminding me, it's like, come on, dude. This isn't that big of a deal, especially to you. But it is kind of a funny, funny way of thinking. Like, you're still kind of just annoyed,

even though something pretty terrible is happening to something. someone else. I think what I did was worse on this. No, these are a very different magnitude. And I do, I kind of want to just do a quick aside. In his interview, he is very honest with like his feelings of how he handled this whole thing. And I found it refreshing. Like hard on himself. Yeah, I found it refreshing. I also had a hard time not agreeing with him with some of the things he was hard on himself about. Yeah. So I'm going to try my best not to like dive in. to that too deeply if you want to listen to that interview. Again, it's on this is actually happening.

Okay. So when he gets to the first guesthouse, this Romanian guy who had been attacked was already there. He told him that he had punched the bear and escaped. And then suddenly Sarah comes running up too. Somehow he had missed them both on the trail like they hadn't crossed paths. But they confirmed what Katie said, that a large brown bear was attacking her and that they needed to get help.

John immediately asked the guest house owner if he had a good. gun and he said that he did but that John couldn't have it because if it was discharged without permission he would have to pay a huge fine he could lose his guest house and his entire means of income that's great why have a gun if you can't go shoot up around that's attacking someone yeah yeah John argues with them he offers him money he offers him his passport everything he can to get the gun even though John has no idea how to fire a gun and this guy says no I should just go with I know. I know. Again, lots of mistakes are made on this one. Then John turns to the group. He says, who will go me, who will go back with me to try and help Katie?

And no one volunteers. So John grabs his flashlight, which is like one of those little wind-up mechanical flashlights, and runs back out into the dark and up the trail. That's crazy that no one was willing to help another huge. They have a gun. Yeah. That's tough. A full guest house to people. So he gets back to where he had last heard Katie. and at this point he can only hear two things. Soft grunting and breathing from the bear and then a high-pitched gurgling scream from Katie. Periodically, she would also say things like no and help.

John points his flashlight at the bear and he's shocked by how big it is. He's about 15 yards away and it turns and looks at him so he runs back further from the bear. He starts throwing rocks at the bear but it has absolutely no effect. And then he just watches helplessly as this bear's head. keeps kind of moving down back and forth along her body and he just assumes it's eating her. It's been about 25 minutes now that she's being attacked by this bear and at this point her

screams are reduced to kind of just a raspy wordless sound, almost inhuman like an animal that's being killed by another animal. He tries to get closer to the bear a few times but his fear would take over and he would back up again and was resigned to simply watch and throw rocks and hope this this bear would leave. He watches as its head dips down over and over again. He can hear her clothes ripping. He hears sounds that he thinks of the bear eating, and he can hear Katie screaming.

Oh, man. So John hears this voice telling him to do something, to intervene, to save his wife, to be the hero. And then he hears another voice telling him what a coward he was for not intervening. And he feels this deep. The angel and the devil on his shoulders are like teaming up. That's all it's bad when they're saying the same things. Yeah.

He feels this really deep sense of failure. Like I think we've talked about this before. We've all imagined these kind of scenarios where you could be the hero. And he probably had two. But when he's confronted with a bear that's actively killing his wife in the darkness, he feels too scared to intervene. He doesn't want to take it any further than he already has. And he imagines Katie feeling this great sense of disappointment.

because she hears him arrive and then he doesn't do anything. And her primal, like deep screams are just washing over them and he's just sitting there frozen in an action. And he knows that she's either going to die or be so severely mauled that her life is going to be changed forever. So he continues to call out to her, tell her that he was there, and then just stand there. He knew that he wasn't willing to really sacrifice himself.

So he owed it to her to at least stand there and witness the attack. dude. I know. It's so rough. That is heavy. So then he looks down the trail at the hostel and he sees a small group armed with flashlights and like pans and stuff and they're moving slowly but making a ton of noise and they're just slowly moving up the trail toward him. They're banging these pots and pans. They're yelling. They're screaming and he watches them move closer and closer and he runs back down to them and this group now has a bunch of Romanians as well as this doctor and her husband. and he leads them to where Katie was. And when they get there, the bear's gone. She's alone. They can see her body. She's completely silent at this point, and the bear left.

Again, like a united group of people making a lot of noise was more than enough to scare this bear off. Immediately, one of the things they noticed was there wasn't really any blood on Katie. Her face was muddy, but untouched. When this doctor bends down to shine the flashlight on her pupils, they're unresponsive. so she's not, you know, reacting to the light. She's completely white, and she had a faint heartbeat that was almost impossible to hear. But because they didn't know where the bear was, they decided they needed to move Katie to safety.

They carry her down to the guest house where they could lay her down on the dining room table. When they lay her down, she has no pulse. She wasn't breathing. And everyone knows that she had died. So they spend the night doing a bunch of different tests just to confirm that she was dead, to really figure out, you know, what had happened. This group of like bear specialists in Romania show up. They're essentially just hunters and they like make dinner and kind of get drunk.

There's this whole thing that's going and John's just kind of sitting there dealing with the fact that his wife had just died, but also dealing with the fact that he had reacted to it in a more cowardly way than he had ever imagined he would. He makes some hard phone calls. He calls Katie's mom. she immediately asks John what she can do for him, which was a really hard pill for him to swallow. Oh, man. And then when some medical professionals arrive, the reason they say she died was something called gross thoracic trauma.

And what that is is it means that her internal organs had been crushed. So the bear had spent pretty much this entire, like half an hour, just jumping on her and pressing its weight onto her and had crushed her rib cage and a lot of her internal organs. And she died from the resulting trauma and essentially, like, bled to death internally instead of externally. So were there any, like, claw or bite marks or anything on her body? I'm sure there were. But that's not why she died.

Like, it was just from the bear. She didn't get, like, eaten at all? No, which is crazy. And that's, I think that's the first one we've had on the podcast where that was the cause of death was just essentially blunt force trauma from a bear, which is pretty wild. Yeah. No, that's interesting. I wonder, like, if it changed. At the start, it seems a little bit more like predatory where it bit the guy's thigh.

Yeah. But then, like, when she was throwing rocks at the bear, maybe is just like, I'm going to neutralize this threat. Yeah, I really don't know. It didn't have cubs. No, I'm just like, I'm not saying that that's what happened. I went through the same thought process. I hypothesizing. I think the fact that it made such a slow, deliberate attempt on them, like, that it just kind of went right for him.

does make me think that it was investigating them as food. And I do think had this bear had more time with her without being interrupted, because kind of pretty consistently through this attack, people were showing up, even if they were just watching or whatever, it probably didn't feel totally comfortable. I do think it probably would have fed on her. But it's hard to say.

This is a hard one to say for sure. All of the interviews I read with John, he talks really openly about this feeling of cowardice, feeling completely frozen. it does make him feel a little detached when you're listening to it. He talks about it in like kind of a very casual way. And he talks about how a lot of the feelings really only hit him after he got back to civilization. And then he broke down.

He had these feelings of panic, of terror, of depression. Lots of different feelings hit this guy throughout his, like the resulting time. One of the main feelings he felt, though, was a sense of loneliness and a sense of kind of wanting to move on past this. and the following year he started dating a friend named Kate. They were married about a year and a half following Katie's death, and he had a few kids with her, and then they ended up getting divorced. But he wrote this book called Young Widower, a memoir.

Then he dated someone named Cat. Yeah, seriously, really likes variations. Yeah. But he wrote this book, Young Widower, a memoir. I didn't read the book, but I did read this excerpt from it. It was in Slate Magazine. the book is kind of supposed to be about grief, but he says it's really a lot of it about guilt

because he just felt really terrible that he didn't intervene. And again, is really honest about his feelings, which I think is impressive, but also kind of a hard pill to swallow. Yeah. I know it's hard to,

from especially like armchair psychology to really understand what all is going through his brain, or like actually what literally did happen over there. But do you think it's justified the way he was feeling because I know a lot of times survivors guilt people feel that way even though they don't really have a compelling reason to like wartime survivors stuff like that do you think his guilt is legitimate yeah yeah I do but I don't think of the wartime survivor's guilt is legitimate yeah yeah yeah for sure well like if you okay I mean if you get like blown up in a car

and you survive for whatever reason like it was yeah oh and it's like your friends died and Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's a bad joke. It's funny. No, you should make more of us. There's a tweet I saw recently that was like, only the U.S. will go invade a country and then later make a movie about how sad it made them feel.

I thought it was pretty good. Anyway, got to make that money. I would say my two cents on it. I think John, he definitely has things he can blame himself for and things like he could have done to save Katie. but I he was like probably like fourth on my list of blame yeah I'd say like number one is the guy with the gun who wouldn't give him the gun like that's just insane that's wild if I was John I mean you can't you can't like say what you would do because what would you actually do but I'd be like let me borrow your knife then and then I would hold the knife to him and be like give me your

fucking gun or I'm going to stab you and then you have to get that gun if there's a it gun. Yeah. And then, I don't know. I feel like there's a lot of, there's a lot of culpability just to like the education of brown bears in that area. Yeah. Sounds like people felt way too afraid of this one bear.

And everyone thought maybe they would die if they went to go help Katie. So like, that's just bad education. Yeah. And then that second cabin should just let him stay there, you know? Yeah. In a way, there's a lot of parallels between night of the grizzlies. because if you guys remember when some of those women, I forget, I think it was Helgeson,

figured her first name when she was being attacked. Like no one wanted to go help because they thought the bear was like going to eat them or kill them or whatever. And it took them a while to go help as well. And I agree with what you said just second ago, Jeff, the education was the main thing that was lacking here. And I don't want to say in Romania, I want to say in this group of people.

Like they were not well educated about what to do with the bear. and had they just had... But some of them were like the home owners of those homes in Grizzly Bear country? Yeah. And but that was people they encountered. That was people they encountered after the attack had already started. And this attack should never happened in the first place. So Mike, to your question, I do want to go through a couple things really quickly just to say, yes, I think John is culpable for some of this.

but not because of like stuff that he knew and didn't do. It's because of stuff he should have known and didn't do. So first of all, I think the number one thing here is they were hiking without any kind of deterrent in brown bear country. And I don't think bear spray is legal in Romania. If I were to go hiking in the Carpathian Mountains, I would probably figure out a way to smuggle some in or figure out a way to get some bear spray. If I didn't have it, I would make sure that I had something. A flare gun, a gun, something to make sure that I had some sort of deterrent. Because this is a place where a lot of bear attacks happen.

And this is a bear that you can't always discourage by just being loud and yelling and throwing things. So having a deterrent. Second, they were hiking at night when someone had told them that they had just seen a bear. That's very high-risk behavior. If you bump into that bear, there's a good chance it's not going to know what you are. and it's going to be very territorial or aggressive. It might just run away, but it might just charge in and hit you. Next, I think their biggest mistake they made that would have stopped this entire encounter

from happening is them splitting up when Katie got hurt. Had they, at that point, they knew there was a bear around and they split up. And if you stay in large groups, bears do not like interacting with large unified groups of people. They just don't do it. when that group came up from the guest house they stopped it the bear left because a large group of people was approaching it so that was where i think that was the fatal mistake in my opinion next the other biggest mistake i would say number two was then playing dead when this bear approached them it could have gone fine maybe the bear would have sniffed them and just walked off but you're giving the bear all of the control at that point you're saying you get to decide how this interaction ends uh running was a big mistake and then not grouping up again once they knew that she was being attacked, John not just saying, listen, you guys are coming with me, we're going to go scare this bear and stop this attack.

Because that's what I would, I would say, listen, we need as bigger group as possible. We're going to be as loud and as unified as possible. It is going to leave if we do that. And it would have. It did. Yeah. Had that guy and Sarah not ran away,

they could have stopped it from killing Katie. Like they ran and they left her behind. Sure. And had the two of them just stayed unified, like they would have been able to just with those three people to discourage that bear. But they broke off and then it just kind of hit them one at a time. And so that running, running. They might have been able to. Like the bear had already bit one of them with three people there though.

Yeah. But like when you look at the data, there's really no bad mallings that have ever happened in groups of three or more. It just doesn't happen when the people are grouped up. that's normally, I know you're right, and I'm not trying to, you're the bear biologist, but like, yeah, that situation is normally like, the bear doesn't engage the people because there's three people standing up making noise, making it so the bear doesn't want to come in. I feel like once a bear engages and, like, bites someone, its mindset has already switched a little bit, you know?

Yeah, but not necessarily, like, not with this bear. Like, you're right, you know, we, the Lillard. But it was with this bear. The hot springs bear, I forget the name of the river Yeah, because that bear like stayed and was throwing rocks at it and trying to get it away. Once that black bear in that story like locked into someone, you're right. Like it switched on a predator mode and there was nothing you could do to discourage it. That wasn't the case with this bear.

Get bit this guy and then it went to someone else and then it went to Katie. Like it was kind of just thinking, oh, I had these three different targets that are all totally submissive. And I can just kind of take my time and explore. each of them. And if they had all three stood up, even after being bitten or knocked down or whatever, had they stood up and grouped up and yelled and thrown things and presented a unified threat against that bear, I really, really, really doubt it would have continued that attack. I think it would have left. So, any other questions before we get onto our categories? I might interrupt you in a little bit and ask a question.

What is like the best bear deterrent available in Romania? I honestly don't know. Probably like dogs, a gun. They don't have... They don't have... They don't have a gun. Yeah. So the best deterrent is just big groups of people at that point, you know, and education. But they really need...

Someone needs to figure out a way to get bears spray broken into Europe because they would have far less attacks in Romania if they had bear spray. And if they had education on how to use it. How often... Is it tracked how often bear spray is deployed in a given year? That's probably really hard to track, but is it pretty frequent in the States? It's not tracked on large, but it's tracked in individual places. Like in Yellowstone, any time it was deployed, we tracked it. And then there's like, again, there's papers, the one I just referenced Tom's paper,

where he analyzed pretty much every time it had been deployed in Alaska and compared it to firearms deployments against bears and looked at the differences. If you had to guess how many times bear spray was used, say, in 2024, would you have a number, a ballpark? Or does it vary pretty widely? Like used on a bear? Yeah, sure. Or just towards any threat. I would say on a bear like a couple dozen times.

Oh, okay. Wow. Yeah. Probably not a lot. Sure. No, I mean, that's still, that's enough to, you know, sway the stats. Yeah. I would probably guess like 40 to 50 times actually.

But, yeah, I can't say for sure. I mean, that's 50 potential attacks that were converted. So that's a good number in my uneducated opinion. But I don't, you know, don't quote me on that because I really don't know. Sure. Yeah. I've never been asked that before. Okay.

Well, let's get to our categories. Will you quote yourself? Yeah. Yeah. All right. First up, I want to hear your favorite Romanian can be real, can be an actor, can be a character, whatever you want. Yeah. So I have kind of a strange one.

that my mom really into this Romanian gymnast named Nadia, Nadia Komanichi. She was the first gymnast ever to score a perfect 10 in gymnastics. I think it was at like the Montreal Games or something. Yeah. And for some reason, my mom talked about her more than you would think. I mean, no one really knows my mom, I guess. That doesn't, that's a weird frame of reference. But like the fact that she brought it up enough for me to remember without even having to

look up whether Nadia wrote Cominici was Romanian, I think that's enough. maybe to put it in your brains how often she was talking about this weird little 14-year-old gymnast from Romania. It was great, though. She was an awesome gymnast. All right. Jeff, are you still looking yours up? You want me to do my...

I kind of forgot to do this one. Who are some good Romanians? Sebastian Stan's Romanian. Is he? He's born in Romania. Yeah. Huh. He's like the Winter Soldier actor.

He was born there? Yeah. Whoa. Interesting. My pick is Vlad the Impaler, Dracula. You know? Yeah. He's, I, like, I have a hard time picking a Romanian.

I like more than Dracula, who's probably my favorite monster of all time. So. He's kind of a bad guy, though. Yeah. But, you know, made for some good stories, good movies. Like, he's got, like, women slaves. You like that? Makes for good stories.

I don't. I don't like that. But I don't think, I don't think that's necessarily what his, like, mistresses are. Doesn't he kind of, like, bite them and enslave them? I don't know what the, you really. You've read the original book, I think. It's been a while. It's kind of like a cannibal, like mask. He's not a good guy.

I'm not arguing that Dracula's a good guy. I don't. I'm not trying to build my life like his, but he's my favorite Romanian character. Here, will you guys give me a few other choices? I don't know many others. Was the guy from Harry Potter, the Victor Crum? Oh, I'll take him.

Yeah, I'll take Crum. Yeah. I'm not sure. He's Romanian. I think he is. He's so an idiot, though, who scored the snitch when his team was down 150 points, right? Oh, yeah. Hold on.

He's Bulgarian. Sorry. Ah, shoot. But their school is in Romania, isn't it? Is that what I'm thinking? That could be it. I think so. So we'll count it.

Let's just count that. That's, okay. I mean, I doubt we have any Romanian listeners will offend by it. I feel like they got some good tennis. in Romania. Yeah, I think just like the Roma people, like Romani people are just really, I think it's an interesting culture, the music. I just think there's a lot of really interesting things about Romania.

I really want to visit Romania. Yeah. You know what though? I don't like people who keep women as slaves. So I'm going to disagree with West. I don't either. I don't like them either. I'm going to go ahead and just make sure everyone knows my position on that is I'm anti.

but I do like Dracula. You're sending me signals. I don't know about all that. The Romanian deadlift, whoever invented that, he's probably a pretty good weightlifter. We're going to move on from this category. All right. Probably a WWE guy. The next category is movie you wish you could give the main character a gun.

Because I think we all wish that John could have had a gun. So a movie that you wish you could go back and give them a gun. Yeah, I'll go first this time. We just mentioned it, but I would love some guns in Harry Potter. Yeah, sure. I don't know. I feel like guns exist in the muggle world and like, like, it takes a while to say a spell. Like a lot of times I feel like a gun would work way better.

Or you can just do that like push thing where you got the different colors coming out and pushing against each other. And you pull your Glock out with your other hand and just fire a few rounds. Yeah. And like, I think the best wizard's like Dumbledore, he doesn't. say his spells, so I think he could, you know, evaporate the bullets or whatever. But, I mean, you start getting, like, nukes and bazooks and stuff. I don't know what Dumbleders are going to do to a nuke. Yeah, I didn't say nuke.

I said gun. Or the purpose of this will say, like, a machine gun. Well, like a nuke gun. No, not a nuke gun. All right. The wizard dude, with a gun, Harry Potter, if you, like, miss your shot, you just do that spell that you, like, recall the bullet to you. Yeah, and it's, like, you don't back in.

waste a shot. Haccio bullet. That's the one. So I'm going to go to stand in the line of the person. I'm going with Neo from the Matrix. I think he could have used a gun. In that one part when he and Agent Smith are fighting in the subway and they both run out of bullets at the same time, just give Neo another gun.

He's got some more bullets and he wins. I think that would have been really handy for him. I love that you picked a movie where it's like famous scene where they get the most guns ever in any movie. Yeah, well, not enough, apparently. I'm going to pick Home Alone. I think just give Kevin like a submachine gun and that ends very difficult. I'd give Marv the gun.

Yeah, kind of ruins the movie, I guess. It makes it a lot shorter. Give Braveheart a gun, you know? You know, it'd be interesting in Hunger Games to have like one gun in the center where everyone goes. It's a good point. Everyone else has like spears and stuff. Do guns exist in that world? Yeah.

The guards have guns. Yeah, that's right. Like the third one is like a whole civil war. Yeah, there's a bunch of guns in that one. That's right. Okay. All right. Jeff, you got a random animal fact for us?

Yeah, I'm going to go with one. I think we've mentioned it before, but people forget. And on our last trip, people didn't know this. And I'm going to need an assist from you because I didn't look up the word. But I'm just going to describe the difference of spots between cheetahs, leopards, and jaguars. Great. So cheetah spots are just dots, right? There's no like real shape to it.

It's just like dots, like a Dalmatian almost. Yeah, they would be considered spots. Spots, yep. And then on a leopard, you get circles. Rosettes. Yeah, so those are rosettes. Rosettes. And it's just a circle, okay?

Then the Jaguar is a circle with a dot in the middle of the circle. And what's the dot called in the middle? You mean like a circle that has an empty middle too because a dot is a circle or spots a circle too. Right like a cheerio circle. Yeah. Leopards are cheerios. Yeah. And the dot, the dot in the middle, I don't know if it has a name, but jaguars have rosettes.

Oh, so I was thinking of rosettes. Yes. Jaguars have rosettes with dots in the middle. Leopards have empty rosettes. And not all of jaguars rosettes will have a dot in the middle, but a couple of them will. Yeah. So if you see a picture of a leopard and a jaguar and you can't tell which is which, just like look at every single circle of their spots and look for a dot in the middle.

And if you see any dots in the middle, it's a jaguar. Yeah. It's barely let you qualify that as a Jeff fact. But Wes really did. It was like a 55-45. He knew what you were saying. I was just, I was just saying a little more clear. I was, yeah.

He knew what you were saying. Sure. I would say there's. probably been leopards out there that have spots inside of their rosettes but as a general rule you can use it okay great great fact uh we're gonna do some nice advice would suffice jeff did you find someone that needs advice yeah it's more just well okay yeah let's start i'm gonna do two because one's quick and one's just like a layup all right this one's from lisa please help settle a family dispute we're headed to a location in mexico for spring

break that has dolphin attractions, specifically swim ride dolphins. Without anthropomorphizing what the dolphins like and dislike, is this enjoyable for them? Is this akin to trained circus animals? Do you think the dolphins are treated well at these attractions? We are split as a family and greatly appreciate your input. Thanks so much. We love the podcast. Cheers.

You shouldn't ride dolphins ever. I can't say exactly what they're feeling or. experiencing, but I do know that any place that lets you like hold on to a dolphin and ride it, the dolphins aren't being treated well. You have to. There's one right by us in Cosma when we were just there. And I had my ass pain. The ass pain's irrelevant to that.

But I think the dolphins might like it when you're like swimming with them and they're like pushing you or whatever because they probably get fed. They probably get rewarded. They're interacting. But their living situation isn't a good situation. shouldn't be in a pool just having to do tricks with humans. Yeah, I would say they might have liked it the first few times, but like that's what those dolphins have to do every day, day in, day out.

That's the only thing they do is drag people around in the water. And you're right, Jeff, I think they've like come to associate it with the reward and they like the reward they get. But there's a reason dolphins don't really do that in the wild because it's not part of their natural behavior. And when they do, it's interesting and that's fine. If you're ever out in the wild and a dolphin decides to come up and bump you and swim around you or whatever, great. But those places are not ethical.

You should never write a dolphin. Yeah. And my point's more just like even if it feels like the dolphin enjoys your company, it's not a good situation for the dolphin. Dolphins, there's something very unfortunate for dolphins is that they always look happy. And so people think they're happy when they're not. And those dolphins in those places are not happy. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, he seemed happy, you know, but he wasn't.

I always sense to sadness behind those eyes. All right. You're very perceptive, Mike. What's that, like, poem or whatever, where the clown is the one who's depressed at the bar? Yeah. But Doc, I am the clown. Yeah, that's a dog. What's number two?

Okay, this is from Alicia. This is a long one. Okay, Wes, my question is kind of long, so I hope. I hope you bear with me. It's about wolves in their conflict with cattle ranchers in California. My husband grew up on a large cattle ranch in northern California where his dad was the cow boss manager. They didn't own the ranch. It belonged to a rich dude with mini businesses, but they lived there and spent every day on horseback ranching. They were honest to God cowboys and cowgirls. Now the ranch is owned by a different rich dude with many businesses and my husband's sister is taken over as manager.

So here's where the wolves come in. As I'm sure you know, wolves have made a comeback in California in recent years. There's currently seven separate California wolf packs in the state, and ranchers are starting to get pretty pissed about the wolves killing calves and other young cattle. Mike, you're probably mad about that, too. Don't do that. The ranch where my sister-in-law works has lost four or five head in the past year, and when they went to California Department of Fish and Wildlife to make claims via the wolf livestock competition,

Compensation pilot program. They were told that there's no money left over for constipation after the administrative cost. I cannot confirm this, but it's what I've been told. While I too come from agriculture, family, and community, I'm of the mindset that when you farm and have a ranch, you have as much responsibility towards the wildlife that share the land that you are on, if not more so, than the livestock you're raising. I think Wes said your Hawaiian cousins call it a tax when a shark or something gets the fish they're fishing.

I'm inclined to feel the same way, and I'm even more inclined to not give a shit about the bottom line of one rich dude's mini businesses. Like, just fucking fold that into your cost of doing business or whatever. But to be fair, my sister-in-law, it's not about the money. She just loves and cares about each calf that's killed, and it's hard for her to lose these cows. And she goes on to say, like, there's also ranchers who aren't rich, who have cattle, who like kind of surviving at low costs and kind of just getting by and they lose cows. So what's your advice, Wes? Yeah, I think, first of all, from what I understand, most of those compensation programs

are run through the federal government, not through state governments. So I'd be surprised if this rancher isn't able to get some compensation for losses to wolves, especially, because wolves in the lower 48 in California's are still protected. There's places in other parts of the country where you can shoot them, but in California, I believe you can't shoot a wolf that's depredating your livestock. So I'd be shocked if they're not able to find compensation. Doge is probably like, we spend like $500 million on wolf competition. with like no evidence or anything just like that might be true it might be harder than ever to get

that money i agree with the author of this question that i think part of you running your cows in wilderness in places where there's predators is you accept some risk that there's a chance that there's going to be animals that kill this like essentially helpless animal that you're putting out right in front of them that's just part of the deal in my opinion if you want to ranch and wolf country or places that were even traditionally wolf country that are becoming wolf country again that's just part of what you have to deal with i do think there's a level though where that line gets crossed like there's a while ago where two wolves in montana killed like 140 sheep in one night and didn't eat any of them even just killed them and i do think in that situation you probably

need to eliminate those wolves those two and you probably need to compensate that farmer because that's a whole loss of like an entire year's worth of animals. So it's nuanced. I don't think there's one answer that fits all for this. But personally, I do believe that ranching inherently comes with some risks. And if you ranch in a place that has predators like wolves or grizzly bears or mountain lions, you just have to accept that you're going to have some losses.

Yeah, I agree with that. It's kind of insane, actually, to just think you can have cattle roaming such large areas and not have like any. animals interact with them at all. Right. It's a lot of range. And I'll just say, too, we were just in Ladakh, India, and there were ranchers there that were ranchers in America who you think are poor.

Like, these guys were definitely way more poor. And in our week there, we saw a horse that was killed by wolves. And we saw a cow that was killed by a snow leopard. And, like, they're dealing with it. And, like, they're guys. government, we have the richest, one of the richest governments in history. Like, they should be taking care of that. Like, in India, they're able to take care of these farmers losing animals.

So I think our government should be able to take care of that as well. Yeah. And over there, they've realized the value of keeping those animals alive, the wildlife. So it's a great question. And we'll definitely talk about it more in other episodes. Okay. Let's do two more quick ones. First of all, something you'd recommend recently.

I'm going to go first. so I can beat Mike to it again. No, please. I'm going to recommend the band Sophie Tucker, which is the combo of a woman and a guy. It's kind of, it was introduced to me and Mike at the same time by some guests on our last trip.

Shout out Chantelle and. I actually heard about them like 24 hours in advance. And we both listened to it on a long drive to Doba. And there's one song, the vocalist, Sophie, speaks fluent Brazilian Portuguese. And so do I. And so it really hits for me. And there's one song called Jakaray, which is pretty much means Cayman.

And it just is one of those songs that just lifts my mood every time I listen to it. I've just really been listening to it a lot lately. So I like Sophie Tucker quite a bit. So that's my shout out. You speak fluent Portuguese? Yeah. Say the crocodile swallowed a black cat and the black cat crawled out. The Jacaree cameo the Gato Negro and the Gato Negro

Salli out of the bocarette. Oh, nice. He's good. That was perfect. I'll go. Mine is, we normally do like pop culture. I normally do just sports. I'm going to just say going on a walk during or right after a snowstorm.

Because we had a big snowstorm in Salt Lake the other day. And I was only one walking. And it's like one of the most beautiful days I've been on a walk this entire year. And it's just weird to me Like, you know, once it gets sunny And it's just like blue sky and sun Everyone's outside But after like a snowstorm like everyone just stays inside

And it's really nice time to go on a walk The whole time where you're just like I'm just built different than all of these people Yeah Earth is just so much better Without anyone else out there to bother you This place is actually pretty amazing And so quiet after a snowstorm

which we all love, a little bit of peace and quiet. I'd be remiss if I didn't shout out the podcast. I just did a guest appearance on. I genuinely think they're a great group of guys over it. Lost and found and rewound. So they have two ampersands in their name. We only have one. So let that tell you what it will.

But what they do is they talk about usually the older, more esoteric or forgotten movies that is kind of right down my alley, if that sounds nice to you. They're just like a super chill group of three friends. And we talked about the movie Sorcer. I'm not telling you to go listen to the episode I was on because I think. Sorcer's on my short list right now of movies to watch. It's, it's unbelievable.

It's actually I picked that movie for us to watch. And it's an all-timer. Kind of a forgotten classic from Friedkin, director of movies, The Exorcist, French Connection, DeLy and I, Nellie, et cetera, et cetera. Jaws is in it, right? Roy Shider. My guy, Roy Shider. Holy cow.

He's so good. Did you plug? plug tooth and claw when you guested? I did not personally talk about the show. But you were the worst guest. Yeah, I really am. Chris did a good job of introducing me, much better than Jeff's ever done. Go figure.

But no, they're awesome. He probably lied. He probably said you're like an equal member of Tooth and Clare. Yeah. He was like a co-host and I was like, oh, whoa, don't put that responsibility on me. You're just the tech guy. I'm just the tech guy. No, but they have a great vibe

And I just, I really want to shout those guys out I feel like I probably went on and rambled Just like I'm doing right now And kind of ruined the energy of the show Because usually it's just like three dudes That are just chilling together And I went on there and started yelling out Much the sorcerer is like better than the Exorcist and stuff

Which I actually, I believe, but did you get mad at them Like you got mad at us last episode? So it's better than it You know, you're an equal member I shouldn't have said that Nah, it won't stop you. All right. Our last, our last category we're going to do today is conservation.

I want to talk about brown bears in Romania quickly. It's actually an interesting story. Romania prior to 1965 probably had far less brown bears than they have now, but a dictator gained power and kept that power until 1989, and there was an unlikely benefit for the bears. This guy's name was Nikolai Chausescu, and he loved shooting bears. In fact, he loved it so much that he wouldn't let anyone else shoot bears, just him and his buddies. And he said that there was a decree that he issued that everyone else had to protect bears,

and they even had to feed bears, and that only he and his buddies were allowed to hunt them. So in a way, the fact that he loved killing bears so much actually protected bears in Romania as a whole. And they really did well during this period. That's interesting. That's like the trophy hunters going to Africa who are like, well, we actually give more money to conservation than anyone. Yeah, that's a whole, we'll get into that at some point. But we're probably going to do a whole episode on this Nikolai Chopsescu at some point because it's a really interesting story. Yeah, that's interesting.

Bear hunting in Romania was outlawed in 2016 over the past few years after some highly publicized attacks. Yeah. Some highly publicized attacks, including one we covered in a news episode where a girl was thrown off a cliff by a bear. The Romanian government introduced a coal on their bears, C-U-L-L. And the quota in 2024 was almost 500 bears that they wanted to coal. I don't know how many of they ended up killing. That's pretty aggressive. The year before, I think it was like 250 to 300 bears.

Last year, they wanted to kill 500. So it's a pretty aggressive call against these bears. They're facing some other threats, loss of habitat, and general conflict with humans because they're increasingly forced to interact with communities, ranchers, and farmers, and they're losing more and more habitat to human expansion. I think there's always going to be some habitat for brown bears in Romania, but it does seem like a place where there's a lot of concern about bears, and they're facing a lot of negative public opinion right now.

So it is kind of a hot spot for brown bear conservation. All right, we've done claws a million times for this, Wait, I have a question going back to Mike's thing. So that podcast has two ampers stamps? Or what are they called? Amper sand. Amper sand. Yes, we have two of them.

What would ours be if we added something else? Tooth and claw and bones? Tooth. Ooh, that's probably what it would be, right? Should we be tooth and claw and bones of West? No, I don't want to add anything. Tooth and horns and bones. Tooth and claw and horns.

Oh, yeah. Tooth and horns and bones. No, we're good. Tooth and claws is fine. We don't need another ampersand. I'm happy. I think two ampersands is as many as a podcast I'll ever have. I can't imagine a three ampersand pod out there.

That'd be unwieldy. All right. Well, with that, I think we're going to end this episode. Thanks so much, guys, for listening. Thank you, everyone, for subscribing. Those of you that are subscribed. Oh, actually, a quick announcement. recently, just so everyone knows, Apple has changed their policies on Patreon.

And if you subscribe to our show through the Patreon app, they're going to charge you more. Apple's going to charge you like an extra 30%. So if you're thinking about subscribing, do it on your web browser, do it outside of the app, and then you can get the app and pour it in your subscription and you'll be fine. But if you download the app and then subscribe, you're going to pay extra. It's like an extra $4 or something. Like on Apple devices, like an iPhone if you have the Patreon app? If you get the Patreon app and then subscribe to us through that app,

Apple's charging 30%. Stupid. Yeah. That's pretty amazing to me. So there's really nothing we can do about it. What you can do, though, is just subscribe through like your web browser or any other way. And it'll still be $10. All right.

I think that's it. Thanks, guys. Love you, Bull. Love you all and we'll talk to you. Love you. Bye.