Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks - Dingo Attack - A Dingo Ate My Baby with Payne Lindsey: Part 1

Episode Date: August 29, 2022

Payne Lindsey of Up and Vanished and Radio Rental fame joins the guys to talk about the shocking origins of the phrase "A dingo ate my baby!" Payne brings some very welcome investigative know-how to the show as Wes tells the horrifying true tale of a dingo attack that shook Australia throughout the 1980s. ~~ 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

Hey everyone, it's Wes. Just wanted to intro this episode very quickly. It's a special two-part episode. It's all about an absolutely crazy criminal case that happened in the 80s in Australia. I think you guys are really going to like it. We have a really cool guest. I did a lot of research for this one. This was one that required a lot of different sources.

And I actually forgot to mention them in this episode. So I did want to bring up my sources. I used this podcast called A Perfect Storm, The True Story of the Chamberlains. That was really helpful for me. There was a lot of little details in that podcast I couldn't find anywhere else. I used Case File, which is one of my favorite podcasts. They did an episode all about the death of Azaria Chamberlain. I also looked at this documentary.

I watched some of it called Lindy Chamberlain, the True Story documentary. Plus, I read just like a billion articles online. There were so many different articles and names and things to remember for this one. I do realize in retrospect I pronounced a few things wrong, including Uluru, which is the place that's a sacred place to a lot of the indigenous people in Australia, and I really feel dumb for mispronouncing that. But just so, you know, I had a billion things in my head. Anyway, that's about it.

I really hope you guys enjoy these ones. I'd put a lot of time into them. Thanks so much for those of you who are subscribers. You really keep us afloat, and it truly means the world to us. So with no further ado, here's part one of a dingo A, My Baby. Welcome to Tooth and Claw, everyone. We're doing a really special episode today. we're doing a dingo got my baby episode, which is a story that people have been asking for for a long time.

It's a story that's pretty well known in pop culture. And I also... It's like well known, but no one actually knows what it is. Right. I feel like people know about the story, but they don't... And they know there was something weird that happened with it, but they don't really know exactly what went on and how big of a deal it was in Australia. And we're bringing the pain.

We are bringing the pain. Quite literally. So an alternative title I had for this episode was Up and Eaton, and that is because we're joined by a really special guest today. We're joined by Payne Lindsay. He is the host of Up and Van vanished and Atlanta Monster. He's produced a number of other podcasts for Tenderfoot, including Radio Rental, and not to mention, he's also a director and a documentary filmmaker.

This story involves a lot of true crime aspects, so we wanted to bring on someone that actually knows what they're talking about. So Payne, thanks so much for. joining us. Thank you guys. I'm happy to be here. So you're you're a pod, you're just not some random guy. You're a podcaster. You do stuff? No, I'm definitely just a random guy for sure. I don't know, I don't even know why I'm here. Honestly, up and vanished is like the premiere. If you guys haven't checked that out, it's, it's incredible work. So we're honored to be joined by the one and the only pain, Lindsay. Yes, we are. I just gave a second introduction. There you go.

I appreciate that. I feel like I just did Wes's job. This is actually just going to be introductions. Okay. Well, no, I'm actually going to introduce the story. It's one that is still talked about in Australia at length today, but during the 80s, it was really all that anyone was talking about. And this phrase that Dingo Got My Baby is still like a phrase that's used in the pop culture lexiconics. This is all anyone was talking about in the 80s. It truly was. It dominated the news cycles in Australia.

In the U.S., I don't think so as much. I think in the U.S. It kind of was more became a thing in the 90s, and that's because shows like Seinfeld and the Simpsons referenced it, really popular shows. And then people started to kind of learn a little bit more about it in the 90s. But it's a really tragic story, and it's one that we've kind of always mocked a little bit in the U.S.

And there's this kind of like Australians kind of resent that. Really? They kind of feel like we don't understand just how tragic of a story this was. And it's kind of true. As I've researched it, I'm like, oh, this isn't something I would joke about too much because it's pretty crazy what actually happened to this family. Okay, so I'm just muting my mind. Yeah, you might as well meet yourself.

Pain is our new Jeff this episode. That's right. All right, I'm going to get into it. Pain, feel free to stop if you ever want to interject, ask any questions, give any kind of expert opinion. I also have a few questions that I have ready for you. But otherwise, you can just listen and hear what happened. Cool.

So, in 1969, Alice Lynn Merchanson, who went by the nickname Lindy from a small age, married Michael Chamberlain in Australia. And we've already talked about how, in Australia, if you're like a Linda, you're just going to be called Lindy. That's how they do things down there. They love nicknames. Anyway, so she went by Lindy, and we're just going to call her Lindy from now on. But she married Michael Chamberlain in 1969.

They're both really active members of the Seventh-day Adventist religion, and Michael was actually a pastor in that church. People that knew them in their community described them as quiet, anonymous, really happy and really polite. Azaria Chamberlain was born to Lindy and Michael on June 11, 1980, in Mount Isa in northern Queensland, Australia.

So they already had two boys. Aidan was six, and Reagan was four, but since marrying, they had dreamed of having a little girl, and those dreams came true when they had Azaria. So on August 13, 1980, when Azaria was only two months old, they decided to go out on vacation. And they kind of sounds like they did vacations

pretty similar to how me and Jeff did vacations growing up, which was like they went camping somewhere within a day or two to drive. Used to do vacations. We do vacations. We do good vacations now. That's a good point. My dad definitely dragged me out to national parks and stuff. And as a kid, I was like, oh, my God, this sucks.

Let's go to the beach or something. And now as an adult, I'm like, that was kind of cool. I've been to that park before. You appreciate it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, Wes. So you might not be into bears if we didn't go to Yellowstone every year. That's a good point.

I'm not upset about it, but I'm saying this is very similar to how we were brought up. Okay, so they went out on this trip, and part of this trip is they were going to Illuru. So Illuru is that really huge monolithic rock in Australia. It's a really famous landmark. The colonizer name for it is Ayr's Rock, but for the purposes of our podcast, we're going to use the indigenous name. It's Aluru, and that was one of the main stops on their trip. What is it? Aluru.

It's U-L-U-R-U. It's like, what is it? It's like that giant, it's almost kind of like a massive plateau. Yeah, there you go. Huge rock in simple terms. Is there like stuff on it? It's just a big rock. It's like 300-something meters high, so like almost a thousand feet high.

And it's just like completely flat outback. And then you just have this huge sandstone rock sticking out of it. So it's just like this big monolith that's been worshipped by Aboriginal people. It's just this really interesting landmark in Australia, and it's very sacred to the indigenous people. It's the kind of thing that people think aliens are responsible for. Like that's the kind of anomaly that it's a really weird thing. Yeah. World's biggest ball of yarn kind of.

Yeah, aliens. Exactly. Well, I don't know if that's quite. We just watched Nope last night, so we got aliens. Oh, man, no spoilers. Was it good, though? It was great. Okay, yeah.

Real good animal attack scene in that movie. Ooh. You got that. That's right. Nice. So, Jeff, if you remember the movie Rescuers Down Under, which I know you do. I kind of don't. There's a scene at the very beginning where the camera's like racing towards Aluru.

Anyway, it's a huge rock. Cool. It sounds cool. It is good. We'll have to do a tour there. All right. Yeah, Payne, you're invited. Yep, Payne, you're coming with.

Let's go. All right. So they arrived on the 16th of August, 1980, and they settled into established campground near Illuru. And that night they set up their camp and they spent a really uneventful night under these expansive stars in the outback. And it would actually be Azaria's last night with her family. Uh-uh. So nearby, an Australian dingo was engaged in its nightly ritual. It's slinking in and out of campsites. It's looking for food scraps that had fallen to the ground. It's even taking handouts from campers. This dingo is an opportunist and had to come to depend on these campers for

food essentially had changed its natural behavior to stay alive. And these humans that used to be avoided and feared are now considered an acceptable risk in order to get food. And that particular dingo would take any opportunity it could to get a meal. So the next day, the family's visiting Aluru, and Michael, he's a hobby photographer. He climbs up a section of the stone. Back in those days, you could actually climb up on Aluru. Anymore, I'm pretty sure you can't. But he climbs up on there, and he takes some photographs of some Aboriginal cave paintings. And down below, Lindy is waiting with Azaria and her two boys at the bottom of the rock.

And she actually takes a picture holding Azaria, like holding her arms out and her feet are on the rocks. And as she's doing this, she has a sense that she's being watched. And she turns to see a dingo standing on the rock behind her, and its gaze is just totally fixed on Azaria. And she remembers it being kind of creepy because it's just like tracking her daughter,

and it didn't seem to care at all that there's all these people around. And she leaves the area, but she feels a little unnerved because this dingo is so clearly habituated. It's a little creepy. Yeah, it would be. Like, if you imagine you're out camping and there's a coyote in your campsite

and you're holding a baby and everywhere you move that baby, it just perfectly tracks it with its eyes. I don't know. People are always like flipping open their photo books and being like, look at my baby, so cute. And everyone's just like, I don't want to look at your baby. Babies are mostly not cute, let's be real.

That's true. Like some are, especially two-month-old babies. They look like aliens. We're back on aliens. But finally, this baby's getting looked at and the mom, I don't know, I'd be a little flattered maybe. You know what else isn't like that fun to look at?

What? Cave paintings in general. Oh, I disagree. I've never been able to just like stare at cave paintings. Yeah, that is a hot take. You said kid paintings? Cave paintings. They're like looking at cave paintings?

Kid paintings, too. Every time I see cave paintings. Yeah, they always suck. Oh, cave paintings. Yeah, those, oh, yeah. Yeah, they're cool, but they're kind of hard. It's kind of the same thing. I'll be honest, I had like an emotional experience once looking at cave art.

So I'm going to disagree with you. That's a hard disagree for me. I hope it's just like some kids that we're like messing around back. It's the little like, it's the little S that everyone draws in elementary school. They're like parents are mad at them. for drawing on their house. It wasn't that. It's still intact from 2,000 years ago.

Yeah, no. My kid drew it this morning. All right. So, she's a little weirded out by this dingo. And part of that is because they had noticed signs in the bathrooms at the campsite. And those signs pretty much said, don't feed the dingoes. These dingoes are really habituated and food conditioned. And they were a growing problem in the Luru area.

And they actually didn't know how big. of a problem they were because six weeks earlier, Amanda Cranwell, a three-year-old girl from Victoria, was attacked by a dingo while she was sitting in the family car with the door open. And the dingo actually attempted to drag her out of the car and away from her parents. And her parents had to intervene and scare the dingo away to rescue their daughter. How much do dingo's weigh? They're pretty similar to coyotes. We're going to get into their facts pretty soon.

Okay. How much do babies weigh? So at two months, it's about 10 pounds. So in August 1980, though, they had no idea about this previous attack, and they, like most Australians, the Chamberlains thought that Dingoes were essentially harmless and just really a nuisance. And they felt really confident in this fact that Dingoes had actually never killed anyone in Australia. So at the time, everyone knew that Dingoes had never killed anyone. But I'm sure if you looked at like indigenous peoples and if you looked actually farther back in history, Dingoes had for sure killed someone at some point. It's just in like modern recorded history, there was no record of a dingo killing a person.

It's like our Night of the Grizzly, they felt like grizzly bears weren't going to kill anyone in Glacier. There's a lot of threads that match up with our Night of the Grizzly story. This is food habituated animals or food conditioned animals that people kind of saw as being somewhat harmless. So the head ranger to Luru, Derek Roth, was really aware of the concerning dingo behavior in the campsites and the previous attacks on children. He had actually worked in Kenya with both law enforcement and wildlife management in the past, and he understood the dangers of food-conditioned animals, and he didn't want to risk anything with this dingo situation. So he had actually written a report to his supervisors, and this is really important,

advising them that the habituated and food-conditioned dingoes might consider babies or children as potential prey. And he actually petitioned his superiors for high-powered rifles and ammo so that they could call some of these boulder dingoes in the campground. So remove them, kill him. And he never got the ammo or the permission. So he knew there was a problem. He knew that it had gone past this kind of threshold of acceptable dingo behavior. And he was ready to kill some dingoes, but they wouldn't let him.

All right. At least he's covered now. Yeah, he's like, well, I said. I tried to. If someone dies, it's not me. I told you. Exactly. Yeah.

All right. So some quick dingo facts. They are medium-sized dogs that live in both Australia and Southeast Asia. As far as their origin in Australia, it's commonly thought they arrived on the boats of Asian sea fares around 4,000 years ago. Some scientists think that they actually may go back way further in Australia and that they might have walked over a land bridge up to 18,000 years ago. So there is a bit of dispute about their origin, but the earliest fossil record of a dingo in Australia is about 3,500 years ago. Do they live anywhere else besides Australia? Just Southeast Asia.

Okay. So they're likely were domesticated dogs that turn feral over time. Males are about 35 pounds. Females, about 31 pounds, which is, again, pretty similar to the weight of a coyote. They're reddish tan with white feet, but then they can be yellow, tan, or even black, too. So that's not really sexually dimorphic, right? They are, but not, like, very strongly. They're pretty much, they're essentially the same size, but they are still.

Males are a little bit bigger. They have a really large... Oh, go ahead, Mike. I was just going to ask Jeff to explain. and what sexual dimorphism is. Yeah, everyone knows what it is. Yeah, I was not in my head like I knew what that was. I was like, yeah, for sure.

It's like when the male or the female get like substantially bigger than the other or if they like have a lot different coloration, they're sexually dimorphic. Okay. These seem like they're more pretty close to the same way. Yeah, most of the time, like they differ a little bit bigger gap. Yeah, generally there's sexual there's some sexual dimorphic. And yeah, these are sexually dimorphic animals, but they're not strongly so. It would be kind of hard to tell them apart if you saw like a male and a female, whereas some of the animals, it's really easy to tell.

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They do? We're going to talk about that. They would or they do? Wow. They would. And I'm going to explain why I say it that way. That's so gross. So one cool thing about their like their morphology, like what they can do, they can actually rotate their wrists, which is something other dogs can't do. And so when, like, people have had dingoes in captivity, they've actually been able to, like, turn doorknobs and lift latches and stuff. What? Yeah. And then they also have really flexible shoulder joints, which allow them to climb trees,

climb fences, climb cliffs. They're much better climbers than most dogs as well. So it's pretty cool. Cool. They're a cool dog. Yeah. They're adaptable. They live throughout Australia.

They live in packs consisting of a breeding pair. Pups from that year and then potentially pups from the previous year. And, Jeff, to your point, they're the largest mammalian carnivores in Australia, and they're super opportunistic. So, I wouldn't to guess that. If a koala were to fall out of a tree or something, a dingo would for sure eat it. It's just that they don't climb trees to get koalas. They're not like a main staple for dingoes.

Okay. You know, and maybe they'd get syphilis while they're at it. Or chlamydia. What do koala's happen? It's the chlamydia. So they eat pretty much everything in Australia. Everything from, like, insects up to kangaroos is on their menu. They can eat kangaroos?

Yeah, that's actually one of their main things they eat. What? And they'll run them down as packs. Yeah. Not adults, right? Adults, but usually not big adult males, but they'll eat, like, females and younger kangaroos. Big adult males are called joys, right? No, that's babies.

Okay. Yeah. So they do eat joys. They do eat joys, yeah. Do you think a good hunting tactic is, like, to pretend that they're the Joey and hide inside the pouch? until the kangaroo falls asleep and then they eat them. I don't think that's a good hunting tactic. You don't?

No. You know, that was always kind of a traumatic thing for me to learn that kangaroo pouches are full of like mucus and they're really gross. Oh, no. Really? Yeah. Yeah. It's not like a pleasant. I thought it was like a warm blanket or something.

Like a, I think that's what I thought too. Like a wet, yeah, warm, wet blanket. That's why I don't like this podcast. I just learn these things and I dislike animals. I quit. You quit. I guess it makes sense. I know.

I'll be back. I'll come crawling back. All right. Anyway, so sometimes they'll hunt in packs to bring down larger animals like big adult kangaroos or even cattle. And when they do... They're coordinated. Yeah, they are.

Much like African wild dogs are wolves. They are very coordinated in their pack hunting behavior. But an interesting thing about them is they do often go for the throat of the animals that they attack. And if it's a small enough animal, they'll grab them by the throat and then shake them back and forth. And that just rips out that larynx and everything and kills it pretty quickly. Yeah, that's a good strategy.

Yeah, it's... Watch McGruber, if you have it. All right. So, we're going to go back to the Chamberlains. That night after sunset, they're barbecuing with some other campers. This is their second night in the campground. They'd met these campers, Greg and Sally Lowe. The Lows were also a really young couple.

They also had a small baby. And because of that, they became fast friends. Sally remarked later that she actually found Baby Azaria to be so. cute and happy that them meeting the Chamberlains made her want to have a second kid. So one point, as they're barbecuing, Sally leaves the dinner, and she goes to throw away her baby's diaper, and she has her baby on her hip, and she turns to see a dingo that's following her a few paces behind. And she turns around, and she's looking at this little dingo, and as she confronts it,

it runs off into the brush. And then she goes back to the barbecue, and not long after another dingo shows up, And Michael, Lindy's husband, throws a crust of bread to this dingo. And Lindy actually gets kind of mad at him. And she's like, you shouldn't be encouraging him. You shouldn't be feeding him. And after this dingo gets this bread, it runs off. So a little bit before 9 p.m., Azari is starting to get sleepy.

And Lindy decides to go put her to bed. And Regan, her older brother, who's four, is already sleeping in the tent. So she and Aiden, the six-year-old, they get up, they leave the other campers, they go put Azaria to bed, allegedly, and they return six to ten minutes later. I just want you guys to remember these details. This little window of 20 minutes is really important. So Lindy gets up, she leaves Greg and Sally Lowe, Michael Chamberlain. They're all together.

And she takes her six-year-old son with her to put her two-month-old baby to sleep in the tent with her four-year-old that's already sleeping in the tent. She's back in like six to ten minutes. So she's not gone very long. So the baby's just in a tent? Yeah, and one thing that she does forget to do, she doesn't zip up this tent. It's really hot, so she just leaves the door open. Regan's already asleep in the tent, and she puts his area asleep in the tent,

and kind of like a baby bassinet that's in the tent. Okay. So a few minutes after Lindy comes back to the barbecue, Sally hears a sharp and really anguished cry from a baby. The cry was really short, and then it was immediately abruptly cut short. Lindy didn't seem to notice, but Michael did, And he told Lindy that it was Azaria and that she should go check on the baby, which I thought was kind of funny.

Like, not funny, but, like, Lindy had just put Azari to bed and then she came back. And then Azaria cries and Michael's like, hey, will you go check on her? It's like, dude, go check on the baby yourself, you know? Yeah, especially if it, like, I don't know that. Yeah. Sometimes they just figure they need milk. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, I guess.

But, like, he'd been, like, playing around in cave paintings all day and stuff. Especially if it's, like, a street. or something well I don't know what can a baby do besides like a normal cry that's all they do right I don't know like I'm saying like oh like as far as like a four year old gets bit by a dog yeah they're gonna like do a different type of like scream I think two months old like two month old babies have multiple different cries there's like a wine think do any of us have babies pain you got any babies uh not that I know of no I'm just kidding I did not have a baby one day maybe I feel like the cry would be like the same as like the I'm hungry cry if it's like a two months

getting attacked by a dog I don't think so if it's a baby the reason I disagree Jeff is I was once in a car with one of our cousins when she was really young and she was like kind of whining and crying and then she got really upset I think something hurt her or something and she was just screaming and it was like a very different cry it was one you couldn't tune out or ignore And so I really think there's a variety of cries for babies. Well, any of you baby listeners, babies write in and let us know what you think. All right.

Okay, so this part's pretty important. The cry gets cut short, and Michael tells Lindy that it was his area. She should go check on her. Lindy still wasn't sure, but Sally then the Southern Camper said, no, I'm pretty sure it was your baby. And so Lindy gets up to go check on her.

And Sally, this other camper, she knows Lindy had just returned from putting his area down. She's a new mother herself. She knows like this frustration of a fussy baby all too well. And she watches as Lindy gets up to go check on his area in Reagan in the small tent. And she and these other campers are still chatting and they're waiting for Lindy to come back when suddenly this really blood-curdling scream pierces through the night, followed by the words,

my God, my God, the dingo's got my baby. So this is Lindy screaming. Everyone hears her scream, the dingo's got my baby. We're going to switch to what Lindy actually saw. She had been approaching the tent where Azari and Regan had been sleeping when she actually sees a dingo run out from the tent and sprint off into the brush. And her first thought is like, okay, there's no food in my tent. So what was it doing in there?

And then she realizes, oh, it might have been messing with my kids. So she runs to the tent door and she immediately sees that Azaria is gone. And she frantically searches around the tent for the two-month-old baby. And knowing that she didn't have much time, she screams out that the dingo had gotten her baby, and then she asks people for a flashlight. Oh my gosh. Derek Roth, the lead ranger that we'd brought up earlier,

him and some indigenous trackers show up really quickly, and they rush over to investigate the tent where they actually notice a large puddle of blood. They grab their flashlights, and they quickly find a set of dingo prints leading from the tent through the dusty ground, and then they disappear when they hit a nearby road. So they try and follow these tracks as best they can.

after they investigate the tracks, this blood, the general scene, none of the men or Roth have any doubt that it was a dingo that had killed or at least run off with Azaria. They even later, as they do later investigations, they even find an impression in the ground where it looks like Azaria had been dragged or set down, and they can even see like the fabric of her one Z in that impression. So they're like, these dudes, and this,

you guys might be wondering why I keep bringing up these little details, but it'll make sense later. they're confident that a dingo killed this kid. And these are like trackers. These are people that know dingoes better than anyone. I listen to some interviews with these guys. And the interviewer was asking them like, you know, what killed this kid?

And they're all like dingo, dingo, dingo. Without a doubt, it was a dingo. That's a dingo. That's a dingo. Dingo. Yep. Exactly. So Sally doesn't have a flashlight, nor does Lindy.

Lindy's the mom, Sally's the friend. And shock's really setting in, and they're feeling pretty useless. So Sally actually decides to help out and try and take care of Aden. And without really thinking ahead, she's like, I'm going to tuck him in and put him to bed, so he's not in the middle of all this. And she takes him to the tent where the baby had just been killed. Oh, no. So she pokes her head into the tent, and she sees like a mess of blankets,

and then she actually kneels into a pool of blood. And she's like, oh, shit, this was not the right place to bring a six-year-old. year old kid. Yeah. But then at that moment, she realizes that Reagan, the four-year-old, is still asleep in there, and she shakes him a bunch, and he's not waking up, and then finally he jumps out of his sleeping bag, and it turns out that he was just so paralyzed by fear that he had, like, refused to move an inch.

Oh, wow. And he finally, like, gets up and runs out of the tent. But poor little Aden, he now has seen all this blood, and Sally later says that he had said a dingo has our baby in its tummy, which is pretty sad to think. have this new baby sister and like, and all of a sudden she's gone and you can't really make sense of that. That's not good. No, it's not.

It's not a nice thing for a sexual kid. Apparently these kids turned out all right, though. So the dingo was the obvious culprit, but it seemed so strange that even Lindy questioned it at one point, and she asked Michael if maybe someone had actually taken his area from their tent. And then Michael mentioned all the blood and he said, you know, it's just not likely that it was anything else. So I wanted to break down a little bit like, why is this such a strange idea that a dingo would take a tent from a baby?

And as I mentioned, up to that point, what was that much? That is a strange idea. To take a tent from a baby? Yeah, why are these dingo stealing tents from babies? We'll never know, to be honest. Science can't explain this one. Yeah. How did these babies save up enough money to get tents in the first place?

It's such a deep question. You have to go really back to the beginning here. Why do these babies have jobs? How do, yeah. I quit, too. I also quit the podcast. We got to interview this tent. Yeah.

All right. Why is it so strange that dingoes would be snatching babies from tents? I mustpoke. There we are. All right. That actually sounds a lot more normal now. So up into that point, as I'd mentioned, there have been no documented human deaths from dingoes in Australia. So the thought of one actually like going into a tent and grabbing a baby was pretty crazy to a lot of people.

But we do have to remember, these are really food-conditioned dingoes, and they're really habituated, and they actually even had a record of attacking children. Way to go, Mike, Michael. What happened with? Throwing that piece of bread to that one? Oh, yeah. I mean, he's just exactly encouraging that behavior. Yeah.

So bad, casting bad light on all us mics. All seven trillion of us mics out there. I wanted to break this down a little bit, the whole food conditioning thing. We talk about a lot in our Night of the Grizzlies three-parter, but I want to just talk about it a little bit more here. In a situation like this with the potentially predatory animal, and you have some food conditioning happening, it's not uncommon to see escalating behavior.

So they're going to be testing the water, they're going to be seeing what they can get away with, and then if wildlife managers don't act to change that behavior or remove these boldest animals, that escalation is going to continue and continue until it crosses over into predation. So we see that in Yellowstone. Like if we start to have a bear come into campgrounds and really start to figure out if it can get food or get some kind of reward, we take care of it immediately, whether that's hazing the bear,

just giving it a really bad experience so it's afraid of the campground or actually trapping it and taking it to a different part of the park, that avoids that bear actually getting a reward and escalating that behavior because that's either going to end up in a dead bear. bear or a dead person or a hurt person. That's what they really should have done. They should have either haze these dingoes every single day or they should have killed the ones that were escalating. So a helpless two-month-old baby in an open, unguarded tent

is really in the wheelhouse of a dingo. I mean, they can bring down kangaroos, so it's not hard for them to kill a baby. Really, the only thing that would typically stop a dingo from doing this is their risk-averse nature. But if they've been around humans for months, receiving rewards and taking all these risks, it would seem like a no-brainer to go and kill this baby.

That's the danger of food conditioning. It really just removes that natural fear of humans, and it associates humans with food. Derek Roth, that lead ranger, he's convinced that the dingo took the baby. He continues to follow tracks that night with the help of these elders and some local police, and then there's also 250 volunteers that scoured the area

looking for his area. The local police arrived, the Northern Territory Police, and they immediately started it on the search. So Payne, I have a question for you. If there's a potential disappearance, especially one that might involve some violence, what are some of the first things police should do when they get to that scene? Find the boyfriend? Yeah. Find the ex-boyfriend? Yeah.

I mean... That baby had like three different boyfriends, I think, too. I mean... Prolific baby. If someone's disappeared, I guess, whatever place... you think that they were last at, make sure that this place isn't being contaminated with people wandering around, touching stuff, moving stuff. Like, is this going to be a crime scene later on that we're going to, that's, you know, going to be further tainted by us just in a panic

trying to figure out what happened and, you know, ruining the chances to find, you know, actual evidence later. That's a thing that happens a lot, I think. So that's one of the first things is just collecting any evidence they can. One thing that really stood out to me is that these police initially just went right into the search for the dingo. And there was a lot of people that witnessed this. There was a lot of people there that had witnessed Azaria being put down and the scream and Lindy, you know, yelling out of dingo's got my baby. And I mean, that's another thing I wanted to ask you, Payne, is in your experience with some of these disappearances, like, how important is it to have some eyewitnesses? I mean, I, I,

witnesses are, it's like a roll of the dice. Either it's extremely reliable or this person doesn't have any clue what they really saw. And now that something bad's happened, they're remembering it differently. And you ask them again 15 years later and it's become this thing that is totally not, right? My thing is, my question right now is, is it the sheriff or something who was like, oh yeah, the dingo definitely got the baby, right? Like, the ranger. Yeah. But is this also the guy who really wanted to kill these dingoes? Yeah, it is. Yeah, so he definitely regrets not.

Just an idea there. Yeah, he, well, I mean, also, he sounds like he probably wanted it to be the dingo, too. He's like, oh, I know it's the dingoes. That's a good point. Yeah, that's a really good point. Those damn dingoes, where is it? Right. I told you we should kill these things.

He had that existing bias. Pre-existing bias, yeah, totally. But, like, probably for good reason, too. Sure. Totally, totally. He sees the dingo's going into camps and he's like, These guys are going to do something. Well, and these elders that he had joined him had no reason to like want to pin this on the dingoes.

Because they actually, for them dingoes are somewhat sacred too. So like they felt the same way. Yeah, they did. But like shouldn't the first thing they should do be look for the baby? Well, what they should be doing is for like the sliver of a chance it's not dead. They should. But what they probably should be doing is dividing and conquering. So they should have some people that are organizing a search party.

And then some people that are collecting witness testimony and collecting evidence because violence... They should be shooting something, too. They should be. Guns out for sure. Yeah. Anyway, someone's been hurt. A baby's missing. There had been some violence.

So it is important that they collect some evidence. And like Payne mentioned, the longer witnesses go without recording a statement, the fuzzier and fuzzier those details are going to get. So it's really important that you get those statements immediately. And in this case especially, it really would have made a huge difference. But the police didn't do that. Yeah. I wanted to ask, because like you said, over the years, information that people remember and retain slowly can change, have you ever had that opportunity to be talking to someone

whose information or story slowly changes over the process of when you were interviewing them or from their first witness to when you were talking to them or anything like that? Oh, yeah, totally. I mean, half the time, these are things that I can't definitively prove or disprove myself. But I'm pretty sure my instincts are like, oh, that's probably not what happened, actually. Like something as simple is the color of this glove and this person thinking that it was blue or it was translucent. And over the years, it becoming this idea was there another glove that was planted here? And it turns into a bigger, more conspiratorial idea just because someone's glance of it, you know, in their in their memory, it's blue, but really maybe it wasn't.

Maybe it was just off white. And it's like, you know, what's the difference? But that becomes some bigger thing that confuses the investigation later potentially. You know what I mean? Those little details can make all the difference. And in this case, West changes his story on everything. A lot. Yeah.

Just like after a month, it's its whole new. All right. Well, we see it in our stories all the time, like, we kind of just have to take the victim's word for it on a lot of things. Because a lot of things are on their own. They're on their own. So, like, you can't, it's hard to ever know 100% if, like you said, you probably have some instincts that you've built up over the years at this point where you can kind of pick out little bits and bobs of things that don't sound quite right. But I don't know. It's just like it can get so messy when there's a lot of people involved. Everyone's telling it. different story and well whatever let's fit maybe we should finish the story before we cast any aspersions yeah we're going to be talking a lot more right we'll be talking a lot more about this in in the second part this is a two-parter if I didn't mention this but um what yeah so are we getting paid overtime so the search was called off that night around 1 p.m. and the local police actually offered to drive the chamberlinson nearby hotel but they only had room for lindy and regan and aiden so michael

went and he actually, and this is like pretty tragic, he collected the clothes and blankets from the bloody tent and packed them into his car like all on his own. And then another tourist that helped with the search, her name was Roberta Downs. She wanted to go with him to the hotel to check in on Lindy and she sat in the passenger seat of his car. Now that might also seem like a kind of a throwaway detail. That's really, really important because not long from now, the police are going to come up with a pretty crazy theory based on some really shady forensic evidence. And what their theory is going to be is they're going to convict Lindy of the death of her daughter. And they're going to say that she had, when she left that barbecue, she somehow got rid of Aiden,

like stashed him somewhere, changed into a track suit, grabbed Azaria, then went to their car, cut Azaria's head off with nail scissors. What? So like those little tiny scissors that you use to cut your fingernails, she used those to completely decapitate her child, or at least slash her throat to where it was almost decapitated, and then put the baby and the head into a camera bag, and then later go and bury the baby and blame it all on dingoes.

So that was their theory that they came up with, and their theory was that she did all of that and then changed back into her outfit in six to ten minutes. Is it pleafed she's wig them from the Simpsons? Bake them away, boys. What's that with a track suit? Why is that even relevant? So she could run faster?

Well, just because she came back with no blood on her whatsoever, I don't know why it was a track suit. Okay. Well, where is this track suit? Where did they ever find it? Or was it missing from her bag? The people at the camp, couldn't they like? We're going to talk about all that. Verify she did a chase.

Yeah. Yeah. This is all stuff that we're going to go over. That's going to be their theory. It's not their theory. I see, I see. So obvious. Well, I think that's the reason why probably people are talking about this forever.

Because like, to us on the outside, it's like, what? It just keeps getting more and more ludicrous. The police were just like, this is too obvious. Something else happened here. We got to get to the bottom of it. We're getting ahead of ourselves, though. This is just, I just want you guys to know that's the. theory they're going to come up with. Right now, that's still not the thing. You're giving a head of us.

Right now. Yeah, that's your fault. All right. So the next day, Derek Roth, the Ranger and some of those indigenous trackers, they followed the tracks longer. They followed them for like five or six miles. They never found Azaria's body or the dingo. Greg and Sally, the other campers showed up the next morning. And they found the local police and actually asked them who they should make their statement to. And the police told them there's no need to make a statement. This whole thing is very straightforward and their main priority was to locate the dingo and azaria. At this point, the news is really badgering the Chamberlains for their story. And their initial reactions to the press is what first brought some scrutiny on them. So Lindy was seen as kind of cold and unfeeling. And Michael

even stopped searching for Azaria to go help the press and like take some pictures of the bloodstained tent. And in their first interviews, they just really seem like kind of clinical almost when they're talking about the loss of their daughter. So I wanted to ask you guys, like, and Payne, you especially, when something like this happens, like a disappearance or a big loss, is there a normal way for people to act? No. I mean, you don't know how you would act. I don't know how I would act either.

You know, we might act in a way that we've never acted before in our whole life. It might come across as strange or whatever. It's a lot of pressure, a lot of eyes on you. So I don't usually read too much into that unless someone is really saying some bizarre stuff that is borderline incriminating or something. You know, obviously take it for what it is and, you know, analyze it. But no one knows how they're going to act when something horrible happens, right? And the media is asking, you know, what you think and feel about it. When, I don't know, maybe I do it.

I don't know how to even say this. Go ahead. When Mike's mom died. He told me about it, and I didn't believe him because of how casual he was about it. Exactly. But that was just like his way of processing it, too. It's not like he didn't care. But it was like, from my perspective is like a little strange.

Dude, like, you need to like react a little bit to this. Yeah. Well, it just was so, we don't need to get into this. But like when something so. You don't need to defend yourself. If something's so unexpected, like a dingo stealing your baby, like you just don't want to accept it. You emotionally probably just shut off and revert to like a previous version of your brain that's saying like that didn't happen, you know? Totally understand.

Yeah, that's what I would probably do. Some version of that where I'm like, okay, let's go into a robot mode here and, you know. Yeah. And how messed up is it to like judge someone's reaction right after their baby got eaten? Totally. Yeah. She seems cold. I don't believe it.

Well, this is the 80s and like a lot of the psychology. Why isn't she smiling? Yeah, yeah. A lot of the psychology of this stuff. She's not crying enough for me. Yeah. It's like, okay. That's what people were saying.

Like, that was totally it. And like, this was the 80s. This was a time when a lot of this psychology hadn't fully been explained. This is a very rural part of Australia. And people were really quick to judge these people. So when the police talked to Lindy and Michael in the hotel, they wanted to know what Azaria was wearing at the time of her disappearance. And Lindy told them, and again, this is a really important thing for episodes. too to remember. She told them that she had been wearing a disposable diaper, a white jumpsuit,

some booties, and a matinee jacket. So a matinee jacket kind of looks like a little Afghan knitted jacket almost that babies were always wearing back in those times. Yeah. So fashionable for baby. Yeah, real fashionable, real trendy that in those days. I'm not really hip on baby fashion, so I'll take your word for it. We know you got a matinee jacket somewhere. I do. You're right. I do. This is a good looking baby. It is.

Well-dressed. So after a couple days of searching, little to no trace of Azari is found. The police actually decide to start killing dingoes. So they kill six dingoes. They check their stomach contents and still nothing. The police. That's what I was saying. You got to start shooting stuff.

They did. Yeah. And they didn't find anything. I will say a two-month-old baby, it's not unheard of for a dingo to like, a dingo could completely consume a two-month-old baby. be. Like there wouldn't necessarily be remains. They could eat the entire thing, bones and all. At this point, though, because of that, because they have no evidence and they don't have a dingo with any kind of remains or anything, the police and the media are starting to feel like maybe

a dingo wasn't actually involved in this. And they assigned some investigators to the case. A few of them believed the dingo theory, but a few of them were a little dubious, too. And this guy, John Lincoln, was one of the ones that immediately didn't believe that the chamberlins had a dingo attack ozaria, and that's mostly because it had never happened before. And some people pushed him on that stance, and then he even said, it's impossible for a dingo to carry a two-month-old baby in its jaws.

And he filled, this guy, I can't believe this. He filled a bucket with like 10 pounds of dirt, and then he tried to hold it in his mouth for like over a minute, and he couldn't do it. And he was like, see, if I can't do it, a dingo can't do it, which is just ridiculous. What? Like, we're the same animal.

But anyway, a dingo definitely can hold a 10-pound animal in its jaws, no problem. I think I can hold a 10-pound bucket of dirt in my mouth for a minute. I want to try this. Let's try it. Next episode. You know, that doesn't sound that hard. All right. You have to go to the chiropractor after that, I would imagine.

Or the dentist. Or the dentist, yeah. And my brother's a dentist. Yeah, so that works. Not me, the other brother. The successful. one. We know. You tell us what you are every yet. Pain, you kind of already. You have to prove it. You kind of already mentioned this pain.

But if you're, so if you're an investigator and this main culprit of a dingo doesn't make sense to you anymore, who is going to be your next person that you're going to think of as like a potential suspect? I mean, whoever was with the baby lust? One of the parents. Yeah. Would the other children, how old was the other one? Aden was six and Reagan was four. Six? Yeah. Is that an age appropriate to like kill a baby? Give like a witness testimony or something about, no.

Yeah, didn't the four-year-old see the dingoes come in the tent? I think so, or at least heard something. Yeah. I don't know. Would you feel comfortable asking a child? Me personally? I mean, I guess if I was assigned to do it, then yes, but I'm not like a real investigator. Sure.

I think it's probably one of those ages where you're young enough to be influenced by something, but also you might have a super pure memories. I mean, I think if it was interrogation or interview that was filmed and you could see how they got that information out of them without, I guess, overly influencing what they're saying, then maybe it could be an actual reliable source. Okay. Do we know Azaria wasn't involved in any drugs or gangs or anything like that? I'm pretty sure the two-month-old Azario was not involved in any crime.

You're asking the hard questions. Because you don't know if there's like a rival baby out there that, you know. Pretty sure there wasn't. A rival baby? We don't know. To your point, though, Mike, whether or not these kids would make good witnesses, I think of these other cases where people who probably had the mental facilities of like a child, there's been cases that totally hinge on them, you know?

You think of making a murder where they, you know, Brendan Dassey, he, he doesn't have the facilities of a child, but he obviously, like, was easily influenced by the police. And, like, they hinge that entire thing on his testimony, you know. So I do think you can, like, a case can be made or broken by someone who you. That's a good point. Like, if the police get it in their mind that it was the mom, they could, like, start asking the four-year-old. Like, did you see the mom put the baby in the tent? And then, like, kind of create a narrative from what they want with, like, a four-year-old. Exactly.

Yep. All right. The Chamberlains go home. They go back home to Mount Isla, and they immediately have all these rumors swirling around them. Some of the main gossip revolved around their relatively unknown religion, their seventh-day Adventist, that seemed really strange to the majority Catholic and Anglican people in Australia. And they actually, people were starting to say that the name Azaria itself meant sacrifice in the wilderness. It doesn't at all, but that's what people were saying. What the heck.

And that they had actually sacrificed Azaria as some kind of sacrificial lamb to like pay for the sins of the Seventh-day Adventist people. And that was like not just like a weird conspiracy theory. That was being published in the news. That was something that people actually thought. Yeah. Another story in Women's Day magazine said that Lindy had written a thesis on dingoes during her studies. And when you break down where that rumor actually came from, she was in like the Girl Scouts of Australia program. It was like the equivalent. And at some point while she was a girl scout, they had her write a paper on wild animals. And one paragraph was about dingoes. So that's where they got her. That's her thesis. Yes. Smoking gun. Well, you said too that dingoes

are like kind of spiritual. So then she just put the baby in the tent and left it. That is kind of a sacrifice. That's how they'd like sacrifice to King Kong. I guess. I don't know. I got to watch that movie. Yeah, Mike, go ahead and flag that one for, uh, for edit. Yeah, we're cutting that shit out. Yeah. All right. So they really didn't do themselves any favors and interviews. People, to people, they came off as religious zealots or uncaring parents. They would constantly bring up how, like, Lindy was happy with God and all that kind of thing. And that was just kind of disconcerting to people that watch these interviews. And again, it's really impossible to expect people to behave a certain way when something like this happens.

There's no kind of pattern for how you should act when your baby gets killed. So after a week of Azaria's disappearance, a white jumpsuit and some other clothes, minus the matinee jacket, were found near Dingo Den. They're torn and bloody. Nobody was ever found. But these clothes were like the first real tangible evidence of Azaria's death. They were torn, they had some ragged cuts in them, but only the top button of the onesie was undone, and outside of that, they're relatively intact. So in an interview, people were asking Lindy, like, how is this possible that this onesie was still, like, only the top button was undone?

And Lindy, like, very clinically explained, like, haven't you ever seen a dingo with its food? It kind of peels away food, like it'll peel the skin off of animals and whatnot and peels it away. and people were like, how can she describe her baby like this? Like, this is crazy that she can say, a dingo could peel my baby like an orange. But that is true. Like, if a dingo grabs a baby by the head and shakes it back and forth, it wouldn't be hard for it to pull it out of this onesie.

But this is another strike against Lindy. She does this interview, and people just can't believe that she could be so clinical talking about the death of her two-month-old baby. They're just ignoring that the onesie was found in front of a dingo day. Right, exactly. Well, I mean, if you're implying that I killed my baby and I didn't, then I would probably clinically explain to you how that would be possible and fuck it off. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, like as clearly and concisely as possible. Right. See, that's the other side of that where it's like, oh, I don't know. That's the thing I think, too, is like, if your master plan is to kill your baby, why would you ever use an animal that has no recorded record of ever killing a human? You know, it's a terrible plan. Like, if that was her kind of escape plan, it's not a very good one, you know? If she did it, which I don't know all the information yet, if she did do it, then it wasn't planned. I think it was an accident, then it turned into the dingo story.

If any evidence even supports that later. Yeah. I don't think she was like this weekend. What animal would you choose, Wes? If I'm in Australia and I'm picking an animal, it's a crocodile because it's just gone. If it's your baby, you're choosing a crocodile. I guess though it's hard to say, like, how it got to the crocodile. Like my baby was out swimming in a pond at two months old.

Right. That's true. I don't know. I'm not picking an animal probably. But I don't know. I've never thought about that. Did they ever find the matinee jacket? Do you think there's a dingo just wearing that out there somewhere today?

We're going to talk more about that. That's an important plot point. We probably found it on a dingo. So we're going to get through this thing. We're almost there. Yeah, the dingo was wearing it. That's him. Yeah.

That's the dingo. That's the one that did it. Yeah. See? All right, so the forensic lab had a lot of the evidence now, and they had no animal attack experts to examine the clothes. They had no way to test for dingo saliva, but they still came to the conclusion that it was almost impossible that dingo had caused the damage to the jumpsuit. And some of the forensic experts that looked at the clothes said it was more likely that the cuts had been caused by some kind of blade. They also said that the hair they found in the tent was most likely from a cat, but that they weren't sure.

They even in a wildlife reserve in Adelaide, they tossed meat wrapped in onesies to dingoes to see how the bite marks and the shredding would compare to these clothes. And they got really mixed results. These are some weird experiments they're running out here. They really are. The forensic tests in this case are pretty wild. They had no other cases. They're just like, all right. Exactly.

Let's toss me. We're putting buckets in our mouths. This did really, I mean, it was all anyone was talking about. So I do think there was a lot of, like, resources put toward this case. Yeah. Bucket of dirt. Yeah, that's expensive. Neat wrapped in a diaper.

Yeah, that'll cost you. I have another question for you. As far as forensic evidence goes, like, how to, can you shed some light on how reliable it is? That is a very general question. And I'm definitely not the forensic expert by any means. I mean, I think it just depends. I would venture to say that forensic evidence from. the 80s is comparatively worthless to now.

When we had, I mean, this is pre-DNA, all that stuff. And, I mean, we were doing blood types to convict people and, you know, fibers from carpets. Really? Yeah. So it's like, you know, comparatively is very primitive. It sounds crazy for them to like find hairs in the tent and just be like, I think this is actually a cat. Right. Right.

We're not sure. It's weird that they can't be like, this is what it is, you know? Exactly, exactly. Huge, huge difference. Yeah. This forensic evidence, like, was kind of starting to become a thing in the 80s. And people believed in it really strongly. That's the crazy thing.

It was this is new science that people were like, oh, they have forensic evidence. Right. But it was essentially worthless. But that is kind of what they based their entire case off was this forensic evidence. So the Golden State killer is starting to get a little sweaty, though. He's like, what's this new forensic evidence stuff? He's like, that wasn't around 10 years ago. Yeah.

The Chamberlains end up going through hours of questioning. Afterward, there's news reports that they're now the prime suspects in the death of Azaria. And when asked what their motive might be, the police that were doing this investigation say that they don't need a motive, that they had enough forensic and circumstantial evidence to see them as the main substance. aspects. I thought motive was like a hundred percent like you need that or am I just watching too many procedures. Apparently that's not. I think motive's really more so for optics like a jury.

Oh. People want to understand, well, why did they do it? Sometimes there isn't a good reason though, you know, motive. What's a good motive that I could give like to kill your baby? Give me a good motive. Yeah. Just not wanting a baby anymore, you know, wanting to kill your baby. It's like what are the number of motives that would be, oh, okay, I get that one.

I hope that's a rhetorical question and you're not actually wanting me to answer. No, we're going to go down the line. You go first. And they already had had two kids. It's not like this was their first kid and they were like, oh, we just can't handle this. They had already had two. Like, they were good parents. So there really wasn't a motive at all.

That's why it's either an accident and then something cover up or I don't know. That's an interesting line of five. Maybe they had like a vision that like it was going to grow up to be like Hitler. Yeah. That'd be a motive. Yeah. That'd be a motive. We're off the off the rails.

So in Australia, you can't ignore that. In Australia, I can. That's generally what I do on this podcast. In Australia, an important part of this process is a coroner's inquest. And essentially what that means is a coroner is going to look into all of the data, all of the evidence, and they're going to essentially say how they think Gazaria died. And the case was really hinging on this coroner's inquest, because if the coroner came back and said, oh, it's a dingo, then the police wouldn't feel like they had much of a case. But if he came back and said it was the parents,

then they're going to run ahead full steam with it. So this is where they get their first lucky break in their corner. This guy's name is Dennis Barrett, and he was one of the first officials that acted really compassionately toward the Chamberlains, and he was actually appalled by the way they had been treated by the media, the police and the public. He's like the first one to be nice to him. I know. Well, I mean, of officials. Like the Rangers and these other campers and stuff were, but the police were not. Yeah, it's still just crazy. So he goes through this whole inquest. He gets witness statements from the Chamberlains, from the Ranger Derek Roth, from the Lowe's, these other campers. And he even goes to Aluru to investigate the scene. So six months after

Azaria's death, he comes out with his inquest findings. And he's so convinced of his decision that he actually lets the media broadcast it live, which was a first for the judicial system in Australia. And he wanted just to make sure that his message got to the public without any spin. And he said it was incredibly clear that the culprit in the death of Azaria Chamberlain was the dingo. And he also criticized the forensic team that delivered the evidence, and he called them negligent and subjective. And he said that the Chamberlains and their children were not involved in Azaria's disappearance. So in your mind, this nightmare's over.

You know, they got kind of like absolved of Azaria's death. And the Chamberlains are thinking that. They're thinking they're like, this is all over. That's kind of what you would think too. But it's far from over. And by the end of 1982, Lindy would be serving a life sentence in prison. Damn. That's what we're going to talk about in the second episode.

Cliffhanger? You're going to leave us that? Oh, Wes. You do this. That's crazy. Hey, everyone listening, don't look it up. We're going to give it to you better than if you, the Wikipedia of it. Just hold tight.

Wikipedia Brown. Yeah, exactly. Is that a thing? Wikipedia Brown. Encyclopedia Brown's son. Yeah. Someone else said that one time. I can remember who it was, but I loved it.

They need to make that a thing if they have it. Yeah. Mike just loves Brown. Oh, dude. I love that. All right. So that's part one. Do you guys have any questions about part one before we get into our categories?

Yeah, I got like a ton of questions, but it's probably all going to be in part two. Right. Just hold on to them. Yeah, I feel the same. Let's do questions after part two. I have a question for pain. So say like you decided you wanted to do some investigative work on this story. What's your first move at this point?

Would you want to go beyond? Would you travel there or would you decide like the first couple people you want to reach out to and talk to? Or where does that whole process start for you? I mean, it's been so long with this case. It would hinge on me being able to talk to people. Okay. So I mean, if I had all the, whoever was still alive or around the closest players in this story, that's who I'd want to talk to. And that would basically inform anything else that I did.

It would just pretty much be entirely on firsthand accounts and anything that was recorded somewhere on paper or files, whatever it is. Really, the people is what I'm more interested in. Yeah. Okay. Hey, Payne, how about if you were the dingo and you wanted to get the baby but not be blamed for it? How would you go about that? Oh, I think he did a good job already. It's key to get it out of the onesie without.

I think the dingo is in hiding still. I think he's up in the mountains somewhere. Grew a beard. The dingo's like, I can't believe I got away with this. He can't, yeah, he comes down at midnight,

steals trash, he runs back up to his little layer. Yeah. He wears like the little groucho glasses whenever he goes out. I can't believe that there's like the dingo's footprints in blood. I am.

Like, I don't know. It's crazy. Well, there's more details to come. We'll get into it though. It's crazy. Mike,

to your question of pain, though, like, what would he do if he re-investigated this. One of the places that I got a lot of this information from that was really great was this other podcast called A Perfect Storm. And they do like a 12-part episode on this.

Wow. And the guy that put that all together, he interviewed a lot of these people in like current day, you know, and got their stories. And it was really interesting and really cool to see just how deep he dove into it. We're obviously just doing like a surface level. but if you went after you're... I think we should do 13 episodes. I don't think we should.

You're back for all of them. And I'll do a few bonus episodes too. But yeah, don't listen to that one. Just listen to us. Well, don't listen to Jeff, because if you are interested in this and you really want to listen to the whole story, check that podcast out. It's called A Perfect Storm.

I really enjoyed it. Okay. Awesome. So let's get into our categories. Payne, I didn't brief you on these, so hopefully you have some answers. Oh, let's do it. Our first category, because there were so many 90s TV shows that made fun of this whole thing, the first thing I want to ask you guys is, what's your favorite 90s TV show? I'll go first.

Mine, without a doubt, is The Simpsons. Like, seasons three through probably 10, I think are like the best show ever made. So for me, it's definitely The Simpsons. Payne, what's your favorite 90s show? That's tough, but I would have to. to say unsolved mysteries. And I've recently been dinging all the episodes. And it starts late 80s, it goes through the 90s to the early 2000s.

But yeah, it's a guilty pleasure. But there's also some really cool stories buried in there that are. Do many of those end up getting solved like now that we have more evidence? So a lot of them have been solved. But some of it's like the weird thing I've been doing is I'll just like lay on my couch at night and watch that, like watch that show and I'll just Google people's names and just see if I can find their Facebooks and just weird shit like that. And half of them are actually still unsolved. And I'm like, yeah, we should get on that. They never figured that one out. I'm like,

wow. We should solve some of these. Were you watching that back in the 90s? Were you watching that? Because I'm kind of, I was, yes. So that's probably where your whole thing started, right? Totally. I was like, I told my mom about it the other day. And she was like, oh yeah, you used to love that show. I was wondering if I was a bad parent for letting you watch that. I was like, honestly, I think it's influenced a lot of the things that I am into, I guess. I don't know. Yeah, that's cool. That's great. That's a perfect answer. So mine's in a similar vein, kind of. I have two. I really need to shout out X-Files. I love the X-Files. Obviously, a highly more fictionalized version of Unsolved Mysteries, but still amazing. Yeah.

I'm going Buffy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Oh, that was my second. pick. Oh, wow. Okay. I just, Sarah Michelle Geller is still like top three crush all time, you know. Have you ever watched that pain? Um, I mean, I have, yes, but not. You kind of look like Spike. You got a spike thing going on. Yeah. Who's Spike? He's like the really hot vampire guy. Yeah. Yeah. He's got like the cool slicked back, uh, bleached hair. You're basically saying you look really pale. I mean, no, he was my favorite character in the show. For sure. He's the best. Yeah. It's a compliment.

It is. It is. Spike on Buffy. I'll look them up. I mean, I would have gone Simpsons, but I'll audible to save by the bell. Okay. Ooh, okay. Got Zach Morris and Kelly, like, hottest couple ever.

Oh, yeah. And then it's such an underrated power to, like, just be able to freeze time for a little bit. And he's just, like, freezing time. And, like, I don't know. That would be pretty awesome. That is a crazy component to it. I feel like he didn't use that power to its full potential. No, he'd, like, he'd, like, he'd, like,

like still get in trouble and stuff. Yeah, you could have totally got out of that. And then like not do anything about it. Yeah. That's a good pick and some really good input. I'm going to look at that very differently. Right. All right.

So our next category is your favorite Australian that's not Steve Irwin. Because I know if we said your favorite Australian blanket, me and Jeff would both pick him. So your favorite Australian that's not Steve Irwin. I have a real dumb answer for this one, but I'm going for it. I'm going Bodie from Point Break because at the very end of the movie moves to Australia for a little bit to catch the wave at Bell's Beach. Did he get dual citizenship? We'll let it count. So mine is Ben Mendelssohn, the actor.

I just, I've had a, there's very few movies of his that I haven't really enjoyed and that like I'm, he's like one of those actors that when he's, like, one of those actors that when he's, in a movie, I want to see the movie because he's in it. Your favorite one's the newest Robin Hood, right? No. My favorite movie of his is probably placed beyond the pines, but I also really like... He's awesome in that. Yeah. I also really liked Rogue One, so yeah, that's my pick.

Oh, yeah. Dude, the newest Robin Hood, he has some of the craziest lines. Like, he's like, I want this man boiled in a pot of piss. We should bring that stuff back, yeah. Oh, man, it's so funny. I'm going with another actor, and this is probably cheating, too. I don't even understand what this means. So his IMDB bio says he's an English-born Australian actor.

It's Guy Pearce. I love Guy Pearce is like my number one guy. He was in my favorite movie of all time, ironically, lockout, space jail. The dumbest most entertaining thing I've ever seen. But also like LA Confidential, Memento, Count of Monumento. Count of Monte Cristo. Like, the dude has always been kind of like a B plus lister. Like, he's never quite hit that, like, highest level.

But I love him and everything. You should watch the movie The Proposition with him. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. That is good. So, wait. So when you say you're number one guy, you just mean men named guy?

Yeah, that's what I said. He's the best guy that I know. Yeah, I don't know who else would even be on that list. Payne you got a favorite Australian So I'm going with the goat Heath Ledger That's a good part Right? Right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah What's your favorite performance by it? I mean, you have to say Dark Night I mean, I think I mean, I think that was just You got better and better Mike will fight you on that one

But I mean, he was great in everything But that was probably the most intense Role he's ever played I loved it in that Yeah All right. So I'm going to go into another quick category. We usually do like a what would Mike and Jeff do. In this case, if we're the baby. There's not really a great answer for that unless you guys have one that you want to say. But I was just going to kind of go right into what you actually should do if you are encounter, if you encounter a dingo. So if you do see one, there are a few different things you should do. This is from the Fraser Island kind of. of like National Park website. Fraser Island is the one place in Australia where you have the highest

risk of being attacked by a dingo. And if you do see one there or anywhere, you should stand still at your full height, fold your arms across your chest, face the dingo and calmly back away. If you're with another person, you can stand back to back because they do try and get behind you. You're going to want to call for help. You're going to make some noise and be as loud as possible. And then you should never run or wave your arms, actually. That's another thing with dingo's that you don't really want to do is wave your arms around. Which is interesting to me. Yeah.

Yeah, because typically that's a thing you should do. Why do you think that is? I'm not sure, but that's everything I read said not to do that. And then really the most important thing to avoid these kind of encounters is never to feed dingoes. Almost every dingo attack that's happened in Australia, on the record at least, has been a direct result of food-conditioned dingoes. So you really want to avoid ever giving dingoes any kind of food, keep a clean campsite, don't feed them directly. Make sure they're not getting human food. But if they're really cute, pet them for a second.

Just a second. Then get out of there. You might get bit, but it'll be worth it. Yeah. All right. Well, I think that's probably it for our time, but we're going to be back with episode two. And Payne, we hope to have you along for that ride. Yeah, let's do it, man.

When do y'all want to do it? We will figure that out. Just let me know, just email us or, yeah, we'll figure it out. We'll get a hold of you. Awesome. Cool. Thanks, pain. That's fun. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, that was fun, guys. Thank you. Sure. Anytime appreciate it. All right. So thanks so much pain for joining us. We have cut pain loose so that we can get into a few of our other categories and respect his time.

But we are going to be back with pain for episode two. We wanted to do a couple more things with you guys just because we love you so much. And we want to give you what you came here for. So, Jeff, do you have any listener questions? I do. All right. All right. All right. This is from Rachel on Patreon. So many of the tooth and claw episodes mention how climate change is impacting animals. How do you all cope with the changing climate? Do you feel hopeful or depressed looking forward? Do you get overwhelmed?

I mean, not to be too depressing, but I feel mostly just depressed about it. Yeah. I don't feel that hopeful. I think there's like a lot of just general anxiety in the world about it. Like, it's hard. Like, it sucks people who won't admit climate change is a problem. Yeah. And, but, like, it's like, they don't worry about it, which is, like, nice for them.

But it's, like, you know, you kind of have to research things and, like, figure out that it is a problem and it's going to suck and it's going to, like, give you anxiety. But it's better to know than not know, you know. For me, the depressing part is that, like, we have all these benchmarks that the climate, climate, scientists keep telling us like, okay, we need to do these things by this date or we are like we're getting past this point of no return or cataclysmic points. And like we are, we have leaders that are just unwilling to like actually try and hit those benchmarks or when they say they're going to, it's all lip service. So for me, I just feel like more and more I feel very powerless and I kind of feel like the only thing that's going to change it is like a revolution.

Like, and potential like violence. I, like, that's kind of how I see it. This is this the start? I don't know. Is this the spark?

That's really that anymore. Like, I'm reading this book called How to Blow Up a Pipeline. That's like about how that's really the only solution at this point. Wow. I, I'm daring to be optimistic. And I know that we're past the point of no return on so many things.

things already. And that is depressing. But I think the generation coming up even behind us at this point, I think things are going to be more acted upon. I'm hoping, again, this is like maybe naive optimism with it though. Okay. If you want to drag me down into the Meyer West, go ahead. I just, I want to hope.

I want to hope that people are going to be better when this generation that's in at the head of everything. And it's a indelicate way of saying it, but they're going to die out. And hopefully the people that are a place by are a little more sensitive and are willing to act. So I guess I hope. What I was trying to interrupt you by saying is just like, I think that if we wait for that, it's too long. And I think the one hope that we do have outside of what I said, like revolution, is technology. I think if someone can figure out a way to actually reverse some of these effects through technology,

then we have some hope in that regard to. but I don't think like waiting for old people to die out at this point is viable because by the time that happens it's already too late. But that's part of what Mike's saying is like the next generation's going to put more resource into figuring it out. It's all going to suck and some species that are going to die and it's going to be tragic. But I do think that 30 years from now the world isn't going to be over. I think there's going to be work that can be done, you know. But what I'm, I guess what I'm saying is the next generation is going to be putting Band-Aids on, not like. stopping it from getting hurt.

Well, you be the cynic and unhappy and all depressed and I'll choose to be. I choose happiness. We'll switch roles. We'll switch roles for a day. A little freaky Friday situation. Yeah, we're all in it together. It sucks. You know, there's a lot of denial that's hard to reason with sometimes.

But just look for facts and follow the facts. It is hard to be like a polar bear biologist and be just confronted with it day in and day out. So it does kind of break you down. All right. Next question. From Bear Tender. This is from Instagram.

What's your favorite movie scene featuring two brothers? Bonus points if it's two brothers and a friend. So just so you know, we all have like three brother families. Right. Like Mike has three brothers. A little sister. Or like three men in his family. And me and Wes have an older brother.

But, I mean, a river runs through. It's the classic choice for me. Yeah. I was going to say that the scene where they shoot to shoot in a river runs through it is probably my favorite brother scene. I don't know. I like any time Sherlock and, oh my gosh, how am I forgetting his brother's name? Bankroft.

Yeah. He's actually part of like the city official, whatever. I think those are always fun no matter what the adaptation is. I just like that dynamic of kind of like a vigilante. and then kind of a guy that plays by the books. So we'll go with that. Cool. Like, I mean O'Reyn or something like that. Want to know showers or baths? Shows. Oh, shower. Yeah. I like, I enjoy a bath more. Oh, me too. But I take a shower. But like it's less convenient. And it takes me like an hour. I probably take five baths a year. And I take a shower like every day or almost every day.

My bathtub is like tiny. Yeah. And I still make it work because I love bath so much. And my, like, knees are just in my chest. I like a huge bath. And I also really like a huge sink, like one of those deep ranch style. You got, like, your whole arms down in the sink with your dishes. I really appreciate that.

We should normalize larger amenities. That's the spark I'm chipping off the old Flint block. You're a revolutionary. I'm just, I just want a nice bathtub. Oh, man. Going back to the climate change thing, if you guys seen the new private jet things where they're taking like 11 minute trips? Yeah. They're like flying in like L.A.

Drake just did it and then like one of the Kardashians did it. So like that's why I feel depressed. It just doesn't seem efficient. It's like kind of a headache to do that. But whatever. All right. What's everyone's favorite Dorito flavor and why is it sweet chili? Mine's sweet chili, so, because it tastes good.

Mine's nacho cheese. Nacho cheese. It's just the classic? Yeah, it's just my favorite. Sweet chili is a little too sweet for me. It almost tastes like a treat. But there's an old discontinued flavor called salsa that's by far the best. That was my favorite all time.

I don't know where it's gone. It needs to come back. The black bag? Yeah, it's in the black bag. Yeah, yeah. That's like my all-time favorite chip. Yeah, I love it. Barring that, since I can't get that anymore, I'm going to go with the salsa verde.

I like that. I like a little more savouriness to my chip than the sweet chili provides. Maybe it's just because I got like the old salsa on my mind, but I can't do the salsa verde. I'm like, this isn't. I need a whole bag of just nacho cheese. All right. Well, that's good. We'll do more on the part two.

Cool. Well, thanks everyone for joining us. Yeah, we're looking forward to part two. I still have a ton of research today. because this story just goes on and on and on. But we're really excited. We're super excited to have Payne join us, someone who actually, you know, has been podcasting for a long time

and has made a big difference in his podcast. So thanks everyone for joining us, and we'll talk to you real soon. All right. Love you guys. Bye. Love you. Bye.