Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks - Grizzly Bear Attack - A Tragic Trip to Yellowstone

Episode Date: September 19, 2022

Wes tells the story of young Swiss woman Brigitta Fredenhagen, and her fateful trip to Yellowstone National Park. The crew then discusses the myth of the dangers of being out in the wild while menstruating, and then get into a tightly contested round of "Were Jeff and Mike Listening?" ~~ 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

If the world were like a sleep number mattress, everything would adapt for your comfort. Because as your life changes and your body changes, sleep number mattresses adapt and shift to give you personalized comfort night after night. And now everything's on sale during our Memorial Day event. Save up to $1,200 on mattresses for a limited time. To experience a whole new world of comfort, visit a sleep number store or go to sleepnumber.com. Sleep number, to a good life sleep. Hey, everyone, welcome back to another episode of Tooth and Claw. On this one, Wes tells of another grizzly bear attack story, this one taking place in Yellowstone National Park.

So let's not waste any more time and get right to it. Hey, everyone, welcome back to Tooth and Claw podcast. Hi, Wes. Hey, Jeff. Hey, Mike. You there? Yeah, we're Tooth and Claw podcast. We talk about animal attacks here.

I'm a wildlife biologist. I've worked with mostly bears for the last 10 years. Prove it. I don't have my degree on me, but I still need to get that for you. But the point in this podcast was like, I've always been fascinated by animal attacks like a lot of other people out there. But I felt like we felt like there wasn't really a great way to tell those stories without demonizing the animals. But then we kind of put it together that you can tell them and you can learn a lot from these kind of stories. And they're really fascinating without demonizing the animals.

And actually with kind of in some ways demonizing the humans sometimes and showing how humans are. often the ones doing something wrong and the animals just displaying natural behavior. So that's kind of the point of this podcast is to be able to tell those stories in a way that isn't detrimental to the animals. And so far so good, I think, you know? I think we definitely have some- canceled yet. No, not canceled yet. We definitely have some people that are more afraid of animals, but, you know, maybe the great outdoors just aren't for you. I don't know. At least they got some fun stories. Yeah, this episode isn't going to help with that at all, unfortunately. Okay. Before we get started, I wanted to quickly bring up the Rings of Power. So we did

like a little bonus episode on the Rings of Power series before it had even come out. And we talked about the trailers and kind of our anticipations and how we're feeling around it. And now there's been three episodes out. And I kind of just wanted to check in with you guys real quick. and see what you think. Like, what do you think of the show? Yeah, I like it more than The Hobbit. Yeah. That's kind of where we guessed it would be.

I think it's been pretty solid. I like the new house of the dragon more, though. I do like that show a lot, too. And Cobra Chi's back out. Let's just name shows we like more than it. That's still going? I thought of, yeah. That's Jeff's Diehard show.

That's the show that he binges the day it comes out. I watched the, What season was the finale where the guy falls off the banister and like dies? It's the first season. Yeah. No, that's not. It's not? No, it's second.

Oh, okay. I watched that episode, and I didn't acknowledge to myself out loud that I would never watch that show again, but I think something inside me was like, I think I'm done here. What's your favorite? You miss some good stuff. What's your favorite storyline going on in The Rings of Power, Jeff? I was hoping you'd say Kobe Kai. I really like the

I really like the I'm just a cover guy review now I really like the mines with the dwarves I thought that part was sweet I really like Elron the project manager kind of thing going on he's just like you're going to build a huge forge

for us dude he looks like a total Mormon whoever that guy is he does well so does Kela Brimbor too I didn't think the one dude looked like Skip Bayless. Mike texts me like one guy looks like Skip Bayless. He totally does. I think he does. I've been, Mike, why don't you say first what you've thought of it and then I will? Yeah, so I I'm actually pretty surprised at how much I'm enjoying it and now how excited I am for each episode to

come out, especially after episode three. The weird thing is that all of the stuff that I thought I would be enjoying, I kind of don't. And all the stuff that I thought I wouldn't be enjoying is by far my favorite stuff. I'm, I'm kind of in the same boat. I, when I first watched the first two episodes, I was, I was like a little underwhelmed, and then I watched the third episode and just absolutely loved it, like had the best time getting to Numenor and like having the orcs really make their main appearance. And like the warg was really cool. I kind of like that a lot of the creature design is like creepier and scarier because these were like things that Morgoth like created so they would be really gross looking and scary.

I just, I don't know, I've been a big fan so far. I think it's really beautiful and I just think the casting's been spot on. But yeah, so for me, there's a few things that I still don't love, but I'm really enjoying and I'm finding myself really looking forward to each new episode. Pleasantly surprised. I'm with Jeff. Like, it's above the Hobbit and below the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings series. One more thing before we jump into the episode real quick.

Okay. So more entertainment NFL starts today. Oh, sports corner. Football. Just a quick fantasy corner. We're in fantasy corner. Fantasyland. With Lord of the Rings.

Yeah. So I'm keeping it in fantasy corner. Okay. All right. So I had my league that I played like all my friends by myself last year where like I just had like them do the computer draft and I was like playing teams with my friends names but none of my friends would play with. me. Uh-huh. So this year I got four of them back in. So then on my Instagram, I was like,

does anyone else want to play fantasy football in my league? And like 10 people responded right away. And I sent them all an invite to it. So then like, I wasn't thinking. So then like five of them filled it right away. And then the other five are like, hey, it's full. Like, what the hell. So then I made a new league and added them to that. And then all these other people started saying they wanted to play. And I ended up filling 12 spots in that league. And then I did the exact same thing where I sent out too many invitations to like other people who wanted to play. So I made another league. And I filled that league up too. So we got a bunch of tooth and claw listeners play in fantasy football with me this year.

How many leagues are you in? I'm the manager three and then a listener invited me to their league, so I'm in four total. I just picture Jeff in front of a console with like 10 monitors and he's just like mission all over the place. Well, after that like thing last year with the other listener who invited me to his league, I know I can just like cheat as commissioner. You just like change my points after I play people. Anyways, I just shout out to all you fans for wanting to play fantasy football with me.

That was really nice. And it's going to be fun. Jeff didn't have many friends in middle school, so it's nice to see him finally. He's overcompensates. That's very true. All right. Well, I think we're going to get into our story. This is, I'm just going to, you know, we don't.

do this that often. I will say this one is maybe one that should come with a little bit of a warning that there's some pretty gory stuff in this one. Oh, baby. That's what I like to hear before you start an episode. Yeah, it's not quite as bad as some of ours, but there is some stuff like the chimpanzee episode or Cynthia Dussle Bacon. But it's pretty bad. And there's some gory details. So if you do have small children, just, you know, it's up to you if you want them to listen to that. No, we need the listeners.

Have them listen. We want to get them young. Yeah, get them young, exactly. So, yeah, let them listen. They'll be okay. Yeah, sure. All right. So today we're going to be talking about Brigida Friedenhagen,

which is a really fun name to say. Yeah, that is a great name. So this is a story that I work in Yellowstone National Park with bears. This takes place in Yellowstone National Park. It involves a grizzly bear. And this was, it doesn't taste that great. But it's a story that when I started working in the park, I would constantly hear co-workers say, oh, Brigida, and they would bring her up.

And it was kind of like with this reverence almost because of how gnarly the circumstances. They didn't say her last name? No, people would say Friedenhogging too because it's fun to say. But it was a story that was kind of always like brought up because of its significance for the park. And it's something that I didn't really know much about until recently. And I want to bring up my sources. One of them is called Taken by Bear in Yellowstone. You know, they should have just named it Taken.

Yeah, they actually already have that though, Jeff. That's a movie. This book's called Taken by Baron Yellowstone More than a Century of Harrowing Encouners Between Grizzlies and Humans It's by Kathleen Snow They could have done taken two They could have

No they can actually That's also taken three Nope All right My other source for this is just personal communications With people that were working in the park When this happened

I'm lucky to be privy to some like really insider information on this kind of stuff And so yeah so I did get to a lot of details that weren't published. Really? Yeah, well, some details. That's exciting.

Yeah. All right. So before I start the story, I want to take you guys back to a morning in June of this year. I'm sleeping in my house in Mammoth, and it's the height of elk calving season. So elk are dropping their calves, and when a female elk has a calf, she'll kind of just like stashed in some sagebrush or something because it takes a while for that calf to really be mobile and to be able to run around on its new legs and everything. They're not an animal that's just immediately mobile.

So she'll stash them somewhere where it's hard to find them. Does the satech dress like kind of mask the scent of the new elk? Maybe a little bit, but bears are still pretty good at finding them. So she'll kind of patrol the area and try and keep predators away. But when bears find them, it's not much that she can do and they'll eat them. and they eat a lot of elk calves in the spring. So on this particular morning, we're in the height of elk calving season, and I wake up to screams of an elk calf.

Like in my house, in Mammoth and Yellowstone, I hear an elk calf being killed. And I hear the mom, like, kind of screaming too. And I can, I look out my window and I see an elk on, like, a hill near my house running around. So I get ready quickly and I go into work. And sure enough, like, like one of my coworkers picks me up in my truck. as I'm walking to my office.

And he's like, hey, there's an elk calf being killed right behind your house. And so we drive over there and there's a big male grizzly sitting on this elk calf. And the elk calf is screaming and you can see it's like head picking up and it's like screaming and screaming. And the bear doesn't care at all. It's just sitting there and it keeps putting its head down and like ripping off like, like sometimes you see it in movies where there's like long pieces of like muscle and stuff like stretching out and tendon and stuff.

And it's doing that. just stripping this elk calf down piece by piece. Like a fruit roll-up. Yeah, while it's alive. And it was too close to town, so we had to haze that bear off of that calf. By the time we got to it, it was dead. And then we went and took it somewhere else where bears could eat it in peace. But it was such a visceral thing for me, like seeing a live animal being killed by a bear so closely,

that that image really stuck in my head. And it's not like it, it didn't traumatize me in any way. Like I'm a big fan of the web of life and predators and everything. But it did stick in my head. And it was one of the first times that I had up close seen a grizzly bear kill something that was still alive. And it's an image that, unfortunately, I kind of want you guys to keep in your head during this story, which is grim.

But just, yeah, anyway. A bunch of listeners wrote in and told me. me babies only have one type of cry after I dingo that's not true it's not true no they all told me that I was wrong yeah so that elk was really screaming huh it was it wasn't having a good time um all right so 150 years ago in 1872 president ulysses s grant signed the yellowstone national park protection act and he made yellowstone the first national park in the u.s likely the first national Park in the world. It's a really special place. It spans 3,468 square miles. That area is roughly the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined. So Yellowstone is like the size of two U.S. states.

So what is that? Like 3,200 buses? Yeah, I don't know how many buses. Not a lot more than that. How much of it is in Montana and how much of it is in Wyoming? The majority of it is in Wyoming. That's interesting to me. Because the two main entrances are in Montana, like the Gardner entrance and the West Yellowstone entrance. You guys like to say it's Montana. A lot of the revenue for the park ends up going to Montana because of those two, that fact. How does Wyoming feel about that? They pretty sore.

I'd be mad. It's funny in Salt Lake, they always have like big billboards saying, like, visit Montana and it's a picture of like a hot pool in Wyoming. Yeah. But it's like we get the money from people going, like traveling from Utah to that spot. It pisses me. That always kind of makes me mad because there's so much good stuff in Montana. Like we don't need to use something from Wyoming. Yeah.

I get it. This summer, serve up the cookout classics, craft mayo and dressing. Toss green salads with delicious ranch dressing or zesty Italian. Serve smooth, crave crave crave crave-crably creamy potato salads with mayo. We all know it's not a cookout without craft. All right, so it's famous for geothermal features. It contains over 500 active geysers as well as lots of hot springs, mud pots, fumaroles. 500's too many geysers.

That's a lot of geysers. It's equally famous for its abundant wildlife. Visitors to Yellowstone have a really good chance of seeing bison, elk, pronghorn, deer, bears, coyotes, wolves, black bears, grizzly bears. I already said bears. Pretty much 100% for bison. Pretty much. If you don't see a bison, I don't know what you did. very hard.

The park currently sees almost 5 million people each year that visit. That's led to really crowded campsites, roadways, and boardwalks. Visitors that are looking for a quieter and kind of a wilder experience can go into Yellowstone's backcountry. And there's around 1,000 miles of trails in the park. So there's really ample opportunities for getting out away from the crowds and experiencing a really different side of Yellowstone. I've in my job been lucky enough to go into the backcountry quite. a bit, and it is really a special place. Like, it feels very wild, and there's lots of really cool things that you see in the back country that you'd never see in the front country.

So that's exactly what Brigitte Friedenhagen was hoping to find when she arrived in Yellowstone on July 28, 1984. The 24-year-old woman from Basel, Switzerland, had a deep fascination with the American West, and she'd traveled to Denver to meet her brother and sister-in-law, and then the trio drove up through Grand Teton National Park and into Yellowstone. So she's there with her brother and her sister-in-law. They're from Switzerland. They're really excited to be there. Meanwhile, a few hundred miles away in Missoula, baby Wes is just starting to get

weaned off his mom's breast milk. He's completely helpless and a tiny drooling idiot, but not really dumber than most babies of that age. You know, he only has one cry. I've been watching The Boys lately, and Homelander doesn't really seem to have ever gotten over the weaning phase. Makes you wonder. Yeah, he loves breast milk.

Maybe you could get back into it, less. I don't, no, I don't think so. Bring it up with Cindy. Gross. Oh, you want me to bring it up with her? That might be a little less awkward. So, we're going back to Yellowstone. The trio spent their first three days, or their first two days in the park,

exploring the Geyser Basins and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, where the Yellowstone falls is. It's really beautiful. And during that time, Brigitte obtained a backcountry. camping permit from the Canyon Ranger Station. So the Ranger that helped her with her permit was James Youngblood, and he described Brigita as a pretty petite girl that was somewhere around 5'4, 120 pounds with dark shoulder-length hair, blue jeans, a knit pullover sweater, and a bubbly personality.

What's sweet? Youngblood, his name? Oh, yeah, yeah, it is a good name. You were saying you'd want some young people blood in our last Patreon episode. Oh, I did say that, didn't I? Yeah, if they're going to pump me full of blood. I want it to be baby blood. That's a weird name for like an old guy though, Youngblood.

Yeah, that is, I don't think, I don't know if he was old. It just says he's a Ranger. They will be one day. Yeah, that's true. Who knows, maybe he'll die young. They all die young. Then I can take his blood. All right, so she spoke near perfect English and the two looked over the map of potential

backcountry campsites. Ranger Youngblood wrote Brigita permit for site 5B1 on the astringent Broad Creek Trail in Pelican Valley. So that campsite would be in Broad Creek, which is a really pretty like forested area of the Pelican Valley. Have you been there? I haven't, but I probably will this fall. It's one of the wildest parts of Yellowstone,

and it's one of the places with the best chances of seeing native wildlife, including grizzly bears. Ranger Youngblood knew this. He knew that there was a good chance of seeing grizzly bears, and he gave Brigitte detailed information on bear safety and general safety in the backcountry. He warned her that the bears and yellows and yellow bear. a stone are dangerous and that she should not approach them, she should hang all her food from a tree and away from the campsite, and that she shouldn't keep any food in her tent or around her campsite.

He also warned her that it was dangerous to travel alone and that she may not want to hike in the park if she was on her period, which we're going to talk about that at length later. So just kind of put a pain in that for now. Yep. Okay. Yeah, I think that's the part he warned our listeners about. That's not necessarily. Okay. So the Grizzlies of Yellowstone are generalist omnivores.

So a generalist omnivore is an animal that essentially will eat anything. Like a specialist omnivore would be one that specializes in a certain type of food. A generalist omnivore is going to eat lots of different things. So grizzlies and Yellowstone have a lot of different food sources to choose from. They eat over 266 species of plants, invertebrates, mammals, fish, and fungi. So that's a lot of species. There's a lot of different things that they eat. So 266.

They're one of the populations of grizzlies that eat the highest number of ungulates, mostly bison and elk. I like that. That makes me, like, just proves they're a good favorite animal to have, you know? Yeah, because they're good at everything. They try any food. Yeah. And that's always a good quality to be, like, kind of diversified in what you eat, you know. An adventurous eater.

No one likes a picky eater. I ate a tuna heart last week that was still beating. That's why I like you Yeah, thanks I'm still beating Wow Yeah Yeah the fishermen just cut it right out of the tuna

And handed it to me How was it? It was good It just tasted chewy and kind of fishy and meaty Do you feel primal? Yeah, I felt like I was That night when I fell asleep I turned into a tuna

I was gonna ask Yeah, that's great What abilities do you get if you like Really? Just like Be a tuna in my dream That would be sweet Dude, unless you're on land.

The only thing tunas are good at, tuna is probably the plural, is just like getting caught in a net accidentally. They're fast as hell. They're fast. They eat fish. They're really good. Fast enough to not get decimated by humanity.

You swim every single day. You wouldn't want to be like 10 times faster. Why would I, I swim enough? All right. Mike's happy with this swimming ability. Okay. So they eat a lot of ungulates. In the early spring,

when they first come out of hybrid. nation. They're mostly going to be looking for winter killed elk and bison. So bison and elk that died during the winter. And they're going to spend a lot of their time feeding on those carcasses, as well as carcasses of ungulates killed by wolves. This is a sp- rotting meat. Oh yeah. Yeah, you know that better than anyone. Well, the listeners might not. So I got asked questions for them, you know. When me and Jeff were trapping, we'd have to cut up rotten meat every couple days. It's the most disgusting thing in the world. Jeff would have to stand back. why I did it.

I helped out. Yeah, but you would also dry heave and stuff. All right. So this is, like this carcass feeding in the spring is especially true for the big males. They'll come out of hibernation relatively early to take advantage to that food source. Throughout the rest of the year, they're best, they have four main food sources that are like their cash crops. That's ungulates, so like elk and bison, white bark pine nuts, army cutworm moths, and cutthroat trout. Those are their like four big things that they rely on.

Ungulate feeding hits a peak in late spring and early summer when elk calves are being born. Both species of bears are really good at killing those elk calves and roughly 50% of elk calves in Yellowstone die from bears each year. It's a really cool time of the year to be in the park because you pay attention. Yeah, 50%. Like I saw, I probably saw, I probably saw 10 different elk calves get killed this spring. How many calves do, does a mom have? Just one. Every once in a while they'll have two, but they get picked off like crazy.

Bears are eating like popcorn. Grizzlies in Yellowstone also, they eat a lot of different plant species, but they aren't great at digesting plant materials, so they only eat certain types of plants and certain parts of plants. So for this reason, you see grizzlies following something that we call the green wave. So when plants start, like, growing in the lower parts of the park in the spring, Grizzlies will be there eating them. And then as the spring progresses,

those plants are going to be blooming and growing higher and higher and higher in elevation. And the grizzlies just kind of follow that progress up into higher elevations. And then as summer really progresses, they switch to eating lots of berries, as well as white bark pine nuts, which are historically one of their best food sources,

but they're losing that source quickly with climate change. But that's also like an interesting way they exploit that food source is they wait for squirrels just to like go and get all these pine nuts and the squirrels will like set aside just thousands of pine nuts for the winter in their middens a midden is like the little ideal that they tuck everything into that they're wearing keep their hands warm yeah and then i knew both of you would make that joke uh midden with d not not t and then the bears will go and they all right thanks jeff the bears will go and they dig up the those middens and they eat all of the pine nuts.

I was thinking about the show alone. Uh-huh. And like I would just follow every squirrel in my area to their tree and try to find a tree full of nuts. Yeah. That's what bears do. And they like get a lot of protein and food from that. So sucks for a squirrel though.

If you're like, you spend the entire summer setting aside a food source and then a grizzly bear just eats it all in like a matter of 20 minutes. Another big food source for them is army cutworm moths. So it's a species of moth that hides under rocks. And in the late summer, hundreds, actually midsummer, hundreds of grizzly bears will appear on these talus slopes in high mountain peaks. And they spend their entire day just flipping rocks and just licking up hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands and thousands of moths. They're really high in protein. Yeah, that's true.

It sounds like me in third grade. You guys want to hear something funny. I did that podcast Fright Day with my friend. Oh, yeah. And we talked about the Beast thing. And she was my friend back then. And without me prompting her, she brought up the fact that we used to eat bugs. Oh, no way.

Yeah. She's like, I'm pretty sure you made me eat bugs back in the day. And I was like, oh, boy. Open to a whole. Cut throw can of worms with that comment. Is that what you said? I should have said that, but I didn't. I guess worms, are worms bugs?

Yeah, they're invertebrates. They're not, I don't know. You can count them as bugs. So that joke isn't funny. No, it's funny. I'll cut it. I'll cut that joke. No, keep that one.

Nope. Cutthroat trout are another really important food source for them. They used to be really important, but in certain parts of the park, native cutthroat trout are now really hard to find, and they don't use spawning streams like they used to. But a lot of those spawning streams are starting to see more trout in them. and bears are starting to feed on them again. So a couple more things about grizzlies in Yellowstone.

So for all park- Don't use spawning streams like they used to. People either. Yep. I don't know what that means, but- I don't know. Last time I went to a hot pot, there's some spawning going on if you catch my drift.

Oh, they're starting to use them again? Yeah, I think so. Okay, good. All right, so for all park visitors combined, the chances of being injured by a grizzly bear are approximately one and 2.7 million visits. So out of every 2.7 million visits to the park, one person gets injured by a bear.

So that means like two a year? It comes out to roughly one a year. You said 5 million people visit the park a year. Yeah, I don't know why. We tell everyone it's roughly one a year. Okay. You understand my... I do understand that I'm contradicting myself right now.

Okay. I think it's because... We'll just put out there. We don't know what that means. In recent years, we've had more visitors and less bear injuries. So I think that's like, I just think. It's averaging out historically. This risk is significantly lower for people who don't leave developed areas or road sides.

So if you're just like walking boardwalks and driving the road, you're really unlikely to be hurt by a bear. And it's much higher for anyone in the backcountry. So I'm going to break that down really quick. If you remain in developed areas, road size, and boardwalks, it's one in 59.5 million visits that people get attacked by a bear. If you camp in a roadside campground, it's one in 26.6 million overnight stays. If you camp in the backcountry, it's one in 1.7 million overnight stays. And if you hike in the back country, it's one in 232,613 personal travel days.

So your chances of being hurt by a bear do go up significantly if you're in the back country. That's just kind of how it works. But only in the history of Yellowstone National Park, only eight people have ever been killed by grizzly bears. That's it? Yep, just eight. Get after it, bears. Slacking. All right, and I'm going to talk a little bit about why that might be a little later.

Okay, so Brigitte had her permit in hand for the next night, July 30th, 1984, and as she and her brother and sister-in-law settled into their campground at Norris Geyser Basin that night, they talked. they talked about their plans for the next day. And their plan was the three would hike the roughly six miles to the Estringent Creek bridge together, where Brigita would then continue on to her campsite at Broad Creek alone. After camping one night alone, on the 31st, she would then hike a trail that would connect back to the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, where she would meet up with her brother and sister-in-law. So on Monday, July 30th, the trio arrives at Pelican Valley Trailhead around 11 a.m., and about 100 feet into their hike, they reminded,

just how wild Yellowstone can be. They see a large orange placard, and it warns about grizzly bear activity on the trail. And Brigida had read about the bears of Yellowstone, and she knew that the key to avoiding problems with bears was creating plenty of noise. And she even tied two bear bells to her backpack in an effort to scare off any bears. Okay, so she's good.

She's not good. So we've talked about this a little bit on the podcast. For a long time, people thought that bear bells, like, for those of you who don't know what a bear bell is, It's essentially like, picture a bell that Santa Claus has on one of his reindeer. That's like what a bear bell is. Or an elf shoes. Yeah, exactly.

People will tie those to their backpacks and they think that little tinkling noise is enough to scare off bears or warn bears that they're coming. And it's not. There's been studies that have proven that it's not. There's no biological significance to that noise. Bears don't really recognize it as anything. It's just kind of an extra noise that they tune out. Dinner bells.

Yep, so we call them dinner bells sometimes because it gives people this false sense of confidence and they're maybe not making other noise that would actually scare off a bear. Yeah. What if you had just enormous bells? That might work. Huge one. Yeah, like church bells. I think that would work. That could possibly do it.

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Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at LinkedIn.com slash small business. All right. So, Brigita was an experienced hiker. Her strong legs carried her really confidently through these vast meadows and wildflowers and pine forests of the Pelican. Valley. The three family members chatted throughout their hike and then really quickly they get to the junction of Estringent Creek and Broad Creek. And not knowing that it would be the last time

they would ever see each other, Brigita's brother and sister confirmed their plans to meet the next day, but changed those plans now just to meet at the trailhead that they'd started on. They gave her a quick hug and they watched as she hiked into the woods to the north alone. The two then hiked back down the way they came. And as they got to the rental car of the Pelican Valley, trailhead, they saw that storm clouds were gathering on the northern horizon. So, Brigitte's alone now. That's bad news. Yeah.

She slung a red backpack over her small frame, and she starts hiking these remaining miles to the Broad Creek backcountry sites. In her pocket, she had a guidebook that had a section warning about Pelican Valley and the particular bear danger that was there. And it said, if the thought of viewing a grizzly bear isn't especially attractive to you, then maybe you should consider a different area. Grizzly bears are drawn to the Pelican Valley for its relatively lush plant growth of grass, sedges, and Forbes. I'm going to apologize midway through this episode.

I'm a little congested today. I feel like my voice sounds a little weird. You sound good, bruh. Thanks, dude. Okay. I will say we set up trail cameras in the Pelican Valley, like we put out remote cameras to count grizzly bears and whatnot. And it is one of the places where we get the most activity on our cameras. We see a lot of bears in the valley.

My main boss, Carrie Gunther, who's been like the bear guy in Yellowstone for over 30 years, he like did his master's project, and we're going to talk a little bit more about this, in Pelican Valley where he was just essentially counting bears from this mountain peak in the middle of the valley. And he saw a lot of bears. There's a lot of bears in this valley. Okay. So when Brigitte got to White Lake, she made a decision that might have cost her everything. She'd arrived at backcountry campsite 5W1 at White Lake, and her campsite 5B1 at Broad Creek was still 3.5 miles away.

But no one was in this campsite that she'd just gotten to, and the thought of venturing even further alone into this bear country was more and more unpleasant to her. So she decides to make camp at White Lake in this 5W1 campsite. And unknown to her, the White Lake area had a really strong history of bear activity and had even been closed a number of times. from conflict bears that had raided campsites. So Brigida had been taking photos with their 35 millimeter camera that whole day, and as she made camp that evening, she took one last photo of her cookstove in her fire ring, about 50 feet from her tent.

In another really kind of unlucky twist of fate, she shouldn't have been alone in that campsite that night. There had been a party of three that had reserved the campsite, but they had started their hikes so late in the day that they just decided to camp in the lower ber, Pelican Valley, and they didn't make it to the campsite that night. And had they made it to the campsite, there's a good chance that Bridgeta would have survived the horror that that night was going to have in store for.

As she settled into the evening, she makes her dinner, she makes some tea, and the sun flies, and the sun falls below the tree line. The sun flew out of the sky, burned her to death, and that's the end of the story. Nope. So the sun falls below the tree line, and in the distant, she can see these gathering thunderheads. She can see far away flashes of lightning, but she's feeling really prepared for any kind of weather

that the summer might throw at her. So before going to bed, she finds two lodgepole pines about 85 feet from her campsite. She climbs up them and she strings a rope between the two and then she hangs their food from that rope. The process takes a while and by the time she gets back to her tent, she's totally exhausted. She changes into some blue cotton pajamas, a sweater,

and some fresh socks, and she puts her clothes that she hiked and cooked in into a plastic bag, and then she rolls that plastic bag up in her poncho. Pretty good fare safety. Yep. She gets into her mummy bag with her head near the tent door. And she actually writes in, like, her journal that night, I've taken all the precautions,

and she, like, lays down to sleep with her flashlight on one side of her and her cassette player on the other. She says, like, I'm positive. I won't be attacked by a bear. Yeah. I'll tell you one thing that's not going to happen tonight. a bear attack. It is, it's really interesting to me reading these stories. Again, I know I talk about this a lot. This was a hard one for me because there are so many details about her and about like how

excited she was for this trip and how confident she was. It made me really like her. It made me think like this is a person that I probably would have really liked hiking around with and like becoming friends with. And like then seeing these tiny decisions that they made that on any given day wouldn't affect their life at all, but on that particular day might have cost them their life. Like just her deciding to put her head near her tent door, that's not a bad decision. Like if you're worried about bears, it doesn't really matter where you put your head in your tent. Like they could collapse your whole tent. But for her, that ended up mattering. Or the fact that she camped in this particular campsite. Just these little things that had they done differently, they would have survived. And it's like,

for me, it's like watching a horror movie when you see the person, you know, break off from the group and decide to go explore upstairs alone and you're just like no you know that's how i feel reading these stories and uh this one hit me particularly hard yeah i'm hoping she just lost interest in photography is why that is the last picture she ever took and she didn't want to talk to her brother anymore brother and sister-in-law yeah i'm hoping that's the only reason you said that's what it was yeah she decided she lost her camera and then because her brother and sister-in-law didn't go with them, it created a rift that lasted the rest of their lives. Yeah. That's what I'm hoping for.

Yeah. Cross your fingers. All right. So as she drifts to sleep, rain begins to pat her on her tent fly. And lightning occasionally lits up the tent and casts brief shadows for a microsecond onto the tent before she gets plunged into darkness again. And now not far from her tent, another shadow emerged from the woods. The grizzly bear walks cautiously toward the tent and the campsite. It's testing the air as it lumbers closer.

Ever the opportunist, the bear's curious about the tent and the smells around and the potential meal inside. So with only one tent in the campsite and no apparent risks nearby, the coast is pretty clear for this bear to do some closer inspection, and it approaches the tent with the 24-year-girl inside. Relatively, quietly and quickly, the bear tears through the rainfly and then uses a single claw to rip a 27-inch gash in the tent wall to the right of the door. It sticks its massive head inside, and with a single bite, grabs briefs. Brigida by the head, crushing her jawbone in the process, and pulling her free from the tent and then free from the sleeping bag, and carries her screaming into the dark night. That's crazy. So the next day... Just use one claw, like a freaking special agent or something?

Yeah, like the little laser thing. They do that. Yeah. They honestly, they'll do that. They'll take one claw and just like rip through a tent with them. So the next day at 3.30 p.m., Brigida's brother and sister-in-law were waiting at the trailhead. Brigida had always been especially punctual, so when she doesn't arrive at the greed upon time, they begin to get a little bit nervous. And then a few hours later, their anxiety is turning into like a really sharp fear.

And the brother goes to the fishing bridge visitor center to tell a ranger that she'd not shown up. A missing hiker alert went out parkwide, and the rangers did their best to get in touch with a backcountry ranger that was actually staying in Pelican Valley. So when they finally reached this backcountry ranger, it's 8.15 p.m. and he goes off and scours the trail until it got dark around 9.30, and he sees no sign of any hikers. So the park personnel continues to check the trailhead throughout the night just in case she shows up in the middle of the night, and Brigida's family returns to Norris for like a really sleepless night in their campsite.

The next day Brigida still had not shown up, and Ranger Mark C. Marshall was dispatched on horseback to go to her campsite. As Ranger Marshall heads towards Brigida original campsite at Broadcreek, he runs into a hiker near the Estringing Creek Junction that had seen a large grizzly bear 15 minutes earlier that was headed south into Pelican Valley. Ranger Marshall thanks him and he continues on the trail. As he passes the White Lake campsite,

he notices a green dome tent set up in 5W1 and a red sleeping bag that was laid out in front of the tent. He thought this was pretty odd, so he rides over to investigate, and as he approaches the tent, he sees a large tear in the wall near the door. When he looks inside the tent, the sleeping pad, the parka, and the other gear were completely undisturbed.

So he continues to look around the tent and the sleeping bag. Not far from the sleeping bag, Ranger Marshall finds a piece of human lip, some scalp with some hair attached to it, and some muscle tissue. So he immediately then gets on his radio and he radios the Lake Ranger station to tell them what he's found. And then he starts looking for Brigitte's body. To me, like, I can't picture a scarier circuit. to be in in the park as like a ranger, we do respond to conflicts like the bear management office will go in and respond to this sort of thing. But if there's like a good chance that a person's been killed by a bear, we go in like packing. There'll be like six of us or more. We have rifles. We have shotguns. We have multiple cans of bear spray. I can think of scary situations to be honest. It's a super volcano, Wes. Fair enough. But this, as far as like bear encounters go, a bear that's

killed a human and that could likely still be there feeding on the carcass is about as scary as they come if you're like knowingly walking into that, which they didn't necessarily know that, but I think when she didn't show up for a few days, they probably thought there's a decent chance this could be. Pelican Valley, she might be. The super volcano got her. Yeah, and this is still an era in the, no, this is still an era in the park when there's a lot of bear conflict, like a lot of bears that are raiding campsites.

and creating problems. So Ranger Marshall doesn't find her body after about 20 minutes of looking, but he does find her food that she'd hung from the tree that the bear had succeeded in getting, and it had been all ripped apart. So back at Yellowstone Lake, Rangers Tim Blank and David Sprites load up some shotguns rifles, and they get some medical equipment and other gear, and they put it all in a helicopter, and they take off for the White Lake campground site. They see Ranger Marshall from the air.

they touch down near campsite 5W1 around noon on August 1st. Marshall and Blank are carrying the shotguns and Sprites has the rifle and they start to survey the scene. So this is an attack where we don't have a witness, so it's kind of a little bit harder to piece together what actually happened. But I'm going to kind of, as a bear biologist and a bear expert and one that's looked at a lot of conflicts and attacks, I'm going to use their information of what they found to kind of piece together of what I'm pretty sure happened to Brigida Friedanagan that night. Okay. So from the sleeping bag, the three men follow a trail of body parts leading north.

Brigita had been violently pulled from the sleeping bag after she was free of the tent, and the bear bit down into her face, neck, head, and torso. And that's evidenced by the pieces of human lip, scalp, and clumps of fat that they found heading north. The trail of carnage led to a roughly two foot by three foot patch of grass that was dark and greasy and covered in small fragments of blue cloth as well as a lot of human tissue. So this was likely the spot where the bear stopped dragging Brigida by her head and her torso and then started to feed on her. So this dark greasy grass indicates that there was heavy blood loss.

And it's also most likely where Brigida died from exinguanation. so she died from blood loss in that spot. I really hope she died quick because the rest is even gnarlier. It had rained a lot, so the trails of this bear weren't really evident, but they found a slight trail that led past the fire ring up a small hill into some woods. And they followed this trail. They found a shredded and bloodstained sweater as well as a blue cotton pullover. Her body was 250 feet from the tent,

and it was stretched out prone, so she was like laying on her stomach, with her left arm bent under her body and her right arm extended above her head. Her right foot was completely detached from the ankle, but it was lying right next to her right ankle. The skin on her arms had been peeled completely back to the shoulder, which is something grizzlies often do with their prey. So I've found like elk and bison carcasses that are turned completely inside out because the bears are trying to get all the stuff inside.

Yeah, you're messed up for telling that elk story at the story. I know. I know. Most of the muscle, skin, and flesh was gone from her arms, legs, buttocks, and upper torso. So, again, hearing all this, like, one just really hopes that it was over quickly for her. I think the things that she had going in her favor for that is that the bear grabbed her by the head to begin with. How do you know that? Because it pulled her out of the tent by her head.

It's just like it opened, like the way her, all her gear and everything was arranged in the sleeping bag when they found it outside of the tent. They're very certain that like she had placed her tent with her head by where the bear ripped in. And for it just to like go in there, it would have grabbed the first thing it would have seen, which is her head or her neck. And then she also had a lot of damage to those areas that was indicative of it grabbing that first. What do you think like the cops and prosecution from our last dingo episodes would have thought? They would have thought that someone killed her. They'd be like they'd make a mold of a grizzly, yeah. They'd make a mold of a grizzly mouth and be like, a human head can't fit in here.

Exactly. Hold a bucket of dirt in their mouth. They would have talked to the brother and sister afterwards and been like, you haven't spoken to her since. the attack. Sounds like there's maybe some trouble between you. Something going on. Anyway, kind of finishing my thought there. My hope is that the bear either killed her immediately out of the tent. Sometimes, like, they will crush, like, someone's skull in a tent or they'll, you know,

do something like that that immediately kills a person. If not, my hope is that she bled out pretty quickly once it got her to that spot. I yeah, it's a terrible way to die and thinking of that elk calf really reminded me of that like it's, don't get eaten by a bear,

do whatever you can to not get eaten by a bear because I have a really hard time thinking of many worse ways to die. It's up there. It's top five for sure. You said this place was steps from the water.

We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now.

Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. Okay. So the rain had really destroyed a lot of the bears evidence and they only found four tracks and very few hairs. This was before the time that DNA could be tested on bears. So the color of the hair found at the site gave them some clues about which bears or bear might be responsible.

Numerous bear scats were found containing human remains, and they found those around the campsite and then also a few miles away in the northeast direction. The frequency of those scats with human tissues in them suggested that the bear actually returned to the site a few times, that it spent some time in there eating her. They were also able to get some precise canine measurements from her wounds and from the bear had bit one of her aluminum pots that night. And they got a pretty good idea of how big those canines were. And that ended up being important information. So that evening, Brigida Friedenhagen's remains were flown out to Fishing Bridge Village.

Her brother and sister-in-law had been notified that her body had been found. The Rangers invited them into their own housing. They were really nice to them. They helped the brother call his father in Switzerland. gave the sister-in-law some medication to calm her down. The next day, Ranger Blank spent almost the entire day with the couple, helping them make arrangements for their trip back to Switzerland, as well as for the cremation of Brigida's remains.

Did that just mean they gave the sister-in-law like drugs? Yeah. I mean, I think from what I understood, she was just like beside herself with grief. So they gave her like, probably like some Xanax or something to calm her down. Gotcha. So on August 3rd, the couple flew from Billings, Montana to Switzerland with Brigida's ashes. It had only been four days since they separated from Brigida, the Stringen Creek Junction. It's pretty crazy to think about, like, that, you know, you're having the trip of your lifetime with your family member, and you separate for them just to have one night alone camping, and four days later, you're on a plane back to Switzerland with their ashes sitting next to you.

Like, life is crazy. It can change really quickly, and that's just, it's crazy to think that to have that happen and have it a grizzly bear be. responsible. Put that on the shirt. Life's crazy. Life is crazy. You don't know what's going to happen. And grizzly bear might eat you.

We'll make an acronym out of that. That'll be a little more wieldy, I think. All right. So trapping began in earnest. Back in the park, they're starting to hunt for these bears. During the entire ordeal, one of my current supervisors, Kerry Gunther, he was doing his master's project at the time on Pelican Cone, which is a peak in the middle of the valley. he was observing grizzly bears,

and he had actually seen Brigida and her family when they separated on July 30th, like he saw them through his binoculars. And during the days following the incident, he and some of the park rangers were tasked for looking for bears. So he spotted three different groups. This is all personal communication from him. He saw one female with a cub,

a group of two sub-adults, and then a really large, dark-colored, silver-tipped male. Oh, that's my guess. Oh, okay. Interesting, Mike. Who do you got your money on? I still think it's the brother and sister. If you had to pick a bear, we've got a female with a cub, two subadults,

and then a large silver-tipped male. The sub-adult. It doesn't seem like a mother cub kind of protection thing going on. There's no cub prints found. And I will say those sub-adults were their own groups. Like they weren't traveling with each other necessarily, but they were kind of spending time in the same area. Okay.

All of these bears had conflict backgrounds. it all created some kind of conflict in the park, whether that's raiding the campsite. Yep, they all have records, exactly. So trapping starts. Traps are placed all over the area, and for 10 days the traps are baited and monitored, but all of these bears somehow elude capture. Because there's no way to positively test which bear had been responsible for the killing, the plan was just to euthanize any bears that they caught in the area.

Yeah, it is unfortunate, but we're going to talk about that a little bit, too. About a week later, a dark, large male grizzly was caught after causing property damage at the fishing bridge campground. So likely that large silver-tipped male. But enough evidence had been gathered from, like, her death, that they were almost certain that a lighter-colored sub-adult grizzly was responsible. And that's mostly due to that canine size. The canines weren't big enough for it to be an adult bear. And then most of the bear hair they had collected was kind of blonder. So they were pretty certain it was a lighter-colored sub-adult.

So because of that, they thought that this male that they had caught wasn't the culprit of this murder. And they still ended up euthanizing that bear because he had been raiding campsites and stuff. But Jeff, you didn't pick the right bear. I'm sorry. Mike, you probably did. It was probably one of those sub-adults. So they did catch several other bears. None of them fit the bill for the bear that killed Brigida.

And it's widely considered that the bear that killed her was never caught. A few weeks later, this is something else I learned from my supervisor. A bear actually pulled a kid out of his tent at Grant Village. It pulled him and his sleeping bag out, just like it did with Brigita. And at first the bear had this kid by the shoulder and was dragging him off. But then it like readjusted its bite. And when it readjusted, it just got sleeping bag. And the kid managed to sleep out and run back to safety.

Oh, my gosh. No way. He slept out? That's, he just fell asleep and slipped right out. Dreamwalker. He slipped out. This is a lot of information for this one. He slept right out of that.

He slept out. The bear put him in a sleeper hold and he just, that's how I deal with all my problems. That is a good way to escape your problems. That bear was also never caught, but that is a really likely candidate for the bear that killed Brigita. It's like the zodiac killer of Yellowstone. Yeah, kind of is.

Oh, so they might not have got the bear. They don't think they ever did. I talked to Carrie about that, and he doesn't think they ever caught that bear. Still at large. It would be dead by now. But Brigitte was found to have done nothing wrong. So I do want to talk about that a little bit.

She was, for the time, especially not having bear spray in 84, or at least it not being like widespread and used, she did do a lot of things right. She hung her food. She was really careful about scents. But she did do one thing wrong. And the main thing that she did wrong is that she was camping alone in Yellowstone's backcountry. and that's a really big risk,

especially if you have no experience with bears, which she had little to no experience with bears. So I would never recommend that. I just, it is a really wild experience, and I think if you do have a lot of bear experience, it's an okay thing to do, but you really are taking a much bigger risk if you're on your own. Timothy Tredwell did it for like four years.

He did it for 13 years, but he did it with some really tame bears, and he did it with a lot of bear, experience too. Yeah. But he ended up dying too. He got to eat my bears. Oh, yes.

That's maybe not the best example. I think that I wanted to bring up to this, and this is something that Tom Smith taught me my mentor, and isn't really widely disseminated as like bear information, bear safety information, but I think it's a really good idea. If you're camping in a place where there's a decent chance of running into a grizzly bear, if you're in like a backcountry place where there's lots of grizzlies, a really good idea is to multiple tents if you're with like a group of two or more. A decoy.

Well, no, it's more that like if one person's in a tent and a bear collapses that tent and is going for that person, if you're both in that tent, it's really hard then to like get your bear spray and to respond to that bear because both of you had a tent collapsed in on you. But if you're in another tent and you hear that happening to your friend, you can then get your bear spray and go spray that bear before it kills your friend. So it's not as fun to like sleep in separate tents. It's, you know, it's more stuff that you have to pack in.

But it is kind of an interesting safety tip that I'd recommend for people in like really bare dense habitat. Here's an idea. How about you just bring like 30 tents and set them all up? That's like, another game. What would Jeff and Mike do? Yeah. Because then you could just like set up little like fake bodies like the Hobbits do in Fellowship of the Ring. Or like whenever there's like the people with the power to like duplicate themselves and you don't know which one the real one is.

It's like that where you got like so many tents. You know what? In Fellowship of the Ring, I always just pictured the ring race like looking over and seeing them like watching them through the window and being like, oh, there they are. And then going over there and killing them. Anyway, I feel like they should have gotten further away than just like the in across the street. So I would say that's like a really good safety tip. Another one is sleeping with your bear spray, like knowing exactly where it is. Because if a bear does come into your campsite, you don't know when you're going to wake up.

You might not wake up until it's actually collapsing your tent or pulling you out of the tent. So you need to be quick to get to your bear spray. The other things that are really important for this story, food storage. You want to do like what Brigita did. You want to get your food away from your campsite. at least 10 feet up in the air, and you want to get rid of any kind of food sense that you might have as well. Sometimes if I don't have like a really good place to hang food, I'll just like put all my food in a backpack and just take it hundreds of yards away from my camp. And you're risking your food then, but like it's far enough away that the bear's going to get your food and not get you.

I also sometimes advise that just because if you don't hang your food right, then you might have a bear that just spends the entire night trying to get your food out of a tree. And you're kind of keeping a bear near your campsite then, which is something you also don't want to do. All right. So the last thing I want to talk about is something that was brought up in this story, which is menstruation. So if you're a person who menstruates,

I think sometimes you hear this thing of like, oh, people on their period shouldn't be around bears or around wild animals. And we've talked about this a little bit on the podcast, but that's been studied. And in 1991, a study by Lynn Rogers found that black bears showed no response to tampons used by people who are menstruating or any response to menstruation in general. And then Kerry Gunther, my supervisor, did a review of all the available literature in 2009, and he showed that among all the existing attack data, there's no indication that menstruation played any part in grizzly bear attacks.

And he concluded saying that the question of whether menstrual fluids or products attract bears has not completely answered, but there's no data showing that grizzly bears are overly attracted to menstrual odors more than any other odor. So there's no data showing that it affects, you know, people and attacks or anything. But on that note, bears are curious. Any foreign odor can be really intriguing to them. So if you're a person who menstruates,

even though the data shows that you're not at a higher risk, there are some things you can do to decrease any chance of bear encounter in a campsite. And these are recommendations that are included in that paper that Kerry Gunther wrote in 2009. So you can use pre-moistened and unscented cleaning towelettes. You should use internal tampons instead of an external pad. Don't bury use tampons. You're going to want to like roll them up in multiple Ziploc bag

and pack them out with you. Place any use sanitary products in double-zip-block baggies, store them out of the reach of bears like you'd do with your food, so don't like sleep with those in your tent or anything. And then use unscented sanitary and hygiene products whenever possible. So I think the main thing here is that if you're menstruating, you don't have a higher than average chance of bear attack, but the focus should really be on proper disposal of those products

rather than worrying about a bear like sniffing you while you're hiking or something. That's not going to happen. Just make sure you're like clean and that you get rid of your products like in the best way possible. That's really it. Wishing you could be there live for the big game. Soaking up the atmosphere in a crowd. But too often life gets busy or the price holds you back. Price line is here to help you make it happy.

With millions of deals on flights, hotels and rental cars, you can go see the game live. Don't just dream about the trip. Book it with Priceline. Download the Priceline app or visit Priceline.com. Actual prices may vary, limited time offer. Okay, so that's pretty much it for the story. So let's do our Oachies, which is a rough one for outgies. I think for me it really depends on when she was killed,

but I think either way I'm giving it a 10. 10 for me. Being killed by a girl. grizzly bear again me having seen animals now up close being killed by him uh it's a terrible way to go okay why i just don't know enough yeah okay i'm not convinced that she didn't die quick and i'm hoping she did die quick yeah i think in my mind she died quick and it's an eight okay yeah optimistically for me it's like a three and the bear just like jumped on her tent and immediately killed her but yeah i think it was probably attend, unfortunately, just from the stuff I learned. Okay. So that's it for the story.

Thanks so much for paying attention, guys. This is a rough one, but we're going to, this book. And we want to say, we made jokes because of how dumb, like, the people and the dingo episode were about investigating and everything, but obviously we know that it's devastating for her brother and that, like, they weren't on bad terms. And that was all just like us, messing around. Poking fun. It's, yeah, it's. Glad you said that.

It's devastating to them and like we want to respect how tragic it was to them. Yeah. I do think like it's nice sometimes when these stories take place a while ago because there has been enough time, you know, for, for us to look at it a little bit more clinically. But for me, this was another emotional one. This is one where after reading it and really diving into it and talking to my body. about it and learning, I think pretty much everything that's out there about this one. I really don't think there's anything that I haven't read or learned about it that anyone

besides Brigita knows. It affected me. Like, it's one that I'm going to think about for the rest of my life. Yeah. Brigida and the bear. Yeah, the bear knows. The bear knows what it did. Yeah, you painted a pretty visceral picture, Wes.

All right. Well, I mean, that's why we're here, but also stop. All right. Okay, so we're going to get into our pop culture category. And for this one, I just asked you guys what your favorite pop culture media that features Yellowstone might be. I'm going to go first. Mine's very vague. When I was a kid, we had a collection of Donald Duck cartoons, like old ones.

And there was like in that collection, there was one where he like goes to Florida and he like steals eggs from an alligator somehow. And there's this whole, his hijinks with the alligator. Gator and Huey, Dewey and Louie are there too. That was their names, right? His nephews or his kids or whatever they were. And then they go to Yellowstone, and there's, like, a whole segment with a bear and him, like, at Old Faithful, and, like, a rock plugs it up and stuff. And I just remember really liking it.

It was, like, such a fun cartoon for me. And Donald Duck was always my favorite Disney character, so that's my favorite. You like the way. Yeah, exactly. It's bad. what he sounded like. Wish you guys could have seen Jeff's face as he did that. I wish I hadn't seen it.

That's going to stick with me. I feel like I used to be able to do Donald Duck, but that was. That was pretty far from it. I can't do it. I got to practice. Yeah. All right. Maybe next time.

I'll find my degree. Next time I'll do a better Donald Duck. And I'll find my degree. Oh, you're already not getting there. Mike, what's your favorite media involving Yellowstone? So I missed the first wave of the movie 2012, like the mania around that blockbuster of a film. Somehow it just kind of passed me by. Somehow.

I heard just, it was the worst movie ever. And I was like, you know what? I like John Cusack. He's my guy. I like Woody Harrelson. And. Conair. John.

Woody Harrelson has a great role in that. Oh, man. And to my surprise, to my pleasant surprise, my favorite scene in that movie is when John Cusack and Woody Harrelson are hanging out up in Yellowstone and the volcano goes off. And somehow, I forget how they, they like drive over pieces of exploding land and stuff. It's incredible. So they drive like an RV. They drive an RV like through the super volcano and somehow survive.

It's awesome. But Woody Harrelson does what I would have done. If I'm in Yellowstone and I see that the super volcano is going off, I'm just getting to the top of a hill to see it because I know I'm going to die. Jeff, what's your favorite? it. Yeah, I had a hard time with this one because I feel like Yellowstone doesn't get a lot of like live action movies in the park. And like, whenever it shows Old Faithful, it's never actually Old Faithful. It's like some tiny geyser. So like that always bugs me. Meet the Dietles was like that. It's like all filmed in Yellowstone but not filming in the Houston. There's like a part in Parks and Rec where they go there.

But I actually like the part in Parks and Rec where Andy and April go to the Grand Canyon. Okay. So that's my choice. That doesn't count at all, but sure. I thought you were going to pick the show Yellowstone, but that's okay. Where they find the dinosaur? That might be fine. Where they blow up the like old truck and there's just a perfectly preserved dinosaur phone underneath.

And then that plot point goes nowhere. Yeah. All right. So our next category is we're Mike and Jeff paying attention. Oh, man. This is going to be bad. Today, I am going to promise a movie and a milkshake. Now, that's too much.

That's a lot of money. I'm going to promise the next movie we see together, I'm going to pay for whoever wins. You're going to have to just remember that, but I will do it. All right? I want to go first. Okay. Jeff, you get to go first. That was a smart move.

All right. Jeff, what country was Brigitte from? Switzerland. And we are allowing stealing. Good job. Scores 1 to 0. Mike, how old was Brigita? I have no idea less.

Are you kidding me? I said it twice. I can steal? Yeah. Wait, I know. Hold on. Wait, he should guess first. Yeah, I'm going to let him guess, but I'm telling you I know it.

Okay. Three. No, she was not three years old. 24. Dang it. She was 24 years old. Okay, 2.0. Jeff, how many people have been killed by grizzly bears in Yellowstone?

Eight. Great. Good job. Mike, I just realized that I didn't say the answer to this question. Oh, give it to me. I'm going to come up with the sweep. You're not going to get this one. otherwise. Let me come up with another one really quickly. Oh, shoot. Okay, Mike. Yes. Of when

Brigitte was killed, how many bears or groups of bears did they see that they thought could potentially be responsible for her death? Okay, so there was like the older grizzly, the two adolescent or whatever you call them? What do you call them? Sub-adults. Sub-adults. And then there was a mother and a cub. I'll give that to you. I'll give it to you. That was four groups. So. And you named them all. Okay. There's three groups. No, those two sub-adults were different.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, Jeff, currently the score is three to one. Your next question is... On the board, baby. Come back. Name three of the four big food sources for Yellowstone grizzly bears.

Okay, you got elk calves. Okay. I'm... That's not how I said it when I first said it. So I'm not going to give that to you just yet. You're going to have to be a little bit more specific. What? Elcaps and the...

How is that? Oh, like, just meat? Sure. I'll give it to you. Ungulets. Ungulets is one of them. You got moths that they flip over and lick up? Are you trying...

You got to name three of the four. You don't want me to name the types of food? You have ungulates and you have moths. There's four big food sources that they have. They eat cutthroat fish and then they eat nuts out of trees. Is it white pine nuts? White bark nuts? I'm going to give it to you, but that was a stretch.

The grass, they eat tons of grass. Ungulates, moths, white bark pine nuts, and cutthroat trout. Are there four big ones? He got it. I said pine nuts. I know, you got it. He said cutthroat fish. That doesn't count.

Zero points. He gets minus. So it's four, right now it's four to one. Mike, over the last few decades, on average, how many people per year are injured by bears in Yellowstone? One. Correct. Two to four. Jeff, what was the campsite number that Brigitte ended up being killed in?

Just the number, not the letter? All of it. You just said number. Well, that's, I mean, that's what they used. 34. No. Mike, would you like to try and steal that? Yeah. T-1,000.

No, 5W1. Mike, how many total species in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem do Grizzlies eat? 5,000, 500. Jeff, do you want to try and steal? Wait, say it again? How many total species in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem do Grizzlies eat? What does that mean? Species of plants, animal, fungi, and fish.

How many total species? I said this. Like bison, elk. Everything combined. Plants, invertebrates. Nuts? Are the nuts species? Yes.

Do you need me to clarify it anymore? Worms? Beals? I don't remember what Mike said, but he was way off. Let's say, you didn't say this one, 52. I did say this one. It's 266. Okay.

Bonus question. And whoever gets this. This is, I'm going to say this is Dumbledore rules. The Golden Stitch. Whoever gets this wins. What? But Jeff, you get asked it first. Okay.

How big was the gash that the bear tore in Brigida's tent? What was it? It's like one 16th of a bus. That's what I was going to guess. I am not going to give that to you, Mike. Do you have an answer? 28 inches? 27 inches.

Oh, come on. No. No. Jeff, you win. No, right. Sweet. Yeah. I even gave Mike a chance for Gryffindor rules.

All right. That's one 16th of a bus. I don't know what you did me that. It's not. A bus would be like three feet long then. Or like, no, it would be like 10 feet long. Even less than that. Okay.

So our next category is the Anaconda scale. So maybe a little bit inappropriate for this one. 16 inches or 27 inches? You're right. Two feet. Two times. You're right. What's two times 16?

Yeah. You're right. All right. Thank you. Okay. Okay. What would Mike and Jeff do? So, Jeff, you already had a pretty good answer to this.

Well, yeah, I'll change it up. Okay. I think I would actually want to try to set my tent up in like the bottom of the middle of the lake. She's at the lake. Right. Just set it up at the bottom of the lake with like some weights and then use like a scuba thing. to go to bed. Okay.

All right. Or a submarine. What? Yeah. Or a submarine. You'd be safe in the sun. You can't pack in a submarine. Okay.

But you're going to pack in all your scuba gear? Yeah. All right. Fair enough. Maybe just a huge hose or like a huge straw. Like a giant bamboo strong. Like a giant bamboo up to the surface. Yeah.

There's a lot of bamboo up in yellow stone. That'd be a lot lighter. Yeah. And it would last a lot. A scuba tank is not going to last you very long. Right. Although if you're sleeping, you're probably taking fewer breaths. Mike, what's your answer for this one?

I would lure it into the super volcano, I think. Okay. Underground. Real answer is, though, I mean, just don't go alone. I don't know, three people more. I would just take a whole tour group with me. More bear bells. Yeah, bigger, more and bigger bear bells, I think.

Yeah. I'll be honest, like, I know my way around bears about as well as. anyone. I... You know how to please them. That's not what I meant. And there are people that know their way better than me. Don't get me wrong, but I think I'm in the top percentage of people that knows their way around

a crazy bear. And I... In the world. I have bear spray. I have like a lot of knowledge. I wouldn't camp alone in Pelican Valley. I wouldn't do it. You wouldn't? No. Well, if somebody's going to give you a million dollars. Then I would for sure, without a doubt. I'd do it for probably

$500. But I wouldn't do it... So you would. Yeah. But I wouldn't do it if there weren't any kind of reward involved. Yeah, well, maybe someone offered, we don't know that no one offered her. That's true. But I don't, I do think, like, we have a lot more information about bear safety than they did in 84.

I think, I don't think Brigitte was dumb. She made a mistake. She shouldn't have done that alone. I don't think she fully understood the risk. But as far as what you actually should do, if you're ever in a campsite and you have a bear come into your tent or break, into your tent, you have to fight back. That's not a situation where any kind of like playing dead or laying down or anything is going to help, you have to put up a fight.

And having a deterrent is really going to make a huge difference in that fight. So bear spray, if you're camping in grizzly bear habitat, make sure you have bear spray in your tent. You know exactly where it is. You're ready to go with it. I can't remember. We had a story where someone, like, wrote a note and they had like an arrow pointing to their bear spray or something.

I can't remember what it was, but they had a trick for knowing exactly where their bear spray was. He put a gun on a napkin or something. Yeah. Is what you said? I can't remember. It was like the older couple. It's the older couple in Alaska that got attacked in their campsite. Yeah.

Just make sure you know where it is. If you do have multiple tents, split up into multiple tents so that if one tent gets collapsed, the other people can respond. And the most important thing is prevention. Keep a clean campsite. Keep your food out of your campsite. Definitely keep it out of your tent. Cook away from your tent.

Don't cook like right in your campsite. Cook at least 100 yards away. Just make sure you keep it as clean and as organized as possible. Those are my main tips. Maybe like some Christmas pajamas where it has like the bell sewed on to them. Yeah. So like that way if you're sleeping, the bear grabs you, the bell starts jingling. Yeah, I don't think that would work.

But that actually brings up a good point. There's a couple other things you can do to prevent your campsite from being harassed by bears. And, like, one of them is they actually sell tents that are electrified. Like, the fly of the tent itself is electrified. And then the easier thing is just the basic... You'd, like, shock yourself every time you'd be to pee? Yeah. I mean, we'd set one up before.

Not where the tent fly was. Yeah. We set one up in Bryce, like our first week there. Okay, you might not have been there. But then another thing is an electric fence that's really easy to set up in backpack. And you can set that up around your tent as well. and that works really well. I remember when we set those up and I just held it and it didn't affect it off.

Well, we were setting it up in like sand, but if you set it up in dirt, they work a lot better. Okay. And then there are also some like little basic proximity alarms that you can get. Like they're called critter getters. And you can set that up and it's just a laser alarm that if something breaks it, it makes a really loud noise. probably enough to scare off the bear, definitely enough to wake you up. But that's also an annoying one if like a deer or a squirrel or something trips it. But I do really recommend the electric fences.

They work really well. I would fully camp alone in the Pelican Valley if I had an electric fence for my campsite, and I'd feel very safe. Fully. Okay. Fully. Committed. Yeah.

All right. Okay. So moving on. Jeff, do you got any listener questions for us? Yeah. Okay. from Iana. This isn't specifically an animal question.

That's fine. We love non-an animal questions, you know. Hit us with whatever. Relationship? I would love to answer your relationship questions. Don't listen to them. But are any of you watching House of the Dragon? If you were a Targaryian and could have a dragon, what would you name it?

So it kind of is an animal question. Is this a patron question or a Instagram? Yeah. I'd name it trogdor Trogdor That's a good name Super Volcano Oh that's man how did I

It was right there for me Oh my gosh I'd name mine Gilbert Because our family had a long standing tradition of the first grandson being named after the grandpa And it got broken So maybe he'd be happy if I named

My dragon after him Yeah Okay from Jack If you could enlarge any type of bug To the size of a horse And ride it as your steed in battle Which would you choose?

Mike, I'm going to allow you to choose worm If you want to Well, I was actually thinking Before you stipulated Like the condition that has to be horse-sized I think it'd be cool to have those dune worms Going around Yeah, horse isn't quite as big enough

What are they like shy hallooed What do they call those again? Yeah I'm picking a spider Like I would want like a tarantula or something I'm picking a praying mantis that's just chopping heads That's cool I just think my spider is going to be like galloping and really fast

Yeah until I chop your head off Yeah that's true Mike I'd pick a rhinoceros beetle And just like flip cars over and stuff We're all picking the wrong animals like Really? Like a bee would be better because then you get to fly around Oh that's a good point

Yeah Yeah Hmm All right I'll pick a I'll pick us my spider still, though, because it was my first answer. Well, I mean, a Hercules beetle is the best answer. Yeah, because they can fly and they got like a rhino horn. That's true.

It's a good answer. Yeah. Okay, from AJ. What's your all's favorite far side animal cartoon comic strip? I just took a screenshot of mine. One of my favorites. Wow. There's so many to pick from.

And like his animal ones are always really good. And a lot of his bear ones are really good. But there's one, and it's like a color one, of all these people like running into the water, like really scared looking behind them. And then there's a shark in the water doing this, and it's yelling, bear, bear, bear. And this shark was scaring them all into the water.

Yeah, I love that one. Yeah, that's good. I'm going to go with that one too. Okay, cool. Because I couldn't think of one, even though I love the fireside. Yeah. The one where one gorilla is grooming,

another gorilla's back and it finds Jane Goodall's hair and it accuses the other gorilla of cheating on her. I think that one's just great. That is a good one. There's one other one where there's two boys and they're like tossing a cub bear up in the air and they're playing with it and you see like the mama bear against the forest edge and the caption is no one ever heard from the Anderson brothers again. And I really like that one. Isn't the bear in that one just like massive and hulking on the horizon? I love, man, the art style is so good. So good.

Yeah. What's next? All right, from Instagram. So this one's from Jackie. Is Jesse there? She is. Yeah. You see her?

Uh-huh, I see her. We might want her to chime in on this one. Okay, we may need your opinion on this question. I want to know if horses can have crooked teeth. I've seen a million horse picks videos and they have scary human dentured looking teeth. Is it possible slash have? Have you seen crooked or gap teeth horses? First of all, who said horse teeth look perfect?

They're so ugly. But they all look like big and like straight. They look like dentures. I feel like they, I've never seen it. They're just, they're really gross teeth. Oh, we finally agree on something, Jesse. Mike says you guys finally agree on something. Have you ever seen crooked teeth?

I've seen messed up teeth, but I haven't seen any that crossover. So like, no, what about British horses? Do you think they can have a crooked teeth? Uh-oh. Okay. Way to alienate our eyes. I looked it up. I mean, we can do without one country.

Plus, they're all like the queen just died so they can't pay attention to us right now. Right. They do really bad on where he has paying attention segment. They don't have the emotional banders. There's a disease that will give horses crooked teeth, but it's like really bad for them. And like it means the horse is like pretty sick. Okay. So, like, they don't naturally get, like, crooked teeth.

Okay. That's interesting. Okay. From Jimmy Spitz. Jimmy Spitz. Jimmy Spitz. Pretty sure I said this guy ever. Fantasy football invite.

I think he's in one of my leagues. Okay. Have you ever considered narrating audiobooks? Your voice is soothing. Who's that for? Jeff. Oh, sorry. For Jeff.

Yeah. For Jeff, have you ever That was the important part. I just skipped. No, well, I don't know. I feel like I'm really bad at reading out loud in general. But, like, I'll do anything for money. He'll do it.

If someone wants to pay me to do it, I'll do it. If you're okay with a third of the words, not being the real words. Maybe if you did audiobook versions of like Dr. Seuss book. books it work yeah exactly yeah kids books I think there's a future Harry Potter yeah I could do I could get through a Harry Potter some big words in that book spelliamis wand I miss that I like how the first word that he tries to say I can't what's the one but text a Patronus there you go all right see there's why I have it from Madison Avenue

two have any of you gotten into a physical fight with someone was it your fault who won yeah i've been in a few uh never my fault me and jeff were in one together with a group of ruffians and there's like some long boarders who they weren't long boarders we long boarded down a canyon right and then our cousin like kind of picked a fight with one of them and the guy left And then he came back with like 11 people and started fighting our cousin. And he, like, threw him on the ground. And then he stepped away so we thought it was over. And then he just, like, kicked him in the face.

Yeah. So then I went and I punched him right in the face. And then I got him in a headlock and started punching him on the side of his face. And then his friends pulled us off of him. And then they circled us. And then somehow everything just stopped. I don't know what. There was like 12 of them and they pulled us off and they were like,

guys, chill, chill, chill, chill. No, because one of his friends, like, had his hands up to hit me and then some, it just ended. The one that pulled me off was saying that and I thought I was about to die. Like, when I felt myself getting pulled off this kid, I was like, oh, crap, people. Yeah, that was our most memorable one, though. My other ones were pretty short. I boxed a lot. I got it, like, I was bullied a lot in high school, and I got into boxing, and that kind of helped me become cool.

And, like, it's stupid, but it's, like, so true to, like, there's, like, this kid who always picked on me, and I boxed him once. And, like, literally the next week, we were, like, buds. It's like, I, like, gained his respect, and I wasn't, like, a dork in his eyes anymore or something. So, kids, go out there and fight your bullies. Yeah, go beat your, go get a fight. Uh, Mike? Uh, nothing. of note, just a like a fifth grader

when I was in second grade, he just threw me on the ground really hard. Yeah. That's, like honestly, I flipped him off during a basketball game. I was a rap scalian when I was little. I shouldn't have done that, and he got me for it. And I learned my lesson.

The real Cole, the real Cole Herman, the real one. We got the real one. We got it. I just wanted, I'm not going to ask his question. I just want to, because I feel like he's Marge is telling us this because it's funny, but he had a dream about getting bit by a rattlesnake, and he knew what to do because he listens to the podcast.

And then you want to ask if we have dreams about getting attacked. But you've talked about that with that you always have them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Every week you have a dream about getting attacked? Yeah. Do you know what to do afterward? It's usually like like wolves chasing you around a kitchen table kind of thing, where it's like I can't escape, but they also never get me.

You just keep going in circles. Kind of. Yeah. It's not, that was an example, but not what actually. Like the who framed Roger Rabbit scene when he's just like going around the kitchen. Exactly. From Armal, what are your guilty pleasure movies? Mine is G.I.J.

Mike? No, come on. No. Please. Vigo pre-Lord of the Rings. That's like the best push-up scene in any movie ever. No way. Rocky four.

The one on push-up? No. The GI-Jane's got it. What's a guilty pleasure movie of mine? Huh. Mine's probably the lone ranger. I just love that Army Hammer, first of all. You like that guy.

And Johnny Depp. I know that it's problematic. People were mad that like Johnny Depp played a Native American, but I don't know. I just, I like the movie. The movie was really, really entertaining for this. Yeah. Like, without being so problematic, it would have been great. But, yeah.

I get it. That was an entertaining movie. Wait, so, she didn't say pre-Lord of the Rings? I thought that's what she said. No, she's saying she likes Vigo N-G-I-Gne. Pre-Lord of the Rings. Yeah. Mike, you want to go?

Let them keep thinking. The new point break West? No. Go ahead, Mike. I don't feel guilty. Well, this is going to be a little obstacle course. I'm going to talk my way through. So people try to make me feel guilty sometimes when I tell them I really like musicals.

And that in and of itself is not a guilty pleasure. But I really like the movie Greece. And I feel guilty about that. But I urge anyone who hasn't seen it or hasn't seen it in a while just to watch like that opening, tell me more, summer nights, whatever it's called. Just incredible stuff. Like every single little person in all of those scenes is doing something really funny and interesting. There's little people in this scene. All right.

I'm going to skip the answer to that. I hate you so much. And just going to come. So. I need to re-watch you now. I'm going to tell you my most recent one because I feel like I have a million guilty pleasure movies. But one that's a recent one. And this isn't a bad movie, but it's kind of a guilty pleasure movie for like a young man of my age.

Is the movie Enkanto, which me and Jesse started watching it one day. And I, like, wasn't into it at all and fell asleep and didn't enjoy it. And then once on my own, I just kind of put it on and then found myself getting really pulled into it and really enjoyed some of the songs in it. And like, the little village that they created in Columbia was like, to me, my garden of Eden, like, that's the place I'd want to live more than anywhere. I want to see that pink river in Columbia really bad. Yeah.

So that's kind of a guilty pleasure of mine. And it's not a bad movie, but it's just one that I probably shouldn't like as much to do. enough movie that that's not guilty. Yeah, but you know what I mean. All right. Okay. Ow. Okay.

Next. Okay. From Irino, Aaron, Orion, Orion. I don't know. There's two O's in there that's tripping me up. They want to know, how's your all's mental health? Hmm. You know, it's kind of, I love roller coasters.

Yeah. And, you know, it's just a real roller coaster. I would say the same thing. So you got some up and down downs. When I'm down, I'm down, you know. But when I'm up, I'm up. Yeah, I'm all over the place. I will say it's been really fulfilling to me to have so many fans of the podcast and just of us in general.

And like I think that's like, I don't know, it makes me really happy to like have tooth and claw like as a thing. So that's been helping me with my mental health. So if you're struggling with yours, start an animal attack podcast with you friends. I would say, like, an offshoot of that for me is, like, for me, the most fulfilling part of this thing is that a lot of people are learning about wildlife and, like, gaining a deeper respect and appreciation for it. And that's been really good for me. I think that's, like, for me, something that's helped a lot with, yeah, with, like, downtime. being able to think about that and making a difference in that way has been really great. I never would guess I'd have four fantasy leagues after playing by myself last year, you know?

How's yours, Mike? How you doing? Yeah, I'm doing pretty good. Even keeled, flatlined for the most part. I never, I don't really ever get stressed about stuff, but I will say maybe this is adjacent to the question being asked, but like Wes was saying that I sometimes find myself thinking about, Like a lot of hubris goes into this line of thinking, but like what is my legacy going to be? Like what am I going to leave behind? And the fact that a small project that I've been a part of is like resulted in lives being saved. It's like I could die happy now, you know? Like I don't want to die, but I just feel like we've been able to do a lot of good.

So yeah, that's a notch in the old feeling good belt. And we're probably helping some animals too. So quick conservation corner. today there's roughly 170 grizzly bears in Yellowstone, which is the question I was going to ask you, Mike, and I didn't get to. So there's roughly 170 grizzly bears in Yellowstone and about 1,000 in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem.

So the park itself has around 170. The total ecosystem probably has more than 1,000 at this point. In the early days of the park, there were really big open dumps where hundreds of bears would gather to feed on trash and human food. And pretty much every bear in the park use those dumps as a source of food. So they were all food conditioned, and people also fed bears directly out of their cars and stuff.

And every year there would be dozens of minor injuries from bears and some major injuries, too. When the dumps were closed in the 50s and 60s, all those food-conditioned bears had to find new sources of food, and a lot of bears ended up having to be killed because they were breaking into property. They were all-problem bears. So they killed a lot of bears during that time. And that led to an all-time low number of grizzly bears in the ecosystem in the early 7. with about 130 bears. So now we have over a thousand in the ecosystem, but back then there was only like in the

low hundreds. That being said, all those new bears were born into an ecosystem where they didn't have access to human food. And they also got increased protection from the Endangered Species Act. And that population began to rise. And today in the park, we have a really unique approach to bear conservation and bear management. we have made sure that all food in the park is secured. So whether that's in people's cars or in bear boxes,

everyone has to secure their food. If you don't, you get ridden a ticket really quickly and they're big tickets. And then we also do a combination of like hazing bears in developed areas on road sides. We don't allow bears to be in places where they're likely to get into trouble. That's a big part of my job is going out and pushing bears away from those areas. and it's led to a really astounding low number of conflict. So we get roughly 5 million visitors a year, and with 170 bears you would expect a lot of conflict,

and we average one conflict per year and one injury per year. So it's a really low amount considering how many people come into the park. It's kind of a miracle, actually, and a big part of that is because we haze the bears and we're so on top of it. So it is a really big conservation success story, It's something I feel really lucky to have been able to be a part of so far over the last couple years. All right. How big are the tickets?

It's like a few hundred dollars for leaving food out. Oh, okay. Yeah. So it's worth it. When like someone wins a golf tournament, it's huge checks. Yeah, they show up with like a massive ticket. That's what I meant by big ticket. Yep.

All right. So we have talked about how in other episodes about how there's a lot of pressure on predators right now in the Intermountain West. just the political climate and whatnot has led to anti-preditor viewpoints. Legislation right now is trying to be passed to remove the grizzly bears in the yellow son ecosystem from the endangered species list. Technically they are recovered. I think we have more than enough bears to do that and to start managing them the way we manage other animals. But because of those attitudes and this hatred for predators right now among legislators, I don't think we should remove them from the Endangered Species Act because I think they're going to treat them like wolves.

What do you mean? A lot of those legislators are predators. That's true. A lot of them themselves are predators, so they should love predators. All right. So that's my conservation corner. Our last category and one that's going to be a real slam dunk again is how much do we like this animal on a claw rating and then Jeff's arbitrary rating, which this one's not very arbitrary. This is probably my favorite animal in the world.

I love them so much. I care about them deeply. I think my life would be greatly reduced in quality if grizzly bears weren't part of it. So this is a 10-claw animal. If we had like a golden or platinum rating for our claws, this would be a 10-cloth platinum animal for me. Yeah, this is a 10-claw for me, my number one overall. they just got everything, you know, they're cute, they're intimidating, they can be scary, they can be sweet,

yeah, they can dig holes, they can climb trees, you know, what can't they do? And that brings up something really quick. If you, if this is your first time listening to a grizzly episode on the podcast, if you go back and listen to some of our older ones, I'll get deeper into their specific biology. I didn't really do it for this one because we've done so many. But just so you know, we do have that in another episode. I just did it. I just covered it. Yeah.

That's true. Jeff just got off. Mike, I think traditionally I've given them a nine. I'm going to stick with it. They're cool. Okay. 20th overall? That's not my, that's not my schtip. That's not your thing.

That's a good. Probably around there, if I'm being honest. All right. Okay, so you're leaving like top tens for 10 clause. Yeah, right. I don't hand them out all willy-nilly like West does. This isn't willy-nilly for me. It's embarrassing.

It's my favorite animal. All right. Okay. All right. Well, thanks everyone so much for joining us. Hopefully this wasn't too traumatic for you guys. It's a good story. I think there's a lot we can learn from it.

And yeah, thanks for joining us, and we sure love you. Love you. Oh, bye guys. Nope. It's over. See you. Jeff just did a really fun episode on fire ants and a really crazy fire ant story on our, on our Patreon and our Apple Grizz Club.

So if you're looking for more bonus content, that's a really fun one. You should check it out because I had a really fun time on that episode. Also with our Patreon, I just wanted to bring this up and our Gris Club. I have learned a lot about Yellowstone Bear Attacks recently, so I am going to kind of do a bonus to this episode next week for our next patron episode. I'm going to tell another really fun. Well, this one wasn't fun, but I'm going to tell one that's more fun story about a Bear attack in Yellowstone. It's a really interesting story. It's one that I kind of just wanted to give

to our subscribers. So if you're keen on hearing more about Yellowstone Bear attacks and you're not yet a subscriber, now would be a good time to do it. And you also get access to our entire catalog of subscriber material. And if you're not keen on hearing it and you are a subscriber, you should unsubscribe. Yeah, then just get out of you. Yeah. At least you guys all have a choice. I kind of have to be there. But you sold me on it, Wes. I'm excited. Okay.

It's coming soon. Thanks, everyone. We sure love you. All right. We'll see you later. Bye. Bye.