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#2213 – Diane K. Boyd Podcast Episode Description
Diane K. Boyd is a wildlife biologist who has devoted decades to studying wolves. She is the author of “A Woman Among Wolves: My Journey Through Forty Years of Wolf Recovery.”
www.dianekboyd.com
A Woman Among Wolves
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#2213 – Diane K. Boyd Podcast Episode Summary
In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, the discussion revolves around the intriguing dynamics of solitude and nature, as well as the pressures and strategies in hiring processes. A key theme is the exploration of personal experiences in isolation, particularly how prolonged periods alone in nature can significantly differ from short excursions or camping trips. This introspective conversation delves into the psychological and emotional aspects of being alone with nature, offering a unique perspective on human-nature relationships.
The episode features a guest who has previously appeared on Steve Rinella’s podcast, adding depth to the conversation with personal anecdotes and insights. The guest shares a memoir, providing a real-life narrative that enriches the discussion. This memoir is highlighted as a genuine account, offering listeners a glimpse into the guest’s experiences and thoughts.
Additionally, the episode includes a recurring advertisement for ZipRecruiter, emphasizing the importance of efficient hiring practices. The ad suggests that pressure can be beneficial, pushing individuals and businesses to achieve their best. ZipRecruiter is presented as a solution for employers under pressure to find qualified candidates quickly, boasting a high success rate in matching employers with suitable candidates.
Overall, the episode combines personal storytelling with practical advice, encouraging listeners to reflect on their relationship with nature and consider effective strategies for business challenges. The overarching message is one of introspection and efficiency, whether in personal growth or professional endeavors.
This summary was created automatically by Speak. Want to transcribe, analyze and summarize yourself? Sign up for Speak!
#2213 – Diane K. Boyd Podcast Episode Transcript (Unedited)
Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out.
The Joe Rogan experience.
Showing my day Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
I am great. Long flight in ram Montana, but I’m great. Thank you.
Well, it’s very nice to meet you. And, I really enjoyed you on Steve Rinnell’s podcast as
Oh, good. You got to watch it.
Yeah. Steve well, Steve made the introduction. Yes. He, told me I have to have you on because he knows how fascinated I am by wolves. So, I’m really excited to talk to you.
Thanks. And I’m excited too because I thought, well, you got we’re you’re we’re both hunters. We’re both dog lovers. You got an interest in wolves. It’s all good.
How did you start getting interested in wolves and start working with wolves?
Well, I grew up in Minnesota and probably tell from the Fargo accent. But, I grew up in Minnesota. And back in the sixties seventies when I was thinking about a career, Minnesota was the only state in the lower forty eight that had wolves with exception of a few, ai, 25 maybe in Iowa, a couple here or there in in, Wisconsin.
And so I was interested from the beginning with that. And then when I went to the University of Minnesota, Dave Meach, who was, like, the god god of the wolf world, his office was on my campus.
So I just stopped by and kept bugging him. And I would I wouldn’t go away like a good parasite. Persist. Persist. Persist.
Why wolves? Why were wolves so interesting to you?
You know, I’m just I’m kind of, a wildlife person. They’re the ultimate in a really wild and smart animal. They’re a carnivore. They’re social like people. And I think I was denied having a dog most of my life growing up till I was about 15. So I had this this passion for canines in general.
I do too. I love them. And I love wolves. I’m so fascinated by them and I’m so, interested in the whole history of them in this country. How they were sort of eradicated from most of the western states and the reintroduction of them. Mhmm. So you were there for all of it. Right?
So when you first started, they had pretty much been wiped out except, as you said, in Minnesota. You said Ai, is that was the only other place that had them?
Or No. Isle Royale, which is an island in Lake Superior. It’s actually technically part of Michigan. And they they walked over on the frozen Lake Superior ice in the late, like, 19 ai fifties early, and they stayed. And they they got seated there, and they had endless amount of moose to kill and eat. So they were in kind of a wolf paradise with that.
And is it still like that there?
Yes. And the populations of of wolves and moose go up and down because, you know, in nature, nothing is here. We always want it to be here, but it’s always doing this. Right. And, yeah, they’re doing there. And then interestingly, when they when they arrived, they migrated on their own power. There was very little immigration.
There was a couple of wolves documented showing up here and there. But, apparently, genetically, there was no influx of new genes. So the wolves that came and went didn’t breed. And, eventually, they became so inbred. They started having physical anomalies. Oh.
And, eventually, just a few few years ago, 4 or 5 years ago, they got down to just a father daughter team and only 2 wolves left, and it was over. And so they wouldn’t breed, because they have they don’t breed close relatives generally. So they just did a reintroduction to Ai oil too.
That’s been relatively new just a handful of years. So they had to reboost the population if they wanted to keep them going or wait for the lake to freeze again, which may or may not happen in our lifetimes, you know.
So when they reintroduce them, this is one of the sticking points about the reintroduction of Yellowstone. A lot of people that were against it were saying that they reintroduced sai different ai wolf, that they reintroduced wolves from Canada.
Yeah. Is that true? Sorta? No. So No. In my book, I’ve got a chapter called Slaying the Super Wolf. And so people call these wolves super wolves because they say that they’re they’re not native. They’re Canadian super wolves, and they weigh a £170 and goes on and on and on.
But, I documented a wolf that I caught in the Glacier Park area, wolf ai, and we just had VHF collars. We didn’t have satellite collars in those days. And she hung around for a while, and then she just disappeared. And 7 months later, the British Columbia Environmental Ministry game warden called meh, Sana we got we got one of your wolves killed. Do you want the collar? Yes, please.
Where is it? Puskupe. I said, oh, where is that? Well, it turns out that is 540 miles north of Glacier Park in 7 months. So we didn’t know if the guy a farmer shot it in July. If they hadn’t shot it, we would never have known what happened to her.
But if she would’ve gone south instead of north, she’d have been about a 100 miles south of Yellowstone Park. So, clearly, they have the ability to disperse that far. The other interesting thing about that wolf is when she went north, they got the reintroduced wolves from 2 areas, from Hinton in Alberta and Fort Sai.
John’s in British Columbia. And she dispersed past the Hinton population and ended up almost at where the the Fort St. John’s wolves were. So this little wolf, 80 paw wolf, showed us that it’s one continuous population from Yellowstone almost to the Yukon. Wow.
It’s connected because it’s a it’s a walkabout for a wolf. It’s not a big deal. We just didn’t back back then, we didn’t have the tools to document ai of those long dispersals. But I just read this week that a wolf that showed up in Colorado that was shot this year, they just did the DNA on it, apparently, pretty recently, and it was from the Midwest.
Think about that. To Colorado. Wow. Yeah.
So Midwest ai Wisconsin like that?
Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan. It just said the Great Lakes region. It didn’t just ai because they’re all ai of the sai, but it was not it’s not a western wolf. It was not from Wyoming or Montana. Really interesting.
Is there any speculation as to why she went so far north? This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Pressure can be a good thing, ai, on the mat or in the ring. It can push you to do your best, break personal records, and make smarter choices. The same is true for businesses, especially, particularly when it comes to hiring.
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The wolf that I’m talking about Yes. 500. 4. Yeah. She was born in Glacier Park. We caught her first as a pup, so we know where she was born. You know, the den. And then at about a year and a half of age, almost 2, she dispersed that far. And she didn’t have to go that far.
I mean, if she wanted to find other wolves and start a pack or join a pack, she could have gone any direction 50 or a 100 miles and found other wolves. You know what? If you tell me why wolves do what they do, and I’ll buy a lottery ticket. I mean, I don’t know how these things work.
So is that common that they would travel that far?
It’s becoming more and more common. So now that we have satellite collars, we’ve been using those for years, we can track them without having to stay in touch physically with them. In the old days, we just had VHF collars, and you had to physically be there within range, like, from an airplane or track them.
But now that we got satellite collars, I mean, my gosh, we got wolves going from Washington to Montana. And one of the wolves from Wyoming went all the way down to Arizona to just north of the Grand Canyon
With the satellite collar. It was tracked, and then it turned around and started home, and it got shot in Utah.
So when they’re doing this and you track them, how long do those collars’ batteries last?
Well, sadly, for the VHF collars, the wolves generally die before the collars do because wolves don’t live very long. And an average VHF collar lasts about 4 years. An average satellite collar, 1 to 2 years. And I don’t understand why the technology is not better to prolong some kind of a new battery.
Because once you put all the trauma of going through the wolf with a helicopter and catching it or whatever, you’d think they could get some kind of a super battery that would last a long time.
Heavy. Yeah. And they’re you know, wolves are, on average, a £100. And the batteries are pretty big, but I’m waiting for Elon Musk to develop a super radio collar battery.
Well, they’re pretty close to developing some pretty spectacular battery technology.
I just was reading about that.
Yeah. Yeah. They’re trying to implement it in automobiles. They’re gonna be able to do it. I think I believe Samsung is at the forefront of that. Yeah. You know, because, obviously, they make batteries for their phones and electronics and things along those lines. But yeah.
Isn’t it a hydrogen battery or something crazy?
I was just ai. I’m sorry. I don’t remember.
But Yeah. So so they’re wearing this heavy collar, and they they’re good for about 2 years. And a wolf in the wild lives how long on on average?
That’s I always when I do have a talk, I ask audience, who how how long do you think the average wolf lives? So if you guess from the time they’re visible from the den emergence, like, you start to see them at 4 weeks and a few die before that until they ai. Do you wanna take a a guess sai
I would be cheating because I listened to the
Podcast. Ai think it was 4.3 years.
4.3 years. Yeah. Doctor Ram got that. I think it was
I was shocked. I thought they would live older because, you know, an elk, you know, or ai a bull elk. Like, if you shoot a mature one, they’re 7, 8 years old. Sometime Yeah. I mean, I shot one that was 11.
You did. I bet the antlers were getting smaller by that
time. Yes. Yeah. They were and the teeth were worn down. There’s nothing.
They’re not they’re not evolved to live that lot.
They just aren’t. They usually die sooner because they they burn up so much energy in years of mating and breeding that they get worn down and then, you know, they die.
The wolves I mean, in a zoo or a captive situation, they can live to be 15.
Yeah. Like a yeah. But they’re that’s extraordinary. I think the longest I had a wolf, a wild wolf that I knew her age, because I caught her as a pup, and we we I captured recaptured her, and we tagged her. 12 years. That’s extremely long for an old boy.
Yeah. There’s a few in Yellowstone that had got that old. We had one of mine that dispersed to Ai, and he kinda interesting. I caught him in 19 ai, and he dispersed about a year later on his own, went to Idaho in the middle of the Frank Church River of Norwegerton Wilderness.
There were no other wolves at that time, and he just hung around. We’d see him once in a while
playing airplane. By himself. He was a big male. When I got him, he
was a £111. Ai was a big male. When I got him, he was a £111. But this animal had to survive by killing animals alone. You think about That’s crazy. Trying to pull down an elk with your teeth? Is it because the old
males don’t get accepted into a
new pack? He went to where there weren’t any wolves, interestingly. But he had a success story because he just waited it out. And when they reintroduced those wolves into Idaho in ai and 96, a little black female wolf pops out of her crate and just hits the road as fast as she can go.
And she bumps into this wolf, and they set up a territory in Kelly Speak. And they became a breeding mating pair for years years till he died of old age. Wow.
Sai he was just kinda chill on his own Yeah. For years.
Yeah. How many years? 4. Wow. And that would be
4 years without seeing any other wolves.
Without being having help to kill for your food item either. That’s what amazes me. Because he could’ve gone to Montana and found other wolves, but he didn’t.
Was there any understanding of what he was basically because, like, they usually hunt in packs. Yes. So it’s probably very difficult for him to take down anything larger than a fawn or a deer. So what was he what was he eating?
I would guess he was killing elk calves, deer fawns, some deer. And if he got lucky, if he had a really deep snow winter, it’s the advantage of the wolves because they got big snowshoe feet, and elk, you know, punch through where they got little sharp hooves. But he did well. Whatever he did, we don’t know. We didn’t we didn’t follow him that long. We didn’t pick up scats. It’s just speculation.
But that I mean, they can kill a big elk, but it’s it’s they risk being killed every time they have to take a meal like that.
Right. They risk being dismembered ai. Like like Yeah. Broken legs and broken jaws and getting kicked.
Yeah. I saw a video of a wolf from Yellowstone last year. It’d been kicked in the jaw by an elk, and it had a broken jaw that was hanging. And a month later, a month, month and a half, it was healed enough, and it was in the process of killing another elk. And and wolves came along and killed the wolf, other wolves. Once in his own pack, obviously, but he survived that.
His his jaw healed up, and he got enough food while his jaw was healing. Yeah. That’s incredible.
I imagine he was scavenging around, you know, picking up on kills and whatever.
How was he even chewing? I don’t know. Because he’s not always got a fork. You know, like, just a fork or a knife where you cut up the pieces. He’s sana bite pieces off with a broken jaw.
It’s mind boggling to me. You know, people think, oh, wolves can just kill it. Well, they can do whatever they want. They have a hard life.
They just they live in packs because they’re not very efficient killers. You know, mountain lions, bears, they’re a a more efficient predator, especially mountain lion. Yeah. And they got all the claws to hang on. But a wolf can only go with its teeth. And so it generally takes numerous wolves to successfully hunt an animal, especially something big like a moose or a bison.
What a friend said to meh, so I I sana run this by you to find out if this is true. He said that mountain lions are killing more elk because of wolves. Because what happens is the mountain lion will kill the the elk, but then the wolf will scare the mountain lion off and steal it from ram.
And so the mountain lion then goes and finds mule deer, finds another deer, and so the mountain lions are killing more animals because in the areas where mountain lions and wolves cohabitate, the the wolves are really good at chasing mountain lions off of kills.
That does happen. And I I saw some in Glacier Park too. But to to that end, I’ll say there are 3 times more mountain lions than there are wolves in northwestern Montana. Really? 3 2a half to 3. It’s been documented. So Wow.
If you think about that I would have never imagined that. Yeah.
And mountain lions arya, on average, a little bit bigger than wolves. I don’t know if you’ve ever hunted them or not. But ai god, they’re really
I’ve never hunted a mountain lion, but I saw one in You did? On yeah. I saw one in Utah a couple years back, and it was a big one. Like, a £70 1.
Did they did they did they tree it with hounds?
No. No. We were ai, and, we were about 25, 30 yards from it. And, my friend stopped the truck, and he said, look at the size of that cat. It was under a tree, and it was just as dawn or just as dusk was happening, so you could see his eyes glowing. Oh. And so I’m in the front seat of the car looking at him through 10 x binos Wow. And just getting a good look at his it was incredible.
They’re they’re beautiful animals. And I always think when I’m out in the woods, I got a little cabin way up northwest Montana. I wonder how many times mountain lions have watched me.
I worry about mountain lions.
They’re stealthy. I don’t worry about wolves.
Yeah. You should worry about mountain lions. You’re out there by yourself too. Right?
Do you have, like, modern amenities up there? Do you have satellite, Internet, ai that jazz?
My little cabin is 55 miles off the grid, and it’s dry. I don’t have any water. I don’t have electricity.
It’s way off the grid. But, I I built it. I took down an old historic homestead, and I moved the logs up to where it sits.
You can come up sometimes. Yourself?
Well, no. No. I had help with a lot of friends help me over the years. It took me 7 years from the time I got the logs and had friends help me take it down till it was livable. Wow. Long time because I when I had money, I didn’t have time. And when I had time, I didn’t have money, right,
So but I eventually got it done, and a lot of friends, very different, helped. But I poured concrete, and I cut logs, and, you know, I did everything. But, when I built the place where was I going with this? Sorry.
You were just talking about what it’s like out there. No electricity. No water.
So for years, I’ve lived without and I haul water from the spring. In the winter, I melt the snow because we get a lot of snow. But 3 3 summers ago now, I was there alone, and I fell down the hard the stairs, all the wooden stairs, and I broke the top of my foot. And I said, you know, this isn’t gonna be very fun for a while because I gotta close-up the cabin, and I have a propane fridge and stove.
And I gotta undo the propane and empty the fridge, and I gotta light shutter because I’m not gonna be back. I got a broken foot, so I’m hobbling around. And I said, okay. Now I’m gonna get Starlink. That was my motivator. Because if Ai had a phone, I I could have called somebody for help.
But I I didn’t, and I couldn’t. So after that, then I got into the Starlink. They were still in the beta development, I think. And, anyway, I got on. So I have Starlink available to me at my cabin, but only when I choose to turn it on. It’s not Right.
Like, if you were to email me or call me up there, you wouldn’t get me. And when I choose to turn it on, I get the messages. So it’s kind of the best of both worlds. But I don’t live there full time anymore. I live in town.
That is actually the best of both worlds. Yeah. Choose to turn it on. Yeah. Ai. I brought a portable one up to Utah with meh. Yeah. It’s ai smaller than the cigar box.
The new one that’s got the router
incredible. It is incredible.
It’s just it’s so light. I couldn’t believe this was it. Yeah. And it works amazing. Just Yeah. Point it at the sai, and all of a sudden, you’re on YouTube.
For worse. Definitely for worse. But it’s, you know, it allows me to call home and Sure. Talk to people. There’s there’s good to it, but it sounds like living up there must have been amazing. But the water thing sounds like a real issue. There was no way you could build a well?
I did 2, and I hit didn’t hit water twice. Oh. But I’m on a creek. I sit on a bluff above a creek. The water’s water’s about 90 to a 100 feet straight below me.
And I drilled my wells a 140 feet. But it’s a really interesting limestone shah in the water. I don’t know how it works. I even had a guy witch it for me because I’m a scientist, but what the hell it might work. Right? So they witch the spot. I didn’t hit water.
You say which are you talking about with the sticks? Yeah. Which ai divining rods? Is that what
Like I said, I’m a sai, but if it might help, why not? But, I didn’t hit water.
It doesn’t seem like it could be real.
I don’t know either. But But people have been doing that for a long time, and it seems like a massive waste of time. If if Jamie, see if we can find a video of someone trying to find water with ai rods. If you haven’t seen it, they they use 2 sticks. Right?
2 sticks, sometimes metal, but usually wood ai a willow or something.
And they claim as they’re walking around that the sticks move They cross. They cross when you get to an area where there’s water. You’re a scientist. Tell me how that’s possible. How could it be has anybody ever ai, like, what factors could be I don’t know. At play?
I don’t know. And I’m kind
of a skeptic on that stuff, but I I had somebody do it, and we didn’t hit water. So it’s okay.
So here it is. This guy’s walking around. He’s it looks like he’s got
Those are probably metal, like coat hangers or some whoops.
Yep. That is coat hangers.
Right there. Coat hangers. How is that possible?
I don’t know. And then So it
That looks like They crossed. And then and then, of course but then they’re gonna go sink and do really well. It might be 2 feet. It might be 200 feet. I I don’t
know. So he’s walking. He’s not moving his hands. Who? They did. Wow. It does really look like they move on their own.
I you know, there may be people in the world who have some kind of a gift. They have their electrical lights are different. I don’t know how it works. I have been told that I can be a woman of science and superstition.
Yeah. But I’m not usually, science wins.
you live in the woods a long time, you get a little bit of superstition, a little bit of intuition, a little bit of you feel the woods a little bit differently than you could measure on a scale.
I can think of twice only in my life. Before I built my little cabin, I lived up this very even more remote outpost called Moose City, loosely Moose City, because it was not a city at all. It was a old homestead with a lot of empty cabins. Twice up there, I got this feeling that there was something dangerous outside ai.
And, ai just said to me, don’t go outside. And I’m not afraid of anything. I mean, I spent my life dealing with wolves and grizzly bears and and angry humans, but I listened to those feelings because I don’t know any different. Why not why not listen to it? Like, I think we have some primordial part of our brains. I don’t know if you ever had that happen.
Do you sana have been out walking or hunting?
I have not. Okay. No. I’ve never had a moment where I was terrified, like, something’s out here.
Yeah. And I have no idea what it was, but I’ve never had that feeling around wildlife. I tend to think it was human. I don’t know if we
Oh, you feel like there was a human out there?
Yeah. I don’t know if we can smell and not register in our forebrain what we detect. Maybe it’s really I don’t know. I’m just saying I had it happen twice.
If you’re not around any people and then all of a sudden you feel a person, I bet that kind of per like, any person that you run into in the woods is scary. It’s weird. Like, if you I always said that everything in the woods is scary. Like, if you saw a naked baby in the woods, you’d be like, what’s that baby doing here?
Baby just standing there looking at you. You’d be like, what the fuck?
It’s like there’s something weird about the woods in general. And if you if you were walking through a mall and a man was walking your way, it’s just another person, like, hello. Hi. You know, you’re at the park, see a ai. Mhmm. Normal.
But if you’re in the middle of nowhere in the woods and you see another person, there’s this moment where you’re like, what’s this guy up to?
Who is he? What’s he doing? Mhmm. Is he dangerous?
Yeah. And I think that’s because we’re all raised in an urban environment more or less nowadays. And so having lots of people around is normal, but to have one person in a pretty remote area, we we don’t experience that very often
anymore. But there’s also no one that’s gonna help you
Like, if you’re at the mall, it’s very difficult for someone to get away with attacking you. Right. If you’re alone in the woods, is this weird like, if you’re some crazy serial killer guys out there Mhmm. Like, and you, you know, you’re backpacking, you’re ai, uh-oh. Mhmm. Like, now I’m at the mercy of this person if they’re crazy.
I have a chapter in my book early in the book where I describe an event that I’m basically been a real private person all my life until this book came out. And once I wrote this book, I had to bring up stories that are very personal to meh. And I had an event one night that was ai.
Probably the most terrifying thing that’s ever happened in my life. It involved humans. So, yeah, I totally get that. People in places where they shouldn’t be. Do you wanna read it? Do you want me to spoil it? You want me to do the spoiler thing?
Okay. I’ll just give you the elevator speech part of it. Okay. So I was in my cabin at night, and the dog started growling. I had I had very big dogs. I always have dogs. And I looked out my window, and it was winter, and it was cold, and I could see a couple of guys out there lurking around.
And I was in the middle of nowhere, and then it kind of digressed from there. So I I for the only first and only time in my life, I pulled a gun on these guys.
What were they doing out there?
Well, they came to pay me a visit.
They called me by name, which was really freaky. So you think somebody in the woods walking around scary? Wait till you see somebody who you don’t know who it is, and they call you by your first name. That’s freaky.
I didn’t find out because I pulled a gun on them.
I drove him off. And it was terrifying to me at the it was not terrifying at the moment because I was absolutely focused, like predator focused calm. But after they left, Ai started to shake and Yeah. Yeah. Kinda after the adrenaline surge happened.
Were were they menacing? Were they
But with with the way they were communicating with you?
And so how did they know who you were? Do you know?
Oh, it’s a long story. But I was I was working up there. I was kind of a novelty, young ai woman. I was only about ai, living alone, studying wolves. In a time, there were other people coming and going studying wolves, but at that winter, I was alone. And I had been working sai long story.
I was working behind the customs station right on the Canadian border, and they were hauling logs down out of Canada, bringing in the customs station. They would have to transfer the logs to an American truck, and then the Canadian trucks would go back. And I temporarily took a job as the knot bumper at the log meh deck landing, which means my job was to run a chainsaw, trim off the branches, trim the the length of the log to exactly fit the log bed.
Anyway, so I was around. So these loggers knew who I was, and I was, you know, I was cordial enough. But it was 2 of those guys. Oh. Yeah.
And I don’t I never told this story till I wrote this book. And I just thought it’s a part of me that’s very personal. It’s a part of me that I learned from. It’s never happened again. And I had one old logger, old Bob. He saw me on the road the next day.
I was pretty shook up, and he stopped. We chatted often. And, he had seen a wolf. He’d taken a picture of it. So, anyway, we chat.
And he says, so I hear you had some visitors last night. And I looked it up, but because he’s up in his log truck. I said, yeah. He says, you don’t have to worry. That won’t happen again. He’s kinda watching out for me.
Yeah. Because we had kinda befriended each other because he’d spotted this wolf, and he’d taken pictures of it. Anyway, he yeah. So how did
he find out that you had visitors?
The Logger Network, the CB radios, I don’t know. I didn’t tell anybody. But he knew right away.
That’s humans that you have to be scared of.
Totally. Yeah. Yeah. Sai, anyway, you asked. That’s There
was no serial killer mountain lions. Right? They just have a purpose in nature.
Yeah. They just kill because they they kill because they eat. That’s
People are Yeah. Weird. Creepy. Sign about there being weird. I love that.
Yeah. Especially men. Men in the woods are scary. So when you were living out there, how many years did you live out there by yourself?
Well, off and on. So when I arrived there, I joined a team of young researchers. We’re studying wolves and grizzly bears, and we helped each other with their work. So we started all that. And then when we ran out of funding, then I was up there alone for about 3 years. But other than that, there were people coming
Well, I had 2 dogs. I wasn’t totally alone. And people were coming and going seasonally. I had summer help, and I had winter help. But, generally, there wasn’t people there on the shoulder season. So
You know, it’s interesting because it didn’t. Really? I back when I was younger, I was a bit of a misanthrope, and I liked being alone. And when I was alone being alone is different than being lonely. It just is. Now as an older person, Ai I feel different about people. I’m more engaged with people. I enjoy people. So, yeah, I get lonely now. But I didn’t back then. I mean, how could you be lonely?
You’re living in the majestic mountains and wilderness of Glacier National Park, and everything is new, and there’s tracks to find and on and on and on.
Well, it’s all amazing stuff, but I I would be lonely. I I like to be around people.
Well, that that’s why you’re really good at what you do because you’re a social person. You like to engage in conversation, but I didn’t used to be that way. You wouldn’t have wanted to have interviewed me 30 years ago. Let’s put it that way. Really?
Nah. I bet we would’ve worked out.
It’d have been alright. But I It would’ve worked out. I’m more conversational now.
I mean, it’s just Ai would’ve been fascinated by who you were then because I’d be fascinated by a person who doesn’t wanna talk to people. Like, if I could just peel back the layers of the onions to find out what that’s like. Ai, because I would imagine there’s a very different relationship with nature when it’s just you and nature alone ai yourself for prolonged periods of time.
It’s very different than taking a a jaunt, taking a weekend excursion, hiking, you know, even camping for a week. It’s there’s there’s a big difference between that and living there for years. This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Pressure can be a good thing ai on the mat or in the ring. It can push you to do your best, break personal records, and make smarter choices.
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Yes. And it’s sort of like it’s like when I go I go up to my cabin for a visit now. I I no longer live there full time, but I live there a couple of months a year, maybe 3, maybe, usually 2. When I go up, it takes me, like, 3 to 4 days to decompress and get back into the mode of, oh, I can’t I can’t call.
Oh, I can’t go on the Internet. Do I wanna hook up this darling? No. Go out and just sit outside and have a cup of tea and and listen to the creek and then think about what you’re gonna do for the go on a hike. But it takes me a few days now to get to that frame of mind. It doesn’t. It’s not instant anymore.
for sure. Once you get to that frame of mind, then you can just, like, today, we’re gonna go on a hike. Just bring the dogs. Just go walk around ai show yourself. Whatever. Wow.
And were were you living off the land? Were you catching fish for food and hunting for food? Like, how are you getting your supplies?
I did that, but, I bought stuff in town, and I would buy a lot in November while I could still drive in. Because sometimes in the winter, you you couldn’t drive in anymore. So I would stock up and buy, you know, 3, £400 of dog food and bulk supplies of flour and oats, and and I can.
Back then, I actually did some canning. I don’t no. I don’t have time. I don’t care about it. I could buy canned peaches or whatever.
But I I and I never grew a food garden because of the bears.
See, I didn’t wanna attract grizzlies.
So I didn’t grow food except lettuce.
How often did you run into them up there?
They’re always there, but you don’t see them very often. So it’s sort of ai all the wild things that are up there are pretty ai, and and there weren’t a lot of people up there. Then now everybody’s discovered Montana, and there’s people everywhere. Right?
It’s so interesting because our senses are so dull
Compared to theirs. We move so saloni, and we’re so loud, and we’re so clunky. And they see us a mile away. They smell us a mile away. Yeah. They know exactly where you arya, and most of the time, they just avoid us.
Totally true. And Sai mean, I’ve just come back from bird hunting. I just was 31 days on the road, and I just got home 3 days ago. Now I’m here. And I was out bird hunting with friends. And I said I told them I said, so when I’m out with my pointers, I ai a griffon and a wire hair. I said, don’t talk.
Don’t call the dog’s name. Don’t holler about just just watch and enjoy and smell and feel what goes on and trust the dogs. If you see them getting birdie, get ready. Because so many ai, you hunt with people, and they’re they’re hacking their dog. They’re calling. They’re hollering.
They’re talking to you about something going on over here. And, hey, did you watch the the Vikings game? Well, nobody watches the Vikings game. Anyway, did you watch this? It’s ai, we arya out there seeking a smart bird that has ears. Watch the dogs.
So I I feel that way when I’m out living in the wild too with or hiking. I’m not gonna see elk or bears or even fox if you’re yammering away.
That’s why I like being alone.
Yeah. That is part of the problem with people. We do like to talk just to just be reassured.
Yeah. You know? And it it’s fun to interact. I mean but even when I go to Yellowstone I go to Yellowstone at least sai couple times a year to watch wolves. I love the wolf watchers. They’re so enthusiastic. But something’s going on, and you can’t take a video because everybody’s
Yeah. Even if the wolves are howling, you have to go
shh. I went to Yellowstone a few years back with my family, and I’ve Ai felt ai it was very weird. I’ve I’ve I’ve felt like I’m enjoying ai daughters are really young at the time. I’m enjoying that they’re seeing bears and they’re seeing well, we didn’t see bears. We did see they had there is this place in Montana that has this grizzly bear, preserve.
It’s like a place where they take care of bears, so they would, like, feed them frozen watermelons, which is crazy to watch a bear chew through a frozen watermelon like it’s a grape. Woah. They just go right through it as a frozen watermelon. Woah. And they just crump ai it’s nothing. Yep.
But, we did see a lot of elk and a a bunch of bison And the Elk was strange because Ai sure you know this but for the people at home, Elk, understand that wolves don’t come to these community centers, these areas where, you know, there’s vending machines and buildings. So the elk are all over the place out there.
Yeah. So I don’t know I don’t know if I put it on Instagram. I think I did a I took a selfie with a a cow elk that was, like, 40 feet from me just lying there, and she wasn’t worried about me at all. And I was trying to tell my kids, I was, like, this never happens. Mhmm. This is weird. Yeah.
It’s weird that they’ve become so habitualized to being around cars and people. They just know the peep it’s safe when you’re around these people, so they just hang out there.
That’s probably at Mammoth Gardner area that happens all the time up there.
Well, it happens in Colorado too, like, in Evergreen. Uh-huh. You know, you see them there’s a whole like, these huge herds of elk that walk down the middle of the street in Evergreen because they know there’s no mountain lions in the middle of the
Ai. And so they just, like, in the rut, they’re walking down the street and there’s, like, 30, 40 elk and they stop traffic. And they’re sitting on people’s lawns, and it’s wild.
Sounds like ram. The the same things happened to the wolves in Yellowstone because they were taken from Canada where they don’t see people, and they had never had exposure to livestock. They’re very wild at first. And then they can’t get away from humans. So after a while, they just start disregarding people.
And, like, if they have to cross the road, there’s a wolf ram, and everybody’s crowding with their cars, and they’re trying to bring their pups across the road to a better spot. And they can’t even get through because of everybody. So they they get kind of lousy fare about it, and they get used to people conditioned or habituated.
And that’s passed on to the next generation next, and and then when they leave the park and they go outside the park and they walk down some some open public land spot where there’s a hunter with a rifle, they don’t think anything about it. So they’re pretty easy targets.
That’s unfortunate. Yeah. The the habitualization is unfortunate because, like, you just wanna see them in the wild. You don’t wanna see them in an intersection.
I know. And, yeah, it it’s tough. And the unfortunate thing is, a couple of years ago, there were 25 Yellowstone wolves killed just outside of the park because they’re used to people, and they wander around. Anyway, that’s, like, out of a 100, so it’s about a quarter of the population.
And there were a couple of particular individual wolves that were very well recognized and loved by the wolf masses and photographed, and they got killed. And this this just went viral and this huge hatred for these people who shot these wolves because they were so special.
And I make the point when I give talks and stuff. I said, you know, if you really feel that strongly, you should really be concerned because every year, there’s about 300 wolves shot that way in Montana. But you don’t know them. They’re not famous. They have just as important of lives.
They live, die, eat, breathe, get injured, heal up, the same as these movie star wolves in Yellowstone. And you should feel that way about all wolves in my ai.
Well, that was the case with Cecil the lion. Do you remember Cecil the lion?
The dentist Ai dentist killed him.
Right? They named him. Yeah. And so when they and I remember after Cecil got killed, another lion got killed, and they thought it was Jericho who is Cecil’s brother. And there was a story, like, oh meh god, they killed Jericho, Cecil’s brother. And then they realized that Jericho was not dead. So the oh, it’s fine.
Jericho is still okay. But that lion is just a lion. You didn’t name him, but that’s still another lion. But because it’s not this named lion’s brother who also has a name, no one cared. Exactly.
That’s so bizarre. It is bizarre. I thank you for understanding that. I forgot about the sai so. But, like, when we were first monitoring the wolves in Glacier, there was just a handful, and we would catch them. And we would give them names because it’s easier. Like, Phyllis was Wolf ai, and Mojave was Wolf ai. They had both names and numbers.
And so when we did our scientific papers and reports, we used a number because we were told by the officials that we don’t want you to name the animals because what happens when Phyllis kills a cow if that happens?
Then you can’t manage Phyllis. So we we went along with it, but we used the names, and we did the scientific stuff with numbers. But then when you go into the park, people would wanna know what’s going on. You need to talk about these different wolf numbers, 8654. And they say, well, who is ai? Oh, that’s Aspen. Oh, yeah. And they would know by the name. So whatever works.
But then all of a sudden, they become like a pet. Like, even more like a majestic wild pet. Like, it’s a different thing. It’s a pet that’s this iconic North Meh, you know, speak predator.
Yes. And I know the wolves in Yellowstone, they don’t have names. They have numbers, but they’re so identifiable by ai or whatever that it becomes like a name
Even though it’s still a number.
But if you shoot 907, it’s not as rude as if you shoot Jake.
Jake the wolf. Right. You know, it’s ai, oh.
Yeah. Michael. Michael. You know, you name a wolf a human name, and all of a sudden, you shouldn’t shoot it anymore I know. Which is just a weird anthropomorphization thing. Right?
Yeah. No. It’s been interesting to me because I for my career, I’ve I’ve done everything. My 1st year, my first job, I worked up in Northern Minnesota in a little tiny 300 person farming community. And I was hired, US Fish and Wildlife Service, to go in and help prevent livestock depredation and when wolves killed cattle or sheep, to go in and remove, which meant trap and to hollowing, they were euthanized.
And when there weren’t depredations, to go out and and research ram and put collars on the other wolves. And it was I mean, this is big big stuff for a girl from Minneapolis, starry eyed and pretty naive to go up and save the folks of Northholme from the wolves. You know? Yeah.
It was such an important summer for me to learn professionally and personally. And I wrote about that. But I learned a lot, and it was interesting work. But I realized, yeah, wolves can cause conflicts for people. And it was a new concept for me.
So when they captured the wolves and they removed them, why did they euthanize them? Why didn’t they just relocate them?
Well, they would be me ai I was the one catching and dropping up. Me.
Well, obviously, someone’s telling you what
to do, though. Right? Right. So I had to bring them to the the the main office in Grand Rapids, Minnesota where they were euthanized. So prior to that, in 1978, you couldn’t euthanize wolves. They changed the status, from endangered to threatened. And so when they were threatened, then under Endangered Species Act, you could actually euthanize them. And they didn’t translocate them.
This is a really good question because they found over the years with studies in Minnesota and eventually in Montana too that when you translocate or move a wolf who’s causing a problem, that wolf very, very rarely survives to reproduce because it gets killed by other wolves.
It comes back to depredate again. It moves on to another farm or ranch. It does it again. They they don’t generally ai. And so it was determined that it makes officials feel good to move them, and it it’s a good facade for the public to believe in.
But sometimes it results in a pretty prolonged and inhumane existence for a few months or a year till they die anyway. Sai, yeah, it’s Is
it because they’re habitualized to start preying on cattle?
It’s tough once they learn to take cattle or sheep. It’s tough to to speak that pattern. Let’s put it that way.
Well, yeah. I mean, if it was me out there walking around and I had a choice between a deer that’s gonna kick me
In the teeth or taking the cow, I’d pick the slow, dumb groceries every time. It’s just me.
And if they know the groceries are all penned up.
Exactly. Yeah. So it’s a it’s a difficult challenge, and wolves are continuing to expand everywhere in the west, the Midwest, Europe. And so there’s more and more challenges, and a lot of the the early excitement about wolves has changed into a a bitter battle.
Yeah. It’s a it’s a really interesting complex battle because there’s a a lot of hunters that do not like the reintroduction of wolves.
Because and they’ll say that the the elk populations are down, and they they’re down dramatically in Montana because the reintroduction. Shah is the 1996? When when did they?
ai, 96, and then ai, 97. Those winters.
So but the reality is it’s not natural to not have those predators there, and you’re gonna get an overpopulation of elk, and that’s gonna lead to starvation and disease.
Yes. And so ai of the the the ai was cast when those wolves were removed. And, basically, by the 19 thirties, there really weren’t viable populations in the west anymore. There are wolves here or there and a pack here or there, but there weren’t 1,000. And and they went into inside the national parks.
They have a picture in many books of rangers with cute little wolf pups that are, like, 7, 8 weeks old, and they took the pictures. This was in 1926, and then they killed them all. So they even removed all the predators within national parks. So people historic memory you know, we have really short memories.
Historic memory of, say, for example, the northern range, northern herd, range of elk out of Gardner. It was about 20,000 before the wolves were introduced. Way over carrying capacity. Elk were starving. The browse ai as high up as they could reach. They ate everything they could eat.
They were paying people to people being paid to come in and kill deer and elk, and then they started the late hunting seasons out of Gardner, which I went in because my boyfriend at the time had a tag. And they just have a shooting line in February and kill kill all these elk because they aren’t gonna make it anyway until you shoot a starving cow in February.
Because it wasn’t predators.
when the wolves came back, 2 things happened. Number 1, it was a new new predator. But number 2, in the winter of ai, 97, we had some of the deepest snows ever recorded in in the mountains ever. And so many of the herd died from snowfall. And Ai had hunters tell me, yeah, the population elk ram went from 20,000 to 10000 in 2 years.
Damn those wolves. And it’s like, do you think 35 wolves killed 10,000 elk? Come on. Let’s let’s just do the math a minute.
Yeah. That is the problem with these people that don’t have a nuanced perspective on what’s happening because they have a vested interest in it being a problem that the wolves are keeping them from being able to be successful on an elk hunt. Right.
And I’m a hunter. I get it.
Yeah. But the the die offs are huge. Like, the the place that I was just telling you about before the podcast that I was in in Utah
They lost 80% of their mule deer population a year ago.
From what? Snow. Yeah. And and saloni Real bad winter. Yeah. Yeah.
Bad and then winter die offs are a big thing. It’s a big thing.
I would sai, to best of my knowledge as a biologist, that winter die off is the limiting factor for ungulate herds. It’s not lions and bears and wolves and humans and cars. Every so often, every 20 years or whatever, you get a massive winter die off. And it takes ai a while for those populations to build back up. Yeah. Predators can keep that at a lower rate. They cannot affect it.
You know, I have to think back to the people say about wolves killing all the deer now. I I think if you look to statistics sai Montana and Wyoming, which have both have had a a lot of wolves for a couple decades, they’re giving away more elk permits. I was just reading they proposed unlimited elk permits in Wyoming, and Montana’s got, basically, in most of its management units, more elk than ever.
And I just say there’s more going on than wolves. And to point your finger at wolves all the time, you need to look at habitat. You need to look at access issues. You know, there’s a lot of places where hunters wanna go shoot these elk
But they’re on large private ranches, and you can’t get on them.
Including landlocked public land where you Yes. There is public land where you’re allowed to hunt there, but you can’t get there.
You’d have to fly in in a helicopter in a lot of places that’s illegal.
Right. And so there’s all this talk of for people that don’t know, there’s what one one of the things that happens is a thing called corner crossing. Yeah. So there might be a piece of public land that you’re allowed to hike into and then there’s a small area. It could be a very small area, just a few yards even
Of private land that you are going to have to cross in order to get into the next piece of public land, but people block access to that because these people that have these ranches and most of them probably don’t even live there and a bunch of wealthy people, they’re terrified that someone’s going to go through that and then go into their private land. They don’t wanna give people the access at all to their private land, so they stop these corner crossings.
And it’s a giant disaster because then you have these areas that are public land that should be available to all of us, and no one can get in there.
Right. I mean, if if the if the viewers can think of imagining a checkerboard, and you’re trying to get from ram black square to the next black square, but you have to step over a tiny piece of white square Right. To meh there. Right? Yeah. That’s being battled in court right now. Yeah. Yeah.
It’s a disaster. Ai I owned the land, I would carve out a big pathway and and give it to the public. Yeah. Why if you have 50,000 acres out there, whatever the hell you have, why is it so hard to take a few acres and just make a path?
But you’re not most landowners. But it seems so simple. I know.
It’s ai the simplest of you just make some sort of an easement.
Well, when that would be good. And some some ranchers do, but many people been in this business 4 or 5 generations on their family ram, and they’ve had a bad experiences with hunters that come in and cut their fences, shoot their cows, leave their gates open, and they just say, I’m done.
I’m closed. And they get really angry. I just hunted on a guy’s ranch, about a week ago up in north cent vatsal Montana, and he owns 60 sections. That’s 60 square miles of land, which may not be a big place in Texas, but for most of the rest of the world.
It’s huge. And we he gave us permission, but he had to tell us all the challenges he’s had and why he had a big sign. Don’t even ask, basically. But Right. But I
that he I know it from I know he was gonna let us because some other friends of mine had hunted there. So he but he had all these heartburns over things that had happened to him. Hunters gave him a really bad taste in their mouth. And I there I, as a single individual person, can’t do a lot about it, and I’d like to see, you know, hunting organizations, many really good ones, help promote better hunter behavior and better hunter landowner relationships.
You you would be very generous to do that, but most people will not give an easement.
Well, I would understand that if you’ve been burned a few ai, people have poached on your land. Right. And and there’s this attitude that people who don’t have anything, and they see someone who has so much and they’re like, screw this guy. I’m just gonna go on his property. Look, the elk are right there over the ridge, 400 yards away. Yep. Let’s just go over there, shoot those elk.
He won’t even know. No. We’ll pack it out. It happens. Yeah. And then they get caught and then this ai like, goddamn it.
They’re poaching on my land and they hate hunters. Hunters are like everybody else. Yep. There’s people that are amazing plumbers and they’re real honest and they work hard and they’re sweethearts and you’re happy to hire them and call them. And there’s people that are just liars and they’re crooks.
It’s just like any other group of people. Else. Exactly. Exactly. And I know in my business with the wolves, I’ve always tried to be very transparent. I’m very honest. And if somebody asks me a question, I’ll give them the best information I have. If I don’t know an answer, I’ll say, I don’t know.
But, you know, you could call so and so who’s maybe had the experience with that. Right. I got nothing to hide by being dishonest or or trying to sell somebody. It’s like hunting impacts of wolves on hunting. It it you look at populations, and they go like this all the time.
And sometimes wolves cause it, sometimes not, sometimes it’s winter, sometimes it’s accumulation of lions and bears and wolves. But it’s like the stock market. People wanna see it do this.
Well, it’s like the climate. Exactly. Nobody wants to admit to that either. They hate looking at long term data.
people wanna talk about the sky is falling, well, it’s actually not. Look at it over a long period of ai, and you see this trend has always existed. And in fact, this is one of the cooler times in history.
We’re we’re facing interesting times.
It’s Bizarrely ideological.
I think the the hardest thing is so much social media. Everything goes on instantly. And whether it’s true or not.
Mhmm. Everything goes on instantly, and everything is ideologically connected. You know, there’s people that just don’t want any animals ever killed ever, and there’s people that want no predators and the easiest hunts possible and they don’t have a nuanced perspective of the ecosystem of what biology is and, like, what these animals they there’s a whole world that they live in and this world is ai interdependent.
There’s so many things going on. And so people, like, I remember there was a a documentary that came out, how wolves changed rivers in Yellowstone. And, they made this incredibly rosy picture of wolves coming in, and it brought in beavers, and they changed the rivers and the lakes, and everything was better.
And it’s ai, no, not really. No. It’s there’s a lot going on all the ai. And to, like, to single out this one aspect of this ecosystem and sai, this is the cause of this. But there’s a lot of different causes.
Yes. And that that film or the video ran viral big time. But there’s no one species that’s gonna make
break the world except maybe people.
but in terms of the impacts, no. And it’s been shown since that video came out, the movie, that that might be true in a short time period in small places, but it’s not the global picture for Yellowstone Park. Wolves have not saved the planet. They just haven’t. It’s just not that simple.
Well, what they have done, though, is brought some balance. Right?
I think yes. They brought so they you can go either way. And I think people who are out on either extreme can actually make people in the middle more involved with conservation efforts, like that guy with the movie. Well, it’s Rosie’s story, and pieces of it may be true in certain places for for a temporal or spatial ai, period.
But then there’s the guy in, where was it, Daniels, Wyoming who roared over that wolf in the snowmobile and crippled it. You heard about this, didn’t you?
story. Brought it back Crippled. To the bar.
And had it in the bar so people could be entertained for an hour before they took it out back and shot it. No. That’s a pretty horrific thing whether it’s a deer or ram mountain lion or no. Sai will. Any animal. Any animal. But that horrific act got a lot of people in the middle fired up to become more strong conservationists. So I’m sorry that that happened.
But on the other hand, it brings a lot of awareness to people who are not aware of the level of capacity of people to be stupid. And evil. And evil.
That’s evil. That when I saw the photos of the wolf, I’m like, that is an evil act.
Like, that thing is that’s an incredible animal, you know, and you have no right to do that. And if you crippled it if you crippled it with a snowmobile, the right thing to do is to call someone or have it euthanized. Yeah. Shoot it or call someone ever to, but to drag it to a bar is just sick.
Well, I mean, he ran it over intentionally, and he had a gun.
Oh, and he had a gun. No. He it was all for show. And it
Well, that’s a the level of vitriol that people have towards wolves is very strange. And I think it goes back to, like, Little Red Riding Hood and, you know, the big bad wolf. And there’s just, like, this thing that we have in our mind that we don’t have for other predators. We don’t have it for bears.
We don’t have it for cats. No. It’s weird. Right?
I thought about this a lot. So why wolves? What’s the deal with wolves? Why does it create that if you look at the facts, I mean, elk, coyotes, lions, bears, all coke machines, whatever, kill people, ai, every year. Lots of people. Mhmm. Wolves, it would be a very rare experience. It occasionally happens, but it’s so much rarer than everything else. And yet people don’t hate lions or grizzly bears.
I think it’s a historical thing. I think wolves are not a problem when you deal with civilization, when you deal with, agriculture and people have guns and people have land and they have property. But I think at one point in time, it was a much bigger deal when there were a larger populations of them and they would hunt people, they would attack people.
You are you aware of the the World War one story?
About them eating corpses?
Well, not just that. About the the Germans and the Russians having a ai because so many people are getting eaten by wolves. No. They they actually I talked to Steve Varnell about it once, and he didn’t he wasn’t even sure if it was true. I So they actually researched it ai found out it was true, and they wrote an article on MeatEater about it.
way. So I haven’t seen it.
So the story I don’t remember where I heard it ram, but the story was, you know, the thing about war, especially trench warfare, the horrific nature of it is that you don’t necessarily always kill people. You shoot them and hurt them and wound them. And these wolves were aware that these people were living in these trenches and that they were wounded.
And so they smelled blood and they came in and there were so many instances of people getting dragged out of trenches by packs of wolves. And there were so many instances of, parties going out, like, 2 or 3 meh, and then they just find a boot with a foot in it, and they they ai, like, oh, boy.
They an animal’s gotten them. And so they decided to have a ai Mhmm. Between the Russians and the Germans to just to get together and kill the wolves before they go back to killing each other.
I’ll have to look that up because I I haven’t actually heard it.
Sai if you can find that article. I believe it’s on meh eater.com.
I’d like to know where the references are. Thanks.
Was there a ai during World War 1 to hunt wolves?
But I wanna know what the references for the story were.
I think it’s the New York Times. Okay. Multiple newspapers in 1917 report this story, including the El Paso Herald, Oklahoma City Times, and New York Times. Since then, it’s become a favorite bit of barroom banter among amateur historians, like me, Joe Rogan. February 19th it says it there. February 1917 Alright.
A dispatch from Berlin noted large packs of wolves moving into populated areas of the German Empire ai the forest of Lithuania and, I don’t know how to say that word, Volhynia? Volhynia? How would you say that word?
Locals ai the war effort displaced the wolves, so the canines started seeking out new hunting grounds. The hungry wolves infiltrated rural villages attacking calves, sheep, goats, and in two cases, children. They also showed up on the front lines feeding on the fallen and sometimes taking advantage of incapacitated fighters.
Parties of Russians and German scouts met recently and were hotly engaged in a skirmish when a large pack of wolves dashed on the scene and attacked the wounded reported a 1917 Oklahoma City Times article. Hostilities were once suspended and Germans and Russians instinctively attacked the pack killing about 50 wolves.
So these are one of the things that happens in Russia is you get these super packs. I’m sure you’ve heard about those where, they’ve had problems with them descending on whether it’s a cattle ranch or horses. They’ve taken out horses. Poison, rifle fire, hand grenades, and even machine guns were successfully tried in attempts to eradicate the nuisance according to ai New York Times arya.
But all to no avail, the wolves, nowhere to be found quite so large and powerful as in Russia, were desperate in their hunger and regardless of danger.
Yeah. Ai I’m reading it too. I just would say
You’re a little skeptical?
I’m very skeptical. Number 1, there weren’t
yeah. It sai, though seemingly farfetched, it turns out these claims arya mostly accurate. Historians estimate that soldiers killed hundreds of wolves during the war and that the surviving wolves fled to escape a carnage the like of which they had never encountered. Click on that link. What is that?
We’re looking at news stories from a 110 years ago.
I know. Look at that. 1917.
A little skeptical? Well, they lie.
Skeptical. I’m very skeptical. Tyler
well, they lie ai the news now. I know. But it seems like something happened. I don’t think they made up the fact that they all got together and shot wolves. And have you have you read about Russian super packs of wolves? No. No? Okay.
So you’re not literature, but But
this is recently. Okay. Within a a few years ago, there was a problem with, these super packs where they I don’t remember what the theory was as to why they had formed such large packs. But there was large packs of up to a 100 wolves that were going into farms.
So my question about this story and I I’m not I’m not I’m just saying I’m skeptical.
2010, 2011, a super pack of wolves numbering up to 400 reportedly terrorized the Russian town of boy, good luck with that one.
Verkoy Vychoyansk. Population 1300.
Guinness Book of World Records. Ai Northern
No. They’re a little better than that. What Wikipedia’s sketch. One of the remotest inhabited areas of the Northern Hemisphere, more than 30 horses were killed in just 4 days. And I remember reading about this in 2,010. It said, according to local officials, teams of hunters were established to patrol neighborhoods and shoot the wolves on-site.
Animal experts suspicious of the claims sai that wolves usually form packs of no more than 10 to 15 animals. Although, the particularly harsh winters may have killed off the wolves’ usual prey, forcing them to attack larger animals. This is a this is multiple sources have this story. Yeah.
And I I remember it about a decade or so ago.
Oh, Ai love to look up more detail, but I can tell I can tell you about I can’t tell you about the news source, and I’d I’m not not familiar with that, and I don’t read that kind of stuff usually. But if it’s true, it’s true. I I don’t happen to believe it’s true. But what I can tell you about the true about wolf biology is wolves live in packs that are generally a family group.
They have a genetic investment in their pack members. There’s oftentimes 1 or 2 that aren’t related. And they defend that territory to the death, whether there’s 5 of them or 25 of them, and that would be a large pack. The largest pack I’ve ever heard of in was in Yellowstone. I think it was 34 because 3 females had pups.
So to have 400 wolves ai together is
Ai would they do that? What’s the benefit to them? They’re com they’re they’re gathering, collaborating with animals that aren’t related to them, that have no genetic benefit to see them each survive. And, normally, packs that genetic benefit to ai them each survive. And, normally, packs that are not related kill each other.
It’s the biggest cause of mortality in Yellowstone Park is wolves killing non pack members. Wolves are very, very intelligent. Oh, I know.
Extremely intelligent. Yeah. And could you imagine a scenario where resources were so diminished that wolves ai that killing each other had no benefit and that moving together as a group, they could do something to these farms. Ai, like, if you arya a pack of 400 wolves and you choose to attack horses, that seems to me a lot more success than 3 wolves or 5 wolves
Saying, but you ask would I believe it? And I have to tell you, no. I wouldn’t
believe it. Based on your real life lived experience.
But I wouldn’t believe it.
But things do vary according to very unusual circumstances in terms of the environment. Right?
So if there were if there were 400 wolves that were starving, they would starve. I mean, they would They knew
You’re giving them some human reasoning skills. They don’t think like humans do. They just don’t. And I’m I’m sorry. I’m not don’t be afraid. I’m not calling you a liar. No. It’s on me. Story. I don’t sai I don’t I’d have to investigate that.
But I’m I’m a 100% skeptical on it just because of everything that I’m familiar with. But it doesn’t, you know stuff happens.
I have, no pun intended, no dog in the race
But my my thought is that in perhaps unusual circumstances ai Sai, where it’s so incredibly harsh, that if you do find a population that had been surviving because there was a a sufficient amount of wildlife for them to kill, and then all of a sudden there wasn’t, but there was farms, and they all might kind of, like, descend on these farms and perhaps not even fight for resources because they realized there was no benefit in that.
You asked meh. Just sai, I don’t believe it. So I hear you.
don’t have anything to contribute further on that.
I guess you’re just a science denier. That’s okay, Diane.
I’m a science denier. There you go. I like that.
Fun thing to call people?
It’s such a horrible thing to say to people. Like, what are you saying? Yeah. Meh. When you, so what is the largest that you’ve observed? The largest pack you observed?
I have only observed probably 15, but that’s not Yellowstone. That’s in my history. And I know in Yellowstone like I said, I know 1 year to get up to 34. And I think the probably the largest I’ve ever heard of being recorded that I I know is factored might be 40, but that’s extremely unusual.
And is that Yellowstone as well?
Might be Canada. I’m trying to remember my source. I can’t remember. But 34 in Yellowstone, that’s unusual.
The large number in Yellowstone was because of the unusual circumstances of the reintroduction and a bunch of animals that weren’t used to having wolves around?
Yes. I think well, three things happen. Three different females had pups. On average, they have 6 6 pups, 7 pups. So there’s recruiting right there, 18, 20 pups ai there. In addition to the adults that were there, they had a good year. They had lots of prey. And so all those pups presumably made it to their 1st year. So for one winter, they were a huge pack, and then mortality happens.
It’s that wolves are not designed to live in packs of 34. I I mean, packs in the Midwest where the prey is smaller and the wolves are smaller, they live in smaller packs. In Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, average pack might be somewhere between 1015. And every year, you can meh, every year, they have 6 to 7 pups.
And by the next spring, they’re back down. That’s 6 or 7 through mortality or dispersal or whatever happens, hunting. Yeah. So stuff happens.
It is a hard life. And the other thing I’ve heard lots of people well, I’ve heard several people and people I know quite well tell me stories about they encountered a wolf or they encountered a wolf speak, and they were really frightened because they were they had their dog with them, and the wolves are interested in the dog, like little Carl there or something.
And and the wolves were circling around, and these people were terrified. And when they told me this are 2 people. They told me this story, and they said, yeah. They could have killed me. And my result my response is, yeah. Easily. But but you’re here telling me this story. Right.
So it’s not very common for wolves to attack people. That’s just what I’m
Not anymore. And I don’t know how good the reporting was way back when. So
But way back when, if you think about people that were living in a time where there was no guns Mhmm. Or, at the very least, muskets, And you’re dealing with people that are completely ai, and you’re dealing with harsh ai.
Yeah. And there might be a time where their the food source for the wolves is diminished. Mhmm. The The homesteaders didn’t really have a problem with wolves, though, attacking people. Right?
When we had time But they had guns. They had guns. They had poisons. They had traps. They had livestock. They had children. That’s just what I’m saying. In this country Right. With probably a, I don’t mean to be offensive, but a better base of information with all the opportunity in the world for all those things you just set up, remote living, no no protection, harsh winners ai the winner of Charlie Russell paintings where all the cattle were starving.
You didn’t have packs of 400 wolves coming in and killing every I’m just saying. Right.
But isn’t that a different environment than Siberia? Siberia is
Oh, you’re assholes homesteaders.
Have you ever seen, the word of Herzog’s documentary, Happy People, Life in the Taiga? Yeah. Isn’t it amazing? It’s beautiful.
Incredible. It’s beautiful. I just actually watched it within the last year.
I thought about that when I was thinking about you living alone by yourself. Like, that’s how those people did. They would go out there, and they would just go with a dog, and they would, go live by themselves in these cabins that they had fortified for the entire winter
And just live out there amongst and they loved it. They all loved it. They all couldn’t wait to get out there.
And how many were killed by wolves?
None. None. But, again, those ai they have ai are very
awesome predators on people.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, Siberian tigers, they, like, known to kill people. I know that. Yeah? Are they?
Ai to remember the name of the book I read. It might just be called ai. I’m trying to remember the name, but it’s a story of a a predatory tiger and these guys, a story of the tiger’s life and how they go to finally try and kill it.
It’s terrifying story. In Siberia?
It’s true story. Yeah. And it’s modern times.
There’s something super scary about a tiger in the snow.
A cat that’s £600 stalking you?
No. Thank you. No. Thank you. No. No. Yeah. It’s just a matter
of whether or not you zig when you should have zagged, and you’re in the wrong spot of land where he’s at. Yes.
And I think that tiger had an injury that was caused by humans, and that’s often the case. Oh. There were it wasn’t able to hunt real proficiently. Or in the according I mean, when you’re reading the book, you get the they get the drift that it it had a vengeance against humans because it was injured.
And so imagine that’s probably the case too.
Just as they’re scared if they survive a situation. The second story of Vladimir Markov, a poacher who met a grizzly and in the winter of 1997 after he shot and wounded a tiger and then stole a part of the tiger’s kill. The injured tiger hunted Markov down in a way that appears to be chilling meh chillingly premeditated.
The ai stalked out Markov’s cabin, systematically destroyed anything that had Markov’s scent on it, and then waited by the front door for Markov to come home. Wow.
Yeah. There’s no doubt that animal, according to the story here, definitely had vengeance on its mind.
Wow. It sai an impulsive response. Vatsal says the tiger was able to hold this idea over a period of time. The animal waited for 12 to 48 hours before attacking. When Markov finally appeared, the tiger killed him, dragged him in the bush, and ate him. The eating may have been secondary, Saloni explained. I think he killed him just because he had a bone to pick.
It’s the book is called The Ai, so I had the title right.
it’s a fascinating story. It Wow. Yeah. And you know, it’s interesting because with With
Look at the size of that.
Look at the guy’s hand next to the footprint. Oh
It’s amazing. Oh, that’s the author with the size of a female’s paw print. So that’s a small one. That’s a small one. Oh my goodness.
Yeah. It it fascinating story. And ai and then there’s this the tiger is just trying to be a tiger.
Is that a photograph of those guys? It looks like a drawing.
1885. ai meh different. So is that Different time era.
Is that a photo, though? Yeah. Ai. Shitty photo. I wouldn’t buy it. If somebody said that’s a photo, I’ll go get out
of here. 40 years old. Come on.
But some of the interesting things looking at that is, like, in Glacier Park or anywhere I play where wolves overlap with with mountain lions, which we call lions. Mountain lions and grizzly bears and coyotes and whatever. When they they kill one of their other competing predators just like that tiger, they don’t usually eat it. It’s secondary.
It’s to kill off a competitor.
So wolves don’t get eaten by mountain lions? They do get killed by mountain lions occasionally. Right?
Occasionally. Matter of fact, one of the Colorado wolves that was just introduced was killed by mountain lion. Really? Yeah. 1 of the 10 that was just introduced.
So they kill them because they are a competitor.
And 1 on 1, a 120 pound cat and a 100 pound wolf, 1 on 1, the cat’s gonna win. But when you have a pack of wolves, I mean, we’ve watched them treat treat the cat, and they’ll wait till they can get it. They’ll wait. But 1 on 1, the cat doesn’t have a chance. But no. And Ai mean, we Well,
the wolf doesn’t have a chance 1 on 1, you mean? Right.
I mean, when the vatsal won and you got a pack of 8 ai.
But we’ve we documented a case where the wolves treat a cat and went it couldn’t stay up the tree any longer. It was on a little skinny lodgepole, and it was sliding down. And as soon as it got the ground, they killed it, and they just ripped it apart, and they didn’t eat any of it. Wow.
It’s strictly to vanquish a competitor just like the tiger.
It’s interesting because wouldn’t you think that food is scarce and that meat is precious? And that if they did kill the mountain lion, they’d realize, which why don’t we eat this thing?
Well, they had better options. Have you ever eaten mountain lion?
I don’t know. Actually, you
know what? Wait a minute. Did I eat it? I don’t know what I have. Why I feel like someone gave me something? It it I don’t think I ate it. I think it’s in my freezer. I think somebody might have served it to me somewhere.
Looks like a pork tenderloin, and you ai it’s very light colored. I will eat it once.
Well, Steve killed 1 and cooked it, and he said it was tremendous.
He he called it superb. He said it was like a superior pork.
Yeah. He said it was really good, which is, like, most people would not think you even eat mountain lion.
Well, apparently either, Well,
that was I was reading about one of the trappers, one of the original people that was traveling across the country in the 1700. His favorite meal was wolf.
No. This guy was eating, like, wolf wolf meat.
I don’t think it’d be very good. They’re skinny and stringy and sinewy.
Yeah. I don’t know why. I mean, I don’t know why that would be anyone’s favorite. Then maybe that’s, like, a cool thing to tell people.
Ai probably cheating wolves. That’s true.
You know, you find some guys who you’re you know, he wants you to be scared of them. What he what he eats up there saloni. He’s eating wolves.
That’s his favorite. He lives by himself, and he just eats wolves. Ai? This doesn’t that sound like something a man would say?
Or worse yet, wolverines.
Oh, right. Imagine eating wolverines.
It’s it’s I’m glad you showed me that stuff because it’s nice to know the stuff is still out there and alive and well. I hear it all the time. Ai I hear about the Canadian super wolves and
Well, we’re the when there there is a thing about mammals. Right? That mammals, as they get into a colder range, they arya larger mammals. Like, if you see, like, let’s say, Northern Alberta ai tailed deer versus an Arizona white tailed deer.
To a certain point. And then when you get to where it’s so cold in arctic that the resources the availability to get food is diminished
Like arctic wolves in Ellesmere Island are pretty small, and they’re white.
And, because they’re tiny. They don’t have any food. They’re smaller. Right.
The the Pieris caribou up there are smaller than, say, the caribou in Alaska. They’re ai because there’s it’s hard to make a living.
But, yeah, northern ai, like the wolves from Canada, most of them are pretty big, and same with the the everything. Yeah.
Well, it’s a resource issue. Right? This is the reason why most people think, when they think of grizzly bears, grizzly bears have a very similar size, but then you get to coastal brown bears. Right. They’re much larger. And it’s really just access to protein. Right?
Yeah. You got I’ve been up to to McNeil to watch the bears and oh my god. They’re just enormously fat. They’re almost obscene waddling around with the rolls. You know? Because you live and sit.
Good old time hibernating.
Yeah. And they’re they’re they’re so content because they have endless food resources. That’s why you can have tourists go out and sit sit and watch grizzly bears feeding within 100 yards of you ai eating saloni, and you’re under no danger. Why would they bother you when they have the thousands of pounds of salmon in the river?
There’s a fantastic video. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it, but there’s a photographer, and he’s got, like, a little lawn chair set up, and he’s photographing all these enormous brown bears that are feeding off salmon. And this one walks up and gets as close to him as where Jaime is to us.
And it’s huge. And it just sits next to him. Oh my god. Sits next to him and looks down. Watch it. This is
it. Oh. Well, that’s a big bear.
look at that little folding chair. Oh ai god. I mean, just imagine that. That is literally where Jamie is. Oh, my God. And he doesn’t care at all about these people. It’s not thinking of them as a food source.
Now ai question is why did the bear bother?
Ai guess because he’s looking at the river. He doesn’t even care that the people were there. He’s just ai looking at the river going, let me take a nap here. So he just chills out. Oh, my God. I meh, any other time. So if you were in the middle of the forest and you saw that first of all, they wouldn’t be that big in the middle of the forest, But if you saw a bear like that in the middle of the forest, it’d be absolutely terrifying.
He’d be scared of you. You’d be scared of him.
You’d have your bear spray out.
Look at this guy. He’s so close. Yeah. And the bear just sort of walks off like Yeah. See you. Bye. Nice. Because he’s got so much food.
I kind of had a similar experience, McNeal. Not that close, but and close enough that I was uncomfortable. And I live with bears because I’m used to bears that have skinny resources, and they they’re voracious, and they’re pretty aggressive in the fall. They can be because they’re getting into hyperphagia where they got a good enough calories to hibernate.
And if you keep them from getting their calories, it it’s you or the hucklebird patch maybe or you or the the elk that you just hung in the woods the night before and you went back to get. That happens. People hang their game in the woods, and they go back the next sai, and the grizzly bears found it.
Have you ever heard Steve’s story of that?
You never oh my god. No. They were on a Fognac Island. Where’s that? It’s in Alaska. Okay. It’s, connected to it’s ai, one of the island chains that’s right near what is the big one where they find all the the big brown bears?
Sai it’s Kodiak. Right off of Kodiak. Mhmm. So they were elk hunting. And they shot an elk. And you you you’re talking about Elk
Yes. Elk hunting on a fognack. Yeah. It’s a very hard hunt.
Incredibly difficult hunt because of the terrain. It’s almost impossible to to traverse. So to get a few miles takes hours and hours and hours. So they go through this, either basically bushwhacking through this incredibly dense terrain. Mhmm. They find an elk. They shoot the elk, and then they’re very far from camp.
So they take some of the meat and then they hang the meat in the trees and, you know, they set up. They didn’t know that when they came back the next day that a bear had claimed that elk. So Of course. There’s a gut ai. There’s all sorts of stuff there for the bear. Obviously, the smell of the meat.
And so, they it took a long time to get where the bear was, and they all sat down. There’s a large group them because they were filming for this television show, my friend Ram Warren, my friend Sana Poutelis Mhmm.
then Steve and a few other people working on the crew. And they sit down to have lunch. And little do they know that there is an enormous, like, 11 foot bear that had claimed vatsal, and he comes running through the camp.
And one guy, our friend, Dartmouth, was actually on his back. The bear plowed through the camp and through the people and just I don’t think it recognized how many people were there, so it didn’t know exactly what to do. So he wound up literally on the back of a bear for, like, 10 to 15 yards Oh ai god. Before he fell off of it.
So then the bear goes in the woods and starts woofing. None of them had their guns out. None of them were ready. They were just eating lunch. They really fucked up. They ram a a huge tactical error.
They also ignored scat, which would they they weren’t sure, like, whether or not that was a bear that had recently Yeah. Yeah. Been, you know so they were there for quite a while, guns drawn, like, trying to fend off this bear. Yeah. So they eventually got out of there.
But both Steve Vrinella and Remy Warren have told the story on my podcast, and it’s Wow. Bone chilling.
Oh, yeah. I I hadn’t heard that when I
saw Steve. Speak said that this thing was literally feet from his head, gnashing its teeth as it’s running through the camp. And it’s enormous. Just the he said, you have all these thoughts in your mind of what you would do and how you would feel. And he said, it’s just reptilian.
Like, your your brain goes to the the most base survival. There’s a recognition of this enormous predator, unbelievably sobering experience.
Yes. And what I would point out with that is that that bear had every chance in the world to kill every one of those ai.
It didn’t hurt any of them.
Well, it was just trying to protect its its kill. Right. It thought it was its. But Ai he his theory was that the bear didn’t realize how many people were there. It didn’t matter.
Ram through the group. It didn’t know, like, who to hit. Like, Giannis hit in the face with trekking poles.
Hit the bear in the face? Hit
The face with trekking poles. Like, that close to
Shibu. Imagine a head that big No. That close, and you hit it with trekking poles. Right. Ah, and it just ran past them, probably ai not knowing what which one to target or what to do. Right. And then they got their guns out, and then I don’t know exactly how they eventually got to a point where they felt confident enough that they could walk
And then walk with meat on their back. Right. Right? So they have to they they went there to pack out, And they have all these guys so they can make the pack out a little bit easier. Terrifying. So now you’re walking even slower because you’ve got £50 on your back.
Maybe they left a little behind.
Yeah. That’s a good move. Ai meh, yeah. I probably would have. Leave the shoulders and the neck.
Yeah. Leave something. Ai. At least something to fill them up.
My point is that bear could’ve run through and killed one of them or all of them in a moment of anger. It it didn’t. It did a bluff charge. It turned around. It woofed and gnashed its teeth. And Yeah. And it could have killed him, seriously. Sure.
Even if they had their guns, it would have killed 1 or 2 of them.
Right. And then we have this happen a lot in Montana. Every year, at least one person is killed by a bear or many are can be injured. And the thing that’s common is they say the bear charged them and, you know, before that, it was woofing. And a lot of times, they do what’s called a bluff charge.
But people don’t wanna wait till a bear is 15 feet away to figure out if it’s a bluff charge or not, so they shoot them. And I bear sprays is very, very effective, because you can do a longer distance, and it’s accurate. But I I personally don’t the ai the science shows and many of your listeners won’t believe this, the science shows that average hunter is better off with a bear spray than a firearm.
But in a moment of panic, you can’t say what you would do. Better off to survive? To survive with less injury or at least fit less fatal. And people have sprayed a bear that’s in attacking somebody, and the bear breaks off and leaves. Of course, you gotta deal with the after have you ever been around bear spray pepper spray?
Oh my god. Ai maybe we didn’t
We we pepper sprayed a bunch of people on Fear Factor once.
Oh, it’s it’s awful. How did you
get everybody to go off camera and get Yeah.
You run away because the the actually, it
It was tear sai. Oh. Now that I’m meh. Okay. So what we did, we put these people in this, like, this cement structure. It was ai, how long can you tolerate it? Ai I forget exactly what the stunt was, but the wind took a lot of it and blew it through the crew, and we were all running away, and it was in your eyes.
And I’m sure to your ai, it’s probably pretty similar to the effects that you get from pepper spray.
I think pepper spray yeah. It might even be worse. Otherwise, they’d have tear gas for bear repellent, and they don’t. They have pepper spray.
It’s it’s bad. But I’m just saying and people can argue this since and it all depends on the situation. But in general, bear spray is a more effective tool because you can spray it 3 times past where you’re sitting.
bear hits that speak, and they run away. And and Ai guess I’ve heard the bear ai say to me, try shooting a rolling tire at 40 miles an hour and see how accurate your shots arya, because that’s what you’re shooting at if a bear’s charging you.
And it’s difficult to keep your act together.
That’s the big problem Right. Is panic.
Right. It it’s not it’s not necessarily the killing pector. It’s just that you’re not gonna hit very well.
Whereas if you have bear spray, it’s just this cloud you’re spraying out.
It’s Yeah. It’s more effective.
So It’s like you had a flamethrower.
I always carry bear spray when I’m hiking.
No. Really? Unless I’m bird hunting.
Do you ever does bear spray work on cats?
I’ve heard it, and I have never heard about it being used on wolves because, generally, wolves aren’t sneaking around. But I if I had a cat stalking me, ai, boy, you bet I’d have my bear spray out.
You’ve never been in a situation where you had a cat stalking you or close to you?
Oh, that’s what’s scary. Right? Mhmm. Exactly.
No. Not really. No. I had one kill my dog in Colorado. Aw. Little dog. Little tiny. Sorry.
It was a bummer. But there’s a big difference, I think, between what you see and what’s there.
Oh, yeah. I think if if you had infrared vision for heat detector and you could see what’s out in the woods, you’d never go outside to take a leak when you’re at your cabin.
You probably wouldn’t. No.
Because they are so aware of you.
And everything’s out there.
We’re basically almost blind.
You know? And especially at nighttime, we’re almost ai. And they have senses that are beyond our wildest imagination.
Like, we were ai we were talking earlier today, where someone brought up, that stuff that hunters use to spray on them to, to kill their scent. I go, listen to me. That shit is nonsense. First of all, whatever that stuff is, they’re gonna smell that stuff. Exactly. And it’s not gonna hide your scent.
Ai you look, I don’t know the science behind it. I don’t wanna kill anybody’s business, but I as you were with the wolf thing, I’m super skeptical that a deer or an elk is not gonna smell you Yeah. If you spray some junk that you bought from Cabela’s on you. I I
know I don’t kill anybody’s business either, but I can tell you from traps too. I do the same thing. I’m incredibly careful about scent, but they can still smell it. It’s just be more care be as careful as you can be. But, ai.
I mean I just don’t think we can even imagine the kind of scents that they have, the kind of ability to smell and hear with those enormous ears Mhmm. And those noses and those eyes they can see at night. Mhmm. I think we’re just guessing, and we’re try it’s almost like when you try ai imagine the size of the universe and someone says, oh, it’s 13,700,000,000 years old.
It’s ai light years and, like, okay. How big is that? Like, you know, your head just someone tried to explain it to me in a way that that actually resonated that it’s similar to how you can smell skunk except much more directional. You know, like, a skunk can die a mile away and you can smell it, which is really weird because there’s no other scent like that in the nature No.
That you can pick up at one animal, sprays one thing Mhmm. A mile away, and you’re driving in your car.
And you’re like, oh, you smell that?
Skunk around here, which is crazy. But now what this guy was saying to me is now imagine that, but directional and better. Yeah. And vatsal, like, what a bear can do.
Or a wolf. Yeah. And Ai I’ve read studies. And if the wind is right, I’ve read several miles sai you can smell
It is unbelievable. And yeah. I Incredible. Yeah. I think, yeah, the whole scent thing. We just it’s way beyond our our ability to detect. And when Ai been burying these traps after being so careful with everything, and I have it’s kind of voodoo and science mix. It’s art and science, and you bury everything. You bury the trap, the hook, the grapple cable. I mean, just everything, and then you cover it up.
And it’s been in the ground 2 weeks. Nothing’s disturbed. And then one day, sai where a wolf has come by, taken its paw, dug at the backside of the trap and lifted it out by the spring and pulled it up onto the trail, not snapped, and then there’d be a scat 2 feet away.
Wow. Like, fuck you. Yeah. Wow.
Well, maybe because they know it’s there, and they probably have had some experience in their life with traps.
But why mess with it at all if they know it’s dangerous?
Right. I mean yeah. Would you think it’s sai they’re trying to, like, tell people Ai not that stupid?
My my imagination and my theory is that maybe this is a wolf that’s already caught been caught, and it’s got other pack members that are naive.
stops because it smells it’s like, oh, man. I know what this is. I maybe it’s time to show junior what’s going on here, and maybe they pull it up. I I don’t know.
Have you ever seen the video of, they caught a rat and the rat takes a stick and blows the mouse trap sai it can get the food?
Rat the rat actually brought over a tool to spring the trap and purposely springs it.
I haven’t seen the video, but I
watched that for a while. The problem Sai have with the video is I don’t know the source. So I don’t know if they trained this rat. I don’t know if
Right. So they maybe done that just to make a viral video, but it’s still pretty extraordinary that this rat figures out it could take a speak, and it, like, moves it and puts the stick on the rat trap. The rat trap springs Yeah. And then it goes over to and ai the way, it doesn’t even flinch when the rat trap springs, which is Shitting. No.
We’ll see if we can find it, Jamie. So It’s really weird. Yeah. This is it. Oh. So he smells it. Yeah. He smells it.
Yeah. So he goes away, and I’ll check this. Now the the thing about him not flinching is the craziest. Sai he gets a speak.
Lifts it up and drops it. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t flinch at all. Isn’t that insane? I mean, imagine you’re a wild animal. Trained. It seems like it. Something. Something. Maybe he’s done it before. But there was something weird about it where Yeah. He must have known that that’s going to happen.
And the camera with the full eye reflection sitting indoors in the room, that doesn’t that doesn’t smack of wildness to me that something is Well,
it’s rats. It’s not really wild. Right? They’re domesticated in some sort of a weird way. Yeah. Well, you know, there’s as close to as many rats as there are people in New York City, by weird estimations, which I’m sure they don’t have a good accurate account of how many rats there are.
But there’s so many of them. And there’s an amazing documentary called Rats that’s on Netflix, and it’s really good. And it it shows you how intelligent they are. And one of the things they do is they take the young brash rats and they meh them go try the food out first to see if it’s poison, because because they’ve been poisoned so many times.
Wow. So they look at this young dummy. It’s ai, oh, eat it. But send Sam. Sam’s a Sam’s a dumbass.
So Sam the rat runs over and and eats the poison and gets sick and they’re ai, let’s get out of here, and they take off. But they have some very bizarre survival instincts that’s highly tuned to this recognition that they’re being at least tried not preyed upon necessarily, but something’s trying to kill
And then they’re not eating them, but it’s some weird situation where it’s poison. So they figured out what poison is.
So they’ll send a a dummy to go out a young guy to go out and eat the poison.
Give it to Mikey. Mikey likes everything. There’s not
I meh, like, what kind of natural adaptation is that? And, like, what is that from? Is this ai there’s a I’m I’m sure you’re aware of this, but there’s a very bizarre study that they’ve done where there’s a thing there’s a concept called morphic resonance, and the idea is that once one animal learns this, the other animals will learn it easier.
And that this is scientifically bryden, and that the ai is that there’s some sort of a sharing of information Mhmm. That is not local and that we don’t totally understand. So the Ai the concept is the way it’s been proven is that rats on one side of the country, if they go through a maze, the rats on the other side of the country will go through the maze quicker.
The exact same maze. Sai if you can find that. Sai they don’t know what the what this is. Like, you know, I think we have a very naive belief that the senses that we have recognized, all of them, whether they’re sight, sound, touch, taste, whatever they are Mhmm. This is it. This is all that’s available. Mhmm. And that the concept might the idea is that there might be something that we’re missing Mhmm.
Or something that we really Yeah. We as dumb blind human beings in terms of our ability to see things Mhmm. We don’t have the ability to tune in to what these animals can tune into.
I think there’s a huge portion of our brain that we never never touch, and I think animals are more tuned in. Ai think in many ways, many species are smarter than us just because they can sense their environment more acutely.
Yeah. Maybe smart is not the right word.
But there’s something. Rat learning and morphic morphic resonance. Yeah. So according to the hypothesis, formative, formative causation, there’s no difference in ai between innate and learned behavior. Both depend on motor fields given by morphic resonance. The ai, therefore, admits a possible transmission of learned behavior from one animal to another and leads to a testable prediction which differs or to testable predictions which differ not only from those of the orthodox theory of inheritance, but also from those of the Lamarckian Lamarckian theory and from inheritance through epigenetic epigenetic modifications of gene expression.
So animals of an inbred strain are placed under conditions in which they learn to respond to a given stimulus in in a characteristic way. They are then made to repeat this pattern of behavior many ai. X ai sai new behavioral field, which will be reinforced by morphic residents, will not only cause the behavior of the trained animals to become increasingly habitual, but will also affect, though less specifically, any similar animal exposed to a similar stimulus.
The larger the number of animals in the past that have learned the task, the easier it should be for the subsequent similar animals to learn it. Therefore, in an experiment of this type, it should be possible to observe a progressive increase in the rate of learning not only in the animals descended from trained ancestors, but also in genetically similar animals descended from untrained ancestors.
This is pretty wild stuff.
So it’s it it just speaks to this we’re I I think we naively look at our senses as being the only ones that are available. There’s obviously some kind of communication that transpires between animals that allows them to hunt in packs. Mhmm. Right? Particularly wolves. Ai, they have strategies.
They do things. Like, they know how to corner animals. They know how to funnel them into, like, pinch points. Mhmm. They do it on purpose, and they seem to be aware of what they’re doing through whether it’s gestures or pheromones or something Mhmm. That we’re just guessing on.
But they’re accomplished at it. It’s not like a singular individual event that you could point to, like, maybe that was just dumb luck. They ran the deer through this area and the other wolves just happened to be there. No. No.
They’re they have specific tasks where they have wolves that’ll get on the top of the ridges and let themselves be known so they get these animals running. And then the other wolves are ahead of them, and then they have wolves that fall behind them.
The Yellowstone’s been a great place to observe hunting. I mean, when I was working up northwest Montana, it’s heavily forested. We never almost never got to watch wolves chasing prey unless we’re in the airplane. But in in the Lamar, you got scopes and everybody’s watching it.
And I’ve seen some pretty incredible chases. And there’s certain in some packs, certain individuals are the chasers, the younger animals, and some of the individuals are the coup de grace. They go in for the kill after the animal’s been tired. And I guess there was some older animals that are too vatsal, potentially, to risk being injured early on, but they they jump join in the chase, and they know how to kill an animal.
So and Ai one thing I’ve always wondered I don’t know if this is with the morphic resonance, but, I that’s something different maybe. But I’ve always wondered when wolves were first walking down from Canada and dispersing from glacier before wolves were reintroduced sana there was a a very thin population of wolves out there, how do they know where to go?
For for example, there is a wolf pack in the ai tyler, it’s a river drainage ai of Missoula. And this pair this pair of wolves had formed a a mating system, and they had a litter of pups. The female was poached on Memorial Day, which is those pups arya born in middle April. So they were pretty young. They were 5, 6 weeks old.
They were still dependent on mom. And the concern was that the dad wouldn’t be able to raise those pups because he’s gotta go out and hunt. And they meh be they’re just being weaned and blah blah blah. Well, 2 weeks 2 weeks after the female was dead, my colleague, Mike, who was working down there sai, hey, Diane. Are you missing any collared wolves from Glacier?
I said, yeah. I’m missing several that I don’t know where they went. He says, because I just had a collared wolf show up here and join the ai Tyler Male. I said, really? I said, well, here’s my list of frequencies of the missing wolves that had been missing. And he put ran through the receiver and listened.
And one of those wolves was one that Ai caught in Glacier and disappeared 6, 7 months earlier. So, like so she wandered around in not cyberspace, but mountain space ai to look for a place to fit in. And all of a sudden, when this female gets shot, boom. She’s there to fill in the slot. Wow. How does that happen?
And that happens in Yellowstone too where, one of the breeding animals
be killed, and very soon after, ai wolf of unknown well, there, they know a lot of the wolves. But a wolf would just show up the right gender, the right age, and and potentially bond and start a new pack. How do they know? And I guess all I can say is with that, there’s scent.
The wolf smelling the urine, the scat can detect all kinds of things hormonally and the the the dominance of an animal. If the female went missing, all of a sudden they won’t smell it anymore, and maybe it’s a male a female coming in and she knows it. But, geographically, how do they know how to migrate?
200 miles and show up exactly when the other wolf disappears.
Well, they’ve been trying to figure out forever what’s going on with birds. Mhmm. And how birds, like sandhill cranes, for example.
Yeah. I mean, Canadian geese. Like, what what’s going on? Like, how are these birds figuring out these incredible migration paths?
Right. It’s amazing to me. So have you ever heard of the book called World on the Wing by Paul I think the last name is Bryden, now it’s something. It’s about the world of ai. It it is mind boggling. If you like to read nature stuff and science, it’s it’s written so anybody can enjoy.
You don’t have to be a scientist. But it’s fascinating full of facts about the world of bird migration and how they get places in, like, a particular important flat in China that was critical habitat for a group of birds suddenly gets developed, and it’s like the wintering ground for half a 1000000 of these birds or whatever it was.
And, certainly, where do they go?
Right. I don’t know. Migratory birds are very fascinating.
And Like, what are they following? And then what GPS do they have in their little tiny brains? They have little tiny brains. I know. But meh, they’re able to use something. Like, there’s a theory that it’s the magnetic poles.
Right. Or the stars or whatever.
The stars. Really? I never heard that one.
I just heard a lot of stuff. I’m I’ve had I remember yeah. 1 winter Oh, crazy. One winter night, I was at my little remote cabin, and it was at Moose City. And it was stormy, and it was, like, November. It was stormy. And I I went outside to use the outhouse, and I heard this calling.
And it was dark and stormy, and I it was calling and calling and got closer and closer. And I put my bright flashlight straight up, And there was a flock of snow geese. I never seen snow geese up there. Never. And they were circling around, and they were lost in the storm. Wow.
And there’s no lights up there except for my house light and my flashlight, and they were circling around the meadow. And I I listened to that haunting call, and I thought, how are they gonna survive it? This is the valley bottom. Are they gonna try and go up over the mountaintops in the storm? Are they gonna ram land in the meadow for the night?
Anyway, I got to thinking about them. I thought, why are how did they get here? They got blown off course. I just shut my light off, and I don’t know what happened to them. Never saw them again.
But I think about these birds. A lot of them die migrating.
You know these birds that fly across the entire ocean?
Mind boggling. They sleep while they’re flying.
I know. I wish I could do that when I was driving. I try sometimes.
There’s one one of them is a very
That’s right. Albatross. And they they literally sleep while they’re soaring across the sky.
Just put out those big old wings.
Yeah. For months or years.
I mean, it’s crazy. Right?
Like, what are you doing? So Why are you doing that?
Here. Albatross can fly nonstop for over 16,000 kilometers. Wow. That is so crazy. For example, a gray headed albatross flew 13,600 and 70 miles around the world in 46 days in 2005. Oh meh god. That’s crazy. Bryden albatross can travel 1600 miles on foraging trips to feed their chicks. Large albatross species can spend up to 5 years at sea.
Albatross can go up to 6 years before returning to the island where they were born to mate and lay eggs. Unbelievable.
Yeah. I got to see albatross one time when I was down I think where was it? It was down I think it was New Zealand, but they were amazing. I like the
It’s crazy here where it’s talking about how they’re they can fly over vast areas without flapping their wings.
They just use the ai, expending almost none of their own. Wow.
So it it would be interesting to me I would hope the day would come with wolves and other large carnivores where people learn about the ai, and they get just as excited as this instead of the wolves have killed all the deer now. Well, I think there’s a there’s
a narrative in this country. Right? Yeah. And I think the narrative is, first of all, they were killed off Yes. A long time ago by poison, by ranchers, and by settlers. And because of that, we grew up with this narrative that they had to kill off the wolves. So then these damn hippies come and vote and bring and I wanted to ask you about that too.
What your feeling is on biology that’s done by vote, which is how informed are these people that are casting this vote? Mhmm. How emotional is this and how much of this these decisions that people are making? Ai, one of them being, that I think was, like, particularly egregious was the delisting of grizzly bears in PC.
Because I have a good friend who lives up there, and he’s ai, there’s a lot of grizzly bears up there. They’ll still allow black bear hunting.
But they’re not controlling the grizzly bear population because the people in Vancouver or the that’s the large population. They have the most votes. They decided who gotta outlaw what they call trophy hunting.
And so biology by vote, by people that probably don’t know anything about what’s going on and they don’t have to other than have this emotional emotional response. Mhmm. But I think going back to what we’re talking about is that we have this narrative that the wolves are bad, the wolves were killed off for a good reason.
We don’t want wolves. Oh, my god. People are bringing back wolves. What are they doing? We sana kill those damn wolves.
And so there’s a there’s a good percentage of the population that lacks this nuanced perspective of the complexity of the ecosystem and how first of all, how amazing it is to be able to see wolves. Mhmm. Like, if if you’re a per I’ve never seen them in the wild. I saw one once in Kitchen? Yeah. In Alberta, but it was so brief. Yeah.
It was dusk. It was, like, it was actually after last ai. So it was running across this dirt road. Ai I was, like, is that
A wolf. There are a lot of wolves up there. Yeah.
of camera trap photos of these wolves. So that’s most likely what it was. And they give out wolf tags. You can get as many wolf tags as you want up there. But good luck finding 1, you know. They’re a lot smarter than you or a lot better at living in the woods than you are. Yes.
But we have these these ideas that are ingrained in us that the wolves were killed off for a good reason, and they’re only being brought back because of morons.
Well, you summed that up pretty well.
Isn’t that how people feel about it?
Yes. So couple of things. I, as a wolf, conservationist, I guess, I’d sai, and researcher
I love wolves. I love dogs. I love foxes.
love white tyler. Ai love wildlife. That’s better. And I’m kind of in the middle, but, obviously, I’m passionate about wolves. And I lead lean towards whatever we need to do to ensure that they continue as a species. I’m not saying they’re gonna live in Iowa and Texas. I’m just saying there’s places that they can live, where they more likely belong. I’m just gonna put it that way.
But I am not in favor of reintroductions, and I was not in favor of the Yellowstone and the Vatsal Idaho reintroductions, which usually surprises people because I promote wolf conservation. But I felt that wolves were coming down on their own from Canada. And before those wolves were ever reintroduced, by 1995, we had, like, 8 packs of wolves in the state of Montana. 70, ai wolves.
And you can Google that with the US Fish and Wildlife Service early reports. They were making it, and I feel like some of these places where reintroductions are happening because of ballot box initiatives, like Colorado, wolves are already starting to get to Colorado, and the people who are wolf proponents say we want them reintroduced because they’ll never make the great desert across Wyoming.
They’ll all be killed. They can’t make it. Well, a few of them have, and they even made pups in 19 I think it was 2020 or 2021. And then this wolf was did I tell you about the wolf from Michigan? Yeah.
The wolf that was killed, trapped in Colorado this year that came from the Great Lakes. My god. How did it get there? But it did. So I feel sort of that Colorado is on the cusp of natural recovery. If it’s gonna be 1 year or 10 years or 50 years, it’s a time issue.
And I think the same was true for Yellowstone in Central Idaho. They were already getting to those places. Wolves had already been seen, 2 of them confirmed, in in and around Yellowstone Park ai 1991 or 2 before they were reintroduced. And my wolves going to yell to Idaho, It’s just a slower wave, and people sana jump start this with reintroducing wolves.
Well, in my humble opinion, I’m not a psychologist, but I think that social tolerance of humans for anything is better when it isn’t forced on them. I don’t like having things forced on me. Nothing. Yeah. So when you force wolves on somebody, it’s was gonna meet with human resistance.
If they walk there on their own, I believe they will get there. Our ai has shown that they do. It just takes longer. The other thing of interest about the reintroductions is that people think the wolf loving hippies pushed to have the wolves reintroduced into Yellowstone in Idaho.
I’ll just say Yellowstone, but it’s the same. And to some point, it is that faction. But the reason it happened was because 2 conservative edit senators, one from Idaho, McClure, one from Ai. Simpson, very conservative ranching supporting base, promoted to Congress to pass laws to get those wolves reintroduced because they could see the writing on the wall that the wolves arya coming anyway.
And if they walked on there on their own, they’re gonna be fully endangered. Well, if we reintroduce them, they get a different classification called nonessential experimental population. Meaning, because humans put them there, you can manipulate them and kill them if they’re taking livestock. It’s just more flexible management.
So the senators thought we were getting there anyway. Let’s just put them in there. Really? So, yeah, that’s a little bit of the interesting background that people aren’t aware of with the reintroductions that it was really people way on the right and way on the left coming towards a common goal for different reasons.
Wanna see a crazy video of Wolf that was in Bakersfield? Yeah. In California. Yeah. My friend filmed this. So, this wolf, he was driving down the freeway in Bakersfield, California. And they looked off and there was this wolf. I’ve I’ve sent you this. Right, Jamie?
I have a video. We’ll replay
it before I try to see. Yeah. Do you think you still have it? I ai Cody sent it to me. I can I can find it? So my friend who was out there filmed this wolf off the highway, and this is ai 5 miles from an In N Out Burger. Sorry. Yeah. And it’s it’s in California. I mean, we’re talking about an hour 40 from Los Angeles. Oh, my gosh. Yeah.
And the he was speculating that perhaps this wolf was brought there by someone. Ram. It might be on my other phone. Did I send it to you, Jamie? I’m looking for I know I saved it. I’ll I can find it, but this might be a little bit of a pain in the ass. Maybe it’s here.
So this, this wolf was very cool looking, like this very big black wolf, and he’s, like, wandering around these cows. And then someone comes and shoos him away, and he runs off. Damn, I don’t have
Does he have a collar on?
I think I’ve read about this wolf. There’s a wolf that went down through the Vatsal California Valley and ended up going down through the Vineyard Country. Ai think it was probably that wolf that it was seen.
wolves there. People are super skeptical. Like, how would a wolf wind up there? But if you what what you’re saying in terms of the amount of land that they can travel on is
And so Hundreds and hundreds of miles.
Historically, back eons of time, wolves had the largest global distribution of any mammal in the world except people. I mean, wolves live from the Arctic to the prairies to the temperate forest to the Gaza Strip still. And they live There’s wolves
There’s wolves in the Netherlands right now. Wolves have expanded. They will live anywhere that we don’t kill them off because they did historically. I mean, there were wolves on Staten Island. I’m sure historically. Yeah. Now we have different wolves there. I know. But I’m thinking that yeah. Anyways, Speak Market.
Yeah. Exactly. That’s where I’m going. So, but they live anywhere because they can eat anything, but mostly what they need is is 4 legged hoofed mammals. Usually deer elk, caribou, most whatever, occasionally livestock. They need a place where they can secure that they can whelp and raise pups, and then they need a freedom of persecution from humans, being it traps, poison, shooting, whatever.
If you have enough of those three factors, they will be there. They I mean, they’ve been showing up in Iowa and Missouri and the Dakotas for years years now, but they they don’t make it because they get killed. But they’re
trying. Yeah. I I think I might have saved it under wolf if I look. There’s, like, videos.
I’d love to see that video.
Thing that you can do now with, your iPhone where you can just search for wolves?
You can search for stuff.
It showed me the werewolf in the lobby. It showed me all the pictures I have of Karl and Marshall.
It’s not showing you that one wolf. No.
But you you saw 1 or your friend did?
No. Our friend did. He filmed it. I know I had the video.
So if you get a chance, Joe, if you’re really interested in seeing wolves, just take a trip to Yellowstone and go, I would suggest, not in the summer because it’s it’s just crazy. I’d go in the winter. You can hire a hire a wolf tour guide or you can go on your own to stay in a hotel, but you gotta get up before dark.
It was just mountain lions crying. Oh, wow.
And you gotta go out dawn and dusk. In the wintertime, they’re easier to see because of the snow. And it’s really fun depending on the season. If you go in the fall, they got bigger pack because the pups are all still alive. You go in the winter, they got breeding behavior and stuff going on.
It’s just there’s always something to see. Just I I go there myself, but I know a lot of the wolf washers. I just drive the roads till I see people pulled over, and I get out and watch. And they might be a mile away. They might be 400 yards away.
But bring a scope, and I’d suggest you just hire a guide.
You’ll see wolves. Just be able
to hear them. It’d be cool.
Yes. I mean, it it’s amazing to hear them howling. Yeah.
One thing we did come across when I was hunting in BC, we’re moose hunting about 10 years ago or sai.
And we found, a calf that had been killed. And it was really interesting because, like, they’d stripped it down to the bryden. And what was wild was all the hair. There was hair everywhere. Ai like, I didn’t even think of that. Mhmm. Like, I didn’t think there’d be hair everywhere for some stupid reason.
How how long ago are they killed it? Was there anything left or not?
It was pretty recent. It was real recent, like, within the day. Yeah.
And you sure? I know that’s on my Instagram. Wasn’t it a
ai tail? Wolf kill. Yeah. Okay. My friend who was up there
I just asked because bear bears and lions both pluck and
strip hair off. Well, that that area had a lot of wolves.
And he was, he was very accustomed to finding, calves that were killed by wolves. We found it because of birds. Sure. Tyler birds were circling. Right. It’s like, let’s go see what’s over there.
Yeah. Magpies and and ravens are my best friends when I’m out looking for kills.
Yeah. Ain’t that interesting? Like, that’s how you find things. Yeah.
the birds. It is. Yeah. And how do they find it? Like, what you know?
So there’s been stories written, and there’s a guy, who does a lot of raven studies. Oh, his name escapes me right now.
Yeah. He’s done some really interesting studies of the ravens. And if you ever watched the videos of crows solving puzzles and ravens, oh my god. Incredible. Right? Next life, I wanna come back as a raven.
Not only do they solve puzzles, but they figure out how to raise water levels so they can get the food in a jar.
They drop rocks into the jar until the water level raises so they can get the food that’s floating.
Yeah. The raven guy’s name is Bernd Heinz. He’s German. Bernd as in Bernie with Bernd, Bernd and Heinz.
Yeah. Anyway, it’s cool stuff.
I mean, this is I mean, you and I are both obviously very interested in animals. We hunt our own food. But just when I’m out hunting, I feel a little bit like a predator. Not not a lot because I got a gun. But I watch the dogs who are basically predators.
And I watch animals in the landscape, and it just you see so much when you’re out hunting. I’m sure Mhmm. I mean, what’s the coolest animal you’ve ever seen when you’ve been out on the landscape? Hiking or hunting or anything?
That mountain lion that we saw might have been the coolest. That was the coolest. But I saw a badger once. I got I got filmed with that. I actually got out of the truck and got next to him, got close to him, then he started coming towards me and I ran. Ai was like, what am I what is wrong
with me? Like, what am I stupid? They’re blonde wolverines. That’s really what they are.
He looked fucking terrifying. And not very big, but, like, ferocious.
I’ve caught a couple of wolf traps. Such a cool looking animal.
I just couldn’t imagine that I was seeing one, like it was in Utah. Uh-huh. I’m seeing one in the wild. I’ve seen I saw 1 grizzly, and
It looked at me so much different than any bear I’ve ever looked at. Ai hunted black bear before, and I’ve been around black bear many, many times. And I’ve this is the first grizzly, and it was so different the way it looked at me.
This is in BC. No. Excuse me. This is in Alberta. And this one was not a big one. He was about 6 feet tall.
But he looked through me. It looked different. Like, a a black bear looks like, who are you? What’s this? What are you doing over there? Are you food? Are you gonna kill me? What are we doing? They’re a little sketched out because they’re not the top of the food chain. The grizzlies are. Right.
And so the grizzly looked at me like this, ai, right at me. We had shotguns. We screamed at him and He
Yeah. And my friend Jen, she slammed a stick against the tree, like, get out of here, bear, and cocked the shah. The bear took off, but it was the difference in looking in their face. They just have a totally different look. They look at you like this.
Like, am I gonna get you right now? It’s just sana grizzly has a hard life. It’s not like that brown bear that has all those salmon that’s sitting by the river. Those grizzlies are out there, like, trying to survive. Yeah.
Our grizzlies in the Rocky Mountains are quite small compared to the coastal brown bears and the same species.
But, they’re very different, and they they have to make a living. I mean, if you had to make your living picking huckleberries and eating gut piles in the fall, it’d be skinny. And they have to they have to put on a lot of weight.
Well, that to me is so fascinating how animals chain they change their behavior based on the amount of resources that are available Mhmm. And and whether or not they’re ai, like the Yellowstone elk that are habitualized, that are just around people hanging out with them.
And Banff. You ever been to Banff in the fall? No.
I haven’t, but I’ve seen photos.
They’re bugling and mating on the post office ai. Literally.
It’s smart for them, though.
hunters. Right. And people just pull over to pull their phones out and film them.
Yeah. I think the wolves I think I’ve heard of occasionally wolves find out and they sneak into town at night.
Well, weren’t you telling a story on Steve Rinnell’s podcast about a very nice neighborhood of, like, these nice homes and these wolves that ai to set up shop?
Yes. It was a closed gated community, between Whitefish and Kalispell, and they had their pups in this closed gated community because there’s no hunting. It’s unlimited green space and undeveloped forest because people have McMansions, and they have huge acreage, and it’s just quiet time.
There there’s not a a safer place, and the people there like them because they had don’t have livestock. They’re usually not hunters. And they there’s great, except then they grow up and they have to leave, the wolves. Right. You know?
So then they go out in the real world and then they get their asses kicked.
Yeah. Right. That’s a problem because then you’re like a wolf growing up in a gated community literally. Right.
And you’ve learned that people are okay.
You learned that people are okay and there’s deer everywhere. Right? Because the deer know that people are okay and the deer are not used to wolves being there.
Right. It it’s really interesting. Yeah. That pack didn’t make it. I’m not surprised. Right. But it was just so interesting to me how adaptable wolves are. You know, when I first started this business, I come from Minnesota, and the wolves lived only in the northern third or quarter of the state where it was Boundary Water Canoe Area and really wild because any place else, they got killed off.
So I always thought these wolves were denizens of the wilderness, and they would only live where it was incredibly wild. And they’ve come to show us that’s not true. They will live wherever we’ll tolerate them. And, that could be it I mean, there were wolves in Texas not that long ago. Red red wolves.
So they were here, but, you know, they they’re just not tolerated.
How much of a problem is it where they kill pets? It’s a ai mountain lion issue, especially in Northern California. Yeah. One place outside of San Francisco, they did an analysis of the diet of mountain lions that they had captured, and it was 50% pets.
But, of course, it’s a ai survey because it’s by San Francisco. So it’s not
yeah. But it’s just fascinating. They had actively chosen to hunt pets.
If I was a mountain lion living near San Francisco, I’d be eating poodles and chihuahuas and cats. Yeah. Absolutely. Easy prey. There are a lot of them. Yep. Nobody’s gonna shoot you in California. It’s illegal. It’s a it’s a charmed life until you get run over in the freeway.
probably one of the reasons why you don’t hear about that in Texas. Texas because in Texas, they’re like vermin. You know, you can shoot as many mountain lions as you want. If you shoot see a mountain lion, you shoot them just like a coyote.
It’s just that’s interesting. I didn’t know that in Texas.
So need a tag. You don’t need anything. Really?
Yep. It’s amazing they’re still hanging on.
I found out that it was on the Adam Greentree episode of 2015.
You see the white white triangle?
You see the white triangle on the chest?
That indicates to me it’s a younger wolf because the pups can be born yeah. Can you wind that back again? Yeah. Thanks.
So this is my friend, Cody, filmed this off the highway.
So he had a scope, you know, ai, you know, a spotting scope. Yeah. Yeah. And he put awesome a phone. Look at that. That’s amazing.
So the white chevron pups younger wolves have that. And as they get older, like the rest of us, they get gray, and that doesn’t stand out so much. So it’d probably be a yearling, maybe a 2 year old wolf.
Interesting. So what their speculation is you know, he works on a ranch. Wow. Their speculation is that someone released that, and they think these rogue wildlife lovers are really look. Cows right there. That these rogue wildlife lovers are releasing wolves, to try to force some sort of a reintroduction into Vatsal California.
I know for a fact that there was a wild wolf that was tracked going down through vatsal into Bakersfield. I don’t know if it’s black or gray, but I know there was one.
So it’s not unprecedented?
No. No. It’s not. My friend, Kent Bryden, does the wolf work in California. He’s a ai. Used to be in Montana and Idaho. And, no, they’re they’re making a comeback. I think there’s 6 packs now, and they’re doing really well.
Mostly Northern California?
Northern California. And yeah. And there’s lots of conflict because they can’t they can’t I’m pretty darn sure. They cannot kill the wolves that are killing ai, so it’s set up for a conflict. Kinda like in California. Right. They’re having some management flexibility in California.
I mean, in Colorado. But so far I mean, they just now so a pair of wolves that they reintroduced found each other and made a speak, and they had the only litter of pups known to be in in Colorado this year. I believe both of those wolves came from Oregon, and they both had livestock killing experience before they chose them to release, which is really unfortunate.
Sai the dilemma was, okay. They did okay until people started calving. And now there’s little calves on the ground. And now the wolves are coming in, and they’re starting to kill calves. And then they might kill, heifer or some. And, anyway, they’re killing livestock.
So what do you do? You got a male and a female and a litter of pups, and they have started a history of killing livestock. What do you do with them when the the the slight majority of people in Colorado, the ballot box initiative stuff, want to see all the worst protected and a slight minority.
It’s, like, ai half to 50a half or something sana them removed. And the people in the middle are trying to figure out what to do, so they went and captured them and put them in a holding facility for a ai, then they’re gonna release them later. Well, you still have a problem.
Because they still are habitualized.
They will will probably likely to continue killing livestock. Ai hard
to find other ranchers reimbursed? Like, is there a fund for that?
In Montana, there is. I presume yeah. There is in Colorado. Yeah. They’re reimbursed, but as I’ve worked with ranchers, and they said, I didn’t raise in my cows for your damn wolves to kill them. I don’t care. I don’t want the money. I just don’t want the wolves here. And No.
And sometimes when you’re working with, a renter community, that’s the only common denominator you have is you’re out there because you don’t want their cows killed because then wolves have to get killed. They don’t want their cows killed because they didn’t they raised them for all these generations. They have a genetic a good pool genetically. They invested.
So you have the same that’s the same common goal. And you might have different reasons to come to that goal, but that’s how you work with people. You know how it is. Yeah. Yeah. There’s always a common denominator, Always.
I was watching a documentary about this guy who lived with wolves, like, lived with wolves in some contained ai, and he would, like, set up a fake kill where he would eat the liver sai he could be, like, the dominant male and he would growl at them. It’s really
Yeah. You’re right. Thanks. I’m I’m with you. Anyway, this gentleman who was a wolf expert was then, recruited to try to help, a sheepherder with wolves that had moved in to take over his flock. And one of the strategies they used is giant speakers. So they took speak, and they played sounds of wolves to scare off these other wolves.
And so then he goes back to the pack and tries to be the alpha again, and they corner ai and snarl at him. And he had a whimper, and and he had to be it’s a very weird documentary because this is some sort of a strange fenced in environment that they’ve created where these wolves are living.
Yeah. Sounds a bit like Timothy Treadwell, the good
Ferriss. Very, very, very similar. Boop boop boop boop boop. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Ai think that that that’s from the movie, the Werner Herzog another Werner Herzog film, Grizzly Man.
Ai think Oh, that was amazing.
Amazing movie. And an unintentional comedy. Maybe intentional. I think it was a little bit intentional. Because there’s there’s a few cuts in there where you’re ai, that he had to know that was funny. And that I think that was Sai by Baer. Yeah. That’s what I think.
Yeah. I think that guy and the girlfriend, unfortunately. Yeah. But I think that guy wanted to ai, and I think he wanted to die that way. Yeah. This he had to know.
But what I’ll say is captive wolf facilities, and Ai gonna have many people who love their captive wolves, But captive animal behavior and wild wolf behavior have some parallels, but they’re not the same.
And that guy doing this thing with would never happen with wild wolves.
Right. Impossible. No. They would never tolerate that. Yeah. No. It’s it it’s it’s a weird bastardization of reality.
Yeah. And many many people I did part of my career earlier helping to try and keep wolves out of ai. And we put out we put out sirens, and we put out blinking lights and and bought raw cowhide patches and raw hamburger and laced it with lithium chloride, which is a toxin that makes you violently ill right away.
It’s not gonna kill you. The idea being that these wolves would eat this baits wrapped with string and taste all this wonderful beef burger and taste the hide and then associate that bad experience of vomiting your guts out for 24 hours or whatever to the animal on the hoof out there.
That’s a great idea for how your human brain works. It didn’t they just ate every bait we put out, and there’s piles of puke everywhere.
They they don’t think like we think.
Right. And that one guy rancher I was working with, we were putting out the baits, whatever. I had and I did the sirens, and I did what’s called fladry. And fladry is and they used it in Europe in places like Poland to hunt wolves where you hang streamers down from fences. And you start out with a really wide funnel in the woods, and the hunters used to drive the wolves through the forest with people at the end with guns.
And they would see the flattery, and it would be quite a ways apart, like, a mile or 2 or something. And they wouldn’t cross the flatter because it scared them. And they get to the end, and it’s like shooting pheasants at the end of a cornfield.
So people have taken that idea to try and keep wolves out of, like, calving pens in specific areas where the livestock are confined. It doesn’t work well when they’re out in free range. And it works pretty well. So I was out working with this pasture guy in Northern Minnesota, and he had a long skinny pasture.
And I had out got highway blinking lights that came on at night and the fladry, and he was so kind. He let me this is a lot of years ago. It’s just this young story, I think. So I stopped in to visit him, and I said, well, I know you had a you had a you had a loss. You got a calf.
I said, have any the wolves been back? And he looked at meh, and he says, well, no, hon. They haven’t been back. He says I said, do you think the blinking lights are working on your pastor? He says, well, I don’t know, but I damn near had a plane land here last night.
I broke up laughing. He broke up laughing. It was just ai, yeah. It was a tough job. Let’s just have some fun here.
But, again, he didn’t like wolves. I didn’t want him killing his cows, and that was a common factor to try and keep them apart. But
What are the cons when there’s pros and cons for reintroduction of wolves? What what do you think the cons are?
re ai, the reintroduction in Colorado, the reintroduction in Yellowstone?
I believe, potentially, a decreased human tolerance. And the wolves don’t have a learning curve. They’re taken from one place and then, boop, they’re popped there versus if they kind of ai. They were down. They run this gauntlet. They kinda have to learn on the way to be successful to get there.
They have to learn to avoid livestock pens or whatever they have to learn and stay a little more secretive. So that’s just my belief that when they’re making on their own, they’ve been smart enough to get there. Whereas when you just put them there, you’re gonna forever have people believing they’re they don’t belong there. They’re not native.
So the problem is in the perceptions of the people that are encountering the wolves or they’re impacted by the wolves being there.
I believe so. Yeah. And so, for example, now we’ve got wolves in the they arya put into, a total of 66 wolves have put into Idaho and Wyoming, and another 10 were added to Wyoming for Montana. But it’s a very small number of wolves. But now wolves have taken over Washington, Oregon, California. They’ve made a few made it to Colorado.
They’re trying to get into Utah if you have been shot there. And all those wolves came from this introduced population, some ram Montana. But they’ll never be considered native.
Which is crazy because they used to be native.
And the wolves that were taken for the sources, like I explained earlier, they’re taken from an area that wolves from Glacier Park walk to. They are one population, but there’s a belief socially because they were put there. They’re not native. They’re Canadian super wolves.
I heard the crazy stories. Like, these wolves weigh a £175, and they were selected out of all the wolves captured. They took the ones that were the most aggressive so that when they put them on the ground, they would survive everything. It’s like, oh ai god. No.
Well, that sounds ridiculous, but it is kind of crazy to me that if you wanted a wolf reintroduction to be successful, why would you take animals that have a history of predation on cattle and livestock and use those as the reintroduction of wolves? So I think that kind of mindset or that ignorance, whether it’s willful ignorance or whether it’s on purpose, whether it’s a fuck you to the ranchers, whatever it is, that is why people have this negative perception Sai think you’re alluding to.
I and I don’t think I don’t think it was sana f u to the ranchers. I think what happened was because of the ballot box initiative. The the state of Colorado was required by law by December 31, 2023 to get 10 wolves or so on the ground. And it took them
What if they weren’t successful? Well Like, if they’re required by law, does someone go to jail if you’re not successful in capturing the wolves to put there? Like
I don’t know. But what I’m saying is they had a pretty limited time. They spent a lot of time trying to prep people and doing committees and working with people to get them prepared. And they by the time they were able to get everything in place, they were running against De Ai. They introduced these wolves very late in the year.
I think it was December. And the only place they could get source wolves, they got them from Oregon. And that point, Oregon gave them 10 wolves. Half of them, roughly half of them, happened to have some livestock experience if they so this ai, right now, they’re already gearing up for the next reintroduction, this winter, probably.
They’re working with British Columbia, I believe, and they’re gonna take wolves, presumably, that have not had livestock experience and let them go, like they did with the original introductions into Yellowstone and Idaho. And I really believe because of the political pressure to squeeze this into a short timeline that the people who are really pro wolf, it was forced that they were had to take the wolves that they got.
That’s what I believe. I don’t think it was an f u. I think it was unintentional. But it’s like, these are the wolves these are the wolves you’re gonna get, and they took them.
That sounds so shortsighted. Well,
I know, but I’m not there, and I’m not I’m not trying to bad mouth their efforts. They’re under a lot of pressure. Half state wants wolves, half doesn’t. They’re under a short timeline. Oregon was the only state that offered up the wolves. Wyoming Ai says you can have 10 of ours. Here’s the 10 you’re gonna get.
Yeah. I I Ai could see why they did it that way, but, boy, that seems like you’re just adding to the problems. It really does.
In hindsight, it does. Yeah. And it
yeah. So what are the positives about the reintroduction of Wolves? So because it has been successful.
In Colorado or in general?
In general. Because the Colorado one is just year. Right?
It’s time frame. See, all this stuff has to do with the time frame, the mistakes and the rewards. So the positive most positive pros of reintroductions is you speed up the time frame. So, like, if we had let wolves slowly wander down from Canada and eventually get to Yellowstone, It may have taken 10 years. It may have taken 50.
I mean, it happened in Montana pretty quickly once they hit critical mass, but it took them a few years to get there, and then they just started, you know, the the curve. But people didn’t want the time window, and we had, presidential administration that was in favor. We had conservative congressmen that were in favor.
You had the Wolf Groupies in favor of it, and it it just, like, all came together in the time frame. And the window of opportunity opened about 4 inches, and they shoved him through. Mhmm. In Colorado, mandated by citizens’ ballot initiatives, which is not a really great way to, I don’t think, to do business on any bill.
I mean, we have bills in Montana coming up now for voting, but the ai was short. And I think if they had more options, they would have taken wolves. They would have taken wolves from Wyoming or Montana for sure because they’re more wild, whatever. We do have depredating wolves.
But they kinda got down to the wire, and everybody denied them except for Oregon. So that’s that’s what happened.
Well, the problem with that, of course, is what we’re talking about with epidemiology. That, like, if these animals do have a learned behavior pattern that’s gonna be imparted on their offspring as well and the surrounding community, they’re gonna favor that because it’s a very simple way to get food.
Pretty simple. On the other hand, they can learn new behavior. Ai, the wolves that were taken for their introductions to Yellowstone, they had never seen a bison, most of them. And they’ve learned now in Yellowstone, a
the animals to kill are bison. They
Yeah. Ai it’s really it’s mind boggling to me to see a herd surround a bison and eventually wear it down or kill it or find one that’s injured.
There’s an amazing painting that I’m pretty sure Ranella told me about. He might even have a copy of it of, or was it Remy? Ai have been Remy. No. It was Remy because Remy actually he, reproduced this on his television show. He had a show called Apex Predator. And the show Speak Predator was all, like, examining the behavior characteristics of Apex Predators and seeing what they did.
And one of the things that some of the Native American tribes used to do, they would take a wolf sai, and they would wear it on put it on their head, and they would crawl on 2 meh or on 4 legs
You know, hands and knees up and took bison.
I’ve used that in my own ai studio.
Isn’t that amazing, that painting?
That’s so incredible. And so they would wander up towards ai, because bison full grown bison are not afraid of a couple of wolves.
And they would use that as a way to get close enough ai a decoy Mhmm. And sneak up and arrow these bison and kill them. Yep. Oh, there’s a lot of paintings of that. That’s cool. So that must have been a very common thing. Well, so Ram actually reproduced this on his television show.
He actually wore a a wolf skin and crawled up to these bison. He did?
Yeah. He did. Wild bison?
I don’t know. I don’t know ai he was. I’m not sure. See if we can find Remy Warren, Speak Predator, bison episode.
There’s bison in Utah too.
Wow. I didn’t know that. How did he do?
Yeah. With an arrow. Really? Yeah. Wow. Well, would you imagine, especially if you have a compound bow?
I was just shooting today, very accurate. Ai just got a new Hoyt bow.
It’s amazing. So I don’t know how they do it, but they keep making these compound bows better every year. But this new one’s incredible. And we’re shooting I was shooting super accurate up to 60 yards.
So if you’re, you know, a guy as good as Ram is, who’s literally a professional hunter, and you crawl close enough to bison to get him. Yeah. So he shot a bison to harvest it. Wow. Yeah.
But, I mean, Indians did that all the time. I shouldn’t say Indians. Native Americans.
Well, there’s yeah. They some of them prefer to be called Indians.
Yeah. It’s tricky. If yeah. You gotta kind of, like, ask them You
What do I what are your pronouns, sir?
Right. Right. Right. Right. The yeah.
So, I know that there’s wild bison that live in Meh. And, I know that from Steve. Steve Ai actually hunted them in in Mexico. And, yeah, and this traditional ranch, they have this incredible way of taking care of it because they, you know, they’ve never had electricity in this area.
It’s ai, this whole there’s this long history of Mhmm. Hundreds of years of hunting them this way. So they do all these different things to dry out the meat. Mhmm. And they make these, like, thin cuts of meat and hang them from sticks and dry them in the sun and
And smoke them and do all kinds of different things to the meat. Really interesting. But Mhmm. This was one of the last when they were all wiped out from or almost wiped out from North America. A few of them survived in Mexico. Sai Where did we
Remi’s Ai on the Sonora Desert. Oh, so he did it in Mexico.
Oh, interesting. Oh, it’s a Cayo. Okay. So but it was in Mexico. So he put the pelt on and did the whole deal.
Yeah. That is a Sowed it into his camo. Yeah.
It’s a big coyote. Yeah. It’s definitely a coyote.
Ain’t that interesting, though?
It’s crazy that it worked.
Yeah. Well Yeah. The Native Americans knew it for
Well, for sure, a buffalo or a bison is not gonna be scared of a coyote. Nope. Yeah. Not at all. So if if they see that, they’re like, oh, they know.
And wolves too for that matter. I mean, there were millions of bison on the prairies with tens of thousands of wolves.
If you were healthy or you protect your calf, you’re fine.
Yes. Yeah. Have you ever read, Coyote America? No. Dan Flores, who was,
Yeah. And he was one of Vernel’s professors. Oh, wow. Yeah. That’s how he met him.
But Dan has a very interesting theory about the population of bison and why there were so many. And he thinks it’s tied into the plague, into when Europeans came across the country and 90% of Native Americans were wiped out because of disease. Yeah. And he thinks that’s why there was millions of bison in the field, this overpopulation of bison because the predators had gone away. Really? Yeah.
It’s I think the the the paper is called Bison Diplomacy Ai Ecology. Is that what it’s called?
I gotta look I have to look that up.
Yeah. So so interesting. Yes. And the book Ai America is crazy.
I’m gonna have to I’m gonna go
to it. Sai good. Yeah. There it is. Okay. It’s, ai ecology and bison diplomacy, the southern plains from 1800 to 1850. So his theory, which I think is a very valid one and it should be researched, it should be at least considered, that the reason why the early native settlers, excuse me, the early, European settlers did not see enormous herds of bison is because the bison weren’t enormous herds back then.
Because bisons have a long gestation period. Mhmm. They’re fairly easy to hunt because they’re very large animals. And, you you know, if you’re speak I’m
Yeah. And if you have horseback, you can get pretty close to them, shoot them with arrows, and they were very effective at hunting them. Mhmm. Particularly, the Comanche lived entirely off of bryden, and they were right here.
So right here in this area Wow. They’re just nothing but bison, eating bison constantly. And so they probably did a really good job of keeping the population in check. Then along come Europeans and their dirty diseases. And, you know, this is what the the ai theory is what wiped out the Maya, wiped out the Aztec, wiped out the people that lived in, the Amazon jungle.
It’s It’s all European settlers, and they’re dirty diseases. Mhmm. And so that when that happened, then you have what’s similar to no wolves in Montana, and you have 20,000 elk in a place that really has a carrying capacity for, like, what, 6 or like, what do you think was, like, the correct number when there was 20,000, elk there?
What’s the correct number of of elk? What would be, like,
a healthy population Well the the the food sources could
I would say right now, there’s about 65100, I think, elk in the northern herd. We’re not talking all of Yellowstone. Just this herd that’s been studied where the wolves are. That’s where it’s at now. It’s stabilized. There’s lions and people outside the park and and wolves and bears, all these things. And that’s where it’s at.
And that’s with everything, and it hasn’t changed because the number of wolves too went from, you know, 0 to 35 31 to a 160, 165. In the last 10 years, it’s been right about a 100 wolves every year because they contain themselves by killing each other and defending the resource.
So they’re stable right now. The wolves are not increasing anymore.
Is that one of the main reasons how they die or the main ways they die is
killing each other? Killing each other and trespassing. People go, oh, that’s awful. I said, not really. I mean, if you had somebody coming into your home to steal your goods, wouldn’t you shoot them if you had the chance, or wouldn’t you defend your Ai
those loggers. You almost had to shoot.
They defend your home. Right? Yourself, your family. The wolves do the same thing. It’s sort of like what’s going on with the wars everywhere in the world. The wolves do the same, and they don’t always kill the the trespassers. If they can catch them, they beat them up pretty bad. Sometimes they kill them.
Sometimes you may have a benevolent pack leader that just kind of has the wolves chase it off. But wolf mortality, the greatest rate, I think, is, like, 70 plus percent, 75, is wolves killing other wolves in Yellowstone Park, not pack members.
Is their action dependent upon the amount of resources that are available? Like, would they be more reluctant to kill a wolf if there was plenty of food for everybody?
out of here. Whereas if they were struggling, they’ve got this is a real problem having this wolf around. So you’d have to go to the Yellowstone researchers to look at it, but I
would say genetic relations, if it’s closely related, they’re more likely to not kill it. And if there’s abundant food, they’d be more likely to probably not kill it. I think it’s a combination of the 2.
One One of the things that Dan Flores talks about in Coyote America is the expansion of of coyotes and that the reason this took place is that coyotes were targeted by gray wolves. Yes. So they had developed this ability to recognize when one of the pack had been killed, they would expand their territory, and the females would have more pups.
The coyotes or the wolves?
Okay. Because the wolves So
the wolves are killing the coyotes. Yes. So the this is why there’s coyotes in literally every state and every city in North America now Yeah. Where there wasn’t a 100 years ago is that because they have this history of being persecuted by the wolves Yep. Because they don’t breed with wolves.
But they do breed with meh wolves. So where you get your ai wolf or your coy wolf is a coyote and a red wolf on the East Coast. Right?
Do they deal with Mexican wolves?
The animal up in the northeastern part of the US is called the coy wolf, and it’s a coyote mixed with wolf of unknown origin mixed with dogs. And there’s lots of theories out there, and I’m not up on the most current theory. The original wolf up there was more like the red wolf.
Then you get down here and down in Louisiana, Texas, Florida, there’s truly red there were red wolves, and now they’re just at the Alligator Refuge in North Carolina. But those are being bred out of almost out of existence because they’re hybridizing with coyotes. Right?
So Interesting. Yeah. Different story, but it But the gray wolves do not hybridize with coyotes was his point. And that this
Well, up in the the Great Lakes, if you look at those wolves, that’s where he started doing wolf stuff, they look a little bit like coyote. And the mitochondrial DNA shows some traces of coyote, but it’s very uncommon. When a wolf when a wolf encounters a coyote, they kill it.
Yeah. What’s interesting you were talking about on Ranell’s show that they don’t kill foxes.
So they were I mean, the so you get a fox. It’s, like, £10. You get a coyote, it’s, like, £30. You get a wolf, it’s 90 to £100. It’s about 3 times between each step.
Sai the ones that are closest so for coyotes, the foxes are a threat. They kill them. For the wolves, the coyotes are a threat, and they kill them. But a 100 pound wolf and a 10 pound fox might be a nuisance, and you let it scavenge. But it’s not a threat to you.
It’s Right. It’s not gonna compete with you. It’s not gonna take out a bison.
Exactly. So when wolves come back on the landscape, it happened up where we are, happened at Yellowstone, where it’s just been a coyote economy for since the wolves were taken on. Coyotes rule. Right? I love coyotes too, but I shouldn’t say love. I really respect them.
But when you have the wolves coming back and they start displacing and killing and hammering on the coyotes, well, surprise. All of a sudden, red fox are coming back. And, like, where I work in the North Fork, all those early winters. We had people out all winter on skis tracking wolves. We never saw ai ram, fox tracks.
Never. And and I never caught 1 in a wolf trap. And then as time went on and the wolves took a foothold, so to speak, a toehold in the country, and they started hammering the coyotes, all of a sudden there’s fox I got fox denning on my property now.
So will coyotes target foxes?
And ai I don’t they consider them competitors? Sure. I mean, in places
I don’t you know what? I haven’t followed that. I don’t track that that closely. But I would guess most of the time not, unless they’re incredibly hungry. I would guess it’s a strict eliminating a competitor situation. I’ve seen I mean, you can look at the data in Yellowstone.
They have witnessed tons of times of wolves going up to coyote dens and digging out on killing all the pups and trying to kill the parents. And
I don’t think they usually eat them. Ai I could be wrong in that, but I don’t think so.
It’s interesting because that’s one of the theories about why it was originally one of the theories why coyotes kill dogs and and coyotes kill cats is that they’re competitors. But then they started eating them. Mhmm. So I think maybe originally that was the case because, again, the expansion to urban areas is fairly recent.
Yeah. And urban urban coyotes are not real wild.
They’ll eat whatever they
Right? Just like we’re talking about
those different their their behavior changes.
Yeah. And it’s really interesting to me how how amazingly versatile coyotes arya. Because I am starting to see wolves being the sai, that they’re much more generous than I would have thought and that they can adapt to situations pretty easily, like that wolf pack raising its pups in the subdivision.
That would be so cool, though. Ai if you lived there.
Because they do eat dogs.
They do eat dogs. Yeah. When every time I go up to my little cabin, I am very conscientious about not leaving my dogs outside without me there.
I did have a big Malamute killed by Mautlein about 35 years ago.
They can get it pretty easy.
Yeah. You know what’s interesting to me is the propensity that foxes have to befriend humans. Yes. Very strange.
So so this is interesting. Ai mean, I you you’re a voracious reader, obviously. Have you ever heard of the study in Russia? Now this is I mean, we’re gonna
I know what you’re going with.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Go ahead. Tell explain it.
Book title is how to tame a fox Yeah. And create a dog. One of the most interesting books I’ve ever read, but this this is true. I’m not saying that the 400 wolves is not true, but I doubt it. But this is true science ai by photos that in the fifties or so, this Russian scientist was starting a study of foxes, and he wanted to select simply for tameness.
And by selecting the tamest male, female from these different fur farms, these are captive fox to start with, that he would see if if their morphology or their physical appearance changed. So he went to fur farms, and he was picking just for tameness. And, eventually, after many years, he’d go to the fur farm, and this fox would lunge at him and snarly leave it.
And they’d say, say, oh, this one over here in the corner, she rubs against the fence. When you go to feed her, you take that one. But over years, they have photographs of these foxes, and they start changing. They were silver fox, a lot of them, instead of red, and they’re they’re black and white.
They kinda look like border collies, and they start to, you know, tipped over ears.
And they got pictures of the guys in the pens. One person’s bent over, and there’s a fox standing on their back while they’re putting out the food bowl and the other I mean Crazy. Yes. And so that was in a very short time
That they changed the the behave the picture.
Oh, you’re leaving out a little bit of it.
One of the things that they did was whenever any of the foxes exhibit any kind of aggression, they shot them. Right. So they only allowed the very ai, submissive foxes to
But then their eyes started getting larger. Their snouts started getting shorter, and their ears started dropping really quick.
Ai glad you read it because I I suggested to their friends because I’m passionate about all canids, well, all things wild. And it was one of the most amazing pieces I read. Because if you think about humans domesticating animals, we took some kind of a primitive form of a horse and a cow and a sheep, and we got our breeds now.
For years, they had bears in captivity, brown bears in Europe forever, living in king’s castles and doing riding these bicycles and the circus and whatever. But in terms of North America, of course, we’ve been here anywhere in the world. Nobody’s domesticated the African wild hunting dog. Right. Nobody’s domesticated European lynx.
Nobody’s successfully taken a wild predator and bred it long enough with heavy artificial pressure by our selection, like shooting them in the head if they aren’t friendly
And turned it into no different animal with the exception of
wolves. That is really fascinating.
Because that’s never been done to tigers or mountain lions. Think about how many people have tried to keep mountain lions as pets. I
know. A lot of people ai. Or coyotes. You keep coyotes, and after 15 generations, they still look like coyotes.
And they still behave like coyotes.
They do. And this little thing with the fur fox, it was extraordinary artificial selection pressure to see that Yes. And they did change a bit.
Well, the fox has a very strange relationship to humans where, that was part of the Timothy Treadmill movie. Ah. In in the movie, he had this fox that was his friend, and the fox stole his hat one day and ran to the den with his hat. He’s like, give me my hat back. And he’s, like, chasing him.
But it’s an adorable relationship that this fox has with people, with with with him, in in fact, climbing on his tent and hanging out with him, and he could touch it. He could pet its head.
I’m sure he probably can he or somebody before him had probably food condition it to be accepting Maybe.
But you’re talking about he’s up in the grizzly maze in Alaska. Like, how
Maybe just never seen a human.
Maybe. That’s more it seems but there seems to be some sort of a strange history of comfort where this animal that’s a 10 pound animal is comfortable around a 150 pound man for no real reason. Like, he’s not giving it anything. Right. Like, just him being around, and it would lie down in front of him and and sun itself and and play around him.
Right. It’s a there was a weird relationship that humans have had with foxes.
Of course, mister Treadwell was not really in the bell curve on the big high point in the normal range either of of normal behavior.
Right. But I’ve had friends that have had encountered with foxes.
Yeah. They are they’re really unique, and they’re also they really adapt with all the people. They live in agricultural areas. I’ve got them done. I mean, we see them all the time now. They’re a different animal than a coyote or a wolf.
It’s just such a strange little fella Yeah. That, like, wants to be your friend. You know? Very interesting.
You don’t see that a lot with wolves.
No. You don’t. Ai have a a fox that visits my yard because I have chickens.
And we have to shoo them out every time he comes into the yard, but they make the craziest noise.
Like, I didn’t know about the noise to my ai, Jim Brewer, who, has fox near his house in New Jersey. They they make this crazy ram, and I was like, what? What does it sound like? And then this little guy that lives in my neighborhood does it in my yard. I got a video of him in my yard going. Yeah.
It’s an e so what it’s kind of interesting to think about the early relation of people with wolves. Yeah. Ai talk about that in A Woman Among Wolves, my book, is there was a couple of paleontologists or sociologists that speak, and I can’t say if their theory is correct or not.
But, they speculated that when people were still living in caves and having spears and atlatls, that they would watch. So people were living in a family group in a pack. The wolves were living in a family group or a pack. They would watch the wolves chasing through a herd of whatever animal they were at that time, depending on where they lived.
And, eventually, getting one tired enough ram maybe it was a cripple who had a badling, they would surround it and eventually kill it. And then they speculate that the the humans would learn that, you know what? We could go up to that killed oryx or whatever they had just killed, the primitive horse, and just drive those wolves away. We got tools.
We can kill the wolves if we have to. So they so then it changed to where maybe those wolves had come around when the animal was cornered, but not not dead. And the humans would come in and do the final blows and drive the wolves away and take what meat they wanted and then leave, and the wolves could then come in and get the spoils of all the work that they had done that the humans had taken.
And that their this is their theory that there was this relationship just because it’s a brutal world, not synergy and not altruistic and not, oh, aren’t this this cute? Just like, hey, people. Look at those wolves. Got an animal, a ram, cornered over. Let’s go kill it. Take what we need. Wolves would come in.
And that that sort of began potentially the process of wolves and people beginning to interact. I hate to hesitate to use the word collaborate, but
It is it’s an interesting idea also. And the the interesting ai, it sort of coincides with the idea of the introduction of agriculture. Yes. So you have the introduction of agriculture. So you have resources that are more abundant, and you have more animals. And so if these people lived in a resource rich environment where there was plenty of meat and they didn’t have to worry, they you could see how maybe they would throw some scraps at a cute little
Wolf that’s near the fire.
There’s many ideas about how dogs time. Right. The the ones who were least afraid hung around. No. I there’s
not much with the foxes over just a course of a few generations
This took a few 1000 years.
Yeah. And then people would grab one of those wolves or let them hang around and then, you know, around they would clean up the offal offal around the camp and whatever. There’s meh ai, though. Of course, nobody knows. But what what is kind of known is the dates from DNA and and carbon dating.
The dates at which humans were able to domesticate livestock and the dates at which humans were able to domesticate dogs from wolves. And domesticating dogs preceded livestock. Livestock was like 11000 years ago, roughly, of all all species, swine, horses, cows, whatever, and sheep.
So was it possible that the initial domestication of wolves into dogs took place in a in a a very game rich environment where they didn’t have fight over resources.
Exactly. Because it hadn’t happened yet.
So there would be more opportunity, potentially, for these animals. Again, I’m not saying it was to help each other so much. But Right. They took advantage of each other’s strengths and weaknesses. The wolf strength was being able to hunt sana run something down until it’s so tired that people didn’t do that.
And then people say, oh, yeah. That thing’s crippled over though. Let’s go kill it, and we’ll get our meat, and the wolves can have the rest of it.
Was there also a con con a consideration that during these times, this was a hunter gathering time where they really didn’t have a preservation of meh. There was no way to store it, so you had to continue to hunt and gather. So if you had an abundance
You didn’t think, oh, I’ll stockpile this for the next few months. That was never even an afterthought.
Probably not. Unless it was in the tundra. It was and it was wintertime, they could freeze it. But the relationship of I mean, there’s many dates it sai about when people domesticated dogs, and it varies a lot. But I think there’s some consensus 30, 35000 years ago.
And you can you can Google it, Jamie. But I thought
No. Because it happened significantly before we began domesticating livestock. So what I’m saying is there wasn’t a conflict base. Resources were abundant. There wasn’t protection of our livestock. There wasn’t this and that. And, eventually, people took when livestock became a a thing, then, eventually, people would take a wolf like Canaan, a dog that we domesticated.
And then I find it interesting to train it to keep the wolves, their wild cousins, away from the livestock. Talk about wow.
Humans are so creative with what they can do, and dogs are so plastic. I mean, you take a wolf and you put a lot of pressure on it, and, eventually, you’d come up with a golden retriever and a Griffon and a poodle because they have a lot of meh. They have a lot of plasticity genetically, morphologically, behaviorally that I don’t think a lot of the other species have or would show up when we try to domesticate them.
Yeah. Well, it’s it seems to be uniquely adaptive.
Have you are you aware of, the baboons that raise dogs? No. Yeah. There’s baboons that take puppies and they use the puppies as guards. So they they keep the puppies near them, and they keep these dogs near them. They don’t kill them. And the the dogs, like, allow them to, sleep sai they could be alerted to any intruders. The dogs bark.
Sounds no different than us.
I mean, I haven’t heard it.
Footage of these these see if you can find it.
Baboons with these dogs, like, drag the dog’s like, what am I doing? The the baboons, like, get over here.
They they use them. I mean, I’m sure they probably kill a few of them. So they don’t They kill babies. Like, baboons are pretty damn ruthless.
I’ve been African and I don’t like baboons.
Scary animal because it seems like a dog monkey. Like, it’s got a face like a dog. It’s a weird animal. Right? Because ai any other primate, they they have a completely different jaw structure.
They look like a dog. It’s like an extended snout. Very strange animal.
Horrible and beautiful and creepy and
I agree. I’ve I’ve I’ve I’m meh Sai, here we go.
So these are these are dogs that are being raised. They’ve raised these feral dogs. Okay. He’s dragging the dog. Meh over here. Oh ai god. Like, they’re not really trying.
I was trying to read on what was going on. So some people think that that might not be be they might not being being raised, that it’s some sort of play, but they’re in I think this is taken from a trash pit.
But did you see that other larger dog that was over there?
It’s a parent dog. Looked like a wolf. Oh, gee. He’s really wailing
on that puppy. It. He’s trying to control it. So I don’t
Sniffing his butt processing data.
Just like our dogs. Yeah.
And they hold on to him by the tail. It’s kinda crazy, and they drag ai around.
Back it up, there was a larger dog that was in the background. Yeah.
one. That dog’s barking. Ai I think the theory that I remember reading was that they had figured out that if they keep these dogs around, the dogs are good watchdogs.
Well, I’m gonna have to Google that and look up the see, this is my first thing. I’m a researcher, so I wanna know the source. I wanna know where it came from. There’s a debate over it.
Yeah. No. It’s a big dig into the
Viral video of baboons in Saudi Arabia garbage dump led to speculation baboons kidnap puppies and keep them pets. However, some say the baboons were likely just playing with the puppies, that the relationship is not analogous to pet owner relationship. Maybe. There’ve been a lot there’s a lot of weird studies on, garbage dumps and baboons. Have you ever read Sapolsky’s work?
Robert Sapolsky, did this study on a particularly vicious
Primate. What was the book he wrote, like, 20 years ago? Something primate. Mhmm. Yeah. I’ve read a long ago book. I haven’t read currently.
I don’t remember. But the study that was fascinating was that they found that there sai fascinating was that they found that there was one contaminated pile of garbage. And, of course, the most vicious alphas were the ones to eat first. Yeah. So they ai, and they got sick.
2002. So you said 20 years ago. Yeah. Too far off.
He’s amazing. I’ve had him on the podcast
as well. Fascinating book. You have. I’ll have to look for it.
Super interesting guy. Oh, yeah. Especially the toxoplasmosis Gandhi, discussion, like, to talk about
with the lions and the wolves. Parasites. You know about lions and wolves and toxoplasmosis?
So in Yellowstone, it’s it’s basically a dog eat cat world down there for the most part because of packs of wolves and the lions. But they have found that because the dogs are coexisting with the lions and sometimes ingest or scatter their guts or anyway, they eat some part of it.
They get exposed. They have found with now the wolves have toxoplasmosis, and what and what happens is there is something ai 11 times it’s a huge amount. I wish I can’t maybe Jamie can Google it. More likely to be extra bold in liters of a pack than a dog than a wolf that does not have toxoplasmosis.
And these these wolves that have the parasite take extraordinary risks and are more likely to die and lead the pack to death. So in the long run, it’s sort of a cat’s revenge on the wolves.
Well, one of the things Sapolsky 46 more times likely to become pack leaders. Incredible.
They’re 11 times more likely to leave their birth packs and do so at a younger age.
And when they do that, they’re not very well set up to survive.
Sapolsky found out when he was doing his residence Yeah. That the there’s a disproportionate amount of motorcycle victims that test positive for Toxo. So they test them, and they find that this is one of the reasons why these guys are taking these crazy risks.
Risk takers because they have Toxo. Yeah. See, it’s and it’s it’s really ai from cats. You know, another book you’d like to read is called, Spillover. Have you read that by David Quamman?
So he wrote it, I think, 2017. It’s an older book, maybe 2012. And he wrote it’s a spillover from wild animals, just q u a m m n n. Wild animals to human populations, and it starts with a horse disease in Australia that becomes some extremely ai, terrible disease in humans.
And he actually traces back the origins of Ai, and all this happened before COVID.
And it just was so set up because COVID is the same kind same kind of a deal. But it’s a fascinating book and because you got an inquisitive ai. I think you’d really enjoy it.
Well, COVID is not really because COVID was a part of, like, a lab experiment.
Yeah. They’re ai% sure now at this point that it was Okay. The it was all gain of function research that was done. There’s the obscuring of the data was done purposely to try to absolve guilt from the people that funded the project, because the project was funded and vatsal during the Obama administration.
And then, when Trump came along, there was a lot of chaos apparently, and they reignited it, and they did it through another EcoHealth Alliance. Mhmm. It was a very sneaky about it. And when grilled, they you know, Fauci lied about whether or not it was gain of function research they were doing in the first place.
There’s a lot of various there’s emails back and forth.
But that’s beside the point.
Well, I’m not I’m not gonna go there because that we have But
but natural spillover’s is clearly real.
The spillover Yeah. Documents many, many speak. And it actually it it’s fascinating. Mad cow disease
And Mad cow disease is the craziest one. Right? CWD. Oh my goodness. Force cows to eat cows.
You dumbass. Like Yeah. And then the prions, the fact that they can exist under thousands of degrees, thousands of degrees. You can’t kill them.
So do you have CWD here yet in Texas?
I’m sure they do. I’m sure they do. It’s not ubiquitous, but I think there have been see if there’s been cases of CWD, and I wanna get to this before I forget. The so the point of the Sapolsky thing was that what Sapolsky observed when these super aggressive baboons ate all of the, garbage, that the garbage was contaminated, they died.
So all the aggressive ones died and they turned into this Utopian society. Sai meh. And so they’re all they started grooming each other more. The males weren’t aggressive anymore. The females didn’t suffer the wrath of the males, and they were like hippie baboons. And it lasted for a long time.
And I think they eventually reverted back to the same sort of typical aggressive alpha male behaviors being the the primary leaders of the groups. But for a long time, they existed in this very strange Wow. Atypical environment where kind baboons were, like, taking care of each other.
Well, it’ll be really interesting with with the the resources of the Yellowstone researchers who do amazing stuff to see what the long range outcome is from this realization that, you know, they’re 46 more time likely more times to be a leader of the pack. And what do these risk taking behaviors entail? I I’m really excited to follow this.
And how many of them, unfortunately, are gonna get hit by cars because of this? And Right. Wasn’t the first ever released mountain lion or a wolf rather that got killed killed by a car?
The first one ai understanding, the first one in Yellowstone that released wolf, the first mortality of a wolf was getting hit by a UPS truck.
poor. I just feel kinda bad for the driver. Shouldn’t laugh. I mean, there’s a dead wolf Imagine
Shah you couldn’t hit that brakes.
But it’s just it’s so fascinating that this toxoplasmosis, it it could I mean, it can implode the population. Yeah. Who knows? They might make terrible decisions.
How prevalent is it in humans?
Ai don’t know. It’s usually prevalent. In France, at one point in time, there was 50% of the population at talk so.
Yeah. And large populations of people in, both Latin America, South America, places where there’s a lot of feral cats.
It’s a huge instance of it. Not only that, there’s a disproportionate amount of people that have toxoplasmosis or in countries that have toxoplasmosis that have successful soccer teams. And they don’t know if it’s just because a lot of poor people, that’s the best way out, become really good at soccer.
Soccer is really common because everybody plays it. Yeah. You know, they don’t know. But it might be that it makes you more aggressive. It makes you more, you’re more interested in taking risks and a little reckless. Yeah. And if you’re a soccer player, I ai I can probably help you.
It’ll be ai, really, just go for it and get crazy. Be more aggressive and less tentative.
Right. Right. No. It’s it’s crazy. It’s it’s the whole interface between humans and wildlife is becoming a a more and more popular field. And if I was young and could do my career over, I wouldn’t I wouldn’t go into that because it’s really crazy. The CWD, the Mhmm. So the when wolves, encountered first encountered parvovirus and distemper from came from people and dogs going into parks and camping and dogs pooping.
And the disease came into being in the in the eighties. But we started documenting it in Glacier. And the 1st year that I was catching wolves and we took blood samples, that the the the they’re off the chart in their immune response, antibodies, to that particular disease. And we had most of our pups all die that
Boom. Like that. And people don’t think about, yeah. I got my little up at, you know, Ai Lake, and he pooped. And you don’t pick it up, and they’ll meh it. But the same thing happened in Yellowstone, and they have certain, years where they have horrible pup ai called recruitment.
They don’t make it into the fall. But the other thing of interest sai, they’ve been learning by studying coat colors of wolves in Yellowstone. That, genetically, the ones who carry the gene for the black coat color, they have a different disease resistance to those diseases than the gray wolves.
And it’s certain maybe Jamie could look that up. At certain times when the disease prevalence is higher, the wolves will select a mate of a certain color because their genetics prove to be an asset to the survival of those pups. It’s crazy.
Do the ones with the darker coats, do they or do they originate from denser forests?
So this is they also been looking at that. So when I first came to Montana, many of the wolves were black, and now it’s probably 5050 or less. In Minnesota, the original Midwestern wolves were gray. And now they’ve got black color genes, and there are changes with the population density.
But what I learned, to my best knowledge, it’s it’s a k locus gene, and they think that when people domesticated dogs from wolves, and we took the wolves into captivity, we mutated their mutations that we helped survive. That gene for black color coat was from dogs, and then dogs got bred a little bit into the wolves occasionally, and that coat is from a dog.
Doesn’t mean that the animals out there that are black are hybrids. I’m just saying it goes back 1000 of years.
So the earliest descriptions of wolves, did they describe them? Like, what is the earliest known, like, written human history of wolves? Did they describe them in a particular color?
Oh, boy. You know what? I haven’t gone I mean, if you look at Romulus and Remus, those arya gray wolves in in Rome. Right. I don’t know. You know, I’m not an I’m not a paleontologist.
The thought would I was just getting to, like, if you’re thinking about a place like, the Pacific Northwest, for example, where you have dense rainforest, It would probably be a benefit to be darker. You could hide a little bit better. Yeah.
I like having Arctic wolves being white.
the K locus for the black color gene and it depends on if they’re homozygous or heterozygous and one is here you go.
One of the earliest written references to black wolves occurs in the Babylonian epic oh, it’s in Gilgamesh. So that’s, 6000 years ago. The titular character rejects the sexual advances of the goddess Ishtar, reminding her that she had transformed a previous lover, a shepherd, into a wolf, thus turning him into the very animal that his flocks must be protected against.
I don’t ai to know what the root of that story is. Yeah. So that’s so fascinating.
This is the article about the
Yeah. This would be, yeah.
Disease outbreak select for mate choice and coat color in wolf. So all dogs come from wolves. Sai, yeah, wolves. Wolves get domesticated into dogs, then some dogs reintroduce their genes into interbreeding with wolves. And somehow or another, this black coat color comes into play. Yes. Wild.
It is. Literally. And I Yeah. Literally. Expect from people living in northern latitudes, the Inuits and the Native Americans throughout Russia and across the north. You know, they they kept dogs doing and they bred them to wolves and made better sled dogs. But, an early reference told me that the native the dog native to North America was brought over here.
There wasn’t the Native Americans didn’t have dogs here 1000 and 1000 of years ago. That’s what I’ve been reading.
Well, one of the things that I learned from,
Yeah. That’s so crazy. That that’s that’s one of the things, that, Dan Flores was talking about was that horses came from here. But then they were all they all died off.
And they don’t know exactly why, but probably during that mass extinction event where ai% of all the megafauna died.
And then the Europeans reintroduced horses. And so the Native Americans initially didn’t have horses, and then some were really good at it. And those are the ones that ai like the Comanche.
The Spaniards brought horses
And that’s how they got their horses. But before that
the horses came from here originally. Even the horses in Africa, even zebras originated genetically originated in the North American continent.
I didn’t know that. No. It’s crazy. Zebras too?
Zebras. How nuts. That is nuts.
But we also have an animal, the pronghorn antelope. Yes. That is a prehistoric animal.
It’s only yeah. It’s only here.
It should not be here. And the only reason why it’s here and the reason why it’s so fast It’s horrible.
It says something about the I don’t know. Ai this gets really deep in the genetics.
The k locusts and codes have something to do with them having canine distemper virus.
That they’re they’re immune more immune to respiratory infections. So anyway yeah. And then the other thing is
Which they probably got from dogs.
Yes. Probably. Distemper. Yeah. Well, I don’t know how long distemper goes back. The other thing with, the pronghorn, I mean, I just came from hunting ai. We’re seeing I mean, hunting birds, we were seeing pronghorn everywhere. Antelope.
I love them, but they’re really pretty star. And do you know Weird. Do you know why they run at 60 miles an hour?
Because we used to have a North American cheep cheetah.
Exactly. Yeah. The cheetahs whittled the limbs of the antelope. Because it was it. What yeah.
That’s why they’re so fast.
They’re so much faster than any predator in North America.
They gotta be 60 miles an hour to run a cheetah. Not wolves, not bears.
And they’re still here, and the cheetahs are gone. But they’re one of the very few of those weird animals, like the North American ai. Mhmm. Like, all these different, like there was a North American lion that is way bigger than the African lion.
I’ve read that. Yeah. I mean, I I would love the paleontologist. There’s so many things I would like to do again and do over.
There’s a lot of interesting things in this world, and we’re still just learning.
We still have to listen to people, experts, and do a lot of reading and think for ourselves.
Well, thanks to you. We know a lot more about wolves. And so I really appreciate you being here.
The book is A Woman Amongst Wolves, Ai Journey Through 40 Years of Wolf Recovery. Yep. Diane Boyd.
Can I read you just a 30 second introductory paragraph?
Then it’ll give you and your readers a flavor of what it’s about. So it’s it’s a memoir. It’s all real. It’s not forward introduction. Here we go. Okay.
I got glasses. Okay. Sorry. Should’ve had a word.
Can I ask you before you do that?
Are you gonna read the audiobook?
No. No. No. There’s a story there too. Diane. We can talk about that after this just be 30 seconds.
My pickup banged and rattled along the pothole inside road in north in the northwest corner of Glacier National Park. Boxes of wolf traps and jars of bait slid across the truck bed. I was in a hurry. My mind focused on the wolf caught in a trap somewhere ahead in the lodgepole pine forest.
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed motion in my rearview mirror. I looked up to catch the glassy reflection of vivid yellow eyes framed by a wolf’s black face looking over my shoulder from the back seat. How did I get
That’s the opening from my book. That’s a that’s a pain. He’s not a tiger.
What did I ask you about? Oh, the audiobook.
So the audiobook. So when I sai my contract this is my debut book, A Woman Among Wolves. I ai not written a book. I’ve published scores of scientific articles, but not a book. I signed the contract. Ai love working with Greystone. They’re a fantastic publisher. Just a standard contract.
I signed away the rights for movie, audio, etcetera, etcetera, but I get a share of the royalties and stuff. So when somebody bought the bid on and bought the media rights for audiobooks months before it was produced and and I didn’t hear about it for a while. And by the time I’d heard about it, they had just started producing it. And I said, well, I’d like to read for it.
I sent off an audio tape of my voice. And, looks like they would need to do a bunch of polishing, and it was almost September. And they would I would be recording for weeks. It takes, like
Enunciation. And I don’t know.
Oh, they have to teach you how to say it differently?
I mean, I think I’m a pretty fair speaker. But it it just, anyway, it would take some training. And then it would more important, it would take up so much time. It takes, like, 80 hours to produce an 8 hour audiobook.
I know. But the thing is, it’s ai the authentic version of this book is gonna be in your voice.
Maybe when the ai expire, but I
Maybe they would just listen to this podcast and just try it. I would love that. It’s not that expensive to meh you in a booth for a couple of weeks.
They hired a professional actress. The other thing was this happened just before bird hunting season opened in Montana. It’s, like, sorry.
I get it. Sai get it. I really do.
Steve Rennell said the same thing. Like, you made a big mistake, Diana. It’s like, I kinda didn’t have options. It’s okay.
Either way, I’m sure it’s awesome. And Ai I really appreciate you being here. It was a lot
I really enjoyed it. It’s been
a blast, Joe. Thank you so much for having me as a guest. You just treated me royally. This has been wonderful.
I’m glad you have fun. Thank you very much. Thank