The Basement: Dan Flores | Ice Age Giants, Camels in America, and Coyote Resilience

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So if you're serious about longevity or even just curious whether your body's aging faster or slower than your actual age, this is one of the easiest ways to find out. Right now, go to truediagnostic.com and use code y-files for 20% off your entire order. That's truediagnostic.com code y-files for 20% off. Today I'm talking with Dan Flores. Dan is a historian of the American West, and he spent 40 years writing the biographies of North America's wild animals, coyotes, bison, wild horses, wolves. 40 years writing biographies for animals that can't sue him for defamation. And it's just my business model, honestly. His most famous book is Coyote America, and the story it tells is hard to believe. For most of the last century, the federal government tried to erase one animal from the continent with poison, bounties, and money from Congress. The Coyote won. Today we're covering that war and the two brothers who exposed it, the footprints at White Sands and the Direwolves. Real Direwolves? Finally, one that might outlive that's that kid. There's a moment where Dan analyzes a set of 23,000-year-old footprints, like a witness statement, a teenage girl, a toddler on her hip, a ground sloth, mirroring up when it catches her scent. That one is a good story. Let's go down to the basement. I'm excited to talk to you, sir. Oh, I'm excited to be here. Before we talk about animals, I want, this is a storytelling show and you're a storyteller, so it's perfect. Take me back to your junior in college, your meeting with your creative writing professor, and something ends up in sports and field. What happened? Wow. I'm impressed. Let's you know that. Yeah, so I was an English major as an undergraduate. And I had a creative writing professor who was quite good, and he published sort of Wild West kind of novels. And so I was impressed by the fact that, you know, he knew the publishing world and had an agent and all that sort of thing. So he asked us to do a piece in his class as if we were going to write it for a magazine. And so I sat down and duly wrote this piece. And he read it, and I frankly don't remember exactly what sort of grade he gave me on it, although one of the things I remember, he did say to me was he said, so you do, you've got a ready flow of words, and that's a good thing for a writer. So that's kind of almost the only memory I had of what exactly he said. But I did have the fun before the semester was over of going into his office, having sent that piece to Sportsafil magazine and had an editor there after taking a look at it about a month later sent me a letter on official letter head stationary Sportsafil and said, we like your piece. It was about Crozen Ravens and we're going to publish it. And so I got to go into my creative writing professor and show him a letter of acceptance from a national magazine for that piece I did. Did you get a check? I did get a check, yeah it was, it was my first gig. It was, you know, because I didn't have any illustrations for it. In fact, one of the things this particular editor's name was David Petzel. I've never forgotten him because he sort of became, he took me under his wing and sort of told me how to play the game and what he would be interested in. And what to look at and one of the things he told me was we're going to have to hire an illustrator to illustrate your piece because you don't have any illustrations, you don't have any photographs to go with it. Go and buy yourself a 35 millimeter camera, get Code of Chrome film, get yourself a 300 millimeter telephoto lens and follow the sort of photographs we published by a guy in one of their photographers named Edwin Bauer. Follow the kind of photographs he does and when you submit things to us in the future, send me photographs and I can double your check. Oh. But the original check for that piece was $300. That's good, that's kind of be good money. I mean, yeah, when you're, yeah, when you're, you know, a junior in college and, I mean, more than that, I think what it gave me a sense of, I remember telling my mother, you know, shit, I think I can be a writer. Of course, yeah, I think I can be a writer. I just sold the first thing I ever wrote to a national magazine. So yeah, and it's funny because it's not really fair because you go to school as a jock. You went on baseball scholarship. Was your dad semi pro? My dad played semi pro baseball. Yeah, and he wanted me to be a baseball player. Of course. Yeah, and so I did go to college on a baseball scholarship. I played center field. Yeah, a lot of legs, okay? Yeah, I played center field. And uh, oh, you're a runner, that makes sense. Yeah, and I'm still a runner. So yeah, I've been running ever since. Ever since chasing down fly ball. But yeah, dad wanted me to play baseball. And I played several sports in high school. And but I was probably best at baseball. And so I played for a couple of years in college. And then I actually, the truth is, I got really interested in the subject matter of a lot of the classes I was taking. And I was sort of drifting away from it. And it was one of my dad's great disappointments. When I told him I didn't think I was going to keep doing it. So he was, did he ever come around? And I mean, he saw you as a professional writer. He did, yes. And he certainly, you know, loved that. And he showed people things that I wrote, books that I wrote, and articles that I wrote. So yeah, I think I finally was able to win him over by being at least successful enough that he was able to show his friends, people he golfed with, so forth, that, you know, that his son published things. Which is great, but it's still not the same. Like my son is, my son is six foot six and left handed. And I tried to put my slider into that arm. Instead, he became a musician. Well, I'm proud of him, but yeah, but you can understand my dad's position. I don't know all this. It was my retirement fund. Yeah, and I don't think dad ever really got over the fact that I didn't continue with it. But that's okay, and they're still proud of you. So one of my favorite stories that I've heard you tell is your 13, you see a dead box on the road, you go, you get the deer whistle, you're terrible at it, an animal comes out into the sunlight. What was that animal? Yeah, so that's a pretty vivid memory, even though it goes back a long way, and you're right, I was 13. And so I had seen this fox and made my parents, I mean, I couldn't drive yet, but I had made my parents stop on the side of the road and I'd gotten out and looked at it because I was kind of fascinated with predators in particular for some reason. They stopped? But they're like, why? They stopped, yeah. Well, because, you know, I was the only child left at home and they were willing to do that for me. So they let me take a look at this animal and I've shot, I had a little Polaroid camera that I shot pictures of it with. And then I happened to be in a hardware store in our little town in Louisiana a few days later, and I was telling this hardware store owner about fox and he said, well, we just got this little device and that, I mean, you might be able to see a live fox, not one hit by a car. If you take this out and this is supposed to be a dying, it sounds like a dying rabbit. And so just go out and blow it and see if a fox comes up. And so I bought this thing for a couple of dollars and I knew of an old deer stand that was out in the woods. And I rode my bicycle out to within about a quarter mile of this deer stand and walked out and climbed up in it one morning. It wasn't even really early in the morning. It was sort of mid-morning about 10 o'clock and set myself up in this deer stand and blew on this thing. I didn't really know what a dead or dying rabbit was supposed to sound like. So I just blew on it. It made squeaking sounds. And within about 30 or 40 seconds, this gorgeous animal comes running out of the woods into an opening directly toward this tree. I was sitting in with his eyes, its eyes fixed on the base of the tree. And so I didn't dare blow the thing again. I just set there and watched and it came loping up these beautiful loping kind of movements. Did you expect that to work? No, of course not. Of course not. I mean, I had no idea what would happen, but what happened was very definitely not what I was anticipating. But it really made an impact. There are some pretty big warning signs in the financial system right now. JPMorgan is telling clients gold could hit $6,000 an ounce. Citibank predicts silver could reach $90 and central banks just bought a record 289 tons of gold last quarter. 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Made a hell of an impact and what I think it was and it got within about 20 or 25 feet of the base of the tree and then I think it caught a whiff of scent of me and it turned and went back exactly on the same path that it had come towards me looking back over its shoulder at this tree as it was running away. And my memory of it was that it had looked like it was walking on stills. It has these really long legs and these sort of yellowish eyes pointed ears. Well, I went back home and sat down and immediately wrote a letter to Louisiana Parks and Wildlife and said, I think I've seen a wolf in cattle perish as it's sixth grader you're writing the government. Yeah, okay, absolutely and so about two or three weeks passed and a letter showed up in the mailbox from Louisiana Parks and Wildlife and it was from the division that was at the time and there was you know, I don't think I'm certain I don't have this letter anymore but there was a very famous guy who became one of the first directors of the Endangered Species Act who was a Louisianaian and who was then looking for Remnant Red Wolves in Louisiana and it may have been from him but the letter basically said you may have seen a wolf. We think they're probably are still some red wolves in your part of the state in cattle perish and that may have been what you saw but more than likely what you saw was a coyote because coyotes are starting to colonize Louisiana now and what did you know about coyotes then just cartoons? I knew about Wiley coyote and the road runner and of course from that what you get is an impression of coyotes being in the red rock deserts of the west and I remember my first thought about that was what in the hell would a coyote be doing here in the bayous and swamps of Louisiana? I mean it'd be like a moose coming to Louisiana so I mean I couldn't quite figure it out and what I really think is that what I saw was a red wolf coyote hybrid because as I began to learn I mean and this this gave me of course a fixation on on these wild predators as a young teenager and so I started reading everything I could everything I could lay my hands on about them and they could interbreed they can interbreed and in fact what was at the time the primary danger for the red wolf was genetic swamping by coyotes migrating into their range right and I think what I saw was a hybrid animal. Did you ever go back up to the deer stand and try again? No I did yeah but I never never was able to lure one back in. He heard you though. He heard me and in fact I had climbed up in a tree probably within a hundred yards of this animal. Sure. For it to have appeared that quickly and it had to be right there. Every night for a year it would have been out there. Yeah yeah I was out there a lot. So your family is French Louisiana but your last name is Spanish. That's correct. What happened there? Well so the French founded Louisiana as a colony in 1714 and the the primary town the first town in what is now the state of Louisiana was not New Orleans which was founded in 1718 four years later but a little town on the Red River in the central part of the state called Nakanish and the Red River at the time all the colonial powers and Thomas Jefferson later later believed the same the Red River they thought came from the southern Rockies near Santa Fe this sort of legendary city of Santa Fe this town of Santa Fe that the Spanish had founded a century before and by this point in 1714 when Nakanish on the Red River was founded by the French the the Spanish were beginning to settle in Texas and they were very alarmed that the French had located a settlement and a new colony on a river that they thought would lead them directly to their capital of the northern provinces of Santa Fe and so what Spain did was to plant a little Presidio a little post of 20 soldiers 10 miles to the west of Nakanish it's in a little town called Robeline Louisiana now and there's actually a Louisiana State Park there that commemorates this little this little Spanish settlement but these young Spanish soldiers all of them evidently were in their 20s and of course they were plunked down in a spot where there were well there were French girls 10 miles away oh okay and so this this this duty is not so bad after all it's not so bad after all and so and there was also the only Catholic church was in Nakanish in the French city that the Spanish soldiers were supposed to be blocking from going to the west so if you wanted to do mass you had to go over to the enemy and journey 10 miles into into French Louisiana I mean you know obviously 10 miles not very far away so the short of the story is my ancestor intermarried into the French families in Louisiana and so I ended up with a Spanish surname but my family is now 11 generations in Louisiana and they primarily I mean my 23 and me indicates that the French ancestry is still about 25 or 30 percent of my ancestry but we started marrying my family in Louisiana started marrying into American families in the 1860s and 1870s so we kind of got like the red wool so we got genetically swamped by Anglo America it's funny there's so there's a Spanish prosidio guarding the river yeah and 300 years later you're the Flores who made it through yeah I'm the one who made it and made it to Santa Fe yeah that's right that's right um we talked a little bit about this before the show I was hoping maybe we can go into more detail August 1978 you're on the road and you rent that room and then the cocktails yeah it's the John cocktail theater yeah what why why well okay so you know let me let me give a little bit of the background that we were talking about I sound like your father now why yeah why would you do that yeah I think dad probably said the same thing why would you do that well at the time I had just gotten a PhD in American history from a university in Texas and 1978 was a particularly bad year for PhDs in history and I had applied for something like about 15 jobs and I had not gotten a single interview let me just say it was a good year for the Yankees it was a good year for the Yankees out but it was not you know not a good year for having a PhD in American history so I had not gotten a single interview with my PhD which I'd spent a lot of effort and time obviously getting a lot of a lot of time in school um but I had going back to when I had been an undergraduate I had this background of writing for magazines and so that first piece that I so sold a sports appeal that was not the last one I continued to write for the outdoor magazines in particular all during these years and so I kind of had the idea okay if I can't get a job at a university maybe I can just you know I know some editors in New York I know I was actually writing a column for outdoor life on conservation in their regional section of the so-called mid-south They had this yellow insert of an outdoor life of various regions, and I was doing a column for them. - You making a living? - On conservation, well, I was making a little bit of money. So I had the idea, I'll call on these editors that I know, and I'll see if I can't get more assignments, and I'll, so what I'll do is I'm gonna move to the most interesting town that I have found in my travels around, particularly the West. I wanted to go West because my ancestors in Louisiana, I had, some of those French ancestors were Indian traders who had gone into the West, and I had sort of grown up with those stories, and I had seen a Western National Park when I was four years old, and had been sort of, just kind of intoxicated with the feel of the air in the West and the blue skies. - I don't believe in genetic memory. - Yeah, well, you know, I don't know if that it was genetic, I think, because I forgot about the trip, and I had an aunt tell me like 25 years later, and I'm 30 years old, and I'm trying to explain to her why I'm fascinated with being in the West and going to the West, and she said, well, maybe it has something to do with when you were four years old, and we took you out to New Mexico and that National Park tour, and I kind of suddenly went, holy cow, you're right, you took me out when I was four, and then I began to remember something about it, but in all those years in between, that had faded away, and I couldn't, I sort of explained it the way I just did to you, that I knew I had these ancestors who had gone West. So anyway, Santa Fe, New Mexico, was the town that, as I traveled around the West, that I thought was the most compelling and interesting place, and so, with no job, I just drove out to Santa Fe, and on the way out, I stopped at one of the universities that had had a job that I had applied for, and just on a whim, basically went into the building that housed the history department, and told the secretary there that I would like to talk to just meet the department chair, and I had walked in, I was wearing t-shirt, and cut off Levi's and moccasins, and she said, Dr. Barr, are you willing, you have time to talk to a student? She said, through his credit, sure, come on in, and I said, well, Dr. Barr, actually, I'm not a student, I'm one of the people who applied for one of the jobs you have, and I was driving through, I thought I'd just come by and introduce myself, and he said, well, I really appreciate you doing that, but unfortunately, those jobs have been filled, and so we're only like three weeks away from school starting, so I wish you luck, and so I left, and I drove on to Santa Fe, and what I did was I went to this little movie theater, this little art movie theater called the John Cocteau Theater, and they had some room to rent above the theater, and so I paid a down payment and two months rent on a little room, single occupancy room, really, right above the ticket booth, in fact, of theater, and as we were talking beforehand, and as you know, this was a movie theater that George R.R. Martin of Game of Thrones, two years later, bought in Santa Fe, so if I had managed to live there, he would have been my landlord, but when I drove back to Texas to get everything to leave my apartment that I was in, while I was loading up my car, the phone rang, and I picked it up, and this voice says, so this is Dr. Holman Barr from this particular university, are you the Stan? I said, yes, he said, are you still interested in that job? When you came by and talked to me, I remembered a couple of weeks ago, you didn't have a job, and you were still interested. And I said, my first thing I said to him was, but I've already rented a room in Santa Fe, and then I thought, holy cow, I've gone this long, okay, when the classes start. And so I ended up giving up that room in Santa Fe, and I shall lay having a career that went for 36 years as a university professor. - What is it about that theater? - You know what's always frustrated me about the annual checkup? You wait forever to get an appointment, rearrange your schedule to actually go, get your lab tests done, and after all that, you spend 10 minutes with the doctor, and here everything looks normal. But I have questions, how are my hormones? Am I deficient in anything? Why is my energy different than it used to be? What can I be doing now to stay healthy as I get older? Everything looks normal, doesn't really answer any of that. That's why I'm excited about superpower. Instead of just checking a few boxes once a year, they give you a much deeper look at what's actually happening inside your body. Your membership includes 150 plus biomarkers every year across two lab tests, a baseline and a progress check. Looking at your heart, liver, thyroid, hormones, metabolism, vitamins, and minerals, and more, then superpower turns that information into a personalized health plan, so you can actually understand what's happening and what you can do about it. Go beyond your annual checkup and finally understand what's really happening inside your body. For limited time, our listeners get $50 off to unlock their health membership. Head over to superpower.com/basement for $50 off your superpower membership. And after you sign up, they'll ask you how you heard about superpower. Tell them the basement sentient. - Well, I mean, it's still going. - Right. - And why did George buy, why is it so interesting? - Well, it was an art theater. And I think he's got interest in obviously in film. And he did then. I think he was already working on the Game of Thrones, the Song of Fire and Ice series. And. - You're still waiting on that, George, if you're listening? - No, I know what, yeah. He's a slowwriter, which he readily concedes. But yeah, I think he just, he probably had the thought even then that this is how. He was not only going to publish the books, but this is how he was going to reach a larger audience with them, that he was ultimately going to try to sell these stories in Hollywood or somewhere. So they could be made into films. And of course, ultimately, Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon, all the rest have been the result. But I think he was already interested in that then. And so having a movie theater was something that he could sort of call on, I think, every day and satisfy his fascination with film. And yeah, he still has it all these years later. - That's a fun idea. I mean, Tarantino's Theater in LA is a lot of fun. - Yeah. Coyotes. Everyone asks you about, not coyotes. But everyone asks you about the natural side. But I think your book said natural and supernatural. - It does, yeah. - Tell me about the supernatural side of the coyote. The coyote, I would argue, after having written this book and done the research to put it together. And having also written other books about other animals, everything about bison and wild horses and jaguars and pronghorn antelope and grizzly bears and wolves and a whole host of animals. But I'm convinced that the coyote is the most interesting indeed fascinating animal in North America. And I don't think I'm alone in believing that. And my evidence for saying that, it's based on the fact that at least 10,000 years ago, and maybe longer ago than that, probably during the time of the Pleistocene Extinctions, when woolly mammoths and sabretooth cats and step lions and all these fantastic creatures are around, but disappearing, if one is at a particular stage of the Pleistocene, these are the animals that are around you, the way elephants and rhinos and hippos and lions and leopards are in Africa today. But at another stage of the Pleistocene, what you're seeing is those animals disappear. You maybe have a memory that your kinship line, your grandparents or something, were the last to see a mammoth. And your uncle was the last to see. No one is seeing the sabretooth cat since. So there's the sense of disappearance, too. And obviously by 10,000 years ago, 32 general of animals in North America are gone. But one of the animals that did not disappear was this little jackal-sized wolf, the coyote. And I think that there was a fascination with that animal that prepared native people to assign it a very unusual role in their stories of who they were, how they had originated, how the world came to be. And that. assignment was to make the coyote into coyote with a capital C. Of course, they would no doubt use a different word for the animal, but what we today refer to as the coyote avatar, our semi deity of Native American stories, we usually designate with a capital C as opposed to the little animal that's trotting by as you're, you know, hearing about this. And that animal was given an enormous responsibility for making the world what it was. And coyote with a capital C became not only a sort of right hand semi deity, which I regard as supernatural, beyond the natural, as the, the emissary of the first cause, whatever that first cause was. And so in the Christian tradition, the best analogy you could use is so there's a God, and there's Jesus of Nazareth, who comes down to earth. The coyote is the figure out of the Paleolithic world in North America, who does the actual work on North America. The first cause never shows up, which tribes would have that legend, almost every tribe that resided within the original range of coyotes in North America. And that was in the American West, basically from the Great Plains, Westward. Well, coyotes in a wild word, isn't it? Yes. So that's Mexico. That's Mexico. And, and that, the word that we use to, to designate the animal is from, yeah, from the Noah language, which is the, the Aztec language. So it's all over, it's all over. They were found from basically southern Mexico to probably the edges of present day Saskatchewan in Alberta. Coyotes did not range, and this is all based on paleontology and archaeology because, of course, we don't know otherwise, but based on paleontology and archaeology, there are no remains of coyotes. For example, in the Pacific Northwest. And from essentially the central coast of California, southward, you find evidence of coyotes in the paleontological size, but not really up in the bay area and in northern California. So the northern part of the coast didn't seem to have them, but east of the cascades and the searas in the north, and then from the central coast of California, southward, all the way to south of Mexico City, there were coyotes. And they extended, they're range extended almost to the Mississippi River. And everywhere those animals were found, the local people treated them as this avatar semi-deity figure. What did the deity do, dirt, in the legends? He basically, and it's he, by the way, there are some stories that refer to, I mean, what I titled a chapter in Coyote America that's about this is I call it Old Man America because I really think he's our oldest literary figure in North America. Yeah. Yeah, all of our early stories that go of the farthest back in time or about coyote. There are some stories about a female coyote, but there are very few in number. Almost all the stories are about a male coyote. But he basically is the act of creation. He creates the topography of North America. He makes the rivers flow the way they flow. He has the Columbia flow westward from the Rockies and the Missouri flow eastward. He also creates and locates humans in their various places in the west. And everything here is about the west because coyote does not range east to the Mississippi River where there are a host of other kind of paleolithic figures who occupy a kind of a similar role. There's spider, there's rabbit, there's there are giant humans who do this. There's a host of different kind of figures, but coyote occupies by far the largest range of any of them. And so he creates topography of North America. The rivers he creates, he places people in there. I think the first cause is the creation of people, but coyote is responsible for placing them where they go on the landscape. He has to fight monsters that are in North America and get them out of the way so people won't be harmed by monsters. What monsters is he fighting? Well, there's a great story from the shishonies of his battle with a monster that's in the Northern Rockies in order to make the country around the Northern Rockies where the shishonies end up settling, safe for the people to be there. And coyote has to battle this monster and it's a very involved tale of all the kind of encounters that he and the monster have before coyote prevails. Give us a little taste of it. Well, he has shishonies in my blood, so I'm really interested. Oh, yeah. He prevails largely through a trick, and it's been a while since I've read this particular story. But as we all know, coyote is referred to in a lot of literature as a trickster figure, and so he manages to trick this particular monster into sacrificing itself. And that's sort of the model for a lot of how these coyote trickster stories work is you pull off a trick that basically prays on, and this is what I came to argue. And I will say I think I'm probably the first and maybe right now the only person to make this argument about the coyote stories. I argue in my book, having read a bunch of those stories, that what's important about the trick is not that it's a trick, not that the monster falls for a trick, but that the trick itself prays on the foibles of human nature. And so it's not the trick that's important, it's why the trick works. And that's what the stories are really intended to convey to you. They're intended to convey, unlike say the Jesus of Nazareth stories where Jesus is a perfect figure, and your goal as a follower is to emulate that kind of perfection. The coyote is portrayed as being a figure who has good traits, but also lots of really bad traits. Like like like people. Exactly like people. And so the coyote's role is actually, to me, rather more useful in being able to say, okay, there are these attributes out there, like gluttony and lust and being addicted to things and being a narcissist and being an absolute buffoon. And all of those traits are used in these stories as part of the trick. And the people who fall, or the, in this case, the monster in the shiny story, who falls for the trick, falls for the trick because of one of the particular foibles of human nature. So the purpose of the stories obviously is to teach people about who we are. And they are very clever, they're very smart, they're often very, very funny. And what coyote essentially comes across as is, okay, he's this biological force that takes huge pleasure in life and in being alive and in sensuality and in sort of getting the most out of the moment. But he's also a narcissistic buffoon. And so you have to look at both sides of the human story and that's how you learn about human nature. I mean, to me, that's a very sophisticated body of literature that teaches the people who hear those stories and they are rendered orally about themselves. That kind of answers a question I was going to ask you is, during this time, you've got all these majestic animals, like the Peruvian tribes, they're worshiping jaguar, so you get it. And why would the native tribes choose this little jackal, but maybe what they observed was this creature is mostly a lot like us where a mammoth is just a, I think a lot of it had to do. I mean, you're right. And even, you know, the Mayans, the jaguar and the eagle are the two most sacred animals. But I think the reason the coyote was picked is because it was seen as a survivor. And it was a survivor that lived by its wits. And that I think people saw as admirable. They were watching mammoths and saber-toothed cats and lions and horses and camels all go extinct. And the animal that was surviving all of it was this little small jackal like wolf. And it was doing so by being smart. And I think that appealed to people. I mean, I've pointed out in coyote. America, that the Kaidu, Kaidu has done this not just once with the Pleistocene, but did it at the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century when we Americans were engaged in the biggest destruction of wildlife and world history, really. I mean, we had reduced 30 million buffalo to fewer than 1,000 animals in the previous 80 years. We were about to wipe out the most numerous bird on earth, the passenger pigeon, our wonderfully beautiful parents, the Carolina parakeet were going to be gone within about three decades of 1900. I mean, we had lost our northern hemisphere penguin, the great awk. I mean, we were just wiping things out right and left and everybody who was paying attention noted that, I mean, wolves were disappearing. The one animal that was not disappearing was the coyote. And one of our great animal riders, Ernest Thompson Seaton, wrote a piece, the lead piece, and Scribner's magazine in 1900 coming up with kind of an apocryphal explanation for why that was. But everybody was noticing it. All these animals are disappearing. For some reason, this one isn't. Well, that is a great transition to take a break when we come back. Maybe you can tell us about the Murray Brothers. Oh, yes, sure. The Murray Brothers, absolutely. Before we get to the murys, just quickly, what is a coyote? How does it relate to dog wolf? Where is it in that in the branch? Well, it's the same genus, canus. It's closely related, so there's an interesting story about wolves in America. Gray wolves are not the same animals as eastern wolves and red wolves. Eastern wolves, red wolves and coyotes, and we only know this really for about a dozen years as a result of genetic work on their genomes. Those all seem to be the canas that after the evolution of canas in North America, some five million years ago, those three coyotes, eastern wolves, and red wolves seem to be the animals that remained in America and did not leave. Gray wolves represented a population of animals that actually migrated into Eurasia, spent a couple of million years really outside North America before they started returning in a series of waves about 30,000 years ago. They left and came back. That's interesting. Yeah. And so they are different enough from coyotes that even in the years in the 1920s and 1930s, when wolves were being wiped out in the west, gray wolves were being wiped out. I mean, there were just small numbers of them left, and they're looking for mates. They, gray wolves, found mates among ranch dogs rather than with coyotes that were all around them. But, and this is the origin of the so-called coy wolf in the east. I was going to ask you about the coy wolf. Yeah. Coyotes do not hybridize with gray wolves, but they readily hybridize with the two kind of wolves that remained in North America along with them. Excuse me. And so red wolves and eastern wolves will both very readily hybridize with coyotes, and that's what's created this population of animals that we refer to these days as coy wolves that are part wolf and part coyote. But that animal does not exist in the west because gray wolves and coyotes as a result of that long separation in time, they have behavioral, probably behavioral differences that prevent them from. And I, you know, I had an interesting time once at the Predator Research Facility in Logan, Utah when I was working on the coyote book, talking to the people there. They have about a hundred coyotes in captive pans, and they're endlessly doing experiments with them, trying to figure out, you know, various things about them, their individuality, for example. But one of the things they attempted, they told me, was to impregnate a coyote with gray wolf, with gray wolf semen. And this female coyote gave birth to a litter of puppies that were part gray wolf and part coyote, and she immediately killed them all. Wow. So it can work, but they didn't want to do it. Yeah. Why do you think that is? Well, as I said, I think there are behavioral differences that prevent them from breeding. But is that a competitive between the species where they are very competitive? In fact, you know, one of the things I wrote about in coyote America was about the so-called "fishing fusion" idea, where one of the things that enables coyote success is that they are able to both exist as pack animals and as singles and pairs, which is called "fishing fusion." And the argument about how they evolved that is that that came from coexisting with gray wolves that harassed them. And so when gray wolves basically were virtually gone, and it was humans who had replaced wolves as the harassers coyote still had this adaptability to function, even though we were trying to wipe them out. Sure. Yeah. But that came from their relationship, their earlier relationship, and it was obviously, I mean, when wolves, for example, were reintroduced into Yellowstone, almost the first thing they did was to reduce the coyote population by about 60%. The wolves did? The wolves did. I mean, they attacked coyotes everywhere they could find them. They dug up their dens and killed their puppies. Wow. So that mother smelled that and said, "Nope." She smelled that and said, "That's not going to happen. I'm not going to raise animals no part wolf." So yeah, she killed those puppies. That's amazing. Yeah. All right, so the Mury Brothers. Yeah. A science agency becomes a killing agency to keep its funding. Yeah. The Bureau of Biological Survey. It already sounds ominous. Yeah. Which had been created in the 1890s, essentially to do a survey of what animals were left after this mayhem of the last years of the 19th century when we were killing so many animals. But by the early 20th century, a purely scientific agency like that was having trouble getting funding from Congress. Meanwhile, ranchers all over the country, especially the West, were complaining about wolves and coyotes and mountain lions and asking because the federal government, by this point, had set aside the national forest system. Right. And the ranchers were convinced that these public lands were becoming the breeding grounds for predators. No Teddy Roosevelt fans out there. Yeah. No Teddy Roosevelt fans among that particular group. And so they'd say, "You did this to us. It's your responsibility, feds, to deal with this predator problem." And unable to get funding for a purely scientific mission, the Bureau of Biological Survey decided in about 1905. Okay. That's what we'll do. Congress will give us money if we pledge to be the agency that solves the predator problem. And so the biological survey at that point began very steadily sort of redefining themselves as the solution to the existence of predators in America. And particularly under the leadership of a young man, a Minnesota without a great deal of education. His name was Vernon Bailey, but he was really good at trapping animals and really good at figuring out how to kill animals. And he began writing for the biological survey. These yearly reports advising forest service managers and national park managers how to get rid of your predators. So what basically happens to get to the Murray brothers, which I know is where we want to go with this discussion, is that the biological survey operating under these old world mythologies about predators. I mean, in the old world after all, you know, we've been hurting stock animals for 8,000 years. We had been domesticating and hurting cattle and sheep and goats and so forth for a very long time so that predators were kind of public enemy number one. And then brought that cinema to America where the native people, not for one thing, not having not being razors of domesticated stock, had always looked at animals like coyotes and wolves. I mean, these are, they teach us about hunting. They teach us about how to care for families. They are really dedicated to their mates and their packs and their pubs and their, we name our clans after wolves and coyotes. We name our children after these animals. We seek them out as total animals and as spiritual guides and vision quests. So there was this huge respect for predators and admiration for them among the native population. But there's more money in cattle and here come the Europeans with all their stock and of course They want to make war. I mean the first environmental act that Europeans pass and in North American history and Plymouth Colony in 8th or 1632 is to put a bounty on wolves Wow, I didn't know that yeah, that's the first environmental act with old worlders Implement in America is to place a bounty on wolves to try to get rid of them I mean England had they had gotten rid of all their wolves by the 1400s. Yep. So, you know These are people who have never been around wolves. They're kind of shocked that suddenly they are in a place where Wolves are very common and easily seen. They're also shocked that with all these ideas they have From Europe about wolves being dangerous to people that as these early settlers particularly in New England Right in fact We've never known it yet for a wolf to ever set upon a man or a woman or a child They don't seem to be aggressive at all towards people all this is kind of worrisome and but it doesn't change the agenda That they're gonna get rid of these animals. So this has been going on since the 1600s And now we have a federal agency that dedicates itself in order to get funding originally To the idea of okay, we're gonna step in. We're gonna replace all these old bounty systems that territories and states have set up And we're going to be professional about this and the way you Professionally approach the so-called predator problem is you start hiring hunters to go out and They don't shoot wolves and coyotes. They basically spread poison bait across the landscape Strict nine is the particular poison they use and start poisoning the predator populations into extinction Four knocks everybody's heard of it supposedly holds over 400,000 tons of U.S. gold But the thing is the last full independent audit of that vault happened in 1953 Since then we've gotten photo ops supervised walkthroughs and a whole lot of trust us never in the outside auditors No full inventory count or no way for anybody outside government to actually verify once down there That's not a conspiracy theory nobody's checked and when the backbone of the world's reserve currency rests on a promise nobody can verify It's worth asking why your own retirement should rest on paper too Physical metal in your name doesn't need an audit you can just hold it call Golden Cres metals and get their free investor kit A walkthrough moving physical gold or silver into an IRA or 401k tax and penalty free or buying directly with cash You'll also get a free portfolio review no pressure no hard sell just a straight conversation about what you're holding and right now Golden Cres running a bonus up to 25,000 dollars and free silver on qualifying purchases go to goldencres metals.com/thewifiles Or text the word files to metals that's 63825 to receive free investor kit a free portfolio review with no obligation or hard sell And a qualifying purchases of the $25,000 in bonus silver all that when you go to goldencres metals.com/thewifiles Or text the word files to metals Imagine setting your makeup then forgetting it's even theirs Meet new grippy setting mist from Maybelline, New York Gel to mist technology locks in your look for up to 24 hours with flexible all-day comfy grip No tightness no stickiness no residue just plump Dewey hydrated skin that still feels like your skin tried new grippy setting mist from Maybelline, New York Maybe it's Maybelline What take us to what happens when an animal ingest strict nine well, it's a it's a It's not a pretty no site in fact. There was a There was a term that these hunters used they called it the the strict nine signature and It was what you saw of an animal what you saw in its its body Contortions that had been killed by ingesting strict nine. It basically wrenched them so powerfully that it Arched their spines and stuck their tray their tail straight out as if the animal had been hit by a bolt of lightning and Left this sort of I mean I describe it in one of my books as it's almost like seeing an animal shaped into a question mark With its body humped up and its tail sticking straight out and that was the characteristic strict nine signature of an animal that had been killed by this poison and it's not a quick death It's not a quick task. I mean what one of the stories I tell and and while new world is about Vernon Bailey Who I mentioned a minute ago who it sort of becomes? Teddy Roosevelt called him wolf Bailey because he was the guy who knew how to get rid of these animals Vernon Bailey writes his superior in Washington and says So what would you say would be the correct dose of strict nine when I put strict nine into these little base They would they would sprinkle these little pieces of meat or sew it around usually a dead horse or something and they would soak them in strict nine They want should be the proper dose to kill a wolf humanely Let's say an under three minutes The response he got back was this You had best go into a hospital that has a mental institution and Have yourself checked in because No employee of ours in his right mind would ever ask such a question the ranchers are not interested in any Compassion directed towards wolves or coyotes. Oh my god You kill them with as big a dose as you wish and don't think one more time about showing any kind of empathy for These animals. They I mean, and this is just one and Going right down to today when we are trying to recover wolves in America We are still employing some of the cruelest strategies for Reducing their numbers are holding their numbers in check as many of these state governments in the west now call it that you could possibly imagine and sort of Approaches that we would never use because sport hunting of course is supposed to be ethical and be all about fair chase but with these animals everything is Everything is basically legal you can kill them in any possible way and we do it I mean we're killing them with wire snare traps now that basically snare a wolf or a coyote and every time this panic Animal attempts to move the wire snare Titans a little bit more until it finally completely strangles them So that kind of cruelty is one of the features of this story and one of the crazy things about this story is that by the 1920s These hunters for the biological survey Have spread more than three and a half million poison baits across western America And one of the things they've learned how to do is They've realized that wolves in particular are so strongly committed to their packs and to their mates That I mean, and I use a quote from one of the hunters that says this and while they were all if you Kill one animal out of the pack And you bait all your subsequent strict nine tablets or pieces of suet with the scent of that animal You can kill every single animal in the pack because they will all be looking for the lost member of the pack And if you put that scent on the bait you can kill every one of them and that works It worked so effectively that I mean, I'll give you one example In the state of Montana in 1899 Montana in that year And they were still using the bounty system. This is before the federal government comes to play this role. I'm describing the state of Montana in 1899 Bountied 21,000 wolves in the state When the Bureau of biological survey takes over the job and it gets permanent funding from the federal government in 15, but it had been doing this for several years before that, but now it's getting well-funded and it starts hiring a lot of people Had more than 350 hunters going out in order to bait the west with strict nine by 1915 By 1920 Montana which had killed 21,000 wolves in 1899 in the year 1920 They killed 20 wolves in Montana That was how effective this strategy was And only 20 because they were gone. They were gone. Yeah, they were gone So that by the middle of the 1920s. I mean, there are still lingering animals when some of the sort of primary wolf hunters. I got named Stanley Young and EA Goldman who are major players in the biological survey. By the way, it becomes the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In 1944, they published a two-volume book. It's in every library in the country called The Wolves of North America. And it's basically a celebration of how we have wiped wolves off the face of the continent. All the wolves are gone from east of the Mississippi River. I mean, there are none left except for a few red wolves they think from Florida across to Texas, down in the along the Gulf Coast. All the other wolves are gone in eastern America. And in western America, west of the Mississippi River, all the Rocky Mountain States have only 100 wolves left. There may be 50 wolves left in California. There are about 150 Mexican wolves in Arizona and New Mexico and on down into Mexico proper. And the only wolves that are really left is there some red wolves left, as I said, along the Gulf Coast. And there are a few wolves up around the Great Lakes still. But we have basically wiped them out by 1945. Were they still dropping poison during this whole time? Absolutely. They're still dropping poison. Is it killing every. It's killing, yes. I mean, the collateral damage is enormous because. We call it like Carian Birds and Eagles, Ravens, Magpies. Oh, what a disaster. Everything. I mean, some of the stories that are told. And, you know, I mean, I feel obligated in these books I've done, like Coyote America and Wild New World, in American Serengeti 2, to tell these stories because I think a lot of Americans don't really know this and they're hard to listen to. But one of the stories about this kind of thing is that you put poison baits out around say a horse that you've killed for this purpose to attract predators. And as these hunters start approaching this bait animal, a dead horse, about a quarter a mile away, they start encountering animals that have been killed by the poison around this bait animal. So they start finding raccoons, foxes, eagles, magpies, Ravens, I mean, skunks, everything that's going to be possibly attracted to little pieces of meat or fat that's left out around this baited animal. So that, I mean, one of the hunters described, he said, it's like a spinning centrifuge that sprays dead animals out for a quarter of a mile, all in a circle all around our bait. And what we're really going for, of course, are wolves or and coyotes, but we're just killing the shed out of all kinds of things. Can you imagine that she's just a number of animals killed? It's, I mean, Neonavus has been able to make any kind of estimate. What we all know, though, at least those of who have studied this story is that the populations of animals coyotes accepted everything else is just crashing. I mean, we are losing animals in America like, I mean, you can hardly believe with the single exception of the things we want to hunt. And so we have state fish and wildlife agency set up to make sure that we have Bob White Quail and we introduce animals like like Chinese peasants and white tail deer we want to protect and elk we want to protect and grass and turkeys and all those things that people want to hunt. But everything else and in part is because the government is telling people, look, the more of these predators we kill, the more stuff you're going to get to shoot the easier it is you're going to make it possible to get your deer or your elk. And so sport hunters, you know, and of course the firearms manufacturers are all in on this too because the more game animals you have out there, you know, the more you're going to sell firearms and ammunition and all that. So the whole, I mean, they called it a buffalo rifle. Yes, they did. Absolutely. So the whole project becomes, convince the public that predators are evil, that they're the desparados of the animal world. They're, you know, like John Dillinger or something. And the biological survey actually has a marketing arm that publishes newspaper articles. I mean, I've read one of them when I was doing the research for these books. It was in the Washington post about how the G-men, the hunters are going to go out and kill the desparados of the animal world with all these photographs of mountain lions and bears and coyotes and wolves just like they're saving us from, you know, John Dillinger and sure and body and Clyde. And so it's good to throw little anti-Mexican racism in the marketing as well. Oh, of course. Yeah. Why not? So we, we sort of are doing this based on these old world hatreds of predators that have harassed domesticated stock for a long time in the old world. Plus these kind of folklore mythologies of these animals as evil, and they all attack your children. And they'll, if they find you in the forest, the pack of wolves will dry. I mean, we still do movies showing scenes like that. Everyone knows little red riding hood. Absolutely. Everybody knows these stories. And so they play on all of this and sort of convince generations of Americans that this is a reality. And they do it all just finally going to get us to the Murie Brothers without having done a single frigging scientific study of the role that wolves or coyotes have played in American natural history or ecology. So kill with chemicals first, do the study later. That's the study later. That's America's, that's their platform. We've been doing that for a long time. We've been doing it for a long time. And the first studies, I mean, when the Murie, so Olos and Adolf Murie are these brothers from the Upper Midwest who are trained ecologists. And this is one of the things, by the way, that begins to rescue the game. Indian ideas about all these animals. We just brushed aside. Of course. What do they know? But starting in 1915, coming out of the work of Charles Darwin and evolution, a new science called Ecology, which is the study of the relationships of animals in the natural world and of botany and all the rest, emerged and the ecological society of America had its first meeting in 1915 with 300 members showing up among them were very famous figures like Aldo Leopold, for example, who's going to become a major player in this whole story. And it's the science of ecology that starts saying, look, before we go out and just kill all these animals and wipe them out. And I mean, the campaign to wipe them out in 1931 in an act called the Animal Damage Control Act manages to get Congress to promise $10 million to exterminate animals like wolves and coyotes completely off the continent. So Congress is pouring money in in 1931, the Animal Damage Control Act of that year. That's yeah, we can't afford that in that year. Yeah, well, right. I mean, it's, you know, the stock market has collapsed, but there's money for this. The Great Depression is, but there's a million dollars a year for 10 years as the plan. We're going to give the biological survey and the animal damage control unit within it, a million dollars a year for the next 10 years from 1931 to 1941 to produce the extinction of these animals. All without doing any science. And so the ecologist, the ecologist like Aldo Leopold and a young man named Joseph Grinnell, who is George Bird Grinnell's nephew, who becomes a major player in the state of California and for the National Park Service in arguing things like, you know, we've got these national parks and the people who go there are fascinated in all the animals and we're supposed to preserve these national parks in order to represent American nature. Why don't we let the predators stay? Joseph Grinnell wrote an article for Science Magazine in 1915 proposing that. And of course, the National Park Service is, it gets its organic act the next year. We finally have a National Park Service. So there are arguments by the ecologists that we need to let these animals have some places where and the parks seem to be the best place far where we can see American nature actually enacted. Were they putting strict 9 in the parks at any point? Absolutely. They were. In fact, Vernon Bailey had gone to like Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks in the 19 teens to teach those park managers how to get rid of their predators. I mean, we killed the last wolf and Yellowstone National Park in 1927. And until 1995, when we reintroduced them, there are no wolves in Yellowstone. And I'll just add one other little bit before I finally do get to the Marri Brothers because that's where we're going. But. Another way of getting rid of wolves and coyotes, this came from the state of Montana, you know, and I keep dragging on Montana, but I live there and taught in the university there for 22 years. And so I know a good bit about the Montana story here. And Montana, of course, is doing really egregious things with wolves these days. In 1905, the state of Montana actually passed an act that required state veterinarians who came across or were brought to their facilities, a wild coyote or a wolf to infect that animal with sarcoptic mange and then release it into the wild in order to spread mange to the wild populations. Required. Required them to do so. And the manager, the first superintendent, I should say, of Glacier National Park actually put in a request that he be delivered animals that had mange into the park so he could more expeditiously kill wolves and coyotes in the park. Now the National Park Service in Washington denied his request, but he actually entered in a request that he get mange infected animals. And even today, when you go to Yellowstone to look at wolves in places like the Lamar Valley, if you see five or six or 10 wolves, you will almost certainly see an animal or two that has got mange. I mean, it's still still still infects those populations. Yeah, more than a hundred years later. What kind of statistics were available about wolf attacks in the parks? Were they going after visitors? No, of course they weren't. Of course not. I mean, in fact, when Stanley Young and EA Goldman wrote there these, you know, sort of leaders of the biological survey wrote there the wolves of North America, they had a chapter dedicated to trying to find evidence of wolf attacks of humans. And basically, I mean, I'll give them credit for their honesty. They had to say at the end of the chapter, we don't really have anything. I mean, there's, you know, they came up with one of the stories I remember from reading it that made me laugh is there was a famous book written about the Great Plains in the 1840s. And the author of this particular book had described at one point being bucked off his horse and losing his hat. And it sort of knocked him unconscious. And when he came to his hat was lying seven or eight feet away. And a wolf was standing over it sniffing it. And they used that in the wolves of North America as an example of possible wolf predation on a human. This is the, did you die with COVID or of COVID? It just goes best that's the same thing. Yeah, exactly. You know, you show them in the wolf. I'll show you the crime. So all this is happening. And there's no science. Nobody has studied these animals. And so the biological survey and the National Park Service finally decide in the middle of the 1930s, okay, let's hire these murray brothers, two of our best trained naturalists to go out and demonstrate that they were referring to the coyote during those years as the arch enemy of our time. The arch of our time. Yes, the arch and the arch predator of our time they were referring it to. So let's send Olas murray to Jackson Hole and Grand Teton's National Park. And let's have him study the coyotes of the Grand Teton's so that we finally have evidence to buttress our endeavors of wiping these animals out. And let's send the National Park Service as well. Let's send his brother Adolf murray to Yellowstone National Park. And let's do a study of the coyotes there. The wolves are gone from both places. Right. So let's do the coyotes there. And that'll finally give us all the evidence we need for this campaign. We've embarked on really since 1620. Right. Since the time of the settlement of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. We've got a million a year coming in. We've got absolutely. So let's we've got a million a year coming in. Let's send these guys out and we'll do the studies and we'll finally provide the scientific evidence to support our programs. The only problem was these two scientists were dedicated to science and the truth. And when they began studying the coyotes of Jackson Hole and the Grand Teton's and basically it was the the winter elk range in Jackson Hole in particular that Olas murray was working on. And Adolf, I mean, he spent five years doing this study in Yellowstone. I mean, he really did a remarkably good study. What they concluded was that coyotes actually, it turns out not only are not a threat to wildlife because what it looks like is that all the animals that they prey on, they've been praying on for a very, very long time. We don't know how far back, but evidently a really long time before we ever got here. And all those animals already have adapted to the predation by coyotes. So I mean, in Yellowstone, Adolf Murray went down one animal after another mountain goats. No reason to suspect that coyotes have any deleterious effect on mountain goat populations. Big horn sheep, same thing, Mule deer, same thing. I mean, he just goes down the list. I've studied all of these. I've looked at the scat. I've observed coyotes and how they've interacted with the young and the old. And there's no evidence that they have any effect on wildlife populations other than to make them healthier because they tend to take out what predators tend to go for with the cost benefit analysis. If I don't want to get kicked in the head, are stabbed with antlers, they tend to go for the animals that are injured, that are old, that are very young. They don't go after the really healthy ones that are the breeding population. So they put all of this in their studies. And one of the things they conclude, OOS, in particular, said, as far as I can tell, 80% of what coyotes actually do is beneficial to humans. And the remaining 20% is neutral in its effects. What's the benefit? Well, for example, he discovered the major prey of coyotes actually. It's not elk calves. It's not mule deer calves. It's mice and rats. And so, of course, they produce a beneficial effect for agriculture because they go after the animals. So yeah, 80% of what they do. So we finally have done the studies. They're published by in the federal register. Copies are distributed to Congress. The Bureau of Biological Survey gets a copy from OOS's study because they had sent him and the National Park Service gets eight offs study from Yellowstone. And what do we do? Throw those studies out the window and keep right on going. Of course, we do. Of course, we do. Yeah, we keep right on going. Whatever happened to the Moory Brothers, do they become activists? They did. They both actually resigned from the government agencies they were working for. And I mean, they did some really important things. They worked in what became. And in fact, suggested that we set aside the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. OOS worked among the caribou herds in Alaska. Adolf worked and recommended the and also in Alaska and recommend among sheep, particularly and recommended that we set aside the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which he did in the 1950s. OOS is the guy who basically he was sent by what was now the U.S. by a Fish and Wildlife Service to Montana to take a look at what has become the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge. And they were thinking of just setting aside some small piece of land up there. And how would you, you know, maybe as a wintering waterfowl spot on the Missouri River. And he recommends instead a giant National Wildlife Refuge on the Missouri River. So they do that, but they both ultimately end up leaving the government service and they work for the wildlife society, for the wilderness society for most of the rest of their lives. I had never heard of them before reading your work. And I feel like more people should know about those. They're very famous individuals. They did a lot of work in Western Wyoming and Yellowstone and in Jackson Hole and are well known in places like that. They're well known in Alaska. Otherwise, a lot of people have never heard of them, but they were a couple of along with Aldo Leopold, a couple of our mid-20th century naturalist and accomplished. who really did important work that helped get us over this hump to the point where we were starting to use ecology and some sense of history to realize we've got to stop this. This is crazy. This attempt to wipe these animals out and what we have to do ultimately, which of course we end up doing when the Endangered Species Act has passed, is we've got to start recovering wolves. Coyotes are okay. Now, they're still being poisoned. And finally in 1972, Richard Nixon will end the poisoning of coyotes on public lands. But nonetheless, the wolf issue was the one that they, because Adolf also went to Mt. McKinley and did with his wolves of Mt. McKinley that was released in 1945. He produced kind of the first of the modern wolf stories where he gets us a look at this animal that has been here for five million years. And finally, we're beginning to realize something, something real about it. And we can begin to manage wolves on a basis of reality and science rather than this old world folklore. Well, it only takes like 20 or 30 years to wipe out the wolves. Why did the coyotes survive? That was one of the really interesting stories of the 20th century war against these animals. The arched predator of our time, the coyotes were called after the wolves were basically gone. And there were a number of attempts to figure it out of what was happening. And one of the ones I mentioned it earlier and I'll go back to it and tell you the story because it's a, I think it's kind of a pretty great story in this whole narrative. Ernest Thompson's seat was a Canadian who ended up becoming a major player in the American Boy Scouts. He ended up, in fact, moving to Santa Fe and founding what's now called Seton Village. I mean, he built several houses and became a major player in the American Boy Scout movement. But he was, in his early years, a predator hunter. And he had come to the West, especially to New Mexico, in the 1880s to try to hunt down and kill a particular wolf, the Lobo of Carompa, it was called, that had eluded a whole host of other hunters and Ernest Thompson's seat and thought that he could pull this off. And so he did so and he did so by using, he managed to kill this wolf and he did it by using the tactic that I mentioned a few minutes ago that the later federal hunters were used, where he realized that all of his attempts to set traps for Lobo were ineffective. This animal was too smart, it had learned too much about all the techniques that people that hunters were trying to use to kill it. But what made it vulnerable was its love for its mate. And so Seton managed to capture Blanca, the mate of Lobo and killed her and then he baited his traps with her scent. And he did a double set where he put a set out that he thought Lobo would dig up with his front paws and then put a set about three or four feet away, two or three sets. In fact, that Lobo's back feet would get into. And he managed to catch this animal. And here's how he wrote because he within a few years, within about 20 years, he was no longer a predator hunter. He was now a writer of the Jack London ilk in the beginning of the 20th century. There were a whole host of these writers about animal stories. And John Burles was one, Jack London obviously was one and Ernest Thompson, Seton was one. And one of the stories he wrote was about Lobo and how he described the way this wolf died. He said they caught Lobo and they wanted to take Lobo alive so the ranchers could kind of gloat over this wolf finally being captured. And they staked it out in a rancher's yard and Seton said it lay on a rise with a chain around its neck looking off into the distance where it and its mate had roamed the countryside and started itself to death. It wouldn't eat and basically died by starting itself dead. So he wrote that story and then the story that I particularly have admired was his story to try to come to grips with why are wolves disappearing? Why were we able to wipe out Bison? Why have 15 million pronghorn antelope shrunk to 5,000? Why are passenger pigeons nearly gone? And coyotes are still here. No matter what we do to them, there seem to be as many as there ever were if not more. So he writes this story that as I said was published in scriptures in 1900 called Tito, the story of the little coyote who learned how. And it's this allegorical story about this coyote, this little female coyote who is a pup is captured by a rancher as he's killing the coyote's parents and the other pups in the litter. He captures her. He changed her up in his yard and she grows up as a captured animal that they throw scraps to. But as she grows up, she is able to observe all the strategies and techniques that this ranching family is using to wipe out as Satan describes it, the coyote kind. And they're using dogs and they're using traps and they're using guns and they're using strict nine poison. And Tito is sitting in the yard watching all of it. And at some point after she's a couple of years old, she manages to get away. And she goes out in the nature and she finds a mate. And as Ernest Thompson tells a story, she then has a litter of pups as she teaches her pups and all her pups offspring are going to learn the same lesson through basically coyote culture being handed down all the techniques that people are using to try to wipe them out. And so they know now as a result of Tito, all the strategies. And he says the human analog of this and there is a human analog is Moses, Moses, who as a young Jewish child is taken into an Egyptian family and raised in Egypt among a people who are attempting to wipe out his people and he learns all the ideas and all the techniques that they're going to use to do so, and then gets away and rescues his people. So that's the story that he tells in Scribner's magazine in 1900. And the native tribes are like, we told you. We told you that this, yeah. Of course, it's a great allegorical story, but it's not the scientific version of how they do it. We've already mentioned it, but it's what we don't find out about coyotes until we spend some five hundred million dollars of taxpayer money by the 1970s and have killed eight and a half million coyotes in America doing this. And not only are there just as many coyotes in the West as there always were, but now with wolves wiped out in the East, coyotes are spreading across the Mississippi River into Louisiana where I was growing up into upstate New York and beginning to colonize all the Eastern states. So, so they are being killed, but they're replacing themselves. They are replacing themselves and spreading and spreading. And spreading. They're going north into Canada where they get all the way up into the Arctic. Is it possible if there was no strict 9 program that they wouldn't have spread? I think two things were required. The strict 9 program was one, but I think wiping out wolves in places like the East in particular, now the expansion of coyotes to the Arctic indicates that they were able to expand into country in Canada that still had wolf populations. But I think the elimination of the kind of predatory niche that wolves and coyotes fill in the East expedited their movement because they were going into places like Virginia and New York and Vermont and New Hampshire and Massachusetts where there was no competition from another predator. And also more people, more food, more rats. More people, more food, more rats, more mice. populations that we're beginning to with no predators. Of course, dear populations are beginning to explode in states like Pennsylvania. So that was the pull and the push was the attempt on the part of federal governments and state governments and just individuals because by now, I mean, there had been a story in scientific American, for example, in 1920 that said, "Any red-blooded American who sees a coyote ought to shoot it on sight, it's a patriotic act." It's not, and it's 1920, if there's a reason I mentioned that date specifically because this is right after the Russian Revolution. This writer in scientific American says you should shoot coyotes as a patriotic act, not because they have any value. They're not worth as much as the ammunition it takes to kill them, but because coyotes are, after all, the original North American Bolsheviks, they're communists and so we need to kill them on sight. So just ordinary people are shooting coyotes every time they see them. The government is trying to poison them with strict nine and by the 1940s, I mean, we've introduced a whole new host of poisons to use against them. It's part of the chemical revolution of World War II is we have things like, I mean, there is a particular poison. I mean, see if I can remember the scientific name of it. In any case, it's a strict nine. Is it the 1080? 1080 is one. I'm just trying to think of the scientific name for 1080, but 1080 is the most important one of the of the age because and it's given that name because it takes 1080 tries on the part of the federal poison engineers to come up with this perfect poison, but we come up with four or five different poisons to kill coyotes. So we don't just use strict nine anymore. And as I said a minute ago, I mean, we've killed by the 1970s. We've killed eight and a half million of them have spent five hundred million dollars trying to wipe them out and they're spreading across all of America. They get to Delaware, the last state in the East. They occupy in 2011. So you got them in Central Park. You got them in Chicago. Got them in Central Park. Yeah, we've got at least four hundred of them in Chicago. Yeah. Four hundred coyotes are living in Chicago. And it's a, you know, it's one of the kind of great reverse nature North American stories because what we always think of and this was one of the reasons I've told people over the years, I had so much fun writing this book is because usually when you write about environmental stories in American history, you're writing, you know, about this, everything is just falling apart. Yeah. And it's this sad kind of outcome. But with the coyote story, it's the reverse. It's like we throw everything we've got at them and we can't wipe them out. And the thing that replaces ultimately the Tito, the story of the little coyote that learned how is a couple of scientists in the late 1950s doing a careful enough scientific study of coyotes to come to these conclusions which they published in all the major journals, the Journal of Memology, Ecology, all the rest. This is why we're not able to wipe out coyotes. Coyotes have evolved in adaptation called Fish and Fusion, which we've mentioned already, where they respond to harassment by breaking up their packs and scattering in singles and pairs. Whereas wolves, of course, would, if you baited your traps with the scent of another member of the pack, you'd eventually kill all the members of a wolf pack. But coyotes won't go for that. Coyotes don't go for that. They respond to that kind of harassment by scattering. Wow. And the result of scattering is that they're also colonizing into new places. Sure. And so this is why they attempt to wipe them out in the West, pushes them towards the East. And what they conclude is that you could wipe out, you could kill 70% of the coyote population in a given area year after year after year, and you would not wipe them out, that they would replace their populations with the numbers that were left because they would respond to this by recruiting larger litters, by having larger litters. And in an area where you're trying to wipe coyotes out, it's possible for coyotes to raise, say, a litter of six or seven or eight puppies to get them all up to adulthood. Whereas when the landscape has a healthy population of coyotes, they have a litter of maybe five and only two or three survived to adulthood. But they respond that quickly. They respond that quickly. Yeah. And this is how they're able to overcome our attempts. So what we finally get to, of course, is where we are now, and every city in America has a coyote management policy, and they're all following the same notion, which is we have to learn to coexist with them. We've got to learn to live with them in our midst and learn not only how to coexist. So you don't feed them. You don't try to lure them in because if you feed them, that's what gets people bitten. That's what gets their pets snagged out of yards and things. I was in the Hollywood Hills for years, and that's when my cats became into our cats, because I lost to coyotes. Absolutely. Yeah. We saw them all every day. Yeah. And coyotes and great horned owls, of course, will, I mean, one of the reasons they do that, coyotes in particular, is because just as they do in rural areas and in wild areas, in cities, they establish territories. And they regard animals like cats and dogs as competitor predators in their territories. And so they will often attack a dog or a cat roaming out, not because usually they're hungry, but because this is a competitor that's invaded my territory. Am I more neat and they were just killed? Yeah. That's usually what happens. I used to tell people when I do, when the book first came out, and I was doing a ton of talks about it, if your animal is left lying on the ground, that's probably a coyote kill. Yeah. If it's gone, that's likely a great horned owl kill, especially if it's a cat, because great horned owls haul cats off into the roost and eat them. Yeah. I was an outdoor cat guy for years, but no more. No, I know. So we have a cat, my wife and I in New Mexico, and that cat very definitely stays inside. You know, and it's beneficial in every kind of way, because roaming cats, as we all know, now take a huge toll on urban birds. Yes. And so one of the effects of coyote presence in urban areas with people keeping their cast inside is that the bird population is going off. So the coyotes now are, they're approaching the Darian gap, aren't they? They are approaching the Darian gap. Yeah. That's one of the really fun and interesting things about the modern story. So tell us what is the Darian gap for people who don't know, because it's an amazing place. Yeah. It's an amazing place. It's a very thick dense jungle full of jaguars and mountain lions and monkeys and impassable and impassable. If you watched, yeah. Pluribus that sci-fi show. Yes. He makes it through the Darian gap barely. Yeah, barely. And so yeah, it's almost impassable, and it's the strip of land between Panama and Colombia, that tiny little strip that connects North and South America together. And one of the great stories about coyotes now, and this is a story I tell in the forward to the new version of the book, the 2026 version of coyote America, is that coyotes in about the last seven or eight years have crossed the Panama Canal. They have colonized south of Mexico all the way through Central America to Panama. They've crossed the Panama Canal, which they did in 2018, and they are now on the northern edge of the Darian gap, which is a big national park, and attempting to find their way through. And the biologists who are studying this that were tracking them were recording that the coyotes were going south at a rate of about 40 miles a year towards the Darian gap. Now they've got to the Darian gap and Darian National Park, and of course everything has slowed down. But the notion is that because coyotes are very individualistic and there are some of them that are epic explorers. There always have been that there are going to be coyotes that make it through that that enormous jungle. And when they do and get on the Colombian side, they're going to get into open country where the trees have been thin, where there are open grasslands and pastures for stock. And at that point, South America is going to become an effect sort of what is our planet B, Mars for us. South America is going to become planet B for coyotes, and they are going to fairly rapidly colonize all of South America. Well, hang on a second. Let me ask you about that, because while the coyotes and moving south, the crab-eating fox is moving more. - Oh, moving north, that's right. - And they're almost at the Darian gap. - We are. - So, that will be the first time in three million years where these species are together again. - That's right, what happens? - That's one of the great things about it. Well, coyotes are the bigger dogs. - Yeah. - And so, the coyotes will prevail in any kind of a counter with the foxes. But those two animals are about to become the first mammals in three million years to cross between North America and South America. And coyotes, I think, in any sort of face-to-face encounter are going to prevail and very likely will be aggressive towards the foxes. But they're going to be foxes, I think, that get through as well. - I think so too. - Yeah, because they eat kind of different things. It's going to be interesting to see what happens. - Yeah. - But hadn't happened in three million years. - Yeah, that's amazing. - Yeah, this is a big story. Let's take a quick break, and when we come back, I want to talk about the ice age. - Okay, let's do it. - Imagine setting your makeup, then forgetting it's even theirs. - Meet new grippy setting mist from Mabelie, New York. Gel to mist technology locks in your look for up to 24 hours, with flexible all-day comfy grip. No tightness, no stickiness, no residue. Just plump, dewy, hydrated skin that still feels like your skin. Try new grippy setting mist from Mabelie, New York. - Maybe it's Mabelie. - All new drinks are now at McDonald's, with refresher's like the strawberry water melon refresher, and the mango pineapple refresher with popping boba to grafted sodas like the Spriteberry Blast with berry flavors and cold foam. Who knew ice cold drinks could be so fire? Six all new drinks are here now at McDonald's. - Refreshers contain caffeine. - Storytelling time. Put us on a lakeshore, white sands in Mexico, 23,000 years ago, there's footprints in the mud. What's happening? - Well, it looks as if a young woman, who's probably in her teens, sets off on a walk along the lakeshore, and she's got a child on her hip. Of course, there's no way of telling whether it's her child or she's doing childcare for someone else, but she's walking along with a child on her hip. And she walks, it appears about, at least judging from the number of steps that are preserved. We don't know exactly what happens on either end, but she walks probably a hundred yards or more along this particular lakeshore to a spot. And then at some point, probably on the same day, she returns from where she's gone and goes back in the other direction. And in the interim, she puts down the child. I don't recall now from the study how many times, but she puts the child down, at least enough to show that they're the footprints of a small child, sort of walking around her footprints. And in the interim between walking on the outward journey and her return going back, a mammoth, a woolly mammoth or a Colombian mammoth, and a dire wolf and a ground sloth, all cross at right angles to her path. And the ground sloth, it appears, must encounter her, see her because the ground sloth, from its footprints, the interpretation is that the ground sloth rairs up in a alarm. - These are large animals then, yes? - These are very large animals, of course. You know, a dire wolf may be a wolf of 150 or 160 pounds. Mammoth is going to be the size of an African elephant. A ground sloth is essentially the size of a grizzly bear. - Yeah. - A very large animal, but it responds to apparently the presence of this young woman by raring up on its hind legs and what the scholars who have tried to interpret its movements from its footprints believe is probably a alarm. And that's an interesting conclusion, because what it implies is that a ground sloth is interpreting the presence of a human as a danger. And that obviously could mean that humans have already begun to prey on the local ground sloths or the local animals of this particular spot. It's a, you know, a story that obviously we have to extrapolate a lot to be able to tell, but that seems to be sort of the gist of it at the moment. And, you know, I know that archaeologists are working to uncover more evidence from that site. And we've subsequently discovered another site in Utah, which I don't recall a great deal about, but there are some other early footprints that we think may relate to a similar period in human history, something before the height of the Wisconsin ice age. And that's really pretty remarkable, because what it implies is that there's no possibility of crossing the land bridge to get to America, to North America then. It means that humans must have come by boat along the shoreline. And where they came inland, we don't know, although there is a site on the Snake River in Idaho that seems to date from about 16,000 years ago. And that particular site has lithics that are very similar to the kind of lithics that have been discovered in Japan from that age. So there's really, yeah, so there's some evidence than that coming by boat, following the kelp highway, going inland where it's possible to go inland. And we don't know exactly where across the Western part of North America, people landed up. But Southern New Mexico is obviously one of them. Yep. Possibly Southern Utah is another. And we think that somewhere in Idaho along Snake River is probably yet another. So do we think that the megafauna extinction was because of human migration there? Was it from overhunting? Is it settled? It's not entirely settled, but I would say, so I can't say with any kind of justification that the consensus is that humans are responsible. I think there's still a lot that we have to figure out. Where I think we are now is that every other suggestion has not really panned out. Nope. And we've tried a bunch because just as with global climate change, we don't want to think that people were responsible. And so to me, there's an interesting convergence between the denial that humans are involved in climate change and the denial similarly that humans could have accomplished the extermination, the extinction of large animals in North and South America. Well, you've got the footprints that are 23,000 years old. The megafauna extinction is 13,000 years ago. So you've got 10,000 years where humans are living with these large animals. Yes. Is it happened slowly or I thought the extinction is a little bit more rapid, isn't it? Yeah, it is more rapid. So I mean, and you raise a very good point because if the incursion of humans in North America 23,000 years ago actually does produce a global population of humans. So that's the question now. Does this produce some global population? So far, we don't have evidence of that. What we've got evidence of is in two or three spots, there's evidence of an ancient human in habitation, but we don't have anything like what happens when the Clovis people come, right? Because when the Clovis people come, they spread from Atlantic to Pacific all the way to the tip of South America and there is evidence all over the place. I mean, there are Clovis sites just everywhere. So it's very clear that there's a Clovisia America 13,000 years ago and those people arrive, they do sort of what Europeans do in North America 500 years ago and go from shore to shore. We don't have that for this 23,000 year old occupation or the 16,000 year old one. And there of course are sites in South America that date back to 16,000 or so years. What we have of these early ancient sites these little small spots. So that's the question. And it's an important question because one of the things that the argument's for clovicia over hunting, really makes is that the animals are encountering really professional and good predators in the human form for the first time. And they're unprepared. And so they're easy marks. I think that's probably true. - I think it's, well, I actually think it's very likely true. And I sort of follow the line of argument that these early populations in North America did not become what clovis became, in other words, they didn't spread it all across North and South America. They were isolated into small spots. They may be lasted for a couple of hundred years. And one of the, as I think I mentioned earlier, when we were talking about this, one of the reasons that some of the paleontologists and paleobiologists and archaeologists think this is because of the rapid expansion of the clovis people as if they were passing across a caught nut in a landscape that was empty of any kind of human blocks. Either there was nobody there, or if there was somebody there, there weren't very many of them 'cause the clovis people just sort of sweep through both continents, as I said earlier, in 300 years. - What do you think the impact, I don't mean to use a pun, but the younger dryas, the rapid climate change, we got warm, they were very cold, and they were warm again. Was there an impact? - I think there was probably some impact. And a lot of people certainly like to use the younger dryas as a possibility, and it's based on the idea that about 12,000 years ago, 11,800 years ago, there is an impact, probably the argument is by a comet because we don't have any evidence for a meteoritic, or asteroid kind of impact, as we do for chick salube, for example. So for a comet that impacted probably North America because there's no evidence of extinctions anywhere else. So it's not a global thing, like the chick salube impact, and that it produced two effects. One was probably what we refer to these days is kind of a nuclear winner where a lot of debris went up and obscured the sun and may have had an impact on animals. That's what produced the cold. And then the idea that there may have been widespread fires in the wake of the cold episode. I think there are two problems with it. And this is the reason why the serious scholars who I know and have talked to don't really think it's that good, an optional explanation anymore, although there are a lot of people out in the world who like it. - Sure, it's fun. - Yeah, it's fun, but the reason the scholars I've talked to don't like it is they say there's two problems with it. One problem is that all these animals had lived through the height of the Wisconsin ice age. And so they're not likely having survived that to be taken out by a relatively minor cold snap around 11 or 12,000 years ago. And the other argument of course is one that people have used for a long time. The only evidence we have of animals that become extinct are the big ones that people like to hunt. All the small animals are fine. They're everywhere and they survive everywhere. But what goes extinct are the very creatures that humans across Asia and finally into North and South America like to hunt. And those are the ones that we end up losing. So you've got animals that are big and slow. And then the big cats I guess you'd hunt because they're dangerous. - Or the fact, I mean one of the arguments about the big cats for example is that if their prey base gets taken out, then they're unlikely to be able to shift to another prey base rapidly in order to survive. It's an argument that's not foolproof. I mean we don't really quite have the ultimate yes, this is what's happened. And it's one of the reasons I think that what we're probably going to have to do is to look at animals one by one. Look at species one by one. What happened to the horses? I mean my god, that's right now a completely unanswerable one. Horses evolve in North America. They spread across the bearing straight into Asia and Europe and Africa where they survive. - Yep. - But they become extinct here. That's just a tough one. And camels the same thing. - Right, their national animal is the bison but it should probably be the camel. - Yeah, it should probably be the camel. They evolved here 45 million years ago. And spread across just as horses do across the bearing straight and survive elsewhere. - Right, but also become extinct here. And so it's hard to square that. The only thing you can kind of argue is that and there was a very famous argument at about 2005 that maybe this is a possibility that as humans arrive, they're bringing new pathogens with them that are infecting some of these animal populations. But we would see that. - We would see it. And of course the one thing about pathogens is that, they don't kill everything. There are always some members of a species that are going to have some resistance. And if they survive, they'll pass their resistance down to subsequent generations. So right now we just don't have enough information to say for certain. I mean, although a lot of people will say it's pretty, pretty conclusive that we probably did take out the mammoths. - Sure. - The other animals I do suspect we may have driven into these separate populations where they couldn't exchange genes. Because of course that's what happens to that last population of mammoths that gets on an island in the bearing sea. - That's right. - And last down to 4,000 years ago. - Yes. - And then they finally go extinct because they don't have enough genetic diversity to continue to survive. So it's a story that I think remains to be told in its entirety, and that somebody is probably going to, you know, become very, very famous by figuring out precisely what happened. But right now it looks like probably the best answer we have is the arrival of humans that unquestionably had some impact on these populations. - My instinct tells me all that is right, but there's one thing that we're missing. - Yeah. - Very likely. - 'Cause it's very strange. Well let's pretend that America is a haunted house of animals and you're the medium. 'Cause we have animals that have evolved to outrun big cats. But big cats aren't here anymore. So what other adaptations do we see that aren't really needed? - Well that one is one that I have always loved to tell and that's the story of the pronghorn, of course. So there was, until fairly recently, really a kind of a mystery about pronghorns because their only predators are wolves and coyotes, neither of which can run more than about 40 miles an hour. And yet here we have pronghorns that run 65 miles an hour. So why the overkill? Why 25 or 30 miles an hour faster than your predators can run? And why also do females among pronghorns sort of put the males to a test to see which one is the fastest one? And that's the one they breed with. And why do they do what's called selfish herd grouping? Which we know of basically from Africa and then biologists paying attention to pronghorns realize, wow, they do this too. They do this thing where they group as a herd and they push the low status animals out to the edges of the herd. So if they're attacked by a predator, it's the low status animals that get taken out. And yet adult pronghorns don't really have any predators. It's just the fawns that get predated. So the result of those mysteries produced are kind of, it's the ghosts of the Pleistocene Yes, story that what pronghorns have really preserved is an imagery of what it was like 10,000 years ago when they were being pursued really by fast hunting hyenas and by American cheetahs. And that speed that they developed and that ability to inhale huge gulps of air. And those giant nostrils that they have and those big eyes that scan the arise on all the time that those are all adaptations to back in the Pleistocene when they were hunted by cheetahs and they've managed to hang on to for 10,000 years. That's a pretty remarkable thing when you see pronghorns out in the natural world and know that story. I mean it changes the way you look at them. It does. boy that the coyotes and the wolves, once they run, it's too bad, man. I know. And you know wolves can outrun coyotes. So one of the things, of course, it happened when wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone and they started taking out coyotes is that they would run down individual animals and they're actually YouTube scenes. You can Google them. They're not very fun to watch. Or wolves will run coyotes down and the coyote disappears in a kind of a mob scene of gray wolves. Yep. But they'll just make more. They'll make more. They absolutely will. They know how to do it. Imagine setting your makeup, then forgetting it's even theirs. Meet new grippy setting mist from Mavily New York. Skeleton mist technology locks in your look for up to 24 hours, with flexible all day comfy grip. Try new grippy setting mist from Mavily New York. Let's talk about Buffalo and Bison a little bit. So Bison becomes the national animal, I guess, that was Obama administration. Yeah, 2016. But there's not really a lot of true Bison left to are there. Well, Bison is the correct scientific name. But of course, I think what you're referring to is the fact that we think most of the animals that we manage to preserve do carry cattle genes. Yes. And there's a story there. There's a bunch of stories. But so the Bison, our national animal, and my head's off to Barack Obama for doing that because I think what that does is, I mean, I think the same is true of the eagle as kind of a national bird and a symbol of America. It causes modern populations of us to look at those animals and wonder a bit about their stories. And of course, if you know much about eagles at all, I mean, so the eagle is a very beautiful animal and we have lots of them around. But by the early 1970s, American eagles, bald eagles were almost gone. I remember. Yes. I mean, we barely rescued bald eagles are the symbol of the country, the avian symbol of the country. We barely rescued them. And we did it through the Endangered Species Act and bald eagles kind of became the poster bird for the success of the Endangered Species Act. And the Bison, I think, by Obama making it into the national mammal, it makes it possible to do the same thing where you, if you consider that animal as kind of this iconic American animal, and you understand that, you know, in the cocktail party version of things, well, once upon a time, wasn't there, wasn't there a whole lot of them? And then there were almost none of them. If you can even get that far and ask the question, so why was that? Why did that happen? Why did something like that sort of simplification of our present day national mammal happen? And you can start grappling with the story of what we did with a lot of these magnificent creatures. And the Bison story, of course, is, it's, it's one that I sometimes suspect and talking to people from other parts of the world, they know the Bison story better than a lot of Americans do. I mean, I talked to people from Australia and England and France, who seem to know more about it sometimes than many of the Americans. What are we getting wrong? Well, I think for one thing, often all we know is that at one point there were a lot of them, and then there were almost none. But if we do know more, I mean, one of the stories that got told early in the 20th century by a former Buffalo hunter named John Cook, who wrote a book called The Border in the Buffalo in 1905, and who basically invented a bunch of stuff in order to convince the American public at a time when Teddy Roosevelt was president, conservation was a big word. People were regretting that we had almost wiped out the Buffalo. This former Buffalo hunter named John Cook writes a book and says, Buffalo hunters like me actually should be getting a national medal. Wow. Because we were just enacting the federal government's secret policy of wiping out Buffalo deliberately in order to enable native people to be conquered and put on reservations. And this is a true story. It's a story he certainly tried to come up with a good argument for and to bring civilization to the West because wild animals like Buffalo and wolves could not be allowed to be present in a civilized country. So this is the story that for most of the 20th century, we basically told ourselves about Buffalo that the federal government had deliberately done this. We all grew up with the stories that they're being shot from trains and all of that. Oh, they were definitely shot from trains. And they were shot down by the millions by basically by people who also wiped out the passenger pigeons, who also wiped out pronghorn antelope and elk and big horn sheep and mule deer. I mean, all those animals were reduced to a tiny fraction because of capitalism directed at wild animal populations. I mean, we thought when we came over here and we started with beavers, of course, that all of North America was filled to the brim with wild animals and animal parts are a great kind of commodity item in the global market economy. Sure. You can kill beavers and you can strip the pelts off of them and sell them all over the world. You can do the same thing with sea otters. You can do the same thing with seals. Sure. You can see everything. Yeah. All of these. And so the truth is, and I mean, I'm one of the people who has tried to investigate the earlier version I just told you, I've never been able to find any evidence that the federal government deliberately tried to do any of this. The truth is the United States federal government never passed a law to regulate animals in North America until 1900. We stood back because we believed in capitalism and let capitalism work. This is the market economy. You simply let it work and see what happens. And if it wipes out buffalo, if it wipes out pronghorns, if it wipes out passenger pigeons chickens, that's just the way the market works. That's the way it works. Yeah. So it took a whole group of sort of proto conservationists, George Bergrenel, who was the editor of Forest and Stream magazine, was one of the first to begin writing editorials and arguing against this. And he talked Teddy Roosevelt into forming an organization called the Boone and Crockett Club that began to lobby to finally get the federal government to say, okay, which they did in 1900, we're going to pass a law to end the market hunting and the shipment, the interstate shipment of animals killed for the market in the United States. Because federal government at the time, they believe that's the only thing they can do. We can regulate shipment between states, interstate commerce, we can't regulate anything else. So yeah, this is what they tried to do controversial. It was very controversial, but it's the beginning of kind of what ultimately will lead to something like the Endangered Species Act in 1973. So I argue that while there were people in the government who understood that letting buffalo be wiped out by the buffalo hunt was going to disadvantage native people to be sure. There was no policy of doing it. What there was was a policy of standing back and letting it happen and see what the market and what capitalism was going to produce. And if it produced the benefit of having native people no longer be able to go out and leave their reservations and hunt, then that was a good thing. But some of those native people would get it on the market. Absolutely. They did. I mean, that's one of the sort of unfortunate stories of the whole native act and involvement in the global market economy. It was what native people learned from the very beginning of colonization was that in order to read the best. benefit of this new metal technology that Europeans were bringing to American shores. And that included not just firearms, but things like hos and rakes and marrow heads and all these things that were made of metal. Yep. And in order to trade for that, what the Europeans wanted, they wanted beaver pelts. They wanted buffalo robes. They wanted in the south deer scans for the leather trade. And so the actual truth is native people all over America, like all the rest of us, and I've tried to couch it that way when I've written about this. I mean, they're humans just like us and they're confronted with a time when for survival in order to compete with your fellows, the only way to make it is to actually engage with these newcomers and this kind of trade. And unfortunately, to the detriment of American wildlife populations, they do so. And it makes perfect sense. Yeah. In talking about trapping and the market, everybody knows about the Lewis and Clark expedition. But you wrote a book about a different expedition that had twice the funding. And nobody has heard about it. Nobody has heard about it. Why not? Why not? Well, there's something, you know, called historical memory. So there are things that we deliberately remember, especially as a part of a kind of a national consciousness. And there's a story we tell ourselves. Absolutely. And there are things that we very deliberately do our best not to remember. And in some cases, even sweep under the rug. And this was my first book, it was called initially Jefferson and Southwestern Exploration. And I wrote it because I had the look of coming across this story that I knew very well there was almost no one even in the historical community that knew anything about this. And particularly in that larger community of people who are fascinated with Lewis and Clark, for example. And that is a very large contingent of Americans with my family has family legends about being part of that expedition. Well, I mean, you know, I grew up in Louisiana, romantic about the Lewis and Clark expedition. We were a Missouri Charbonneau's. Yeah. Well, I mean, there you go, man. So, yeah, you definitely were a part of the expedition then. So, like so many other people, I was fascinated with this. And I happened to talk to an archivist one time about a project that I was working on. And in the course of the conversation, she said, so you're really interested in the Lewis and Clark expedition. There's been a lot done on that, not a whole lot of room to do very much. But are you aware of Jefferson's other expedition? And of course, like everybody else, I said, what other expedition? I think I probably said I may do enough history at the time. I may have said, you mean the Pike expedition? As she said, oh no, I'm not talking about the Pike expedition. That one wasn't even sent out by Jefferson anyway. That was sent out by James Wilkinson, American military. No, Jefferson had another southern version of the Lewis and Clark expedition. And I said, well, my God, when, and so she told me, she said, I have a microfilm version of the official report from this expedition, from 1806, and the leaders of it were a man named Thomas Freeman and a young naturalist named Peter Custis. Who? Yeah, who? Never heard of anyone of them. And with good reason, and as hardly anyone else, as hardly heard of them. So I ended up becoming really fascinated with this because I mean, obviously this was like, okay, there's another Lewis and Clark expedition. I mean, it's not led by Mary where the Lewis and William Clark is led by two other people to another. And when I began doing the research on it, and I had the University where I was teaching at the time, acquire the Thomas Jefferson papers so I could look at sort of the how this all began and all the things that Jefferson wrote about it. And I had spent, you know, a lovely year and a half reading in his own handwriting, Thomas Jefferson's lovely letters about all this. Your book is cinematic. Yeah. Well, the story. Yeah. It's, it is kind of cinematic. You know, it is a, it's a story that, it's like a Apollo 13. It's one of those Apollo expeditions that you have great hopes for. Yeah. And it doesn't work. For even we have a problem. Yes, we have a problem. And so that's in fact, the kind of gist of this particular story. Tell us the story. Yeah, I'll summarize it pretty quickly for you. So Jefferson never intended that Lewis and Clark was going to be the only party. He sent it into the Louisiana territory. And if you think about it for a second, you realize, of course not, of course not. You don't just send one up to the northern part. I mean, there's a huge amount of territory. So he plans this southern expedition that is going to go into the Southwest. And he doesn't think of it in Lewis and Clark terms where it's going to go to the Pacific. Because of course, Lewis and Clark were all about, we're going to do the old Northwest passage. And we finally find a way through to Asia. This expedition was intended to map all the rivers of the southern Louisiana purchase that flowed into the Mississippi. And those rivers Jefferson believed all came out of the southern Rocky Mountains. And so initially what he planned for a second expedition that he hoped would leave like within six months or a year of Lewis and Clark going up the Missouri is he was going to send an expedition up the Red River of the South. That's the river. If people don't know about it, that is the boundary between Texas and Oklahoma today. He was going to send an expedition up that river. And he believed from maps that the famed Geographer Alexander von Humboldt had given to Jefferson that the Red River had its sources and the southern Rockies near Santa Fe. So this was finally going to be one of these expeditions to get out to Santa Fe. Back to Santa Fe. Back to Santa Fe. And then, Jefferson, his initial plan was, I'm going to have the party cross over from the headwaters of the Red River to the headwaters of the Arkansas River, the next river to the north that flows into the Mississippi and come down the Arkansas. And so instead of going to the Pacific, it's going to go out to the Rockies and sort of do this loop out the Red River and back on the Arkansas River. Well, by the time he manages, Jefferson manages it's finally to find leaders for this expedition. And to come up with all of the necessary scientific instruments for making it work. And as you mentioned at the outset, he gets an appropriation from Congress that's twice the size of that for the Lewis and Clark expedition. And the party he organizes is going to be a much bigger party, exploration party than the Lewis and Clark party. Probably needs to. There's activity there. It needs to because of because of two things, really. One is that unlike the Missouri River Columbia stretch that Lewis and Clark traverse, this Southern stretch is going to take you on the borders of Spain. And Spain is not eager to have an American exploring party along its borders until the boundary, the southern boundary of the Louisiana Purchases determined. Right. Because we bought that from France and Spain said, you, we own that. Spain says, Spain actually said, we own all the way up to the Missouri River. Right. You get by that. Yeah. And France, having never really explored any of this country, was unable to say what the boundaries were. And Jefferson, for his part, published a tract in 1805 that said, United States believes the real grand is the Southern boundary, which of course would have included Texas and New Mexico. Of course. Yeah. So here we have the two countries, United States saying that the boundary is the real grand and Spain saying the battery is the Missouri. And in between is all this territory that the Red River flows through. And the other thing that makes it difficult to just to do the original plan is that there is a hostile group of native people called the Osages along the Arkansas River, who make it known that any exploring expedition on our river is going to be intercepted. So to cut to the chase of this story in 1805 in November of 1805 Jefferson believes he's found his leader. So a young man named Thomas Freeman, who is an Irish immigrant, who had been a surveyor, who was a primary surveyor for laying out Washington, DC and was a very well known surveyor. surveyor and astronomer, although he was, he was an adopted American, who had been born in Ireland. That's why we don't know him. Yeah. It's one of the reasons we don't know him. Jefferson called him to Washington for a personal dinner in November of 1805. And Freeman and Jefferson sat down for three hours and Jefferson presented Freeman a seven page letter of exploring instructions, eliminating the Arkansas River from the trip, sending him only up the Red River to its sources near Santa Fe. And also including this passage, which Jefferson had actually pulled out of the document that he gave Maryweather Lewis. And the passage said, if you are stopped or encountered by another force, either authorized or not authorized by European nation, firmly resolute in turning you back from your exploration. I would prefer that you return with the information that you have gathered already, and to risk the lives of American citizens in an aggressive confrontation, do not engage. Do not engage. So when Freeman left that meeting, he went home, wrote a letter to a friend of his, which I managed to find in the National Archives a piece of. And in that letter, Freeman once said, I have been given the assignment of exploring up the Red River to the vicinity of Santa Fe in the far country of Northern Spain. How would you like to be my cashier in that country? He says to his friend. And then he says he concludes his letter with this line, it's going to be a dangerous mission, but the more danger, the more honor I will stick or go through. Wow. Yeah. Okay. So meanwhile, Jefferson has settled on, you know, which he never did for the Lewis and Clark expedition. He never got a scientific naturalist to add to that expedition. He has settled on a young man from Virginia, who's completing a medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania named Peter Custis from a very famous Alamora County family. Martha Custis, some people will remember, was George Washington's wife. And Peter Custis is joined to the expedition. After Jefferson tried to get a couple of more famous naturalists, William Bartram in particular, who was the most famous American naturalist at the time, who had written a famous book called Travels in 1791. Jefferson approached first, but William Bartram was 65 years old. And he said, this is a little bit too arduous for me to take on. So Jefferson settles on on Freeman. He adds a military expedition to the party under the command of a guy named Richard Sparks, Captain Richard Sparks, who was a good friend of Maryweather Lewis's. So the whole party, when they finally add French and Indian guides to it, comes up to almost 55 people. The Lewis and Clark party was in the low 40s. And they start up the Red River in April of 1806, passed the last settlement, which is Nakedish, the town that my family comes from, and Louisiana. And above Nakedish, extended the biggest log jam in North America. It was called the Great Raft. And a lot of people argue that it was a thousand years old, a thousand year old log jam that extended up the Red River for more than a hundred miles. And so to get around it, they had to go through swamps and little bayous out to the east, finally managed to get above the head of it, headed on up the river, Peter Custis collecting plants and both Freeman and Custis writing journals of treating with the Indians and presenting, excuse me, American flags to the native people. And they finally, in early or late July, right on the verge of August of 1806, having gone about 650 miles up the Red River, they get basically about to the Eastern border of Oklahoma and discover as they round a bend that there is a Spanish force of more than 200 troops are right across the river. Spain has sent two different military contingents. Oh, they were sent. They were sent. Okay. From this, this one was the Texas contingent sent from Nakedoches, which is a Spanish settlement in East Texas that had a Presidio and an 800 man force from Santa Fe had been sent eastward in case the Texas expedition was unable to stop these Americans. But when confronted by this Spanish force, Freeman consulted his letter that Jefferson had given him and he turned around and basically went back. What happened to honor? Well, yeah, honor went out the window and there are 200 Spaniards in front of you. Yeah, all armed with arc buses and who knows what else. But the Americans decided to turn around and go back. And the reason of course that nobody in American history and among the public has ever heard of this expedition is that while you want to celebrate a Lewis and Clark that goes all the way to the Pacific and comes back and is the toast of Washington, an expedition that comes back with its tail between his legs, having been turned around by another country. Yeah, that's not the sort of thing that you want to remember. Now, I mean, I wrote a full book about it and, you know, and found the journals, the original journals of both Freeman and Custis and particular Custis stuff on natural history was really terrific material. But they're all sorts of, you know, sort of unfortunate circumstances that even follow that because Jefferson hired a guy to write a reduction of the two journals combined into one sky was named Nicholas King and he wrote a version of the expedition that somehow either he couldn't read Peter Custis his handwriting. I'm not sure. But he not only combined the two, two journals into one, he mangled all the natural history work. So all these careful scientific binomials that Custis had used for all these plants and trees and animals he had seen end up going out to the American scientific community. So mangled that anyone who saw them would have said Jefferson sent an idiot right on this expedition. It reads like a movie so much an option. It's always I know it prevails. It's a crazy story and I have often thought of returning to it. I mean, one of the things I have done with it and one of the last of the, you know, as you probably know, I do a podcast or have been doing one. It's it's done finish now. But I've done a podcast called the American West and a couple of the last episodes I did of it was essentially a historical fiction of what would have happened. If if the Spanish commander had said, OK, we're going to let you guys go ahead, but you have to stay on the north side of the Red River until we finally come up with the boundary between Spain. And so I need to listen to this. I did a historical fiction where where Freeman and Custis get to continue on into the Southwest. Do you want to spoil it or no? Well, I'll say this. OK, about it. And I certainly encourage people to take a look because a lot of research and personal exploration into the countryside went into doing this. No, the story so romantic. Yeah. Well, it's and and the historical fiction version of it as well. I mean, I went into all the places they would have gone and, but the, the truth of the matter is this Alexander von Humboldt was wrong in his maps to Jefferson. Right. The Red River did not come out of the southern Rockies near Santa Fe. The Red River has its sources on what's called the Yanos de Cato Plateau in West Texas and Eastern New Mexico. So it drains off the top of this gigantic plateau through a series of canyons, the most famous of which is Palo Duro Canyon in the Texas Panhandle. And Jefferson told Freeman specifically, not only in person, but in the letter he gave him, I do not want you to go beyond the sources of the Red River. And so I'm working on a deal here. Yes. Working on a deal. And so Freeman is going to get to the Western edge of the Yanos de Cato Plateau in my historical version or my fictitious version of it with Santa Fe still 10 days away. The southern Rocky Mountain still out of sight. And Jefferson has told him, this is as far as I want you to go. So it's still ends up being a failure. right because he's not able to get to Santa Fe as he knew probably the country wanted him to do. What they wanted to do, I think, is to start the Santa Fe trade, which in 1821, after Spain loses the Southwest to Mexico, the new Republic of Mexico, Mexico opens up the trade between the United States and Santa Fe, and it becomes this very lucrative trade route. And I think that's what Jefferson had in mind was opening the Santa Fe trade. But I think you're right. I mean, the floor is as we're there guarding it for a hundred years. Absolutely. Hey, are you still advising colossal? I am advising colossal, although I'm going to miss their fall gathering, they're doing a September gathering in Dallas that will be their, the second of their big colossal bioengineering summits. I was at the one last summer, and I, in fact, was one of the first speakers for that summit, but they're doing one in September that I'm going to have to miss just because of I've got had already agreed to do a talk in Colorado, right on top of it. But yeah, I'm still on the advisory board or the conservation board. Yeah, I mean, I think they mostly do conservation, but they're known for, yes, for de-extinction. What they're best known for because of the direwolf story, of course, is de-extinction. How do they make a direwolf? Well, they made a direwolf, and this is, this is sort of how de-extinction works. What you do is you try to find the existing animal that most closely resembles genetically the species you're interested in that became extinct. And so, in the case of the direwolf, that's, of course, the gray wolf. So, what they did with the gray wolf genome and the gray wolf genome has been reconstructed. So, we've got a very good genomic baseline for gray wolves. What colossal did was to go into the specimens collections around America, and the direwolf is very specifically an American wolf. It's not found anywhere else in the world. So, you know, unfortunately for George or Martin, there would have been no direwolves in medieval wistros, wherever wistros was, which looks an awful lot like sort of Western Europe. But yeah, but the direwolves were actually American wolves. And what colossal did was to go into the museum specimens collections, and they found two skulls that they were able to extract enough DNA from to be able to recognize, and one of these skulls was 73,000 years old. Wow. And one of them was 13,000 years old. With viable DNA. Vible DNA. And with that DNA signature from those two skulls, they were able to recognize 28 different aliens that were not found in the gray wolf genome that were distinctive to both of those direwolf skulls. And so, what they did was to use CRISPR genetic engineering to engineer those 28 aliens into a gray wolf genome and produced puppies. Meet new grippy setting mist from Maybelline New York. Gel to mist technology locks in your look for up to 24 hours with flexible all-day comfy grip. No tightness, no stickiness, no residue, just clump, dewy hydrated skin that still feels like your skin. Try new grippy setting mist from Maybelline New York. Maybe it's Maybelline. Based on that genetic information that as we all have seen, because of course, this became a global story. And Calisi. And Calisi. That's right. Have you seen them yet? I have not seen them. I've only seen because I don't think they're, no, they don't release where they are. No, they do not release where they are. And although I have a strong idea where they are, I'm not at liberty to say either. No, don't. And I have not seen them, of course. And I have seen personal videos that people who are with them have taken of them. And they are, as we all know, because there have been plenty of released photos and some video, too. They are, and this actually was a surprise, because the assumption was that we're likely to be read. It turns out that those genetic signatures from diable genes produce pure white. Yes, animals. I mean, all these animals are gloriously white. And of course, they are larger. They're approaching two years old now. So they are considerably larger than gray wolves. I don't know exactly how much the two males weigh. I know the female is slider than the two males, but they are really remarkable animals. And here's what I would say about this. Genetically, I think they represent something very close to their wolves. But, of course, we don't have Darwin culture to teach them. So they don't have a mother. They don't have a mother. They don't have a legacy coming down from wild Darwin wolves that they can absorb. And one of the things we now know about wild animals, of course, is that they, just like us, they have culture. They learn things. They have a Tito. They, I mean, with, particularly with canids, I mean, the sort of instruction period is very long. I mean, it's not as long as we instruct human infants and children, but it lasts for a year or two anyway. And these wolves don't have that. So what we have are animals that we think probably look like Darwin wolves, but they can't be Darwin wolves because they don't exist in the wild and they have no Darwin wolf cultural legacy to call on. That's what I was going to ask you. Is that a real Darwin wolf? And it probably isn't. No, I think what a lot of a lot of ecologists and biologists have argued, and I think they're probably right, is that without those critical aspects, I mean, what you have is an animal that may well look like a Darwin wolf. It's morphology may be Darwin wolf, but it can't be a Darwin wolf because it doesn't know how to be one. Is there any ethical issue with the extinction? Well, yes, there are ethical issues obviously because what you don't want ultimately, and this is going to be the fate of these particular animals. I mean, and I think what colossal head in mind here was, they wanted to demonstrate because they were working and still are working on four or five different different de-extinction. Yeah, we're waiting on the mammoth, right? They're working on the mammoth, they're working on the dodo, they're working on the thylacene, the Tasmanian tiger. Yeah, so they're working on a lot of different things. The Darwin wolf came first because it was the easiest one out of that group to do. Cainids are relatively more easy than particularly than birds are, and there were also donors. A colossal is a it's a it's a for-profit company. It's a multi-billion dollar company. Yes, it is, and there were donors who wanted to see a Darwin wolf, and so there was there was some some of that happening. I have ethical concerns, but I want to see a mammoth. Yeah, I do too, and I want to see a thylacene. Sure. So the issue, of course, is that these animals, these Darwin wolves, Romulus, Remus and Calisi, are not going to get to be anything other than caged animals. What you want, ultimately, and this is one of the things, of course, that we talk about when we have our summits and our conferences and the conservation board assembles, and we're able to offer our thoughts and our advice to colossal, and the people who are running colossal, is that what one ultimately wants to see is some way of releasing these animals into the wild. I've read this book though. Yeah, well, yeah, you have read it. We've all seen the movie too, of course, but it depends on acquiring some piece of ground, and of course, before the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, the idea was we're going to get a Siberian place to scene park, and this is where animals like this are going to go. Now that's become problematic because of the war, and it's difficult to come up with other places that you can think of in northern Canada, say, or Alaska, and Canada is probably not an cooperative mood with the United States right now. So, we've got Siberia eliminated as a result of the invasion of the Ukraine. We've got Canada pissed off, and Alaska is about the only possibility, and right now we're basically an administration hoping to drill all across the northern reaches of Canada, even offering bids in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. So finding a place for things has been the next problematic step. And if you have mammoths, if you have diarwolves, demonstrating that you can do it is one step, but you don't want to leave it. And then. No. So that's kind of where colossal is at the moment. You think they could develop a culture over time? Yes, I think they probably could. I think if you have subsequent generations, but they have to be in the wild in order to do it. I mean, they can certainly develop a pin culture, but that's not the culture you want. Yeah, you want them to be in the wild and you want them to have the experience of being able to interact with prey. I mean, that's what's going to produce some kind of diarwolf culture. It may not be the diarwolf culture of the Pleistocene because all the animals of the Pleistocene are not going to be on hand. Right, the prey isn't there. But it might be, you know, it's going to be something, but yeah, this is the issue. I mean, you know, so that it doesn't just look like a stunt, that we've finally been able to come up with a scientific ability to do, we have to think in terms of some kind of recovery. So one of the things that's happening in New Mexico and one of Ted Turner's ranches, for example, is the Boulson tortoise, which isn't an extinct or was an extinct nearly extinct Pleistocene tortoise is being recovered by colossal and is being released. And that's an animal, of course, that you can release. Yes. And not really worry that people are going to go holy shit. I mean, you've got a giant wolf that you've turned loose. Right. Yeah, the tortoises, you know, not going to scare anybody. But yeah, it's that. And as you said, and I appreciate you saying this too, what colossal is most involved with is trying to prevent wildlife around the globe from going extinct and from using genetic engineering to assist in providing a healthier kind of a diverse genetic possibility. Possibility among the founding populations of those animals in order for them to succeed. I think this is a science that's going to stick around. Yeah, it is. There's no doubt about it. And they are, you know, and I haven't heard the latest in a few months. But the last time I did here, I mean, there are countries and governments and conservation organizations all over the world that are partnering with colossal to help with these kinds of things. Yeah, they're doing great work. Last story that it went from you, if you don't mind, is if you can tell us about Chiki. Yeah, it's Chiki. Okay. I have a reason for asking. Okay. So this is a story that I had never told before until I wrote while new world. Except to personal friends and into my wife, who's heard it. But it was a story that, you know, really kind of changed my way of thinking about the world. And part because it's the oldest memory I have. You know, a lot of people argue psychologists of the human condition argue that usually your, your earliest memories are from about the age of four. And I was four years old and I had my first little animal companion, which was a little yellow chicken of the kind that you can get at feed stores in a spring. Little fuzzy thing. Yeah, a little fuzzy thing. And, you know, I'm four years old, so I'm not really imaginative with the name. And so I name it Chiki. And so Chiki and I was this first little animal companion that I really fell in love with. And I gave it water and I fed it and it slept with me as it was growing up. And I don't even remember how long I had it. Although I think it was probably on in the nature of maybe a month or six weeks, not a really long time. Because it was still a little, little small chicken when this happened. But it would, Chiki and I would do these games of chase through the house. And we would run through the house and Chiki would dart under the kitchen table. And I would go after Chiki and so I'm a little clumsy four year old. And one day I'm chasing Chiki and I accidentally step on Chiki and kill my little pet, Chiki. So I'm traumatized, obviously. And my mother says, well, let's go, you know, let's go bury Chiki out in the backyard. And she got a little box and we went out and dug a little grave for Chiki and put Chiki in the box. And I gave Chiki some little pieces of food and a leaf. And I don't remember what else, but two or three things I put in with Chiki. I think probably my mother's urging who told me this is one of the things you do. And close the box and covered Chiki up with dirt. And as we were doing it, of course, tears coming down my face, I turned to my mom. And I said, so mom, I'm going to get to see Chiki and heaven, right? And my mother, who was always this sort of, you know, straight to the mark, honest kind of person, even if you were four years old, said, why no, honey. So you're a human and you have an everlasting soul. And when humans die, we get to go to heaven. But animals don't have souls. They're just animals. So when an animal dies, it's just, it's gone. And the reason, of course, this is my earliest memory is because of the power of a story like that, which is sort of the classic Judeo-Christian story of humans or the only animals made in the image of God. We're the only ones with souls. Everything else is made for our use. And I think from the age of four, with that idea in my head, that produced those books that are sitting over here because that did not seem right to me. Not having known this little bird and loved this little bird, that was not something I was willing to accept. And so many, many years later, I think that was the origin of books like Coyote America and Wild New World and American Serengeti. Well, I'm a pet guy. I'm an animal guy, obviously you are. So when one of my boys goes, when one of my cats, I get to see him again. Well, here's what I think is probably the truth. I think the truth is the soul as a distinction to make humans exceptional from all other creatures is a fiction. It's a nice fiction, but I think there are no souls for either humans or animals. And probably at the end, there's not much to look forward to, no matter if you're a cat, a human, or a little chicken. Well, that's dark, but I guess I'm not going to care. I think if it happens that way, yeah, you're not going to care, that's the end of things. But yeah, that's kind of, I've not been able to find any good evidence for being able to look forward to a kind of an after life that includes. Me and all the animals that I've had throughout my life, and you know, I mean, when I think of them now and some of the ones I've lost, I mean, my stomach goes into knots. Of course. Right now, for animals that I lost 50 years ago, I mean, I had an experience going for a run just about a month ago, where I happen to think of this dog that I had one time and what happened to him. At a moment when he was still young, he was crazy about me, and I was crazy about him, and I lost him in a really stupid accident that I should have been able to avoid for him. What happened? He got run over on a street following me, and what, I mean, it was a really stupid thing. I, it's going to turn my stomach into knots just telling it, but I had this young dog had followed me to a convenient store, and he had waited for me at the door, and I was inside the store buying something, and when I came out, he was not there, and my assumption was that he had probably just turned around and went across the street because the house was just a block or so on the other side of the street. And so thinking that he had gone home, and stupidly not calling for him, I walked across the street, and got home, and he wasn't there, and about the time I turned around to go back, I heard tires screeching on the road, and he had been around the side of the building, finally real quick. I wasn't inside anymore and it started at home and it got across the street and got hit by a car and I mean man. I Can't think of that one Without really kind of being torn up about it, and I've had two or three. What was his name? His name was Gandhi Gandhi, Gandhi. Yeah, I think you're gonna see Gandhi again. Well stick with it. Yeah, if You know if there are everlasting souls, I can guarantee you Gandhi has got one Thanks for coming in today. This has been a pleasure. It's been my pleasure, too. It's been great fun Anything you want to tell the folks where to find you what books websites? Well, I don't do social media smart so You know and I apologize for that My wife does Sarah Dan is her name. She's a former professor in a writer, too, and so whatever social media We need she usually does, but I don't do social social media. I don't have a website But my stuff is easy to find it's in most bookstores and of course Amazon has an author site for me and so all the books are there and they're easily come by But most local bookstores have them, too, and I always am a great advocate for local bookstores same But Dan Flores was here. Here's the Gandhi. Man, no kidding. Thank you so much. Hi everybody That was Dan Flores. Let's start with the law. I didn't believe in 1905 Montana ordered its state bed to infect coyotes and wolves with Mange and turned them loose to carry it home. I looked it up. It's a real law real program and yellowstone wolves are still catching Manges today. Now white sands in 2021 the US geological survey and a team of British geologists published dates for the footprints 23,000 years old Skeptics attacked the number so the team ran it again two more ways the footprints won Then there's the buffalo Dan says there was never a federal policy to exterminate them Just a government content to watch the market do it other historians point at the generals who cheered the slaughter on But nobody's ever found an order on the paper trail Dan's right now chickie Every book Dan is written goes back to the day his mother told the four-year-old that his chicken had no soul Dan still thinks she was right nothing waiting Chickens over us that he choked up over a dog he lost 50 years ago I'll tell you what I told him I think he's gonna see Gandhi again Dan doesn't do social media which might be why he's the happiest man to ever sit in that chair Start with coyote America at your local bookstore and everything I mentioned is linked below until next time be safe Be kind and other you I'll appreciate I believe the Libya's an area 51 a secret code inside the Bible said I was I love my you and boys and parents on my phone as well as mirrors it so I'm saying it like I should Within another conspiracy theory becomes the truth my friends And it never ends no it never ends I feel the crowd cat and got stuck inside my home with them chaos truck I'll be in only two hours Do Stan look you've read faith the moon land in alone on a film set I wore the shadow people there The raspberry is just for the smiling man I'm told and his name was cold I can't believe I'm dancing with the bitch Had no fish on Thursday nights with age 82 and when I have to be off to the night All ever wanted was to just hear the truth so the one falls on your feet all through the line Oh The mouth man's side and van the solar storm still come to a god the secret city underground Mysterious number stations when it's supposed to bracket stockade and whether dark watchers found In assimilation Black night said a lie to me so I can't believe I'm dancing with the bitch Had no fish on Thursday nights with age 82 and when I have to be off to the night All ever wanted was to just hear the truth so the one falls on your feet all through the line Girl you lost your dance yeah girl you lost your dance time and dance for because she is a camel We can't walk the dance when the feeling is right on weight in time You Imagine setting your makeup then forgetting it's even theirs Meet new grippy setting mist from Mabelie, New York Gel to mist technology locks in your look for up to 24 hours with flexible all-day comfy grip No tightness no stickiness no residue just plump Dewey hydrated skin that still feels like your skin try new grippy setting mist from Mabelie, New York Maybe it's Maybelline.