Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 220: An Elk-Hunting Nudist Checks the Breeze

Transcript

Ep. 220: An Elk-Hunting Nudist Checks the Breeze · The MeatEater Podcast

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: This is me eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening Hunt podcast,
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: you can't predict anything presented by on X. Hunt creators
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: are the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google play store.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: Nor where you stand with on X. You know we
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: had a guy. We had a guy right in that
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: He's a He's a nudist. You know, do I know
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: what a new this is? My kids they were wondering
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: what nudists where and I had to explain it to him. Um,
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: how much time do you have to spend in the
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: nude to be a nudist? That's what I don't understand,
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: the percentage of the day. That's why when I ran,
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: when I was talking to my kids, I left it
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: to be that a nudist, Um, I kind of let
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: it be that, like a nudist would be someone who
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: would sort of go out of their way to do
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: their chosen activities in a place that would allow them
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: to do them nude like that was sort of where
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: I drew it is nude when possible. I just looked
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: it up. I had watched the intro of a nudist documentary.
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: That's as far as I got. That makes me, and
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: that makes me largely a nudist. No, no, because you'd
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: be nude right now. No, I'd get in all kinds
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: of trouble, like from a like an HR type thing.
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: Phil doesn't need to Phil, Phil would complain. Probably the
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: Oxford Dictionary just defines it as a person who does
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: not wear any clothes because they believe this is more
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: natural and healthy. Yeah, you know, I'm not. I'm not
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: a nudist, but um, we got a talk about with
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: our kids. I was explained to them that there is
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: a there's a thing that happens like because like if
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: they were kind of one night, why do they wear pajamas?
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna get to this nudie that rode in, But
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: they're talking about, like why do we wear pajamas? And
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: I said that people tend to begin life in pajamas
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: and they end life in pajamas. But then there's a long,
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: long window in the middle when you don't wear pajamas.
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: I find I think that's accurate, Like you spend decades
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: not in pajamas. I don't know like when it ends
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: and begins, but you you start and end in pjs. Yeah,
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: if I wear him now, it's more like to have
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: Sunday brunch or something, you know, at the house. Yeah,
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: I can't. I don't even I haven't owned a pair
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: of pajamas, probably since I would got rid of my
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: Superman pajamas. The reason I'm right about this guy's he
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: l counts in the nude. He says, he's. He says,
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: I've une with trad bows, compound bows, rifles. Being nude
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: is the most difficult obstacle i'veter on it myself. He
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: checked into it. Says his nudity is completely legal where
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: he hunts um. He says, you have to be very
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: careful about where you pick. He leaves his shoes on.
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: He says he's been a nudist for many years, and
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: he says one of the main things that you wouldn't
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: think about is just your awareness of wind direction mm
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: hmm is enhanced. You got a lot of receptors. He says.
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: It's it's very free, and he says you pick your
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: routes very carefully. Has he had any kills in the nude?
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: I don't think so. He's got a nudist friend who
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: also hunts different state, also hunts naked. I wonder if
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: they have to wear hunter orange during a modern firearm season.
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: That's when you get that, you get that body paint. Man,
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: if that's all they wear, Uh, ladies and Gentlemanell's Bart,
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: George Bart, how's it going going. Well, I'm gonna you know,
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: we've got a couple of days to cover before we
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: start talking about your work, your recent work. But so
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: all the caribou. Last time we had you on, we
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: talked about Mountain cariboo that are in the Lower Fort
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: which had at the time had like shrank srank, shrank,
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: shrank until there was kind of a couple in Idaho. Yeah,
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: that's been They are gone, like gone gone. We're pretty
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: sure they're gone, gone, gone. Yeah. Um, we did get
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: a little surprised. Oh, I can't even remember when it was.
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: It's been eighteen months or so ago. A couple of
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: caribou turned up in northern Montana. Um, just a fleeting glimpse,
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: you know, they passed through, you know, photographs they were
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: able to document them and then never saw them again.
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: Where do you think they came from? Probably out of
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: the purse cells. But nobody really knows. Um. So that's
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: a lot ask cariboo documented in the lower forty eight
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: and they're actually in Montana. What year was that, I said,
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: it's about eighteen months ago. I think it is right
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: when all the self right when the selker occurred was
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: just yeah, I remember seeing that they had turned up there,
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: and I didn't I never really heard what the story was.
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: Nobody knows the story. They there's no conclusion to that story.
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: They just disappeared. What was the nail on the coffin
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: for the Selkirk. We're not exactly sure they were, you know,
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: there's I think when we talked, there was what a
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: dozen caribou left in that herd, and we were putting
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: together a big project to do a maternal pen and
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: put together a whole bunch of pretty heavy handed management actions.
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: And that march, when we were about to really get
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: going with captures and stuff like that, we started our
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: census and we only found three cows. Um obviously none
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: of them were pregnant, so that everything got put on hold.
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: We completed our senses, only found the three. We found
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: three over in the purcels. I think two of them
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: were bulls. So we decided we'd better get those animals together,
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: and then moved them all north up to revel Stoke
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: and put them in the maternal pin that they have
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: in place up there. Um, put collars on them obviously,
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: and then let Actually it was a kind of a
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: stroke of luck. One of the resident animals from the
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: revel Stoke area dropped down close to the penning site
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: about the time they were being placed, and they captured
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: her and put her in the pen to kind of
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: help them acclimate or whatever. Hopefully the mother up to her,
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: and that did work. They followed her back up to
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: the top and as far as we know right now,
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: they're alive and doing well. And that heard m hm.
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: So the last of the Selkirk Mountains don't live in
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: the last the Selkirk Caribou don't really live in the
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: Selkirks anymore. They're up north, man, I invite you. What
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: was the name of that episode, bart and we covered
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: this whole thing. I don't know it was. We always
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: give them qute, clever names that are hard to remember. Yeah,
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: I think it was number forty three, but I'm not sure. Um,
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: a guy at a guy that guy know that works
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: at Old Town Canoes sent me this article about a dude,
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: a hunter who became the first World Slam recipient across
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: four categories. So everyone knows, um, everyone knows that I
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: happened to be a turkey super slam holder now almost
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: two times super Slam holder. What what? What? What? I what?
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: What that is? Is I have gotten? There's there's there's
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: this notion that there are five subspecies of wild turkeys
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: and and they have in different places, you know, and
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: I've gotten them all and once I get another Florida
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: one I'll have I'll be a two time super slam holder.
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: A world Slam holder is a fellow who gets all
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: five of the you know, all five of our wild turkeys,
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: and then it goes down to get this all five
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: subspecies of our just you know, American wild turkey, and
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: then you go down to Central America or you know,
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: bleeze southern Yucatan area and you get yourself what's called
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: an oscillated turkey, which is a whole different species of turkey.
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: At the point you get an oscillated turkey, you become
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: a world Slam holder. And there's an article about this dude.
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: What's really funny as he's standing there doing a grip
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: and grin with a turkey, and it described the caption
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: says that it's a deceased so he's holding his turkey,
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: says that he poses with a deceased oscillated turkey. Deceased,
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: but so the dude, So this is what the dude did. Though,
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: this is kind of like I can't tell. I can't
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: tell if I think this is the greatest or what thing.
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: So he's done the world slam, So all five North Americans,
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: you know, all all five American wild turkey subspecies, and
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: then the oscillated turkey he's got four times. He's done
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: it with a bow, a crossbow, a modern firearm, and
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: a muzzle loader. So he's he's like a four time
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: for like, I don't know, at what point you're hunting
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: turkeys and at what point you're just sort of checking
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: things off a list. I don't know. I think he's
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: still hunting turkeys. I mean he's out there having fun,
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: still chasing gobblers every time, just choosing a different different fires.
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: I saw it wasn't a gripping. Granted was a picture
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: of a dead turkey today on Instagram, and uh, it
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: was with a pistol shotgun, and I was like, I
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: could get like that, you know, because it's obviously shorter range,
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: you know, easy to pack around. Check the dude a
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: decade to get it done. M So that's what I
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: wish I was better at math six times four four
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: twenty four. So he's getting two point four turkeys per
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: year to work towards the That makes it seem very achievable. Yeah,
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: not crazy heard on the pocket book either, if you
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: think of it that way. Mike Petrasca, congrats, Mike. That's good.
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: When I retire, man, I'm gonna be hot on that
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: dude's heels. Um. Oh, you know, this is the last
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: thing I'm gonna bring up and the this is the
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: last part of the last installment of our I shouldn't
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: say are the Yeah, the ongoing story of like our
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: flip flops appropriate footwear. This has been beaten to death,
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: but you got room from one last Sure, you never
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: know he might learn something. So dude, he's out like
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: supposedly scouting for turkeys, and which he says, comes down
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: to sit in the back of a drinking beer, listening
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: for gobbles at night and his dog. He doesn't put
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: the he doesn't put an e collar on his dog,
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: and his dog just sized to get up and take
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: off and heads out into a swamp. He he's got
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: his flip flops on. So the dog goes off in
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: the swamp and it's like knee deep muck. And because
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: he has his flip flops on, he can't go in
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: there after it, but his body he's got sneakers on,
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: goes in there after it. The go out the flip flops,
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: takes his flip flops off so he can run and
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: runs around on the road and in so doing encounters
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: the neighbor and scores a hunting permission on the neighbor's place.
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: So it's sort of like an inadvertent uh af fect.
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: You were in flip flops, Scalel's got him on right
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: now and inverted upside to to run around flip flops.
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: Uh oh, companies, I want to talk about two real
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: quick back when when people used to just freely fly
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: around the country on um airplanes back in the long
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: long ago. Yeah, the boy, you just get on an
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: airplane and just go where the hell you felt like,
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: no mask, nothing, I travel Yanni. I keep wanting to
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: bring this up with Yannie. I realized Yanni is a
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: Yanni's a he's like a chatter, like you like to
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: chit chat with your seatmates, m more so than than
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: I'm comfortable doing, more so than you, that's for sure.
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: And uh, I keep my I never like brought this
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: up with you life, like, yeah, that's talking with someone.
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: They're talking behind me. I can hear him talking, and yeah,
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: he's telling them all about just different stuff and what
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: he's coming from doing. And Yannie gets to talking about
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: game meat, wild game meating. I laughed about this because
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: the woman he's sitting to, sitting next to you, tries
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: to up him, and I even wrote it down in
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: my nose and she told him my favorite meat of
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: all time is kangaroo. Yeah. I remember that too, because
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: I didn't realize you're sitting in front of me until
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: much later in the flight. But I remember when she
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: said that. I said, is that right? And I opened
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: my book and she's like, don't what you be telling
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: me about this wild game? You know? I also heard this,
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: do it? Like this interesting story on an airplane not
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: long ago, one of my final flights, and the guy
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: was it was like we were on a plane there's
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: a bunch of dudes going down to We're going home
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: from the Midge, Minnesota, And there was a bunch of
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: Minnesota dudes going down to watch their team do spring
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: training in Florida, which that that is a trip I
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: cannot I cannot imagine. Did you know that people did
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: this prior to that? No, No, they're real excited. They're
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: traveling down to watch people practice playing baseball in Florida.
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: But he was observing to someone how the area where
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: their Minnesota team carries on this activity that he was
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: talking about how it got built up over the years,
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: and he was saying, how you used to be when
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: you went down there, it was all cows and now
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: it's all buildings. And I started thinking about that. Um,
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: remember the old cows, not condos, the bumber stick are. Yeah,
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: you still see a few around this town. I never
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: think of that like applied to Florida, But like that,
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: the cattle operations replaced by just buildings. I look at
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: like every day, I look friendly when I look at cows.
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: I think I feel like more affection toward than normal. Um.
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: Over time, So Bart, what's going on? Man? What else
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: has happening? We got a bunch of stuff to talk
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: about about your mountain lion, crazy mountain lion projects. Yeah,
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: that's been the highlight of my spring. The you know,
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: the COVID stuff is everything kind of weird right now
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: at work, But are you able to get out and
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: do your work still? Kind of Uh, not as much
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: as I'd like. I'm really working like two or three
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: days a week. We don't have childcare available, so my
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: wife and I are kind of fighting over who gets
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: to go to work and who stays home with kids.
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: Got both both of us are supposed to be doing
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: our jobs. But we do have callers out working, but
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: we're still generating quite a bit of data. Like you
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: have you have collars on how many mountain lions. We
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: have five callers out right now. But so these these
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: collars are on a like a five week rotation, So
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: I really don't want more than about four or five
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: because we have to see every one of these cats
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: every week, and that's quite a bit of work, you know,
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: capturing five cats a week. Oh man, you gotta go.
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: You gotta go catch the cat and mess with it
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: every week to put a new collar on it. We
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: don't have to put a new collar on it that
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: once it's collared, though, we revisit that cat once a
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: week tree it, basically approach it and tree it to
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: do what just to grab that data point. So we're
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: measuring the distance. I can get into the details now
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: if you if you want to get a little far
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: ahead of yourself, am I okay? But but here's no,
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: I'm not getting into the details of what you doing yet.
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: I'm just trying to understand, uh, in today's day, in
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: this day and age, what like I thought, you just
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: put them on it and then you just sit back
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: and reap the information the caller and faller research. No,
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: we're not doing that. This is pretty hands on as
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: far as big cat research goes. So we're looking at
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: these cats every week and we are then measuring their
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: response to that. Okay, so let's let's let's let's back up.
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: Let's yeah, we we can't. We can't start there. Okay,
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: you tell me where to start, Well, I can tell
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: you about the project. Project. So the reason the project
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: is occurring because UM, we're seeing lots of depredations. I'm
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: seeing lots of cats hanging around um X urban you know,
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: urban interface areas. UM depredations depredations on what typically small
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: livestock and pets. Typically the way those work, um, a
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: cat kills whatever X number of sheep or a couple
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: of llamas or whatever eats its phil cashes the carcass
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: you know, near the pasture usually and then just lays around,
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: comes back and feeds that night. By the time we
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: get the call, usually it's a day or two. Um.
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: And we started noticing that the cats are right there,
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: Like we would turn the dogs loose from the carcass
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: and they'd have the cat caught, and like thirty seconds
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: sometimes cataby laying two yards away, bedded someplace near the carcass, um,
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: totally not concerned about us pulling in with the pickups
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: and our voices and the dogs making a racket on
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: the box and barking and everything else that's going on. Um.
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: So it kind of got me wondering, like, what's it take.
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: Why are these cats not concerned about all of this
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: goings on that's happening so close to them? Why aren't
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: they running away from all that noise? And then you know,
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: the next question was out, how close can we it
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: to these cats if we don't know it, how close
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: are we walking up to these cats and and maybe
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: never knowing it. Um. They got a couple of questions,
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: all right when they killed someone's dog, Like, is a
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: dog small enough where they don't kind of like eat
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: some and stash it and then come back and feed
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: on it some more. Or do you see him doing
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: that with house dogs? Well, it depends on the size
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: of the dog. A small dog they'll just pick up
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: and walk off with. Oftentimes we don't find, you know,
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: a carcass cashed away if it's a docks in or something.
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: We have found big dogs. We had a like a
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: pit bull that was killed and mostly eaten, and that
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: cat hung around on that carcass for a couple of
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: days eating it before we caught him. And that was
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: some dude's dog. Yeah, it's actually a service dog dog. Yeah.
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: They let it out to pee and the middle of
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: the night and the cat was just laying there waiting
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: and grabbed it and packed it up the hill a
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: few hundred yards and eight him. Obviously, a cat like
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: that I wouldn't want in my study. I get a
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: little alley about running dog killers. Um, because we're running
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: them with dogs. I don't want one of my hounds
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: to get out in front and encounter a bad cat
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: like that. Uh, and then tell me where this is
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: kind of happening where you're doing your work, just so
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: people understand. Like where we are on the map, we're
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: up in northeast Washington, So Spokane, Washington is where I live,
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: north all the way to Canada and then out towards
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: like Lake Roosevelt, Lincoln County. Um, so we have a
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: five county area that we're kind of working in. Pretty rural, Yeah,
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: pretty rural. We have cats close to town. Um had
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: a cat callar like ten minutes away from my house
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: and like I said, I'm right on the north side
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: of Spokane. Um. You know you could see the city
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: from where that cat lived. We have another one right
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: now that's working over by like Mount Spokane, Ski area
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: between there in the city. So rural but not remote.
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: Definitely that kind of wildland urban interface, you know, ex
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: urban however you want to describe it. A lot of
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: white tails to write, lots of white tails, lots of
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: edge habitat, a lot of turkeys there. Um. But yeah,
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: just broken landscape, a lot of small landowners. Ten and
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: twenty acre parcels are very common. When you say Uh,
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: dog killers. Have you found like habitual dog eating cats,
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: like cats that have kind of started to specialize on
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: I don't think that they have started to specialize on
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: hunting and you know, preying on dogs. But I think
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: cats do start to figure things out once they work.
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: And it might have been with a coyote or something,
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: but some sometimes I think those cats do figure out
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: that they can turn and fight a single dog and
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: and pretty easily take care of that problem. Gotcha. Uh
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: do you have Do you see where they kill many
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: lions or lamas, because that's the thing off. I was
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: a mountain lionman. I wouldn't eat anything but lamas. When
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: they get them, do they give them? They just twist
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: that neck. Oh yeah, they grabbed that big long neck anywhere.
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: I think it's probably works with them. Uh. We see
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: a lot of lamas, Yeah, a lot of alpacas, to
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: which I guess are slightly smaller than a full sized lama.
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: We had one cat it was a big, young tom
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: hundred and sixty pound tom cat and he's only like
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: three years old, right outside of Spokane. That killed fourteen
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: alpacas over over the course of the sweaters. You could
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: make with that and they were. It was a strange
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: one because a cat must have spent quite a bit
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: of time there. He had moved between three different pastures
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: to kill all of these alpacas a period of time
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: to take him to kill all those alpacas, I think
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: just overnight. But it was like a battle scene. There's
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: just carcasses everywhere. It was awful. He knows how uh
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: surplus like there's people that, Um, there's depending on how
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: you feel about predators, right, depends on whether you're that
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: whether you embrace or try to deny the thing of
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: surplus killing. Yeah, there's it's well documented. Um with livestock,
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: we see, I would venture your guests. More than half
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: of our depredations right now are multiple animals. What does
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: it like? What do you think? I know, you don't
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: know what he's thinking, But what is he thinking when
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: he wants to when he goes in and kills fourteen
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: al pack Because it's just that he's wired, you know,
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: like it's opportunity and he can't really picture his future
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: food needs or is he like this is a hoot,
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: this is great fun. Yeah, I mean it doesn't make
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: sense for him, right, Like I knew that if I Yeah,
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: I would look at that as a savings account if
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: I was a lion and just come back when I
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: was hungry, but rather than kill them all at once. Um, yeah,
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: I don't know what he's thinking. I think it's just irresistible.
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: I think all those animals running around in a frenzy,
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: and they're sort of in a you know, frenzy themselves,
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: and I don't think they can help themselves at that point.
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: How does he how is he killing the alpaca? Is
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: typically bites to the neck and head, not typically almost
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: every single time bites to the neck and head. Was
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: the owner of the alpac is pretty distraught? Yeah? They
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: were distraught? My brother, he would my brother would. I
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: can't imagine he'd be catatonic man if he came out
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: and all of his lamas are dead. Yeah, well there.
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: I mean, there's a financial value, right, But the bigger
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: thing is a lot of these animals they have a
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: lot more value than just the finances. There are a
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: lot of these people count on their goats and their
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: sheep for meat or for four h show animals, for
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: their kids and other things. Most of our depredations aren't
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: on big like whatever corporate ranches, or something. These are
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: like ten acre places with a couple of animals, and
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: you know that they used to feed their family or
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: do whatever with so yeah, typically the landowner is pretty
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: upset about it. How do people the people that lose
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: their dog, do they tend to be that this is
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: like I'm just asking for a girl's generalization here. Do
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: people to lose their dog tend to be circumspect and
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: and sort of be like, well, he's just that lions
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: just trying to make a living, and you know, I
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: can't really blame them. Are they like do they want blood?
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: They want its head on a on a spike, like
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: what's there? General, most of the time, if it's a dog,
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: like you know, particularly a pet dog, not a working dog,
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: people are pretty fired up. They want that cat dead.
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: That's been our experience we have. You know, that's the
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: other issue. When they kill dogs. It's hard for us
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: because you know, if they kill a goat, most people,
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: you know, they understand what we're doing and you know
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: that we're going to catch this cat and probably kill it.
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: So they'll let us leave that goat tied out. You know,
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: we'll tie it to a tree, put it. You know,
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: can't trail camera on. It will come back the next morning,
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: and if that cat's hit it, we'll go catch it
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: and kill it. It's hard to talk somebody into letting
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: us do that with their dogs. Yeah, they don't want
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: their dog bees as bait and I I understand that. Um,
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: I would be that way too. So yeah, dogs are
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: a little different than small livestock. Typically, you gotta wonder
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: if a cat starts out with a llama or an
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: alpaca as pray species, if that cat tries to move
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: on to something else, it has a very steep learning
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: curve ahead of it due to the margin of error
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: for the length and size of the neck. Oh yeah,
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: like an alpaca and a little teeny enclosure. Yeah, I
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: got kill it with my teeth, you know, I just
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: gotta get it in the neck. Now, move over to
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: a badger that has I don't know, I don't think
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: that there are very many lines that get that opportunity enough. Um,
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: you know, if they kill an alpaca, typically we have
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: to respond pretty quickly. I say we, it's really the
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: w DFW enforcement that responds, um. And then you guys
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: met Bruce. Bruce does a lot of those I help
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: with as many as I can, and we go out
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: and help enforcement take care of that cat. And can
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: you guys do anything with with the carcass at that point?
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: Do you guys? Not? Really? Um? Unfortunately, most of those animals.
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: Sometimes if the landowner has a tag um or once
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: a cat, sometimes they can get it um if they
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: request that animal. But typically no, we've had a handful
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: of them donated to the tribes. Um. You know, the
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: tribes will make use of that cat and the meat
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: and the hide and the bones and different things. What
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: do you do with them? Just burn them up? Yeah?
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: They just go in the dump with the road killed
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: deer and everything else. And people don't fish them out
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: of the dump. Well maybe they do. I don't. I
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: wouldn't else they did. I don't know, man, I don't
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: want to see who this was. But a good friend
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: of mine, he um. When he was in college, he
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: was working on these nets surveys, these fish surveys where
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: they go out and set nets uh in lakes and
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: what they were supposed to do is they're not supposed
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: to use the fish. They had to just dump the
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: fish because they put it put you put out gil
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: nets for surveys and he would. He would. They'd go
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: out in the work truck and dump the fish. He'd
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: come home, get his regular vehicle, wait an hour and
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: go back and get the fish, and then take the
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: fish back home and flame him and freeze him. Couldn't
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: bring himself to dump fils fish. What kind of fish
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: were we talking about? He he liked it, he was
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: he was kind of a white fish specialists. He'd like
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: to go get the white fish out of there with
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: other stuff too. Yeah, his initials were m d and
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: he had a thirty thirty, so we called him m
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: d Ye. You had a point. Yeah, you were going
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: to say something Yanni's take. Just stroking his beard. Yeah,
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: because again it's it's not something I'm used to. Its
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: found a new thing on space. Um No, I don't
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: think I did. Just having a glance over even you'd
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: happened to be glancing this drect. No, you like I
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: thought you had, like think you started to say maybe that,
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: Maybe he didn't. I spoke to on the disposal side
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: of things. I spoke to Montana game warden, longtime game warden,
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: and somebody in his area hit a abnormally large black
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: bear and killed it, and he went to his normal
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: disposal site, which was a sharp turn on the highway,
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: um where he'd give critters that hev ho because he
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: didn't he couldn't stomach taking them to a dump. He
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: thought it was too disrespectful to take animals just throw
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: them in with all the plastics and ship like that. Yeah. Um,
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: but he did. And he said, he said, his physics
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: were a little off on just how big this bear was.
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: And uh so he slit it out of the back
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: of the truck. Down mountain it went, and he drove off.
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: And the next day he got from the town police department,
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: he got a phone call saying, hey, we have a
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: very large black bear that must have rolled off the
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: mountain above town that is now on the bike path.
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: It did the whole hill. It did the whole hill.
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: Remember that very that chainsaw commercials like that, Like some
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: dude coming down the switchbacks and his chainsaw rolls out
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: the back of his truck and eventually like finaggles his
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: way down all the switchbacks and there's a sauce landing
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: in a mud puddles, still running. Yes, is it running? No,
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: it was not running. He picks up and starts with
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: one crank. No, okay, so here you are. You got
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: a dead alpaca tied to a tree mark. Yeah about it.
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: So when we show up show up the next morning.
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: Typically the cat comes back and feeds overnight. Um, we
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: check trail camera if we have one out. If we don't,
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: we just walked dogs over to the to the alpaca
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: and h turn loose from that spot. And it's kind
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: of you know, without snow, it's typically just up to
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: the dogs to figure out the end track and the
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: out track, which way the cat came from and went.
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: But what we're seeing is these cats are just laying
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: around pretty close to us the whole just listening. Um.
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: And we're not sneaking around out there. We're at a house,
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: we're at a farm with the dog box in the
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: back of the truck and yapping dogs and people talking
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: at normal voices, and um, it was shocking how close
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: the cats would be to us. Sometimes we would hear
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: there were times where we heard the jump race where
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: the dogs ran into the cat while he was just
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: laying around in a bed listening to this whole racket
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: that we were making. But and is that would that
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: not be like when you could you'd like to run
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: lions as the hell of a start to a sentence, Listen,
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: you like to run lions out in the very remote
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: wilderness areas too down and then right? Is that not
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: the same though? They're like when you find if you
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: find where he just killed elk Um, is he more
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: inclined to as you approach scoot out? Like? Is this
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: something that's peculiar? Is this a behavior that you were
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: curious about because you felt that it was counter to
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: what you'd see in other areas or aren't you factoring
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: in the proximity to to to the proximity to a
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: suburb people. Does that make any sense? That was a
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: bad sense? If I think I can clarify. I think
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: what you're saying is that you were oblivious to it, right,
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: And you were only realizing this because some of those
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: cats were collared. We were on the well, no, we were.
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: We realized that when the dogs would jump that cat
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: so close to us. But you got me wondering, like,
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: what would it take for this cat to be afraid
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: of people like you don't obviously, we don't want cats
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: hanging out two feet from people's houses, laying around in
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: the brush listening to people listening to engines and dogs
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: bark and whatever else that goes on to the house
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: or a farm. So is that normal cat behavior or
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: is that some level of habituation? I got you, I
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: got you, all right. That kind of answers my stupid,
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: my not well articulated question of meaning. Uh, are you
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: curious about um? Is that just like ambivalence to human
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: presence a factor of just exposure to humans? Or do
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: you think it might be innate and cats? But you're
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: gonna find You're gonna probably explain how you're going to
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: find that out, Well, we hope. So whether or not
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: we find out if it's just normal cat behavior that's
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: innate two cats, or or if it's a learned behavior.
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: I don't know if we'll pin that down necessarily, but
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: we are going to know whether or not we can
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: change that behavior and and modify the way they respond
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: after being chased around by dogs and and yelled at
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: by people in different things. You guys are in Montana,
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: you know where they've chased cats around. I'm sure any
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: cat that gets within Bozeman city limits probably has some
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: eyes on it pretty fast. If there's snow, especially, there's
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: a lot of there's an active community of hound hunters
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: there that are going to go chase that cat and
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: get a look at it. They probably won't kill it,
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: particularly if it's a female. But um, those cats, they
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: get looked at a lot, they get chased around, harassed
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: by hound hunters. Washington doesn't have that. We're chasing cats
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: that have very very likely never been pursued by a
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: dog we're chasing. We're chasing cats that have probably never
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: had a negative interaction with a person at all. So, um,
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: that's another one of the questions, because it's how it's
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: been how many years since they banned Uh, it's been
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: how many years since they banned lion hunting with dogs
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: in Washington? Over twenty now. I think they've banned it
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: in ninety six, remember, so long enough ago. There's no
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: cat living today that remembers those times. Yeah, yeah, any
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: of those any cat that was legally pursued, And um,
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: you know, I say that because they're I don't know
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: if people are out bootlegging around or chasing cats. That
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: used to be a problem. Right after the right after
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: they made it illegal, there was still a lot of
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: hound hunters around and they were pretty upset about it,
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: and I think that probably happened more than um. The
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: hound hunting ranks in Washington now are pretty slim. There's
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: not a lot of people that still keep dogs because
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: the opportunities are really tough. Okay, so you get curious
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: about this, like why do these cats just not care?
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: What's your next step? Well, we started kind of think
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: about ways to protect you know, the farms and pets
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: and small livestock that we kind of suspect that are
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: going to get picked off by cats. And a lot
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: of times, like real, a real common narrative when we
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: showed up at the site of a depredation would be
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: this landowner that would say, you know, oh yeah, such
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: and such saw this cat a couple of days ago,
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: and my kids saw it when he was walking to
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: the bus yesterday, and you know, it's been around um,
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: but nobody. There's no method to track those cats down
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: and do anything about them. They're just sightings, right, And
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: it's kind of a meaningless metric. So the state wasn't
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: really responding to a sighting because that's just a cat
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: being a cat until it actually does something. There's no
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: real reason for them to send somebody out to chase
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: it and get a look at it. So I kind
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: of got to thinking like, all right, well, if that
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: cat's hanging around this farm for a couple of days
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: and you know, showing up on whatever porch or something
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: like that, that's probably going to cause a problem sooner
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: or later. It's obviously showing that it's not that concerned
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: about people and noise and all the things that we
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: have going on on a farm. So the project then
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: kind of got started, like, all right, so when these
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: cats show up and they're being cited, I want to
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: know about it, and I want to come out and
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: chase them and see if they come back to that spot. Um.
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: So initially it was a little bit of a geographic thing,
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: but really it's a stretch to think that that cat
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: is going to make a connection between hanging around a
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: farm and then all of a sudden, you know, twelve
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: hours later, here comes these dogs and pop it up
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: a tree, and then here comes these people yelling at
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: it and stressing it out. Um, it's a stretch for
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: the cat to make that connection back to that original
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: sighting that might have been the previous day. So it
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: really became more of a behavior study. How does this
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: cat respond over time if we do this, um, you know,
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: how does it respond to this stimuli, which in this
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: case is your voice, Steve over time if we pursue
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: it and give this negative interaction every time it hears
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: that human voice. Yeah, I love that you're using this podcast.
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: Who's gonna who cares enough about this research mark to
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: pay for it? That's a good question. It's a it's
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: a shoe string operation right now. We're looking for funding.
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: If you guys know any plays the ground money. Imagine
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: like the Los Angeles Pet Owners Association. Okay, so you're
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: saying this is on your own dimeond that the Washington
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: Game of Fish isn't helping you out. You have a
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: bartworks to the tribe, I know, but he also does
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: work for the game of fish, correct with these probably animals,
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: So a lot of the fishing game is the manager
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: of the wildlife in the state. Spell tribe has a
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: pretty keen interest in cougar stuff right now because we
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: have um a reservation that's smack dab in the middle
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: of prime winter habitat, and we have had years where
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: we've had terrible problems with cougars on the reservation. UM
• 37:40
  Speaker 1: In yards at bus stops and all the things that
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: you hear about. So my initial kind of seed money
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: came from the the U CUT Group, which is the
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: Upper Columbia United Tribes. It's a consortium of five tribes
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: UM in North Idaho and Northeast Washington. So that was
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: the initial seed money for the research. UM. I've got
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: a couple of grants outstanding right now. But it doesn't
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: cost that much what we're doing. Um I said, we
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: only had to. We bought six collars. I've got uh
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: that w Buddy would bury his company doing the garment
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: stuff for me. He's been real super helpful with Alva Tech.
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: Um questions that I've got with garment, and we're using
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: their equipment. I think it's on loan, but they're not
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: going to get a lot of it back because it
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: just gets trashed out there in the woods for a
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: month on a cat. Um. Yeah, we're just kind of
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: piecing it together as we go. Okay, so keep going on,
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: keep going on the story here, so you explain how
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: you work and how you use how you use this
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: this this podcast to help Okay. So as we're designing
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: this project, we're starting to you know, we're one question
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: tends to lead to another, and that's where we ended up.
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: So we have all these questions starting to pile up
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: and all the the protocol that we ended up settling
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: on to try to answer as many questions as possible.
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: I'll try to describe um succinctly, but we we capture
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: a cat that's been sited. So Washington Department of Fishing Wildlife,
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: the enforcement group is cooperating with us pretty well. So um,
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: they are the ones fielding the calls for sightings or
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: depredations or whatever. So when there's a cat hanging around
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: a farm or a home that's spotted under a porch
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: or wherever that it probably shouldn't be, they call me
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: and then we get our stuff together and go get
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: a look at this cat and we go capture the cat.
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: It's you know, Bruce is volunteering for the project and
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: put a ton of hours into it, and I, UM,
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: we'll go out and capture this cat and get it
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: in a tree, and then we make a decision if
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: it's a cat that we want to add to the project.
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: We're really looking for adult cats. We don't want sub
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: adults that are still with their mom, and we don't
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: want lactating females. I don't want to disrupt um a
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: cat that's actively nursing or feeding young. So we take
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: this at we end up. We darted, put a collar
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: on it, and we put it. Explain that darting process
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: real quick. Uh So we just use a you know,
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: it's an air gun, and we're we're working on a
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: drug formulation. I think I'm actually really excited about because
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: a lot of people use ketamine zylazine on cats. We're
• 40:18
  Speaker 1: trying to save some money. We're trying to do some
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: things different and test some different stuff, and um use
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: a safer drug. Keta means a little bit dangerous and
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: it's also evidently a street drug that we have to
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: be really careful about. So we're using a drug called
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: bam um that we've used on sheep successfully, so we're
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: testing that on the cats and um, it seems to
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: be working real well. So we're darting this cat. When
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: you when someone uses ketemine, what are the what like?
• 40:42
  Speaker 1: What are they? What's it like? What what's the what
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: are they after? I have no idea. UM, I know
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: for cats, it's a it's it looks like it looks
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: like It would suck when you see a cat under
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: ketemine because they're like rigid and uncomfortable, and then when
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: they recover their drooling in their heads, bobbing around and
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: they could they just staggering. It looks awful. Um I can't.
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: So you know, you never like, you never like put
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: a little give a little squirt in your mouth because
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: you don't want to replicate that experience of the cat.
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: It doesn't know. It does not look like they're having
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: a good time at all. I was really hoping you
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: guys were gonna go into like the marijuana side of things,
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: like super shot of CBD, just get them high. Yeah,
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: we can try. Um uh, people use ether and knock
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: cats out. I've heard of the old timers doing that.
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: Um starting fluid. Basically they'll knock a cat out to
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: get it out of a trap or something. And then
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: did you hear the story we had on this show
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: one time about a guy that got accidentally shot by
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: the tranquil as You're gone, No, Yeah, it was quite
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: an ordeal for him. Yeah, it could be very dangerous.
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: They had to pack him down on a mule. They
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: had to load the guy up on a mule and
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: pack him out of the mountains. I thought he's gonna
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: die shot by dart. That's another reason I would you
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: trying to experiment with his bam. Yeah, um, I would
• 42:08
  Speaker 1: get that wrong if I told you it's a three
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: drug formulation. It's beautourphin al I think at a pamazole
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: and metatomadine. Um. So it's a three drugs mixed one.
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: It's made by a wildlife vet in Colorado. It's a
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: great product, super safe. They're using it on moose and
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: sheep and deer and other things. The one thing it
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: does have it's reverse herble. So if I was to
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: dart myself, I could also reverse myself. You can carry
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: like you can carry like a vial of antidote. Right,
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: so I have a reversal agent. Um. I'll get back
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: to darting the cat and we'll talk about reversing it
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: and everything else. But um, so it's a dark the cat.
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: We get it in the right tree. So if it's
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: in a super high tree someplace where it's going to
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: get injured, if it comes out of the tree, we'll
• 42:54
  Speaker 1: jump it out of that tree and put dogs on
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: it right away. So they put a lot of pressure
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: on it and get it to grab another tree. When
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: you do that, typically that cats running from those dogs
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: and it's gonna grab the first tree it can get to.
• 43:05
  Speaker 1: It's so it's less likely that's going to pick a
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: great bit. But how do you climb at the top?
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: How do you prompt it when it's when it finds
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: a tree and it goes into a tree and it's
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: the wrong tree, it's gonna fall, presumably right, it's gonna
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: fall and get hurt if you tranquilize it. How do
• 43:17
  Speaker 1: you how do you willfully prompt it to jump to
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: another tree, to jump to the ground. So we've done
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: in a couple of ways. Um, Sometimes you can just
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: bang on that tree with a stick or a log,
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: and that I think that vibration drives them a little
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: bit crazy and they'll just climb out. If they haven't
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: been treed very much and they are pretty nervous, it's
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: easy to get them to jump. We also carry a
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: paintball gun and you can rattle the tree above them
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: or actually shoot the cat with the paintballs and they'll
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: come out of the tree and try to get them
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: in a better tree. Right, So I want them in,
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: you know, I don't want them over about you know,
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: thirty five ft high, and then we carry climbing equipment
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: because sometimes they go down in the tree. But once
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: so I deliver the dart and we get this tar
• 44:02
  Speaker 1: pung out and it's like you would expect. It's a
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: big you know, I don't know if it's canvas or not,
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: but it's that kind of heavy cotton material. Hey, do
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: you have to hit him in any special spot with
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: that dart? I always try to hit him in the hamstring.
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: You can, you can shoot him in the shoulder, but
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: there's just more connective tissue and more likelihood of an injury.
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: So I always try to shoot him right in the
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: hamstring or yeah, the butt, and that's a big muscle group.
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: I'm using a one and a half inch long needle,
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: so it's a big needle and you have to get
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: into a pretty deep muscle. Um. So these are just
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: pressurized darts that are reusable. Um. So, once the dart
• 44:38
  Speaker 1: hits you know, typically the dart comes out of the
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: cat um in the tree. It's not barbed or anything
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: like that, so the drugs delivered dart typically falls out
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: of the tree. We get our tarp up and just
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: watching that cat. About half the time they go down
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: and they're stuck in the tree and we have to
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: climb up, tie a rope around him and push him
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: out of the tree down into the tarp. How long
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: is it to put that cat asleep? That depends typically.
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: If so, the BAM itself is going to take like
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: ten minutes, which seems like an eternity when you're out there. Um,
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: we have decided we have started adding a really small
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: dose of ketamine to that BAM. Um, and it's a
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: low dose ketamine. It's a one a hundred milligrams per
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: mill leader ketamine. So it's like the stuff that used
• 45:28
  Speaker 1: on horses. Um. We put just a whisper of that
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: in there, and that knocks him out way faster. So
• 45:34
  Speaker 1: those two drugs really work together well. And they'll go
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: down on about two and a half minutes with that,
• 45:39
  Speaker 1: And then you guys are like fireman catching someone jumping
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: out of a window pretty much. Yeah, we'll tie the
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: tarp up and hold the tarp up in the corners,
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: do whatever and catch it when it lands. Um. So
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: you had a funny dark story. I had one of
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: those just a week ago. I was shot a cat
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: and we're we look at the cat the through the
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: scope of our air rifle, you know, and I could
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: see the plunger wasn't all the way down on the dart,
• 46:02
  Speaker 1: which is a concern because it means there's still half
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: the drugs and the dart. It also means the cat
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: only got half the delivery. So we're wondering if we're
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: gonna have to dart him again. And um, he started
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: looking like he was going to come out of the tree.
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: He was getting pretty heavy, his head was hanging. So
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: we've gotten position with the dart and the cat started
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: moving around, and that I wasn't paying attention to the cat.
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: I was looking at the tarp and I felt something.
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: I thought a stick landed on me. And I looked
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: down and that dart had come out of the tree
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: and stuck in my palm like a with half the
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: drug still in it, and the sleeve was off and
• 46:39
  Speaker 1: his pressure eyes. I was like, oh my god, this
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: is gonna be embarrassing. But it didn't. It didn't. Um,
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: I just cleaned I cleaned it up, of course, and
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: nowadays everybody has hand sanitizer in every pocket, so I
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: pulled it out and smeared some hand sanitizer in there,
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: and UM kept a pretty close eye on it. And
• 46:57
  Speaker 1: I don't think I got any of the drug at all.
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: I didn't feel like I did any So you you've
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: got a lot of practice shooting cats with darts, though, right, Like,
• 47:07
  Speaker 1: how many cats? This is a two part question? Teeny
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: up for what's the first part of the question, how
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: many cats have you darted? UM, I'm not sure where
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: I'm at right now. So we have, oh, probably twenty
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: cats so far. We're permitted for thirty five this year.
• 47:29
  Speaker 1: You in your whole career, I figured you would have
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: shot more than that. Yeah, beyond this study. Uh, Now,
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: I didn't really shoot very many when I was helping
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: the state. UM, that was typically their their biologists delivering
• 47:40
  Speaker 1: the drugs on that I was just I was just
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: doing the capture part with the dogs. So this project
• 47:46
  Speaker 1: is really my most of my cat darting. I've darted
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: sheep and deer and some other things, but UM, for
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: this one, probably twenty cats and probably oh, I think
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: three or four of those cats we've had to handle
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: three different times, most of them twice. So I don't
• 48:02
  Speaker 1: know how many darts I've delivered fifty or sixty, I guess.
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: And since they're reusable, have you identified the lucky dart? Like,
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: what is the dart that comes out of like that
• 48:13
  Speaker 1: one is gonna that puts Tabby down? Um? We have
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: identified a couple of unlucky darts. I don't know. Um,
• 48:23
  Speaker 1: we don't have one that I like better than the others.
• 48:25
  Speaker 1: But we always test them before we load the drugs,
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: and sometimes those you know, it's just a syringe, right,
• 48:29
  Speaker 1: and sometimes those plungers and get sticky and things like that.
• 48:32
  Speaker 1: So we're always testing them and that has helped. But
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: I had a terrible time the first cat we treat.
• 48:38
  Speaker 1: I missed twice before I got a dart in it,
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: and the gun was shooting like a foot high, and
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: I I sighted the gun in on the flat, like
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: a total rookie move, you know, I just took it
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: out in the lawn and sighted it in. And that's
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: a very different trajectory than shooting almost straight up into
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: a tree. So I was shooting over the cat and
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: it was launching these eighteen dollar darts full, you know,
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: forty worth the drugs out into the stratosphere. UM. So
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: that was embarrassing, But we've got it dialed in now,
• 49:07
  Speaker 1: I haven't missed a cat in a long time. Good
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: for you. Okay. So the cat falls out of the tree,
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: lands on the trampoline the cop. Yeah, if the lot
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: of times the cat comes out still has some life
• 49:18
  Speaker 1: in it, we tied up. We just put a loop
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: around its hind leg and tied to the tree and
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: let the drugs take the full effect. Um. The dogs
• 49:26
  Speaker 1: are tied back a hundred or so yards to kind
• 49:29
  Speaker 1: of lower stimulation. We tell people to be quiet and
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: not talk, not stimulate the cat. Um they are. They're
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: really paying it like visual stimulation will really bother them
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: when they're anesthesia has taken effect, and it will it
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: will slow down the effects of the drugs. So we
• 49:48
  Speaker 1: get a head cover on them as soon as it's
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: kind of safe right and there and their head can
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: still be up. They really want to get away from
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: you at that point. They're not like trying to fight
• 49:56
  Speaker 1: or anything. They just want to walk away. Um. So
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: we get a head cover on and that really seems
• 49:59
  Speaker 1: to subdue them, and they relax pretty fast once their
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: eyes are covered. So we call her the cat. We're
• 50:06
  Speaker 1: using the regular survey caller that you see on every
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: wildlife project, right, the big GPS collar weighs like whatever.
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: I don't know how many grams, but they're big. And
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: on that we're we're fixing the garment unit. So we're
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: putting that that other garment UM T five tracking unit,
• 50:25
  Speaker 1: which basically the same thing you get from a UM
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: same thing for a dog. Right, we're fixing that to
• 50:31
  Speaker 1: the Vectronics survey caller and with that unit were able
• 50:37
  Speaker 1: to get two second data on the cat. And then
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: what does so on a survey caller, I'm getting data
• 50:45
  Speaker 1: every four hours, so I kind of have an idea
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: where that cat lives. On a four hour rippet, you know,
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: every four hours I get a point. So over time
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: you get really good data. But I only have a month.
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: I'm not trying to determine home range or any of
• 50:57
  Speaker 1: that stuff. I just want to know where that cats
• 50:59
  Speaker 1: at right now out. So with a with this garment,
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: it's the same thing I use on a dog. I
• 51:05
  Speaker 1: have a handheld that shows that cat's location, shows my location,
• 51:08
  Speaker 1: it shows the dog's location. So when I'm in the field,
• 51:13
  Speaker 1: I have this real time data on the cat and
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: I know within two seconds where that cat's at and
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: when it's moving and how fast, so you basically, I mean,
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: you know right where he is, that everything I know exactly.
• 51:24
  Speaker 1: It's UM so, to my knowledge, is the first time
• 51:28
  Speaker 1: anybody's done this with cats anyway, with that kind of
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: data and that kind of field capability. But bart why
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: even attached the regular GPS collar because battery life is
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: an issue with the garments. We're still working on how long.
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: We don't really know how long a battery will last.
• 51:46
  Speaker 1: In the winter time, it seems like we're getting about
• 51:48
  Speaker 1: a month out of one of those batteries right now.
• 51:50
  Speaker 1: It's extended out to about six weeks, I think. But
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: I just didn't want to have a cat running around
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: with a dead caller on it and have no way
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: to go recapture the cat. So that normal survey caller
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: has the four hour data and um VHF capability, so
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: it lasts. You know, I get two years of battery
• 52:09
  Speaker 1: life out of that unit, UM compared to that other
• 52:12
  Speaker 1: collar where I'm getting two second data and it's just
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: going through the battery fast. When this cat wakes up
• 52:17
  Speaker 1: from getting tranquilized. I know this isn't the object of
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: your study, but when when you tranquilize the mountainlin. Um,
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: you put the collar on it, it's effective immediately right,
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: you can just start tracking him instantaneously. How far does
• 52:33
  Speaker 1: he go and how long? How much time goes by
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: before he's back to like acting like a mountline. I
• 52:42
  Speaker 1: with this, with the ban, the recovery is fast. I
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: think they start acting normal far more quickly than they
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: do with the ketamine capture. I think that that ketamine
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: capture really it causes you know, for lack of a
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: better terms, I hangover for that cat that lasts a
• 53:02
  Speaker 1: day or two with the BAM, we see movement pretty quick. Um,
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: once they recover because we reverse it. Remember, So we
• 53:09
  Speaker 1: reverse that cat and within about three minutes that cat
• 53:12
  Speaker 1: is on its feet and running away from us. And
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: how far will he run before he goes? Like? How
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: far does the hall ask before he like chills out again?
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: Not far? Maybe a hundred or two yards. I mean
• 53:23
  Speaker 1: it doesn't just run for miles just nope. So they
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: move away from us and we get out of there.
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: And so before I leave, I put that garment caller
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: to sleep mode, so that saves the battery life. And
• 53:37
  Speaker 1: when I want to go find that cat again, I
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: use the VHF on the electronics collar. I get close
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: and I used my handheld garment unit to just wake
• 53:46
  Speaker 1: that collar up so it's in wake mode, and then
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: I started generating that two seconds data, so I'm not
• 53:50
  Speaker 1: logging data all the time. It's only when it's awake.
• 53:53
  Speaker 1: So it's kind of a nice function to save battery
• 53:55
  Speaker 1: on that unit. So how much time will elapse before
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: you go back to look at it. I've been trying
• 54:00
  Speaker 1: to give him at least five days after capture to
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: go re to go have another look at that cat
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: to recapture it. And typically how far away are they
• 54:08
  Speaker 1: from where you've originally caught them. You know, we've had
• 54:11
  Speaker 1: a couple of cats that live on the same mountain
• 54:13
  Speaker 1: the whole time we we've studied them, and then we've
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: had others that bounce around, you know, six, eight, ten
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: miles over the course of that week. So it just
• 54:22
  Speaker 1: really depends on the cat and also the time of year.
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: You know, the cat that lived on one mountain the
• 54:28
  Speaker 1: whole project was in the middle of winters up north,
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: but by Calville, Washington, deep Snow had a nice piece
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: of winter range for deer, and that cat was just
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: living right above the deer. I had no reason to leave.
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: And then after you tranquilize them and collar them, what's
• 54:46
  Speaker 1: as soon as you've seen him actually kill a big
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: game animal or kill a large animal after that, I'm
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: not sure. I haven't really paid attention to that. I
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: know one cat we collared her, so we were approaching
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: her to call her, and she had just killed a deer.
• 55:04
  Speaker 1: The deer was actually hadn't even been dragged too a
• 55:08
  Speaker 1: cash It was laying in an open field basically or
• 55:10
  Speaker 1: meadow up in the mountain, so she had just made
• 55:13
  Speaker 1: a kill. We callared her, and later that day she
• 55:17
  Speaker 1: was on that deer and drug it into the brush
• 55:19
  Speaker 1: and and ate on it for about a week. So
• 55:23
  Speaker 1: so pretty quick turnaround to going back to normal. Yeah,
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: she started acting normal pretty quick. Oh yeah, that's amazing.
• 55:30
  Speaker 1: Like you did that to a person, do it, they'd
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: be whacked out for the longest time. Man, Yeah, the
• 55:35
  Speaker 1: BC A counselor. Yeah, yeah, well we would be thinking
• 55:39
  Speaker 1: about it too much. She's just her belly started growling
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: and she said, oh yeah, that's right, killed the deer
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: this morning. All right, I think I can ask a
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: good prompting question, um kind of what are the like
• 55:51
  Speaker 1: the data points then that you're actually looking for now
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: that you've you've you've probably got the data point of
• 55:57
  Speaker 1: like where you caught it right at your start, and
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: then so what are the data points? And then next
• 56:03
  Speaker 1: time you go in that you're capturing. So there's really
• 56:07
  Speaker 1: there's three important data points that I'm gathering. And that's
• 56:11
  Speaker 1: more important than the actual point is that the distances
• 56:14
  Speaker 1: in between them. So when a week after we put
• 56:18
  Speaker 1: a collar on a cat, we go, we approach that cat,
• 56:21
  Speaker 1: and when I'm within about four hundred yards, I start
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: the podcast on an ad decibel little bluetooth speaker. Do
• 56:29
  Speaker 1: you play the intro because it's gonna think it's tree
• 56:32
  Speaker 1: has fallen down. I don't play the intro. It's actually
• 56:36
  Speaker 1: I've only used like two podcasts, don't I don't. I'm
• 56:39
  Speaker 1: not out there that long, so um so you don't
• 56:42
  Speaker 1: pick your favorite parts. Now. I've just got one podcast
• 56:45
  Speaker 1: that's been playing for the same for the cats for
• 56:47
  Speaker 1: quite a while. Okay, okay, what do you mind me
• 56:49
  Speaker 1: asking real quick? Like what's going on in the show.
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: It was the Polar Expedition show, all people eating each
• 56:57
  Speaker 1: other and everything that's turns a cat man. Yeah, they
• 57:01
  Speaker 1: don't like that. And then the other one was that
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: gentleman that wrote the book about Davy Crockett. Yeah, which, yeah,
• 57:08
  Speaker 1: I listened to. I mean, I want to read that
• 57:11
  Speaker 1: book now. After listening to you at eighty decibels for
• 57:14
  Speaker 1: an hour and a half talk about it, it's like,
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: I feel like I have to read it. Um. So
• 57:20
  Speaker 1: I approached the cat from about four yards I'll start
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: that podcast, and I started approaching the cat on it
• 57:25
  Speaker 1: basically a direct line, and I know exactly where it's at.
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: I've got it on the handheld and i know where
• 57:30
  Speaker 1: I'm at, and I don't have dogs with me or
• 57:32
  Speaker 1: anything else. I'm just walking up to the cat with
• 57:34
  Speaker 1: this human voice playing the important data is back backup,
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: and he's like in a predictable place. Are you like, oh,
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: he's he's in a cliff, or he's in you know
• 57:44
  Speaker 1: what I mean, or they just like our in just
• 57:47
  Speaker 1: weird places. If it's in the middle of the day,
• 57:51
  Speaker 1: which we're trying to trying to capture cats or recapture
• 57:54
  Speaker 1: cats in the middle of the day, it's a pretty
• 57:56
  Speaker 1: predictable place. And we're starting to make some connections that
• 57:59
  Speaker 1: way about. Um, wind cats are on the move compared
• 58:02
  Speaker 1: to wind cats are in a bed. How they respond.
• 58:06
  Speaker 1: But there's a little bit of individuality that way too. Um.
• 58:10
  Speaker 1: Some cats are a little more comfortable laying out in
• 58:13
  Speaker 1: a less of a thicket, and some cats really hole
• 58:16
  Speaker 1: into some gnarly little thickets or rock overhangs and things
• 58:19
  Speaker 1: like that, so they like it. They like to lay
• 58:21
  Speaker 1: in the thicket. We Yeah, there are some cats that
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: lay in a thicket that's like impenetrable thickets, And when
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: they're in one of those, they feel very safe. You
• 58:30
  Speaker 1: could walk right up to them, got you, Okay, So
• 58:34
  Speaker 1: I don't mean to derail you there. I was just
• 58:35
  Speaker 1: curious about. No, but what's the more open location look like? Uh,
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: penetrable thicket? Okay, So it's never like you just laid
• 58:45
  Speaker 1: out in the sun in the midle of a hundred
• 58:47
  Speaker 1: yard grassy meadow. No, they we do find them laying
• 58:50
  Speaker 1: an open forest on occasion, but tip if they are,
• 58:54
  Speaker 1: it's like at the base of a tree with heavy
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: with branches. I feel like when we chase those first
• 59:00
  Speaker 1: day we chased lines with you in northern Idaho, didn't
• 59:02
  Speaker 1: we find two beds that were in a pretty open
• 59:05
  Speaker 1: for forest. Yeah, that was open forest, are up up
• 59:08
  Speaker 1: against you know, old growth cedar trees. I mean they
• 59:11
  Speaker 1: had some cover. They're still so they like some covered.
• 59:14
  Speaker 1: They like a thicket, they're like a rocky spot. Yeah,
• 59:19
  Speaker 1: we find them in all of those things. Over hung rocks.
• 59:21
  Speaker 1: We've had a couple of cats that we walked right
• 59:23
  Speaker 1: up to that we're in over hung rocks. Um, we
• 59:26
  Speaker 1: actually had one Monday that was we got within thirty
• 59:30
  Speaker 1: yards of she was laid up in a rock pile. Okay,
• 59:33
  Speaker 1: so you start playing this sing and walking towards him,
• 59:35
  Speaker 1: and you start playing it at four yards, Yeah, four yards.
• 59:39
  Speaker 1: I turned the podcast on. I approached them in the
• 59:41
  Speaker 1: most direct line. How loud is it? How how loud
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: is it for you? Like you're playing it to It's like,
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: that's an annoying level for you. Yeah, it's it's annoying.
• 59:52
  Speaker 1: It's an outside voice for sure. Um, it's not a
• 59:56
  Speaker 1: it's not a shout necessarily, but it's a loud talk
• 59:59
  Speaker 1: for sure. If we were talking, if we were walking
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 1: in the woods talking at that level, it would be annoying,
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: probably it. Um, So they're hearing it from quite a ways.
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: So as we approached this cat. The important data that
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: I grab is how close do I get to the
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 1: cat before it gets to its feet and leaves? So
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 1: I grabbed at that point, I stopped, I get my location,
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 1: pin that I get the cat's location. I pined that,
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 1: and then I just watched that cat, and I keep
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 1: the speaker playing and I just stand still, and I'll
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: let that cat move away however it chooses. Whatever that
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: flight looks like, however much energy it wants to put
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 1: into escaping my approach, and the cat moves away and
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 1: I get Typically that happens within about oh ten minutes.
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 1: And once that cat stops moving for you know, I
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 1: don't have a set amount of time, but once it's
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 1: hanging out in an area and not really going anywhere,
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: I called at the end of the mobilization, and I
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 1: grabbed that distance. So the two important measurements really are
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 1: the distance from me the stimuli, and the distance of
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: the flight. And then I hop on the radio. I
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 1: walk up to where that cat was laying around. I
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 1: hop on the radio, and uh, tell, Bruce kicked the
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 1: dogs loose. The dogs are now trained to like track me.
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: If I ever get lost, of dogs are gonna find
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 1: me in a second. They they know what's going on now,
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 1: so they track me to the site of the cat's bed,
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 1: and once they get there, they take off and go
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 1: treat that cat. What are the distances, like the cats
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 1: responding at what distance typically, so we are seeing those
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 1: distances extend over the course of the project for all
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 1: pretty much every cat the first time, the first time
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 1: we approach a cat. So Monday was an exciting day.
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 1: Monday was the first cat that I've walked up on
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: and actually looked at before it ran away from me.
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 1: And it's the first time. It's the first hazing. That's
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 1: kind of what we're calling this, the first hazing event. Um.
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: The cat had been captured once. It was pretty calm
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 1: at capture. UM. So last Monday, I went out and
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 1: I walked up to that cat and I'm watching the
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: GPS and it's pretty thick. They're not terribly thick. You
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 1: can certainly see, you know, forty or fifty yards in
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 1: the forest. And I'm watching the GPS and like, man,
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 1: I'm getting pretty close to this cat. He ought to be.
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 1: It's like that scene. It's like that scene in Red
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 1: Don when the dudes in the white suits the rooskis
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 1: in the white suits start tracking that kid down right. Yeah,
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 1: it was unnerving. I'm looking at my GPS and it like,
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 1: is this thing updating? Right? Like, what's going on here?
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 1: Do you get nervous? Do you get nervous around mountainlines? Um?
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 1: I had my gun out, I had my gun out
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 1: of its holster. Yeah, I was nervous. Um. I mean
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: when I was close, I got within nineteen feet of him.
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 1: Ho he smokes. He's just as laying there listening to
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 1: the podcast. He's like, dude, this is fascinating. Yeah, I
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 1: can't get enough of this guy. So he was bedded
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 1: underneath the kind of a leaning log, and I hopped
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: up on top of the log to get a better
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 1: view and get a little bit of elevation. And when
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 1: I did, the end of the log moved, and I
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 1: think that unnerved him and he ran out from underneath that. Um.
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 1: So that's the first one that I've actually watched run away.
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 1: And then he sorry to be clear, this was the
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 1: first time you had gone in right after this cat,
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 1: after this cat. This is the first time it's been
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 1: exposed to this stimuli. So it run it ran off
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 1: and only went seventy five and stopped and would not move.
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 1: And I'm like, really, now I'm unnerved at this point.
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 1: So I'm holler and I'm watching the GPS very closely
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: to make sure it's not circling me or coming back
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 1: to me or something, because it knows I'm there. It
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 1: has seen me. It's here and me and now here's me,
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: holler and added over the podcast. Um. And it sat
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 1: there for a long time, I mean several minutes at
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 1: seventy and finally I'm like, well, I guess we have
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 1: to turn the dogs loose. It's that's that's it's flight.
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 1: That's what it's gonna do. It's not gonna run from me.
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, I got just so you marked down
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: his his his flight. Yeah, that's pretty close. So the
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 1: dogs treat it within about four hundred yards, and UM,
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 1: at the first at the first hazing event, we shoot
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 1: him with a paintball gun. We tie all the dogs back,
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 1: take him back to the truck, and we shoot that
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 1: cat with a paintball gun to give it a to
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 1: reinforce that negative stimuli, and holler at it, you know,
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: and kind of try to stress it out a little bit.
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: That first capture event. So I'll see what he does.
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 1: We're gonna go after him again next week, and I'll
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: probably take somebody with me this time, just because and
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 1: presumably he'll I think he's gonna I think he's going
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 1: to get out of there. Yeah, that has been our
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 1: experience the first the first time we approach a cat,
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 1: they let us get quite close. Um. I we have
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 1: not had one flea from outside of a hundred yards yet,
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: so we're within a hundreds of anything right now the
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: first time. And we have complete data I think on
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: eight cats now and pretty much across the boarder complete me.
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 1: You've done it four or five weeks in a row. Yes,
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 1: So that's mats that have been collared, hazed four or
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 1: five times and then uncollared and released. And are you
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 1: seeing that it grow every time? Not every time? UM.
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: We do have a couple of negative data points. We
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 1: have a couple of cats that let us get a
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: little bit closer, you know, on the third or fourth event. Um.
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 1: Some of those are easily explained. Some one of those
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 1: cats was sitting down by a creek in a thicket.
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 1: Probably didn't hear us with that running water right next
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 1: to it. Um. Let us get pretty close. Another one
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 1: was up with them. It was a tom a big
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: tom ud seventy pound cat that had a female and
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 1: they were laid up in a rock pile together. And
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 1: he let me get quite close before they mobilized, which
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: I want to say that, which is to say as well,
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 1: that she let you get quite close. That was an
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 1: interesting deal for sure, because he left first. He was
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 1: in a little town called Ion up north, and he
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 1: was in a wood shed when we darted him. Actually
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 1: he was in the woodshed and we couldn't get him out.
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 1: He shot him with a slingshot to get him to
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 1: run out of the woodshed, and I couldn't get a
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 1: dart in him when he was running out, and he
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: went into a car port and was hiding under a boat,
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 1: and I tried to get a dart in in there,
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 1: and he squirted out the back of that and went
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: under a deck and we ended up having to dig
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 1: deep snow. It's chest deep snow. We had to dig
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: a tunnel kind of down underneath the deck and he
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 1: I got a dart in him there. Um, So that
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: guy had some experience with people, and he lived in
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 1: very close proximity to a little town and the first
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 1: time we when after him, he was up in these
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 1: rocky cliffy, this terrible spot, walk around and hunt and
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 1: you know in the GPS and you're looking at data
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 1: from overhead, you know, so fifteen yards might mean a
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 1: hundred or two hundred vertical feet if it's cliffs, which
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 1: is in this case is what it was, so that
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 1: data is difficult to explain. Um. Yeah, I got within
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 1: forty of him, but he was uphill of me in
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 1: this overhang with a with a female that you know,
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 1: line of sight would have been a hundred meters or something,
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 1: so difficult. So he left and I circled around and
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 1: I got up on top of the cliff and I
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 1: found his tracks, and I was sitting on his tracks,
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 1: and at this point I didn't know there was another
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: cat there. So I was sitting on his tracks, just
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 1: kind of watching the garment unit and filling out my
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 1: daddas sheet and grabbing data that I needed. And he
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 1: got out a few hundred yards and I still had
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 1: the podcast playing, and I hear something to my side
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 1: and I look over and there that female is walking
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 1: on his tracks straight at me and maybe fifteen ft
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 1: from me, and slips down through that same little crack
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: in the rocks that that mail had just used to escape.
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 1: It kind of seemed like without a care in the
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 1: world about me, and you're making noise because you're still
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 1: playing the noise she's walking toward. Yeah, she walked right
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 1: up close to me, but it was Yeah, her desire
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 1: to follow that Tom's tracks was pretty strong. She pretty
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 1: much ignored me to do that. And we got eyes
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: on him twice before he went in a tree that day.
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 1: He was just pretty bold. Cat. I'm surprised that I
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 1: don't picture you're gonna have a continued problem, uh, funding
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 1: your work. I don't think so. A lot of people
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 1: will be like really interested in this and how to
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 1: because the thing about it's not like rats, right, It's
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 1: not like where you have just thousands and thousands of
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 1: them and there's nothing you can do, Like what do
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 1: you have mountain lion problems or mountain lions that you
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 1: want in areas where they're imperiled and not doing well.
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 1: You're talking about like a small number of animals, so
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 1: you could actually go through and give them some white
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 1: glove of service, so to speak, and and and and
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 1: be targeted about it. And it will still make sense,
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 1: you know, I mean, because there's so few of them.
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 1: It's not like it's not insurmountable to go into an
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 1: area that has a lot of lion problems and and
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 1: adjust some lion behavior, right. Yeah, And had a biologist
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 1: from California reach out to me and he's got some
• 1:09:12
  Speaker 1: interest in replicating the project down near San Francisco on
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 1: a one of the big reserves that they have a
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 1: lot of what they believe are habituated cougars. Cougars that
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 1: are kind of just laying around in day use areas,
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 1: um and sort of don't have a care in the
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 1: world about people. And I don't tend to make a
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 1: whole bunch of promises about what we can do. But
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 1: I can, like I did promise him, Like if there's
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 1: a cat laying in a day use area, I promise
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: I can change that cat's behavior to not do that anymore.
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 1: Like we can we can adjust that cat's attitude really
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 1: quickly with dogs and paintballs. Have you messed with I
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 1: know that? Like I support using the podcast, think it's
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 1: a great idea, it's a great touch. But have you
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 1: um experimented with other stimul others stimuli, like do they
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 1: hear free like like a dog for instance? Do they
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 1: hear frequencies that humans can't hear? I don't know that. Um.
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 1: I have considered using the sound of dogs barking rather
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 1: than a human voice to approach the cat and see
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 1: how they respond, not like a not like a hounds bang,
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 1: but like you know, a border collie happen around, or
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 1: something that's going to hear I mean fairly regularly. If
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 1: we get to a point in the project where we
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 1: have good enough data and solid enough data with the
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 1: human voice stimuli, we will switch to another sound, but
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 1: it will probably be either like the sound of equipment
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 1: droning on like a four wheeler, or like dog barking,
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 1: or something that cats are going to hear that would
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 1: have a management It would be a management action, right,
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 1: like something you could tell people. You could tell people like, YEA,
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 1: once we do this, this cat is probably not going
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 1: to go close to your barking dogs or whatever. I
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 1: had a friend who uses to design soundscapes and films,
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 1: and when you're watching a movie, you know, and there's
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 1: people sort of driving around and you're hearing the sounds
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 1: of the city, he would like design those just just
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 1: the ambiance sound you know in films. So yeah, like
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 1: it just that that you'd make a soundscape of just
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 1: human activity, you know, doors shutting, kids whatever, people yelling
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 1: at their kids would be like my house, yeah, and
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 1: get him use of that noise, right, And then the
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 1: obvious thing that you know, if you let's say you
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 1: did this over the course of time in an area. Um,
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 1: it's a small area. This isn't something that I expect
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 1: to happen across the whole region or something. But it
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 1: would be interesting then to see how cats responded to
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 1: just a speaker at a house or out in the woods, say,
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 1: see how they moved around the landscape, to see if
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 1: they avoided that or just passed through like they always have.
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 1: And is there a thing you can do to them
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 1: that they really really hate? Touch them? Yeah, if you
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 1: can get contact with them that paintball or anything like
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 1: that just drives them crazy. They hate that. They don't
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 1: like it. No, you change your shot placement when you're
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 1: doing the negative reinforcement a game, for like point of
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 1: the shoulder or something. Something that's gonna chip of the
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 1: nose bruise. Yeah. Um, when I'm when I'm shooting a paintball.
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 1: So that's I was kind of experimenting with this permanent
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 1: paint that foresters use. They mark trees with this stuff,
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 1: and it lasts quite a while on a tree. Um.
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 1: So I bought some of these fancy paintballs with permanent
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 1: paint in them, and I wanted to see how long
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 1: that would last on a cat. Just so if we
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 1: had a cat that was causing trouble in an area
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 1: of sighting, I didn't have a caller available or whatever.
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 1: All right, we'll go. We'll go mark this thing and
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 1: if it you know, without having to drug it and
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 1: handle it. We're not going to put an ear tag
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 1: in it or anything else. If that cat shows up,
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 1: hopefully the people that see it would be able to
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 1: say yeah. As it turns out, I had a bunch
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 1: of blue paint on its side, so I wanted to
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 1: see how long that paint would last. And it turns
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 1: out it's not that effective. It comes off fairly quickly.
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 1: But I was trying to shoot the cat forward in
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 1: the body where it wouldn't be able to reach back
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 1: and lick that stuff off. So I was shooting him
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 1: in the front of the shoulder, neck and back. It's
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 1: kind of where I was aiming. But I don't know
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 1: if that. I mean, anybody that's played paintball and knows
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 1: the things they staying. They're not gonna break skin on
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 1: a cougar for sure, but they do sting and making
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 1: contact with that cat drives him crazy. Have any of
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 1: the cats that you got right now? How often you
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 1: have a cat that has a collar on and then
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 1: it gets killed somehow or another while like unrelated to
• 1:13:40
  Speaker 1: your activity. So that big tom cat that I was
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 1: talking about in the cliff just a minute ago, he
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 1: got killed. He took off after that day and walked
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 1: all the way into Canada about ten miles north of
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 1: the border, and got himself killed by a legal hunter
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 1: up there. Yeah, so I got that collar back. Um.
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 1: And then another cat was down here close to Spokane.
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 1: It was a cat that Were you pissed at the
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 1: guy shot your collared lion? No, I don't care. It
• 1:14:11
  Speaker 1: was a whatever. That's the that's the deal. He's was
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 1: he aware that it had a collar? Oh yeah, now
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 1: he knew I had a caller. I think he's a
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 1: little bit nervous. He was like, he's a little bit
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 1: resisent to to call me, and you know, on the
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 1: caller has my name and phone number and says whatever,
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 1: please call it. Found it took a little I actually
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 1: saw it on Facebook before I think I actually I
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 1: think I actually reached out to him first. Um, but
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 1: I think I'm not mad. Just by any chance that
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 1: color lying you shot right, Well, that's got you know,
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 1: that's a caller plus the garment caller plus all the
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 1: data that's on it, which is you know, that's three
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 1: or four days of work worth a data that's stored
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 1: on that garment. You know that I really want. So yeah,
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 1: I called him and I'm like, hey, look, congratulations, that's
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 1: a big cat. I can I can send you some
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 1: pictures of them if you want, you know, pictures of
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 1: him in a wood shed and pictures of him in
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 1: a tree and whatever, pictures of him with anesthetized and
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 1: whatever else. So once he knew that I was not
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 1: mad and I was also a hunter, and you know,
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 1: congratulated him on such an awesome cat he was, he
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 1: softened up a little bit and sent me my collar
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 1: back and that was a Yeah, it was a really
• 1:15:24
  Speaker 1: nice cat. Man. It's cooler for him too, because he
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 1: can be like I can tell you exactly what that
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 1: cat's been doing. You don't have to. Yeah, he'd be like,
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 1: and he ran over to this tree, and then he
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 1: ran over this that's right. Yeah, I had an ear
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 1: tag into I don't know if they I'm sure they
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 1: pulled that out for the taxi ermist. But get a
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 1: little jewelry too. Wow, And and remind me getting how
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 1: many cats you got running around right now? I got
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 1: five on their right now. So I haven't really got
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 1: into a couple of parts of the project that are
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 1: fairly important one of them. Um. So once that cat runs,
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 1: I'm getting the I'm getting screwed route on this deal
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 1: as far as seeing cougars other than happening upon one
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 1: here and there. Um, I don't understand what do you
• 1:16:07
  Speaker 1: mean by that. I'm not even going to the tree anymore.
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 1: So Bruce and the other gang walks to the tree,
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 1: and I am now measuring the habitat. So I'm grabbing
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 1: all this data from the flight of the cat. So
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 1: once that cat runs away. Once that cat runs, I
• 1:16:23
  Speaker 1: measure the distance. You know, let's say it goes two
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 1: yards or whatever meters. Um. I then lay out a
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 1: tape and I measure the slope, So did that cat
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 1: run uphill or downhill? I grab a slope measurement, and
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 1: then I grab um the basil area measurement. So it's
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 1: a forestry measurement that kind of tells you the forest type,
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 1: will give you a rough idea how wooded it is,
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 1: and then also shrub component, and you know if it's
• 1:16:48
  Speaker 1: a thicket or if it's running through fairly open stuff
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 1: or down the road or whatever. So I'm trying to describe,
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 1: then how much energy that cat used to escape? Are
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 1: you taking note of the wind to wind direction? I
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 1: have a wind noise factor that's just one through five.
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 1: And does he play the wind when he runs? Oh?
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 1: I haven't. No, I haven't paid attention to that man. Yeah,
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 1: because maybe he always he always goes into the wind.
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 1: It would be an interesting thing to start to test
• 1:17:22
  Speaker 1: some of that, as far as circling up wind or
• 1:17:24
  Speaker 1: downwind of him too. I should have been a scientist, man,
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 1: You should have been a scientist. You should come along
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 1: to have all kinds of science things I'd figure out. Yeah,
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 1: that'd be fun to circle give him, give him the
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 1: wind advantage and see if they mobilize more quickly or not. Yeah,
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 1: So I'm grabbing all of this habitat data for the
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 1: escape path, and I'll use that UM to kind of
• 1:17:45
  Speaker 1: help describe distance with you know, capital D distance then,
• 1:17:50
  Speaker 1: so rather than just a linear measurement, it will include
• 1:17:53
  Speaker 1: all of this other stuff like if it ran up
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 1: and over a cliff, that might only be a couple
• 1:17:58
  Speaker 1: hundred yards, but it's a definitely more energy to escape
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 1: than just jogging down a two track road. UM. And
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 1: then I'm also grabbing some data when we get to
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 1: the tree, uh, kind of measuring the behavior of that cat.
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 1: And we have we've kind of had to develop this scale,
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 1: but I don't I think it'll be useful when we're done.
• 1:18:17
  Speaker 1: We'll have a lot of it. How that cat's responding
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 1: in the tree. How is it snarling, is it urinating?
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 1: Is it jump bailing out and finding a different tree,
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 1: How high is it in the tree, is it moving around? Whatever?
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 1: So we measure all that stuff for a number of
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 1: times per five minutes that it's tree, and we're seeing
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 1: that number change as well. The cats tend to by
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 1: the end of the project tree quite a bit higher
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 1: and be quite a bit calmer where they're not dancing
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 1: around in the tree. They kind of know the routine
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 1: by about the fourth or fifth time we're capturing them.
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 1: It's like they just grab a tree before the dogs
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 1: are very close to them, and they climb way up
• 1:18:55
  Speaker 1: high and they're just like laid out, relaxed when we
• 1:18:57
  Speaker 1: get there. That's not going to bowl well for them
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 1: when they're traveled like that one, when they're traveling into
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 1: hunted areas, they're gonna make them. They're gonna make them
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 1: easy pickings. Maybe. I mean it might also have implications
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 1: in wolf country, which almost everything in northeast Washington is
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 1: wolf country now. So I don't know how that'll, if
• 1:19:15
  Speaker 1: that will play out, or how it would. Oh yeah,
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 1: because you were mentioned that that that you find that
• 1:19:20
  Speaker 1: cats that have exposure to wolves. You were wondering if
• 1:19:23
  Speaker 1: it changes their attitude about whether or not they need
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 1: to get into a tree or not. Yeah. Maybe. Um,
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 1: I think no, that's well documented that a single wolf
• 1:19:33
  Speaker 1: is trouble for a cat, like if is in trouble
• 1:19:36
  Speaker 1: if it encounters a cat. A cat'll kill a wolf
• 1:19:38
  Speaker 1: when it gets the opportunity, as long as there's not
• 1:19:41
  Speaker 1: a bunch of them. Um, And I think it's not
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 1: a far stretch to imagine those cats learning that on
• 1:19:48
  Speaker 1: a single wolf a couple of times in their life,
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 1: and then all of a sudden, this single dog shows
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 1: up that's half as big as a wolf. You happen
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 1: and they're just like, well, I'll just kill that because
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 1: I've done this before. So a lion will kill a
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 1: single wolf, yes, not vice versa. Oh, one on one,
• 1:20:03
  Speaker 1: it's a no contest lions or yeah, they're deadly at
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 1: all five ends. Huh, yeah, that wolf doesn't have a chance. Well,
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 1: it's interesting. I wouldn't think, I guess, I don't know.
• 1:20:14
  Speaker 1: I mean, unless it's a subadult line or something else.
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 1: An adult lion versus adult wolf, I'd say lion every
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 1: single time. So what's next? Man? Um, Well, hold on,
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 1: I gotta I feel like we You told us about
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 1: the negative changes in in the couple of the data
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 1: points right when you went back subsequently, But what on
• 1:20:36
  Speaker 1: average is the change after the hazing for the third, fourth,
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 1: and fifth times you come in there with the podcast
• 1:20:44
  Speaker 1: going yeah, um, good question. The biggest The biggest change
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 1: almost always occurs on the second hazing, So that cat
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 1: the second time it happens, I think they're still pretty
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 1: freaked out. And it's been two of both the flight
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 1: initiation and the flight distance. And we've had some that
• 1:21:05
  Speaker 1: like don't stop running. We've had some cats once they mobilized,
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 1: they run like nine hundred yards along ways. Um, so
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 1: they're getting out of there by the end of the project.
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 1: These cats, without exception, we haven't had any cat let
• 1:21:20
  Speaker 1: us get closer over the course of the project. We've
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 1: just had a couple. When I say a couple of
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 1: data points, I mean like outliers, Like we caught this
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 1: cat four times and one of them was a negative distance. Yeah,
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 1: so of the you know, let's say we have eight
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 1: cats with full data, you know, four to five points each.
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 1: You know those points are positive and two is a
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 1: pretty standard increase. So that's why you feel so confident
• 1:21:47
  Speaker 1: if you you had a problem line that was hanging
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 1: out in a day used area, that you you could
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 1: go in there and do this for a month and
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 1: that would cure his that habit of his or s.
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 1: And I think you know the other reason that second
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 1: might be so significant, that second hazing event might that
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 1: increase might be so significant because at the first hazing
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 1: event we shoot him with paintballs. If we did that
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 1: every time, that distance might just contendue to increase until
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 1: as soon as that cat heart Steve's voice at hauled ass.
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 1: Oh so you guys don't continue that the paintball. Now
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 1: we just shoot at the one time? Was that? I
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 1: don't know. I kind of feel bad shooting him every time,
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 1: Like I don't want I don't know. I just need
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 1: to learn whether or not it works. I don't need
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 1: to torture a cat. Yeah, you don want to make
• 1:22:32
  Speaker 1: a man hater out of what? Yeah? So again this
• 1:22:35
  Speaker 1: I want this to have management implications where when a
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 1: cat's hanging around a farm and it gets sited, they
• 1:22:39
  Speaker 1: can call somebody with dogs and say, all right, go
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 1: treat this cat and shoot it with paintballs, and we
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 1: have a and have a reasonable expectation of how that
• 1:22:47
  Speaker 1: cat is going to respond in the future. If you
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 1: give it a known if you give it a stimuli
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 1: that it can associate right well, and then replicate that,
• 1:22:57
  Speaker 1: then then you have to turn around and replicate that
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 1: stimuli to get the desired effect out of it. Well,
• 1:23:03
  Speaker 1: I don't think you would have to. I mean I
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 1: don't think let's say whatever, after this project said and done,
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 1: and um we get a call, say, there's a cat
• 1:23:13
  Speaker 1: on the edge of a neighborhood, can you go chase
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 1: it out of there. I don't think we would have
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 1: to go approach that cat with a voice recording or
• 1:23:20
  Speaker 1: anything else. I think we could go capture that cat,
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 1: bang on the tree, shoot it with paintballs, and it
• 1:23:25
  Speaker 1: would make the association between our because we're talking while
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 1: we're at the tree. I mean, it's hearing human voices
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 1: the whole time, right, It would make that association that way.
• 1:23:34
  Speaker 1: It is interesting though, because I mean you said in
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 1: the beginning that some of these cats were hanging out
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 1: so close to these you know, urban interface kill sites
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 1: where they're likely hearing a lot of human voices too.
• 1:23:46
  Speaker 1: So you're fighting against this kind of maybe not a positive,
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 1: uh interaction, but it's kind of like this background noise
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 1: of human ranch work, farmwork. But I can still go
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 1: down and pick off alpaca or a dog or something
• 1:24:04
  Speaker 1: like that, right, Yeah, And you know that's one of
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 1: the real that's one of the misconceptions of having a
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 1: terrible time with on this project. A lot of people
• 1:24:12
  Speaker 1: think that I'm going out and trying to chase his
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 1: cat away from a farm with the expectation that it's
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 1: not going to come back to the farm or that area,
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 1: and that's not really it. What I want is that
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 1: cat to avoid all of these human associations. Um And
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 1: I don't know if we'll get there or not, not
• 1:24:30
  Speaker 1: for all of the cats, not for all the time,
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 1: but I think there is an argument to be made
• 1:24:35
  Speaker 1: that the cats being messed with are going to behave better.
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 1: Is there a version of this you could attempt on grizzlies?
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 1: Not with my dogs. They do this. They tell on
• 1:24:51
  Speaker 1: dogs if you go, if you try to run a
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 1: grizzly with dogs, they're just hard on the dogs. I've
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 1: never done it, but I have heard stories about people
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 1: getting on them. Um And I guess they're long runners.
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 1: They're straight line long runners like a black barrel tend
• 1:25:03
  Speaker 1: to circle, and a grizzly barrel just lying out and go.
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 1: And then of course they don't climb, they just bay
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 1: and fight. So I mean people certainly do it. There's
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 1: like famous hound hunters from back in the day that
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 1: collected bounties on grizzly bears by using dogs, and I
• 1:25:18
  Speaker 1: don't think we have good records of how many dogs
• 1:25:20
  Speaker 1: they went through over the course of that time, but
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 1: probably a lot. Yeah, I mean black bears are tough
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 1: on dogs. Mean, black bear is a tough thing for
• 1:25:28
  Speaker 1: a dog to handle. Have you lost the dogs lately? No,
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 1: We've had good luck with dogs. Actually, I've still got Whisper.
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 1: She's twelve. Nosies nine Radar die to cancer two years ago.
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 1: And what's the one who got what's the one who
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 1: got mauled up? Pretty good? Nosy? Yeah, she's hanging in there.
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 1: She was with me to listen Monday. She'd treated two
• 1:25:49
  Speaker 1: cats with me. Does she Oh, she hates him, Yeah,
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 1: she's She was kind of hateful little dog before that
• 1:25:55
  Speaker 1: whole reck and now she's now she's full of it.
• 1:25:58
  Speaker 1: I got and oh, sorry, go ahead, go on with
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 1: the dogs. I got a question for you. It's out
• 1:26:06
  Speaker 1: there though. Okay. Yeah, we had and we had a
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 1: litter of pups. Actually, remember Bruce has had that big
• 1:26:12
  Speaker 1: red dog, Gus. We've read him back to Tipsy who
• 1:26:15
  Speaker 1: those were the two cats that were at your tree,
• 1:26:17
  Speaker 1: Steve Guss and Tipsy Um, So we've read those two
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 1: dogs together. Yeah, they were awesome. We have a good
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 1: litter of pups out of them, and they've been on
• 1:26:25
  Speaker 1: a lot of cats like, um, those pups are doing
• 1:26:28
  Speaker 1: most of the work right now. I think they've seen
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 1: well sixty three cats so far since January one um
• 1:26:36
  Speaker 1: that we've treated, So they're getting a lot of exercise.
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 1: Cal what's your question you have to fire you have
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 1: to fire out question. Yeah, this this would fall firmly
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 1: in the final thoughts type of I got this new neighbor,
• 1:26:51
  Speaker 1: California guy, just the guy that throws all the good
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 1: stuff in the dumpster. Okay, um, real, real, nice guy.
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 1: He's got a place that butts up to the Hearst Castle,
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 1: which is now California State Park and Hurst William Randolph Hurst.
• 1:27:13
  Speaker 1: Tons of cash through the twenties thirties built up this
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 1: incredible place. I had this giant zoo and wildlife menagerie,
• 1:27:24
  Speaker 1: and there's all these stories going around that when the
• 1:27:30
  Speaker 1: financial hard times of the thirties caught up to him Uh,
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 1: one solution that they came across was to release a
• 1:27:40
  Speaker 1: bunch of animals, the animals that they couldn't give away.
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 1: And my neighbor claims that they have trail camera pictures
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 1: of the descendants of hers Uh jaguar population that have
• 1:27:57
  Speaker 1: now crossbread with the California mountain lions in the area,
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 1: and they're getting black mountain lions that are noticeably larger
• 1:28:08
  Speaker 1: than your typical mountain lion. H I have my doubts.
• 1:28:12
  Speaker 1: Come on, I mean, if they're getting trail camera pictures,
• 1:28:15
  Speaker 1: just ask them to produce those. Let's see it. Um,
• 1:28:22
  Speaker 1: does that exist though, Jaguar mountain lion hybrids or cross
• 1:28:28
  Speaker 1: breeding of any sort. Have you ever heard of that?
• 1:28:31
  Speaker 1: I've never heard of that. And if I mean they
• 1:28:33
  Speaker 1: share range, they share habitat and the southwest right, Yeah,
• 1:28:39
  Speaker 1: I mean they we would probably know if that happened. Yeah,
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 1: they share habitat like across the I think the entirety
• 1:28:46
  Speaker 1: of the jaguars range. Yeah. Probably. I mean, no, they do,
• 1:28:51
  Speaker 1: I know they do now I think about it. But anyway,
• 1:28:54
  Speaker 1: I give this guy your cellphone number. So yeah, alright, Bart, George,
• 1:29:01
  Speaker 1: you got any more questions for Bart? No, I'm good, Bart.
• 1:29:04
  Speaker 1: Thanks for chatting with us. Yeah, man, I hope you.
• 1:29:08
  Speaker 1: I hope your money comes through because it's interesting. But see,
• 1:29:10
  Speaker 1: I'm trying to figure out what it means, uh, what
• 1:29:12
  Speaker 1: it means in general, because I don't know if it
• 1:29:16
  Speaker 1: means um like doesn't mean that this will be like
• 1:29:23
  Speaker 1: a thing that winds up being used against people hunting
• 1:29:29
  Speaker 1: mountain lions with dogs. Well, this will national geographic reports
• 1:29:34
  Speaker 1: on this. Will they be able to twist it into
• 1:29:37
  Speaker 1: a you see, people shouldn't be able to hunt mountain
• 1:29:40
  Speaker 1: lions with dogs. I gotta think this through for a minute.
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 1: I hope not. I mean, I think it's Ultimately I
• 1:29:46
  Speaker 1: wanted to lead to another tool for wildlife managers that
• 1:29:50
  Speaker 1: are dealing with potential public safety conflicts and depredation issues,
• 1:29:58
  Speaker 1: you know, like that that park or reserve down in California.
• 1:30:02
  Speaker 1: I want them to have a tool to be able
• 1:30:04
  Speaker 1: to say with some level of certainty, like, look, we
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 1: can save these cats lives in the future. If these
• 1:30:12
  Speaker 1: cats get in trouble, if they get in a mix
• 1:30:14
  Speaker 1: up with a person, they're gonna die. Like that's that's
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 1: a certainty. UM. In Northeast Washington, when a cat kills livestock,
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 1: it dies. So if we can keep that from happening,
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 1: and you know, let's say it only works of the time,
• 1:30:27
  Speaker 1: that's still that's a lot of cats, um that we
• 1:30:30
  Speaker 1: can keep out there on the landscape and um, you know,
• 1:30:33
  Speaker 1: available to sport hunters and available for whatever other purpose.
• 1:30:37
  Speaker 1: That was good. Little I liked that, man, It was
• 1:30:38
  Speaker 1: a good little twist in the end. That was good.
• 1:30:40
  Speaker 1: All right, Bart George, How long is it gonna be
• 1:30:43
  Speaker 1: till you come back on again and tells what you're
• 1:30:46
  Speaker 1: out your next how long you've be doing this for
• 1:30:47
  Speaker 1: it and go on to something else that might be interesting. Um, well,
• 1:30:51
  Speaker 1: I'll be working on this probably for another year or so. Um.
• 1:30:55
  Speaker 1: Still doing some cariboo work if you want to have
• 1:30:57
  Speaker 1: a talk about cariboo. There's still some in the Central
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 1: Selk Works and working with International Cariboo Foundation trying to
• 1:31:03
  Speaker 1: help out a group up at the Arrow Lakes um
• 1:31:06
  Speaker 1: save a herd that's down to about twenty four animals.
• 1:31:10
  Speaker 1: Got some callers out on that heard this year, so
• 1:31:13
  Speaker 1: we know that there's at least nine cows up there
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 1: and a couple of calves alive, but the census wasn't
• 1:31:18
  Speaker 1: complete because damn shut down stuff Canada. Also, so what
• 1:31:22
  Speaker 1: about personal hunting? You hunt in spring bear? Is here? No?
• 1:31:26
  Speaker 1: I usually hunt Idaho spring bears and they won't let
• 1:31:28
  Speaker 1: us come across the border. Nowadays they cut off all
• 1:31:31
  Speaker 1: the non resident taxies Washington. Our season, yeah, our season
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 1: will be open here in a couple of days for turkeys.
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 1: I'll probably go try to pick a couple of them
• 1:31:40
  Speaker 1: up on my way to work. Are they letting non
• 1:31:42
  Speaker 1: residents come to Washington for what? Turkeys? Extremely late turkey
• 1:31:49
  Speaker 1: season that you told? Yeah, probably it's that's it's turkeys
• 1:31:55
  Speaker 1: in June. June. Man, that's crazy. I an't. I I
• 1:32:00
  Speaker 1: don't like hunting turkeys after May first, once some mosquitoes
• 1:32:02
  Speaker 1: are out and the ticks are out, which I've already
• 1:32:03
  Speaker 1: found some of those. I kind of shy away from
• 1:32:06
  Speaker 1: turkey on but I'll probably try to get out. It's
• 1:32:08
  Speaker 1: the only show in town right now for us. The
• 1:32:10
  Speaker 1: last question, you're married, right? Oh? Yeah, two kids? I
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 1: was getting to is where you're at with the kid
• 1:32:17
  Speaker 1: thing right now? Yeah? We Uh, my wife and I
• 1:32:20
  Speaker 1: have two boys, two and a half and seven months,
• 1:32:23
  Speaker 1: so we're pretty busy. And ever, the older boy has
• 1:32:26
  Speaker 1: been able to tag along on a few cougar hunts.
• 1:32:29
  Speaker 1: He was in a backpack with me the other day
• 1:32:30
  Speaker 1: when we treate a cat for work. Um so he
• 1:32:34
  Speaker 1: knows the routine. He'll be has year old say or
• 1:32:37
  Speaker 1: do when they see a cat in a tree. Um. Well,
• 1:32:41
  Speaker 1: the more concerning part was before we saw the cat.
• 1:32:45
  Speaker 1: I was approaching the cat, had the podcast playing, and
• 1:32:47
  Speaker 1: he's got a stick back there, and he's banging around
• 1:32:49
  Speaker 1: hitting everything with a stick as we're walking in the backpack. Um,
• 1:32:54
  Speaker 1: and he knows we're he knows kind of what we're doing.
• 1:32:56
  Speaker 1: He has an idea that we're out looking for a cougar,
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 1: but he doesn't know the routine yet. So we march
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 1: along and he starts saying, I see a cougar. I
• 1:33:03
  Speaker 1: see a cougar. And I'm I'm close to the cat,
• 1:33:06
  Speaker 1: you know, I'm within about sixty yards. I'm like, ship,
• 1:33:08
  Speaker 1: is this call or not working? Does he actually see
• 1:33:09
  Speaker 1: a cougar? And I'm like trying to ask him where
• 1:33:11
  Speaker 1: and I can't see where he's pointing. But he hadn't
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 1: he was just telling stories. So when he when we
• 1:33:19
  Speaker 1: get to the tree, he's excited about I keep a
• 1:33:20
  Speaker 1: distance obviously, I'm not handling cats with him, Um, But
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 1: we get to the tree, will stay a little ways
• 1:33:27
  Speaker 1: back and let Bruce to all the heavy lifting at
• 1:33:29
  Speaker 1: the tree and then just call the dogs to us
• 1:33:31
  Speaker 1: when we're done. He's excited about it. Good future scientists. Yeah,
• 1:33:36
  Speaker 1: maybe all right? Man, thanks again for joining us Bart
• 1:33:40
  Speaker 1: we'll talk later hecks later.