Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 605: A Woman Among Wolves

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Ep. 605: A Woman Among Wolves · The MeatEater Podcast

0:08
Speaker 1: This is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
0:13
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening to podcast
0:18
Speaker 1: you Can't Predict Anything, brought to you by first Light.
0:21
Speaker 1: This week, first Light is celebrating its annual White Tail Week,
0:24
Speaker 1: where you can tune in for tips, tricks and tactics,
0:27
Speaker 1: as well as incredible deals site wise. Check it out
0:31
Speaker 1: first light dot com, f I R S T L
0:35
Speaker 1: I t E dot com.
0:40
Speaker 2: You hunt Big Game two?
0:41
Speaker 3: I have?
0:42
Speaker 4: Yeah, Yeah, I've got a I haven't hunted big game
0:45
Speaker 4: in about four years now, but I've shot a lot
0:48
Speaker 4: of deer, antelope, elk, bighorn, sheep, you bears, and I
0:54
Speaker 4: just I train dogs and a bird hunt. That's what
0:57
Speaker 4: I do now.
0:57
Speaker 5: And so that's podcast. Yeah, earlier this about in the podcast, I.
1:08
Speaker 1: Might bring that pigeon down here in a couple of days.
1:10
Speaker 1: Let him walk around up here.
1:12
Speaker 5: At home, build a little roost for him in here.
1:15
Speaker 1: Pretty tame, extremely tame. Nice when you all it tries
1:19
Speaker 1: to do is get into the house. You're kidding me,
1:21
Speaker 1: because it knows people are in the house.
1:23
Speaker 4: Did you raise it?
1:24
Speaker 1: My kids did?
1:25
Speaker 4: It's not going to be a shooter then, right, No,
1:28
Speaker 4: you got to.
1:28
Speaker 6: Pass for forty of his uh roostmates went to bird
1:35
Speaker 6: dog trainers.
1:37
Speaker 7: Yeah, but this was so what's his name?
1:41
Speaker 1: Peanut butter? Peanut but because there was peanut butter and
1:44
Speaker 1: jelly but jelly, Uh, John had to get euthanized. Yeah,
1:48
Speaker 1: I had a health had a congenital birth effect as
1:50
Speaker 1: far as we can tell.
1:51
Speaker 4: Come on, you really did euthanize it. You didn't train it?
1:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, well it had as it started passing its own intestine.
2:01
Speaker 1: Oh my god, real buzz kills. Yeah, yeah, Brody is over.
2:07
Speaker 5: Is peanut Butter aware of the windows outside and know where?
2:12
Speaker 1: But it knows where the door is. It goes to
2:13
Speaker 1: the door.
2:15
Speaker 4: Unbelievable.
2:17
Speaker 2: Does it live outside?
2:18
Speaker 1: Lives outside?
2:19
Speaker 4: Oh?
2:19
Speaker 1: Nice, it's at a bird sitters house? Right now?
2:22
Speaker 5: Did he fly over there?
2:27
Speaker 1: You got the pigeon Gooso comes back home.
2:29
Speaker 2: This is the start of the show.
2:30
Speaker 1: We're already rolling. Give me your book. There you go, Phil,
2:40
Speaker 1: where's a good spot.
2:41
Speaker 2: That's a great spot.
2:42
Speaker 1: That looks good. Yeah, we're missing the bottom.
2:44
Speaker 3: Quarter of the book of the cover, but we've got
2:46
Speaker 3: the time.
2:48
Speaker 1: That's better. That's better. Joined today by Diane Boyd, who
2:54
Speaker 1: came on the you were on the show.
2:57
Speaker 4: A while ago, probably five years now.
2:59
Speaker 1: Five years ago, way back in episode one, six six days. Okay,
3:03
Speaker 1: that was a great episode.
3:04
Speaker 4: Thanks you made it great.
3:06
Speaker 1: We did an episode called Hunting with Teeth with Diane
3:09
Speaker 1: Boyd lay out your can Can you lay out your
3:12
Speaker 1: your an abbreviated form of your resume so people know
3:15
Speaker 1: what you're all about?
3:16
Speaker 4: Oh golly, yeah. I started working with wolves in Minnesota
3:19
Speaker 4: in nineteen seventy six. I was just a child prodigy,
3:23
Speaker 4: Not really, I'm just old. And anyway, I picked up
3:26
Speaker 4: Minnesota wolves. I went worked in Wild the Wolves in
3:29
Speaker 4: Northern Minnesota, and then I worked as a for one
3:32
Speaker 4: summer before I came to Montana as a depredation control
3:36
Speaker 4: trapper and research collar northern Minnesota. And then I moved
3:39
Speaker 4: to Montana in seventy nine to pursue a couple of
3:42
Speaker 4: graduate degrees. And I basically started with the first wolf
3:46
Speaker 4: that walked down from Canada and have maintained wolf reintroduction,
3:54
Speaker 4: recolonization information, all those yeares so kind of from the
3:58
Speaker 4: first wolf to three thousand wolf. Now that's what we
4:00
Speaker 4: got in the West.
4:01
Speaker 1: Got it? And reason I like the reason I like
4:05
Speaker 1: Diane Boyd and reach he's back on the show. Is
4:08
Speaker 1: you caught a lot of the hysteria and a lot
4:13
Speaker 1: of the on each side. If I don't know it,
4:18
Speaker 1: it's not right, especially in today's climate of an election season.
4:21
Speaker 1: I don't want to put it as the left and
4:23
Speaker 1: the right. How do you put it the inn and
4:24
Speaker 1: the yang? Now? Okay, if this can you see the
4:29
Speaker 1: book and my hand film, if this is attitudes of wolves,
4:35
Speaker 1: and this is what this side is that they're going
4:38
Speaker 1: to kill your children, okay? And this side is that
4:43
Speaker 1: they snuggle fawns.
4:45
Speaker 6: They're going to save the planet, that they're gonna.
4:48
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're gonna save the planet, and and and and
4:50
Speaker 1: reverse climate change. Diane Boyd is, I don't want to
4:56
Speaker 1: have you be the middle finger.
4:57
Speaker 4: That's a bad thing.
5:00
Speaker 1: I'm gonna move this finger over where the middle finger lives.
5:03
Speaker 5: Great because it's like diet.
5:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, she gives the middle finger to the sides.
5:09
Speaker 7: I like that.
5:09
Speaker 2: Never that way.
5:12
Speaker 1: And she's got a new book coming out, A Woman
5:15
Speaker 1: among Wolves, My Journey through forty Years of Wolf Recovery.
5:19
Speaker 1: When is it available? Right?
5:21
Speaker 4: So it's coming out September tenth, it's being released and
5:24
Speaker 4: you can pre ordered on Amazon and Barnes and Nobles.
5:28
Speaker 4: It's up there now, got it.
5:31
Speaker 1: My mom's husband, my mom got married. After my dad died,
5:33
Speaker 1: my mom got remarried. Now that guy passed away. You
5:36
Speaker 1: know he called Barnes and Noble. He called it books
5:39
Speaker 1: and Nobles.
5:40
Speaker 2: Wow, makes sense.
5:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was MacDonald's and it was Books and Nobles.
5:49
Speaker 2: Uh, case you forget later. I think you should ask Diane.
5:52
Speaker 2: She's gonna read her own audiobook.
5:56
Speaker 1: Oh listen, I'm gonna tell you the audiobook. Don't don't
6:03
Speaker 1: have them to do a person. Don't bring in a
6:05
Speaker 1: soap opera person. Who's going to do the audiobook.
6:08
Speaker 4: It's got to be you. Do you want to start
6:10
Speaker 4: a little bit? So my Graystone Publishing sold the audio
6:14
Speaker 4: rights to a media company.
6:16
Speaker 1: Ye, and that's how that's normal.
6:18
Speaker 4: They hired a professional actress to read.
6:21
Speaker 1: Did you really come in there and complain?
6:23
Speaker 7: Well?
6:23
Speaker 4: I didn't know that, And then when I found out,
6:26
Speaker 4: I just said, well, you know, I know the story
6:28
Speaker 4: pretty well, and I do a lot of public speaking,
6:30
Speaker 4: and I think I've got an engaging voice, even with
6:33
Speaker 4: my Fargo accent. So they had me send an audio
6:37
Speaker 4: edition and they wrote me back and he said, well,
6:40
Speaker 4: if you want to do the reading, we're going to
6:42
Speaker 4: have to basically train you and it's going to take
6:45
Speaker 4: a lot of time and blah blah blah blah.
6:47
Speaker 1: So you know why they're telling me that they got
6:49
Speaker 1: these holsers that do it all the time. Okay, and
6:52
Speaker 1: they come in they know they're going to get it
6:54
Speaker 1: done in two days whatever. Don't let that happen. I
6:58
Speaker 1: let that happen before, and I've mentioned bunch of times.
7:02
Speaker 1: I let that happen before. I got the thing in.
7:06
Speaker 1: I turned it on and I could not cross the
7:08
Speaker 1: room quick enough to turn it off the minute that
7:11
Speaker 1: person opened their mouth, Because like, you live your work,
7:16
Speaker 1: yeah right, and when you're writing it, you're it's you.
7:19
Speaker 1: You're it's you know what I mean. You're doing it,
7:21
Speaker 1: you're saying it, you're reading it to yourself, you're making
7:23
Speaker 1: it perfect, and then some other person picks it up
7:26
Speaker 1: and touches it. It's like watching It's like, are you married? No,
7:32
Speaker 1: If you were, it would be like watching someone handle
7:38
Speaker 1: your husband.
7:39
Speaker 4: That was an impossibility. I was married briefly, Okay, I
7:44
Speaker 4: get it.
7:44
Speaker 7: You get it.
7:45
Speaker 1: Picture that you were still married. You really liked him,
7:49
Speaker 1: and you had to watch someone else, right.
7:53
Speaker 4: No go. But anyway, I the other thing was they're
7:57
Speaker 4: doing this. They wanted to be done when the book
7:59
Speaker 4: is released in September tenth, and I'm going bird hunting.
8:03
Speaker 4: I mean, I got stuff to do, and I actually
8:05
Speaker 4: just don't. At this point, I just threw my hands
8:08
Speaker 4: upisode whatever. Yeah, I'm okay, thank you though.
8:15
Speaker 2: Next time, next time.
8:17
Speaker 1: I appreciate the advice.
8:18
Speaker 7: Yeah, I knew.
8:20
Speaker 1: Whitetail Week coming up here at me Eiter one week
8:23
Speaker 1: only nine to thirty to ten six. White Tail Week's
8:27
Speaker 1: the best time stock up on whitetail gear with deals
8:30
Speaker 1: from first like FHF Gear, Phelps, game calls, Dave Smith,
8:33
Speaker 1: Decoy's at the me Eater store, plus a full week
8:39
Speaker 1: of white tail content we've done he's in the past.
8:41
Speaker 1: It's like, you know, there's a TV channel that has
8:46
Speaker 1: a they celebrate a fish all week every year. It's
8:51
Speaker 1: like that, but it's for people that like white tails.
8:54
Speaker 1: Oh you know, it's funny. I'm working on this new
8:58
Speaker 1: project and we got to do a bunch of scuba
9:01
Speaker 1: diving over the last week, and we had these underwater
9:05
Speaker 1: It's like an you can talk underwater. It's a special
9:08
Speaker 1: mask like you don't, you know, normally use a you
9:10
Speaker 1: have like a breathing apparatus and a regular mask. But
9:12
Speaker 1: it's this big contained things you can hold a button
9:14
Speaker 1: like talk underwater to people, it's hard to be heard
9:20
Speaker 1: and h it's just it's not a perfect system, as
9:23
Speaker 1: you can imagine talking underwater and someone so we rented
9:31
Speaker 1: this equipment from this place that rents this stuff out,
9:33
Speaker 1: and like, well, how in the world on Shark Week
9:35
Speaker 1: are they all talking to each other underwater? He goes, Oh,
9:38
Speaker 1: they dubed that all the uh mid uh this is
9:49
Speaker 1: you folks will appreciate this. Sometime between mid and end
9:52
Speaker 1: of September, The Fucked Up Bullshitters Calendar is out. It's
9:57
Speaker 1: the third in our ft up series. We the Deer
10:00
Speaker 1: Stands Taxidermy and now it shitters. Some of the world's
10:06
Speaker 1: best and worst worst not best, yeah, the best of
10:12
Speaker 1: the worst old shitters laying around out in the woods
10:17
Speaker 1: from the Arctic to the Midwest and probably points south.
10:22
Speaker 2: Did you do captions this time?
10:23
Speaker 4: Oh?
10:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, great captions.
10:25
Speaker 6: Oh yeah, I don't know that I'd say that they're
10:27
Speaker 6: all the worst because some of them are just intriguing intriguing,
10:31
Speaker 6: like you you'd want to give them a run.
10:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, carved out a giant tree stumps. So like one, Yeah,
10:38
Speaker 1: one is sort of I don't know what. It looks like,
10:39
Speaker 1: a giant redwood or a sequoia or something. I don't
10:41
Speaker 1: know what it is, probably not. No, it's a cedar,
10:44
Speaker 1: a huge Western red seedar, that's what it is. And
10:47
Speaker 1: they carved a shitter out of a Western red seater.
10:49
Speaker 1: It's beautiful. So in the caption process, we sit around
10:53
Speaker 1: thinking of what would be funny, and we're like, something
10:55
Speaker 1: to do with e walks would be funny, and then
10:58
Speaker 1: you work that into a caption. There's one that is
11:02
Speaker 1: very Southwest and when I looked at it, I thought
11:05
Speaker 1: of the Alamo. And so then you work up a
11:07
Speaker 1: caption that's like a joke about the Alamo. That's all
11:13
Speaker 1: that process.
11:14
Speaker 2: Are there any uh outhouses or ships that you wouldn't
11:18
Speaker 2: want to Oh?
11:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, there are. I'd say the one I wouldn't want
11:25
Speaker 1: to do the want need of an upholstery job.
11:28
Speaker 6: I wouldn't touch that thing until someone's mm hmm.
11:32
Speaker 5: There was definitely something that made me lose my faith
11:35
Speaker 5: in humanity, like gross like stuff.
11:38
Speaker 1: That didn't make the cut. There's nothing gross about the count.
11:40
Speaker 5: No, no, no, we had some gross submissions, a lot.
11:47
Speaker 1: Of gross submissions. There was none of our submissions has
11:51
Speaker 1: none of the submissions are like poor etiquette. None of
11:54
Speaker 1: the submissions. There's no there's no fecal matter. There were a.
11:59
Speaker 5: Couple that you guys didn't see that.
12:00
Speaker 3: We're being used the people send in.
12:04
Speaker 1: Oh you cut those out. We have no people in it.
12:07
Speaker 2: I didn't.
12:07
Speaker 3: I didn't think they'd make the cut, so I didn't
12:09
Speaker 3: send those alone.
12:10
Speaker 1: It's twelve months, that's how many months, or in a year,
12:15
Speaker 1: it's twelve months of beautiful photography of if you were
12:20
Speaker 1: wandering around out in the woods, or wandering around up
12:22
Speaker 1: in the Arctic, or wandering around wherever, and you came
12:26
Speaker 1: into a and you came across an old shitter, and
12:30
Speaker 1: you're like, gow the stories that old shitter could tell,
12:35
Speaker 1: that's what this calendar is all about.
12:37
Speaker 6: And they're all shitters you'd tell someone about. Oh, you're like,
12:40
Speaker 6: you wouldn't believe what I found.
12:41
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, If you were hunting with your buddy or whatever,
12:44
Speaker 1: and you went off to go check on something and
12:46
Speaker 1: you encountered one of these shitters and you came back.
12:50
Speaker 1: I don't care. If you saw two booner bucks fighting
12:56
Speaker 1: and stuck together, you'd run back to your body and
13:00
Speaker 1: you'd be like, you would not believe the shitter. I
13:03
Speaker 1: just saw it.
13:03
Speaker 3: Oh.
13:03
Speaker 1: Plus, there's two booner bucks stuck together over there. That's
13:08
Speaker 1: how that that's the quality of these shitters.
13:10
Speaker 2: Like recently, I was was last hunting season, I was
13:13
Speaker 2: up on the Rocky Mountain front, and that Augusta showedo zone.
13:17
Speaker 2: You've probably Randall. Seems like you've been to every bar
13:20
Speaker 2: in every small town in Montana's you've probably been to
13:22
Speaker 2: this one. But in their bathrooms they have pictures of
13:27
Speaker 2: uh some outhouses. And one of the favorite ones I've seen,
13:30
Speaker 2: it's like it's you can see the front, but the
13:32
Speaker 2: outhouses out in the flats and it's got these it
13:36
Speaker 2: looks like two telephone poles that are wedged like between
13:40
Speaker 2: it's like upper corners at the eve and the ground,
13:44
Speaker 2: just basically meaning that the wind blows so hard there
13:48
Speaker 2: that if this outhouse isn't supported with telephone poles, like
13:51
Speaker 2: you know at an angle.
13:52
Speaker 1: It's gonna lift it off.
13:54
Speaker 5: Yeah, or at least that was brutalized by the wind.
13:59
Speaker 5: Pretty good.
13:59
Speaker 1: Yeah, just there's just you're looking down a hill and
14:03
Speaker 1: you can just see the the shitter blown off away.
14:08
Speaker 1: We also had a lot of tandems, and we only
14:10
Speaker 1: put one tandem in because I don't I don't really understand,
14:13
Speaker 1: like my when my little kids were littler, I could
14:18
Speaker 1: see them utilizing a tandem, but.
14:21
Speaker 5: You wouldn't park next to you on in the morning.
14:24
Speaker 1: They're not going to utilize the tandem, right.
14:27
Speaker 4: I know of a use for a tandem out house
14:29
Speaker 4: at the pace. So my first year up there in
14:31
Speaker 4: seventy nine, got Giardia and there was a two seater
14:35
Speaker 4: outhouse and there was a moment one day when I
14:38
Speaker 4: needed to use both holes at the same time, just saying.
14:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, do you know what the next installment of ft UP.
14:52
Speaker 1: I want to do. It's a it's a photographic challenge.
14:56
Speaker 1: I want to do fish cleaning stations or just fucked
14:59
Speaker 1: up old fisher man. But I'd like to do fish
15:05
Speaker 1: cleaning stations, just the nastiest, grossest fish clean stations. But
15:09
Speaker 1: it's hard to capture the smell. Never scratch and sniff.
15:13
Speaker 1: When you were a kid, if you could scratch and
15:15
Speaker 1: sniff old fish cleaning stations.
15:20
Speaker 5: Hit too nice. Now after the fix up joke.
15:24
Speaker 1: It wouldn't even be good anymore. I know we got
15:26
Speaker 1: ruined for that. Yeah, I'm not sure, but this one is.
15:29
Speaker 1: This one is great if you know someone else appreciates
15:32
Speaker 1: an old out house. Oh one of these old out
15:34
Speaker 1: houses that got caught on fire and put out. And
15:39
Speaker 1: I was trying to think of a taco bell joke
15:43
Speaker 1: fire too many flaming hot cheetos. But I think on
15:48
Speaker 1: that one, the joke landed around like it was from
15:51
Speaker 1: Southeast Alaska, and I think the joke was something about
15:54
Speaker 1: how hard it is to get anything to burn in
15:56
Speaker 1: southeast Alaska, but nothing wants to burn there, so how
16:00
Speaker 1: would you get, you know, some kind of joke like that.
16:03
Speaker 1: A couple thoughts from Helfelfinger on a past episode. It's
16:08
Speaker 1: a rebuttal, it's a retraction. It's actually not. It's a fortification.
16:14
Speaker 1: But half a Finger had a good quote. It's not
16:17
Speaker 1: his quote. He wrote it down. A retraction never gets
16:21
Speaker 1: the traction of the reaction to the original action. Once again,
16:29
Speaker 1: a retraction never gets the from the top. A retraction
16:36
Speaker 1: never gets the traction of the reaction to the original action.
16:45
Speaker 1: A great illustration of that would be when it came
16:48
Speaker 1: out two I can think of years ago, it came
16:52
Speaker 1: out that like a guy supposedly got died from eating
16:57
Speaker 1: squirrel brains, and then it was all that was everywhere.
17:04
Speaker 1: Every news agency picked this article up, and then it
17:08
Speaker 1: came out, well, actually, no, he just died of a
17:13
Speaker 1: brain disease. And in his past he had eaten a
17:15
Speaker 1: squirrel brain. So of the one hundred or two hundred
17:20
Speaker 1: people that die of this every year, he happened in
17:23
Speaker 1: his history had eaten a squirrel brain. And it just
17:25
Speaker 1: didn't quite get the traction of the reaction to the
17:29
Speaker 1: original action. I was commenting. I used to always tell people.
17:34
Speaker 1: I used to somehow, somehow, it was told to me
17:37
Speaker 1: that automobile insurance companies often pushed to reduce deer numbers
17:43
Speaker 1: so that to reduce their premium load from all the
17:48
Speaker 1: claims made from crashing and cars hitting things. So agricultural interests,
17:54
Speaker 1: and I would say, automobile interests, automobile insurance interests would
17:58
Speaker 1: like to suppressed dear numbers. Now helfle Finger, I don't
18:04
Speaker 1: know where he hangs out. He's saying automobile insurance companies
18:11
Speaker 1: plural have told Helfflefinger personally they have no interest in
18:16
Speaker 1: spending any money to reduce audio collisions because they just
18:21
Speaker 1: run the numbers and charge whatever premium they need to
18:23
Speaker 1: cover collisions with deer, while they want to spend time
18:27
Speaker 1: or money on something that might reduce deer collisions like overpasses,
18:31
Speaker 1: when they can just simply take it into consideration when
18:33
Speaker 1: they do all their math, they pass it along to
18:40
Speaker 1: the consumer also, so Hefflefinger commented on that. Hefflefinger commented
18:48
Speaker 1: on this. We were discussing a plan taking route in
18:54
Speaker 1: Oklahoma and elsewhere of taking this is a little bit complicated.
19:00
Speaker 1: Some white tailed deer farmers, white tail deer ranchers that
19:03
Speaker 1: hell you call them, that believe they have some deer
19:06
Speaker 1: that are resistant to CWD, meaning they'll have a population
19:10
Speaker 1: deer and some de just don't get it. And they're saying, hey,
19:14
Speaker 1: we should take these deer that don't get it and
19:16
Speaker 1: seed wild populations with our resistant deer in the hopes
19:20
Speaker 1: of sort of speeding along or making you know, these
19:25
Speaker 1: deer have a g mutation that makes them not so susceptible.
19:28
Speaker 1: Let's put them out in the wild, and hopefully they'll
19:30
Speaker 1: breed with wild deer and eventually we will create this
19:33
Speaker 1: CWD resistant wild deer herds, which just strikes me as
19:36
Speaker 1: like incredibly dubious health. A finger says, deer with that
19:42
Speaker 1: genetic combo are not resistant to c w D. They
19:46
Speaker 1: just don't die as fast, and it's not a good
19:49
Speaker 1: thing to have CWD positive deer running around for a
19:52
Speaker 1: longer period of time in the environment shutting infectious prions.
19:57
Speaker 1: I can't remember if I decided on preons or prions.
19:59
Speaker 6: What do you say, primes?
20:01
Speaker 1: Okay, so I'm gonna stick with the Pandora's box is
20:05
Speaker 1: that when you intensively select for those CWD related genes
20:10
Speaker 1: in captivity, you are also selecting for other genes that
20:13
Speaker 1: are close to them on the same chromosome. Genes that
20:17
Speaker 1: are physically close to one another on the same chromosome
20:20
Speaker 1: are inherited together at a higher rate. We have no
20:25
Speaker 1: idea what those other nearby genes are. They might be
20:29
Speaker 1: genes that lower reproductive rate, produce smaller antlers, a higher
20:34
Speaker 1: susceptibility to other diseases. Tameness, who knows. It's just a
20:41
Speaker 1: bad idea to circumvent natural selection for a lot of reasons,
20:45
Speaker 1: and this would never move the needle on CWD spread
20:48
Speaker 1: or prevalence in the wild. These genes associated with deer
20:52
Speaker 1: surviving longer with CWD are in fact increasing in frequency
20:56
Speaker 1: in the wild populations through natural selection, but very slowly.
21:02
Speaker 1: Steve's point is right. Ha, that's my favorite part of
21:06
Speaker 1: the letter. I don't even know what I said. This
21:11
Speaker 1: makes me feel like when I once every five years
21:15
Speaker 1: and I go bowling, and I always get like at
21:16
Speaker 1: least one strike. Steve's point is right that releasing a
21:21
Speaker 1: few more of those animals from captivity is not going
21:23
Speaker 1: to change gene frequencies in a free ranging wild population
21:27
Speaker 1: and has the potential to do harm. He goes on
21:30
Speaker 1: to say, if you like Sonoran hot dogs, Guero, which
21:36
Speaker 1: I do, well, I think that's what he's talking about.
21:40
Speaker 1: Who's gonna take a stab at this?
21:41
Speaker 2: Guero Canelo?
21:43
Speaker 1: Guero Canelo very good, top ten and two sound number
21:50
Speaker 1: one in his opinion, But prices have gone up in
21:52
Speaker 1: a way that the exceeds the quality of the food.
21:55
Speaker 2: He says, no, no, no, no, Guero Canelo is where I
21:58
Speaker 2: always take you. He's giving you a another option.
22:05
Speaker 6: Yeah, we plugged Guero Canelo in a Trivia episode.
22:08
Speaker 1: Oh, and he's saying, las cerrita del roro, h is
22:12
Speaker 1: a better Mexican hot dog.
22:17
Speaker 2: I think it's La care delro but you're close. Is
22:22
Speaker 2: that as good? That's in Tucson as well, Yes, where
22:25
Speaker 2: the Snoran dogs are famous, and it looks way different.
22:28
Speaker 2: And I think he can didn't he read what goes
22:31
Speaker 2: on there and what is?
22:36
Speaker 1: Or he wrote sorry, but yep, Jim, if you Jim's
22:40
Speaker 1: got his eyes on a good Mexican hot dog. Another rebuttal.
22:49
Speaker 1: This is a rebuttal from Bubbly Doug.
22:51
Speaker 2: We're gonna eat him in January.
22:52
Speaker 1: Half a finger. Bubbly Doug are sort of the main
22:55
Speaker 1: rebuttal generators and clarification generators, but.
23:00
Speaker 8: This is from Doug's splash like a friend.
23:02
Speaker 1: Doug's friend you. Doug's friend is very annoyed about something
23:06
Speaker 1: I said about c w D. And I've said this,
23:08
Speaker 1: and I've said it before. I don't love if I'll
23:10
Speaker 1: say it again. But there's a there's a point I
23:11
Speaker 1: often make, and and all it always irritates some people,
23:16
Speaker 1: but I just I say it because it's just it's
23:19
Speaker 1: a true feeling that I have in discussing chronic waste
23:23
Speaker 1: and disease in deer, I often say the thing most scary.
23:28
Speaker 1: This is not what I say, but I'm trying to
23:29
Speaker 1: say it in cleaner terms. What's horrifying to me is
23:35
Speaker 1: that some hunter out there. It horrifies me that some
23:42
Speaker 1: hunter out there would contract CWD from a deer and
23:45
Speaker 1: it would jump the species barrier. And so because it
23:49
Speaker 1: because it's so alarming to me, it's so scary to me,
23:52
Speaker 1: I'll often say that that I'll put some statistic around
23:55
Speaker 1: it where I'll try to say, you know, I might
23:57
Speaker 1: say something to the effect of ninety percent of my
24:01
Speaker 1: concern about chronic waste and diseases, it's going to pass
24:04
Speaker 1: to some that some hunter is gonna get it. And
24:06
Speaker 1: if it were to jump the species barrier, just it
24:08
Speaker 1: would just change deer hunting. It would change deer management,
24:13
Speaker 1: it would change deer hunting, it would change the perception
24:15
Speaker 1: of deer, like we put a huge cultural value on
24:17
Speaker 1: deer if they were this thing that was causing you know,
24:24
Speaker 1: like like these sort of like horrible prolonged deaths from
24:27
Speaker 1: like prion diseases and humans. I mean, it's it's just
24:29
Speaker 1: disgusting to even think about. So when I track see
24:33
Speaker 1: when I when I follow news about CWD and try
24:35
Speaker 1: to advocate on behalf of research around CWD and trying
24:38
Speaker 1: to stop the spread of CWD. A huge part of
24:41
Speaker 1: my motivation is that, like, it just makes me sick
24:44
Speaker 1: to think about anyone, my kids, whatever, somehow doing this
24:50
Speaker 1: and the implication how it would affect my diet. That's
24:52
Speaker 1: kind of like the main thing I'd like to eat.
24:54
Speaker 1: Dear me, Uh, this does not go over well with
24:58
Speaker 1: some people, and don't Ug's friend who's a landowner farmer
25:03
Speaker 1: in the state of Washington. She says, if Steve's biggest
25:07
Speaker 1: concern with CWD is the potential risk to humans, it
25:11
Speaker 1: feels contradictory to the values he often expresses as a conservationist.
25:19
Speaker 1: You could be a humanist and a conservation at the
25:21
Speaker 1: same time. But back to the letter, it gives the
25:24
Speaker 1: impression that he values animal welfare less than he claims,
25:29
Speaker 1: which stands in contrast to his usual corn arguments against
25:32
Speaker 1: vegans that he likely cares more for animals and understands
25:36
Speaker 1: them better than they do. It's frustrating to hear him
25:39
Speaker 1: repeatedly say that his greatest worry is the disease jumping
25:43
Speaker 1: to humans when animal welfare is at stake right now,
25:48
Speaker 1: it's not just Doug who's upset about this, me too.
25:52
Speaker 1: And she goes on as well to counter my observation
25:56
Speaker 1: that if another thing I've said about CWD, then we'renna leave.
26:00
Speaker 1: I'm gonna leave the subject behind for a minute. Another
26:02
Speaker 1: thing I will frequently say about CWD is how can
26:06
Speaker 1: it be? Or why is it that I'm so afraid
26:08
Speaker 1: of it jumping the species barrier to humans. I would
26:13
Speaker 1: feel that livestock producers would be more afraid than I am, because,
26:21
Speaker 1: as I said, a cow in a sheep look a
26:28
Speaker 1: hell of a lot more like a deer than I do.
26:31
Speaker 5: All you gotta look at is like what happened with
26:33
Speaker 5: mad cow disease written right, they can imagine that across
26:36
Speaker 5: the entire United States.
26:38
Speaker 1: Correct what it would do to the cattle ustry. And
26:41
Speaker 1: this person is countering. She's saying, I don't think they're
26:47
Speaker 1: not worried about this. I can't really do a tit
26:53
Speaker 1: for tat on that issue. I understand what you're saying
26:55
Speaker 1: about animal welfare. I'm just telling you a thing that like, like,
26:59
Speaker 1: for instance, when my kids out playing in the road, okay,
27:05
Speaker 1: and I get nervous that they're chasing there, that they're
27:08
Speaker 1: that they go to chase their baseball across the highway
27:12
Speaker 1: without looking. And I'm like, man, the main thing that
27:15
Speaker 1: worries me about my kid chasing the ball across the
27:19
Speaker 1: highway is that my kid will get hit by a car.
27:21
Speaker 1: Someone would say like, well, that doesn't go with your
27:24
Speaker 1: view as a conservationist, because why are you not so
27:26
Speaker 1: worried about the deer that get hit on the road.
27:29
Speaker 1: Aren't you worried about animal welfare? I'm like, yes, not
27:32
Speaker 1: as worried any about my kid get hit on the road.
27:34
Speaker 4: Yeah.
27:34
Speaker 5: I mean I read this as like the only thing
27:38
Speaker 5: you're concerned about is humans. But what I said, I know,
27:41
Speaker 5: but that's what it kind of sounds like she's saying here,
27:45
Speaker 5: like you can be concerned about humans and worry about
27:47
Speaker 5: the deer herds too.
27:48
Speaker 1: Yeah. When I see a deer run across the room,
27:50
Speaker 1: I was like the driver I freaked out on. I
27:54
Speaker 1: was in the pastor's seat and I freaked out on.
27:56
Speaker 1: The guy'd be like, slow down, dude, how do you
27:57
Speaker 1: know there's not more.
27:58
Speaker 2: I think that she's just I think it's a she.
28:01
Speaker 2: I don't know why it is because.
28:05
Speaker 1: And the fact that he says she.
28:06
Speaker 2: But I think she's pointing out that maybe there's a
28:09
Speaker 2: constant O middle when you talk about CWD, about that part,
28:14
Speaker 2: I always qualify that part.
28:16
Speaker 6: I also think it's hard to I mean, the CWD
28:21
Speaker 6: is going to be a lot worse for deer if
28:23
Speaker 6: people get it from deer, Like, if you're concerned about
28:26
Speaker 6: deer as a whole, if it jumps the species barrier,
28:29
Speaker 6: CWD is going to be a much worse outcome for
28:33
Speaker 6: our white tail populations as a whole.
28:35
Speaker 1: And if it jumps the species, yeah, if it jumps
28:38
Speaker 1: the species barrier into cattle, and all of a sudden,
28:41
Speaker 1: we have to have the same conversations about deer and
28:44
Speaker 1: CWD as we do about free ranging buffalo and cattle
28:49
Speaker 1: because of brucellosis. And people are like, hey, man, if
28:52
Speaker 1: the state owns the deer, keep those deer away from
28:55
Speaker 1: my place.
28:56
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's a it's a much darker picture for not
29:00
Speaker 6: only people, but the health of deer as a whole
29:03
Speaker 6: if that were to happen.
29:04
Speaker 1: And I don't omit. The other thing I don't omit
29:06
Speaker 1: the other thing the same way. When I'm driving, or
29:09
Speaker 1: I'm right in the car and I see a deer
29:11
Speaker 1: cross and I see that the driver that I'm with
29:14
Speaker 1: isn't thinking about how there's probably some following it, and
29:16
Speaker 1: I'm like, dude, so now come on. But if I
29:21
Speaker 1: saw a kid run across the road, my reaction is
29:24
Speaker 1: going to be even stronger. I'm gonna get out and
29:26
Speaker 1: yelled the kid.
29:27
Speaker 2: Yeah.
29:27
Speaker 3: I think it's perfectly normal to be more worried about
29:29
Speaker 3: your kids than deer. Then you are worried about like
29:35
Speaker 3: the welfare of a deer, or deer is a population.
29:38
Speaker 1: I do worry.
29:39
Speaker 6: Yeah, let me ask you this.
29:40
Speaker 3: I think it's pretty valid.
29:41
Speaker 6: If I could guarantee you that it would not jump
29:44
Speaker 6: the species barrier, but you could get rid of it
29:47
Speaker 6: by snapping your fingers, would you still get rid of CWD?
29:51
Speaker 1: Oh? Yeah, I mean that's the course.
29:52
Speaker 6: And let's say it's like you can you can be
29:54
Speaker 6: worried about one thing more than the other, but still
29:57
Speaker 6: have concern for cw D as a problem for deer.
30:02
Speaker 1: If we could spend money and get rid of EHD
30:05
Speaker 1: in blue tongue, I'd be like, oh, let's go spend
30:07
Speaker 1: the money and get rid of HD. In blue tongue, Yeah,
30:09
Speaker 1: it's like it upsets any It upsets equilibrium and causes
30:12
Speaker 1: a lot of trouble for deer hunters when their area
30:14
Speaker 1: gets wiped out. It's like rags the riches on deer populations,
30:17
Speaker 1: where you get a lot of deer and all of
30:18
Speaker 1: a sudden you're like, well, we got a lot now, but
30:20
Speaker 1: now that we got this many, just wait for EHD
30:22
Speaker 1: to come through and then they'll be laying dead on
30:24
Speaker 1: the side of some pond. I would still think we
30:28
Speaker 1: should spend much money, and like, here's the thing too,
30:31
Speaker 1: from their perspective, that's the reason I'm always advocating on research, Like,
30:37
Speaker 1: knowing that there's that risk out there, study the hell
30:39
Speaker 1: out of it. I think they should be. I think
30:41
Speaker 1: there should be a lot of money getting pumped into
30:43
Speaker 1: studying it. It's not like that perspective is not adversarial
30:46
Speaker 1: to want to control what's going on. Who else to
30:52
Speaker 1: talk about?
30:52
Speaker 6: Wolves?
30:53
Speaker 8: Me?
30:58
Speaker 1: Where do we start? Let me ask you this question.
31:03
Speaker 1: Can I remind you of something you told me the
31:04
Speaker 1: last time?
31:05
Speaker 9: Oh?
31:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, sure, the last time you were on the show.
31:10
Speaker 1: And I want to pick this up and have you
31:12
Speaker 1: extend that logic. I want to see if you still
31:13
Speaker 1: feel that way, and if you would extend it to
31:15
Speaker 1: Colorado and just just run with this. You said something
31:20
Speaker 1: that surprised me when you were on the show before.
31:23
Speaker 1: You had said, had we never did we humans America's Americans? Whatever?
31:33
Speaker 1: Had we never conducted had we decided to not do
31:37
Speaker 1: a reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone National Park in the
31:41
Speaker 1: frank Church Wilderness area, meaning have we not gone and
31:45
Speaker 1: live captured wolves elsewhere and brought them to turn them loose?
31:51
Speaker 1: We probably would have. I can't remember the exact way
31:54
Speaker 1: you put it. We probably would have eventually landed in
31:58
Speaker 1: the same spot we're at right now. From natural migration.
32:03
Speaker 4: Yes, I still feel that way. And the only so
32:07
Speaker 4: wolves are expanding globally in Canada. They're all over the
32:12
Speaker 4: Midwest here in our west Europe, and the only place
32:16
Speaker 4: where wolves have been reintroduced was Yellowstone and the frank
32:20
Speaker 4: Church Mexican wolves, red wolves. But wolves have globally expanded
32:25
Speaker 4: without any reintroduction. There's wolves in the Netherlands. Now, there's
32:29
Speaker 4: wolves in Denmark. Nobody put them there. Wolves have been
32:32
Speaker 4: getting there on their own and the wolves did get
32:35
Speaker 4: to Colorado. They've had the first reproduction I think it
32:37
Speaker 4: was twenty twenty or twenty twenty one from Wyoming wolves,
32:41
Speaker 4: and those wolves ended up boot them being killed, but
32:43
Speaker 4: they were getting there on their own. And I feel
32:47
Speaker 4: very strongly that where Colorado is at since twenty twenty
32:51
Speaker 4: is about where we were at in Montana in nineteen
32:54
Speaker 4: seventy nine eighty when a few wolves started walking down
32:58
Speaker 4: on their own power from Canada and slowly got a
33:02
Speaker 4: toe hold, so to speak, and repopulated on their own.
33:08
Speaker 1: Can you mentioned the Great Lakes? Can you move over?
33:10
Speaker 1: Can we move over real quick to the Great Lakes?
33:12
Speaker 1: And you can touch on that real quick? Talk about
33:16
Speaker 1: that for a men like no reintroduction? Right, if we
33:21
Speaker 1: look at in the northern Great Lakes, we have Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan,
33:28
Speaker 1: anyone else have a stable viable population.
33:32
Speaker 4: No Ile Royal. There was a recent reintroduction to Ile
33:36
Speaker 4: Royal because the wolves are dying out other than that
33:39
Speaker 4: Michigan waters.
33:40
Speaker 1: Yes, can you give a little crash course on how
33:46
Speaker 1: were they ever gone gone?
33:47
Speaker 4: No?
33:48
Speaker 7: Good question.
33:49
Speaker 4: So when I left Minnesota in nineteen seventy nine working
33:52
Speaker 4: with wolves, there was just under a thousand wolves, nine
33:54
Speaker 4: hundred to one thousand wolves in Minnesota. There was a
33:58
Speaker 4: handful in Wisconsin, probably less than a dozen. There was
34:01
Speaker 4: maybe twenty five in Isle Royal that had gotten their
34:04
Speaker 4: late forties early fifties by crossing the frozen Lake Superior
34:07
Speaker 4: ice and that was it. And now there's I'm trying
34:11
Speaker 4: to think of the numbers of wolves in the Midwest.
34:13
Speaker 4: It's over a thousand, might be a couple thousand, three thousand.
34:16
Speaker 4: I'm trying to think, have.
34:17
Speaker 5: They been extirpated from Michigan.
34:20
Speaker 4: Yes, they're extirpated from Michigan and Wisconsin. They were never
34:24
Speaker 4: extirpated from Minnesota because the northern fourth or third of
34:27
Speaker 4: the state is too remote roadless, so there always was
34:30
Speaker 4: a stronghold. And I'm trying to think.
34:32
Speaker 1: You're not calling me a liar when I say that
34:34
Speaker 1: I saw a wolf track in the eastern up in
34:36
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety four.
34:37
Speaker 4: Are no, no what I saw?
34:39
Speaker 1: I fight you?
34:40
Speaker 2: No.
34:40
Speaker 4: Absolutely, I'm saying viable populations breading reproducing established packs.
34:45
Speaker 8: No.
34:45
Speaker 4: Because my friend Dick Theo was documenting wolves recovering to
34:48
Speaker 4: Wisconsin starting and I think I think he saw his
34:50
Speaker 4: first wolf track in like seventy two or seventy three,
34:53
Speaker 4: they were trying and Michigan same thing. And actually there
34:58
Speaker 4: was a reintroduction into Michigan in the up. It's nineteen seventy,
35:04
Speaker 4: seventy four to seventy eight, somewhere in there. Seventy four
35:07
Speaker 4: you can read about. It's in my book. And they
35:09
Speaker 4: took four wolves from Minnesota and they transplanted them, reintroduced
35:14
Speaker 4: them to northern Michigan. It was during just before deer seasons,
35:17
Speaker 4: were they really and they eventually all four were killed
35:20
Speaker 4: pretty quickly, So that.
35:22
Speaker 1: What people guns, animal rights people.
35:26
Speaker 4: Failing sorry for him in the Michigan winters. So that
35:30
Speaker 4: was actually the very first wolf for introduction that I'm
35:34
Speaker 4: aware of, and people don't.
35:35
Speaker 1: Often who did that reinduction. It was like the state
35:39
Speaker 1: was it real hot politically at the time.
35:41
Speaker 4: You you didn't know about it. I'd say, no, it
35:43
Speaker 4: wasn't right.
35:43
Speaker 1: It's no internet, right, no.
35:45
Speaker 4: Internet, no Facebook and on social media. So it was done.
35:50
Speaker 4: They were held a little while in a pen and
35:53
Speaker 4: then they were let go, and that was the model
35:55
Speaker 4: for how they were going to reintroduce to wolf seat
35:57
Speaker 4: to Yellowstone. So Yellowstone wasn't Yellowstone, Ido. Wasn't the first
36:01
Speaker 4: reintroduction Michigan.
36:03
Speaker 1: Was they took them from Minnesota and put them in Michigan. Yes,
36:05
Speaker 1: I'm from Michigan. I didn't know that.
36:07
Speaker 10: Google it.
36:08
Speaker 4: Try it Michigan wolf for introduction if you're so, and
36:13
Speaker 4: look in the seventies, I think seventy four. So yeah,
36:16
Speaker 4: but none of them made it. And it wasn't that
36:19
Speaker 4: they didn't know how to hunter, didn't know how to
36:21
Speaker 4: find their way around because they're wild wolves, just that
36:23
Speaker 4: too many people with guns. So anyway, that was you asked.
36:27
Speaker 4: That was the first. And then of course our wolves
36:30
Speaker 4: were coming down into Montana from the North Country from
36:34
Speaker 4: Canada on their own.
36:35
Speaker 1: What year were they so in the Rockies? So let's
36:41
Speaker 1: leave the Upper Midwest out of it. Yeah, so we'll
36:43
Speaker 1: go from like the hundredths of Meridian west or whatever. Kay,
36:50
Speaker 1: in what year can you say with some certainty there
36:53
Speaker 1: were no wolves south of the Canadian border in the
36:59
Speaker 1: whole west in the Yeah, in the whole West?
37:01
Speaker 4: Well the statement so wolves have always trickled down, So
37:05
Speaker 4: I can't say there was never a wolf. But in
37:07
Speaker 4: terms of a viable breeding surviving.
37:10
Speaker 1: Oh no, no, I want to hear about that a
37:11
Speaker 1: little bit.
37:11
Speaker 4: Okay, So by they say generally by the nineteen thirties
37:14
Speaker 4: wolves were extirpated as a viable population in the West.
37:18
Speaker 4: But I know of individual people like what you just said,
37:21
Speaker 4: who saw wolves, wolf tracks a wolf. There was a
37:26
Speaker 4: wolf shot in Glacier Park in nineteen fifty three. There
37:29
Speaker 4: was another wolf shot outside of Bulbridge in nineteen seventy.
37:32
Speaker 4: There's individual shot, they get run over, they show up.
37:35
Speaker 4: But in terms of a viable, reproducing population, nineteen thirties
37:40
Speaker 4: is pretty well the date that they've chosen.
37:42
Speaker 1: Okay, But since from nineteen thirty up until they will
37:49
Speaker 1: come to focus on when a vible population came Yeah,
37:53
Speaker 1: at any time along that there could have been singles
37:57
Speaker 1: that would come down from camp.
37:58
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I hearing from people who live over on
38:01
Speaker 4: the on the Rocky Mountain Front, the Blackfoot Indian Reservation,
38:06
Speaker 4: Glacier Park, it's pretty remote, inaccessible, badger to med and
38:11
Speaker 4: people have seen wolves there more commonly than other parts
38:15
Speaker 4: of Montana. And then of course they don't survive in
38:17
Speaker 4: eastern Montana because.
38:18
Speaker 7: They got nowhere to hide.
38:19
Speaker 4: They show up, boom, they're dead.
38:20
Speaker 1: Got it.
38:21
Speaker 4: So there's been a little bit, but not reproduction.
38:25
Speaker 1: Okay, And then when did they start coming down and
38:30
Speaker 1: getting a foothold? And how did that? How did that work?
38:33
Speaker 1: They keep using toll holding foothold, which.
38:34
Speaker 4: Is which is there's They don't forget legholds anyway, one
38:39
Speaker 4: of my better tools. Sorry, did you find it?
38:43
Speaker 5: Yeah?
38:43
Speaker 4: Go ahead.
38:44
Speaker 5: A failed attempt by Northern Michigan University and the Michigan
38:47
Speaker 5: DNR to reintroduce four wolves to the Upper Peninsula occurred
38:51
Speaker 5: in nineteen seventy four. See Eventually wolves move from Wisconsin
38:56
Speaker 5: to Upper Michigan following strong prey populations in the early nineties.
39:01
Speaker 5: When'd you see that wolf track?
39:03
Speaker 1: I saw a wolf track in nineteen ninety four?
39:05
Speaker 5: Eastern up that that corroborates your your story, Try and
39:12
Speaker 5: trap right again.
39:16
Speaker 1: That's not far from the final resting place of my dog, Duchess.
39:20
Speaker 5: Wolves got her?
39:21
Speaker 1: Huh Nope, two guys named Ben and Matt got her.
39:25
Speaker 1: Oh man, yep, well they were supposed to. Oh oh,
39:29
Speaker 1: I gotch she was crippled up. Oh god, sorry god,
39:32
Speaker 1: HER's not the right word.
39:35
Speaker 4: Thank you for the back job, Brody.
39:38
Speaker 5: Thanks.
39:41
Speaker 1: So the question was oh from nineteen so nineteen thirty
39:46
Speaker 1: there's around nineteen thirty, there's no viable population of wolves
39:50
Speaker 1: left in the lower in the American West.
39:53
Speaker 7: Yeah.
39:53
Speaker 4: They even went in the parks with poisons and traps
39:55
Speaker 4: and rifles and killed all the wolves inside Yellowstone and
39:59
Speaker 4: Glacier and all the parks. Yeah, they were pretty well gone.
40:02
Speaker 4: Coyotes didn't disappear, but wolves did.
40:05
Speaker 5: Why is that white coyotes stick around?
40:09
Speaker 4: I think because they're smaller, they have a higher reproductive capacity,
40:13
Speaker 4: they breed more often, they're breeding in smaller units, and
40:18
Speaker 4: people weren't so focused on eradicating coyotes. You know, you
40:21
Speaker 4: see a wolf, by god, we've got to kill every
40:24
Speaker 4: last one coyote like well whatever, it just not doesn't
40:27
Speaker 4: it generate the emotional impact of hatred?
40:30
Speaker 2: Gotcha?
40:31
Speaker 5: What about Mexican gray wolves?
40:32
Speaker 2: Were they always?
40:33
Speaker 5: Were there always some north of the border or had
40:35
Speaker 5: they been eliminated?
40:38
Speaker 1: Also?
40:38
Speaker 4: It's interesting, so the Mexican wolves were basically eliminated except
40:43
Speaker 4: in Mexico, and there were a few into the southwest,
40:46
Speaker 4: Arizona and New Mexico right at the border area. They
40:51
Speaker 4: captured every last one. Then they could fund find out
40:54
Speaker 4: of the wild. Roy McBride went there and I think
40:56
Speaker 4: the last wild capture was about nineteen seventy early ninety seventies,
41:02
Speaker 4: and they moved them into captive breeding facilities to help
41:06
Speaker 4: build up the species, but their founding population was seven.
41:11
Speaker 4: There's a lot of genetic concerns obviously with a bottleneck
41:15
Speaker 4: of seven. So they're always managing and manipulating them to
41:19
Speaker 4: try and maximize genetic diversity, including taking pups from captivity
41:24
Speaker 4: at a young age and then finding a den in
41:27
Speaker 4: the wild where the mothers got wild pups, and they'll
41:30
Speaker 4: go sneak a couple of the captive pups like ten
41:33
Speaker 4: days old. However, really and with a while once because
41:36
Speaker 4: that has the desirable genetics.
41:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, what's that bird? Does that?
41:41
Speaker 4: A coward?
41:41
Speaker 2: Right?
41:43
Speaker 4: They call them a parasite though, instead of an improvement.
41:45
Speaker 7: Okay, so yeah, So.
41:49
Speaker 4: The Mexican wolf, they were pretty well gone. And interestingly,
41:53
Speaker 4: one of my first years in the Northwark I think
41:54
Speaker 4: it was nineteen eighty, Chuck Johnkle brought up a Mexican
41:58
Speaker 4: carnivore biologist, Pepe Trevino, and he showed me a polar
42:03
Speaker 4: eight you know, photograph he brought up of a wolf.
42:05
Speaker 4: It was like in a barn or a shed, and
42:08
Speaker 4: he said, is that a wolf? Well, yeah, he says,
42:11
Speaker 4: and I know it's a wild one because this is
42:13
Speaker 4: a Mexican wolf from the Chiuaua area of Mexico and
42:17
Speaker 4: it was coming to a ranch and it was a
42:20
Speaker 4: male wolf and it was bringing deer legs and meat
42:24
Speaker 4: to the ranch dog, who was a female on spade
42:27
Speaker 4: because it was the last mate choice out there, and
42:30
Speaker 4: they ended up the rancher could have just killed it,
42:33
Speaker 4: everybody did, but he didn't. He called some authority said
42:35
Speaker 4: if you don't come take this wolf away, we're going
42:37
Speaker 4: to kill it. So they went and captured it and
42:39
Speaker 4: held it in his barn until they moved it to
42:41
Speaker 4: the zoo. But it's kind of a sad story, yeah,
42:44
Speaker 4: the very last one.
42:46
Speaker 1: Yeah. But we played this on this podcast some time
42:51
Speaker 1: ago and it was some bird from was I think
42:56
Speaker 1: of some bird from Hawaii and it was the I
43:01
Speaker 1: can't remember some bird species and it was just down
43:03
Speaker 1: to one. It was down to a male or a
43:05
Speaker 1: female and this bird species with duet I heard it. Yeah,
43:11
Speaker 1: And so they have this recording of the last bird.
43:16
Speaker 1: Let's say it was a male, the last male of
43:19
Speaker 1: the species doing the duet without his without accompaniment, because
43:23
Speaker 1: he like does his part and you wait and the
43:25
Speaker 1: female supposed to Yeah, and it was gone.
43:28
Speaker 2: I heard that.
43:28
Speaker 4: It's kind of terrors at you a little bit.
43:30
Speaker 1: Yeah.
43:30
Speaker 4: Yeah.
43:33
Speaker 1: Have you ever heard a guy named Frank Glazer.
43:36
Speaker 4: Old Pilot, different guy Don, that was Don Glazier, No,
43:39
Speaker 4: I haven't.
43:40
Speaker 1: He has a book called Alaska's Well, there's a book
43:43
Speaker 1: about him called Alaska's Wolfman, huh. And he had gone
43:47
Speaker 1: up to He gone out to Alaska very early and
43:50
Speaker 1: was a market hunter for people building roads and people
43:53
Speaker 1: building railroads and whatever, and eventually just became this very
43:58
Speaker 1: accomplished hunter. And at the time they were trying to
44:01
Speaker 1: get they were trying to do economic improvement for Eskimo
44:07
Speaker 1: groups in northwest Alaska, and part of this economic improvement
44:12
Speaker 1: plan was to introduce reindeer herding, which never never really
44:17
Speaker 1: took so as they were trying to go into Eskimo
44:22
Speaker 1: communities and the fads are trying to get Eskimo communities
44:28
Speaker 1: establish raindeer populations, but they're having the hell of the
44:31
Speaker 1: time with wolves, and so Frank Glazer, in addition to
44:36
Speaker 1: a lot of aerial gunning, was doing bait operations and
44:44
Speaker 1: he would go into an area and get them poison
44:46
Speaker 1: bait yep, strict nine. He'd be able to go get
44:50
Speaker 1: them all.
44:51
Speaker 4: Yes.
44:51
Speaker 1: In his book he talks a lot about all the
44:53
Speaker 1: other stuff that would turn up at the bait pile,
44:56
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff, but it was so affect that
44:58
Speaker 1: he doesn't talk about its effectiveness with pois in this way,
45:01
Speaker 1: but it was so effective. He has some anecdotes in
45:04
Speaker 1: there where he gets them all and then someone will say,
45:08
Speaker 1: there's this part of it where an Eskimo tells him
45:10
Speaker 1: that he saw it's like seven come across the ice
45:14
Speaker 1: and it was like six white wolves and a black wolf.
45:17
Speaker 1: And a couple days later he goes to his bait pile.
45:21
Speaker 1: There's six white wolves and a black wolf at the
45:23
Speaker 1: bait pile. Just very effective, yes, yeah, And even talked
45:26
Speaker 1: about you want to set it on a high knob
45:29
Speaker 1: like he's got like he took like a real approach
45:32
Speaker 1: to it, you know, like he was good at poison
45:36
Speaker 1: and wolves.
45:36
Speaker 7: He's a good predator, good at poison wolf.
45:39
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, well, I mean poisonous. How they wiped the
45:42
Speaker 4: wolves out of the West. It wasn't so much traps
45:44
Speaker 4: and guns it was poison. How else are you going
45:47
Speaker 4: to get every last one? That's it?
45:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, when they started coming down, what eventually what factors
45:55
Speaker 1: eventually led them to you know what, what factors led
45:59
Speaker 1: them to kind of get a toe hold? Was it
46:01
Speaker 1: ESA protection where you were where people were more afraid
46:05
Speaker 1: to shoot them because they'd get in a bunch of trouble.
46:08
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think I mean Rachel Carson and you know,
46:11
Speaker 4: the whole wave of ecology and being environmentally a where
46:14
Speaker 4: it started in the late sixties, and then the ESA
46:16
Speaker 4: came about, the Act came out seventy three, I think
46:19
Speaker 4: the final version. Wolves were protected in seventy four, and
46:23
Speaker 4: there was just a little change of mindset. And the
46:25
Speaker 4: interesting thing was that they would find the north Fork
46:28
Speaker 4: of the Flathead, you know, right along glacier. Because back
46:31
Speaker 4: in the seventies, people like myself and other people, they
46:35
Speaker 4: just wanted to move to a quiet place where there
46:37
Speaker 4: were a few people and could enjoy wildlife and have
46:39
Speaker 4: a simpler life. They weren't laggers or hunters or ranchers. Well,
46:43
Speaker 4: there were some, there were some, but mostly just sort
46:45
Speaker 4: of go back to earthers and have a better quality life.
46:48
Speaker 4: So they didn't mind wolves, and these wolves happened to
46:50
Speaker 4: find that valley, that corridor of tolerance, and they that's
46:55
Speaker 4: how they found their way. They didn't work on the
46:57
Speaker 4: Rocky mount Front, it didn't work in eastern montann it
47:00
Speaker 4: didn't work.
47:00
Speaker 1: And I know because of cattle, yes.
47:03
Speaker 4: And so they found this little zone and they were
47:06
Speaker 4: able to one came, and then two years later her
47:09
Speaker 4: male came and they made it. And then more wolves
47:12
Speaker 4: come down. But it was the tolerance of the local
47:15
Speaker 4: community that found wolves interesting and novel versus dangerous and threatening.
47:20
Speaker 1: Where were you? Then?
47:21
Speaker 4: I came to that valley in nineteen seventy nine, the
47:24
Speaker 4: first wolf that survived that we got a radio collar
47:27
Speaker 4: on Kishnina. She arrived in nineteen the fall of seventy eight.
47:33
Speaker 4: We put a radio collar in April fourth, nineteen seventy nine,
47:36
Speaker 4: and I trapped there for forever, just trying to catch
47:39
Speaker 4: more wolves. And there weren't other wolves until about two
47:42
Speaker 4: years later when this male came down and joined her.
47:45
Speaker 4: But the meantime, you know, she wanted her out looking
47:48
Speaker 4: for a female like that poor bird in the wale. Yeah,
47:51
Speaker 4: looking for a male, right, And eventually found one and
47:54
Speaker 4: they made it and had the pops and so forth.
47:57
Speaker 4: So that process just they filtered on their own four
48:01
Speaker 4: paws without any assistance whatsoever, and no fanfare and no
48:06
Speaker 4: people from Washington, d C. Carrying crates and they just
48:09
Speaker 4: they just walk down. And I think that's why they
48:11
Speaker 4: made it there was just socially acceptable and tolerant because
48:15
Speaker 4: it wasn't forced on anybody.
48:18
Speaker 1: You tell that story in your book. Yeah, how did
48:20
Speaker 1: you get a collar on that? Or was it collers
48:22
Speaker 1: at the time or so.
48:23
Speaker 4: The British Columbia Barry researcher Bruce McLellan's been up doing embarrassed.
48:28
Speaker 4: He's now retired, but he saw the wolves and wolf
48:31
Speaker 4: tracks and he contacted Bob Riem at the university and
48:35
Speaker 4: Bob hired a wolf trapper from Minnesota, Joe Smith. Uncommon name,
48:39
Speaker 4: but it was Joe Smith. And he came out and
48:43
Speaker 4: set traps and caught that wolf. And then I came
48:45
Speaker 4: out in September to replace the crew that was there
48:50
Speaker 4: and follow her, and I was a trapper and to
48:52
Speaker 4: try and catch more wolves. And that's kind of how
48:55
Speaker 4: it started. So she was already collared, although I know
48:58
Speaker 4: some there had one neighbor who didn't really like wolves
49:01
Speaker 4: and said that I brought the wolf with me, which
49:04
Speaker 4: you know, or that a sled dog got loose but slid.
49:08
Speaker 4: You know, you don't see sled dogs that are three
49:10
Speaker 4: feet off the shoulder with yellow eyes.
49:11
Speaker 7: I mean, it's just all the stuff.
49:13
Speaker 4: But that was how they got there. They walked and
49:15
Speaker 4: she had to come along ways because they poisoned off
49:18
Speaker 4: wolves in southern BC and Alberta in the rockies, just
49:22
Speaker 4: like they did in the States, because they were afraid
49:25
Speaker 4: of rabies. And they started poisoning wolves in the sixties,
49:27
Speaker 4: late sixties, and so.
49:28
Speaker 1: There was a zone they were at it late.
49:30
Speaker 2: Yeah, there was a.
49:31
Speaker 4: Zone when there weren't wolves along the border. There weren't
49:33
Speaker 4: wolves in Waterton and vanmf. So this first wolf, Chrishtina,
49:36
Speaker 4: may have come from as far as Josper, but she
49:38
Speaker 4: came quite a ways. We didn't have genetic resources back
49:42
Speaker 4: then to determine where she came from. Of course now
49:45
Speaker 4: we could if we'd had a sample, but we don't
49:47
Speaker 4: have a sample.
49:50
Speaker 1: Did you when you say you were a wolf trapper,
49:53
Speaker 1: then were you trapping problem wolves too?
49:59
Speaker 4: Yes? No, I don't mind at all when I.
50:03
Speaker 1: So or whatever word you want to.
50:05
Speaker 4: Do well, you'll enjoy the chapter north Holm in the book,
50:08
Speaker 4: but did you like the North Holme chapter? So I
50:10
Speaker 4: started working with wolves as a sty eyed, waistlink blonde
50:14
Speaker 4: haired hippie wolf hugging lady and I.
50:18
Speaker 1: Came from Niver want me through that descriptor now story.
50:24
Speaker 4: I was a bit enamored with wolves. I was a
50:27
Speaker 4: university college student Dave Meach, who's like the wolf god.
50:31
Speaker 4: He's still working full time at eighty six studying wolves.
50:34
Speaker 4: He's published more scientific papers than anybody I know. Anyway,
50:37
Speaker 4: I got to work on his captive project and then
50:40
Speaker 4: I got to go to northern Minnesota and work, and
50:42
Speaker 4: I learned how to catch and collar wolves and track them.
50:45
Speaker 4: And then I was hired as a year after this,
50:48
Speaker 4: so I'm pretty early in my career. In nineteen seventy nine,
50:50
Speaker 4: I was hired as a livestock depredation control trapper and
50:55
Speaker 4: research trapper. So when there weren't wolves killing livestock, I
50:59
Speaker 4: went out and form and collared wolves that were just
51:01
Speaker 4: wild and added to the database for stie Fritz was
51:04
Speaker 4: post docking PhD stuff. So my job picture you live
51:08
Speaker 4: in North Holme. Picture, you're a conservative guy from Michigan
51:12
Speaker 4: with a few cows and you have a few acres
51:14
Speaker 4: and some young blonde galoy's going to come up and
51:17
Speaker 4: save you from.
51:18
Speaker 7: The wolves, right.
51:19
Speaker 4: I mean it was a hard roto. So that was
51:24
Speaker 4: my job and I learned so much that summer. It
51:28
Speaker 4: was so important to my career development and having me
51:31
Speaker 4: be in the middle finger as you described, of behavior
51:35
Speaker 4: of public wolves reaction on my part. So there were
51:40
Speaker 4: truly farmers, they don't call them Rochester farmers that had
51:43
Speaker 4: chronic depredation problems and there were some farmers that had none.
51:46
Speaker 4: I worked with both, but getting into that community was
51:51
Speaker 4: real challenging, and I could tell stories forever about that.
51:57
Speaker 1: How would you generally handle those situations?
52:00
Speaker 4: Okay, example, I try to use there's no point in
52:04
Speaker 4: feeding them a lot of scientific data. They don't care.
52:08
Speaker 4: You just have to work with them and develop a relationship.
52:10
Speaker 4: I use my sense of humor. There was like, for example,
52:13
Speaker 4: I was working in there and I kind of stayed
52:16
Speaker 4: on my own and I tried to stay away from people,
52:18
Speaker 4: just do my job because I was young in inexperience
52:21
Speaker 4: and I kind of didn't want them to know that.
52:23
Speaker 10: Right.
52:24
Speaker 4: Well, one day I'm at the gas station that a
52:26
Speaker 4: guy pumping gas. They've actually pumped your gas back. Then says,
52:30
Speaker 4: you know, you got to pick up the local paper
52:32
Speaker 4: and see what Bing wrote about you. I said, well,
52:34
Speaker 4: who's Bing girl. He's what he's like close to God.
52:38
Speaker 4: He writes our local news column and the weekly paper,
52:41
Speaker 4: and he knows all the goings on. So I go
52:43
Speaker 4: buy the paper and I open it up and there's
52:47
Speaker 4: being being Elhard's column and he talks about who visited
52:50
Speaker 4: who and what they were having the church bazaar at
52:53
Speaker 4: and then he says, and by the way, we have
52:56
Speaker 4: a new community member. There's an attractive, young blonde lady
53:00
Speaker 4: wolf Trapper. And next exact quote and next to his words,
53:07
Speaker 4: he had a photograph of a six foot tall cardboard
53:11
Speaker 4: cut out wolf and he's got his arm around it
53:14
Speaker 4: and is sitting outside at his house and he says,
53:16
Speaker 4: Lady wolf Trapper, I have a problem. Wolf's like, what
53:21
Speaker 4: do you do?
53:22
Speaker 8: Right?
53:22
Speaker 4: I'm twenty four years old. I'm like, oh my God,
53:25
Speaker 4: and knowing that how I deal with this guy is
53:28
Speaker 4: going to make or break my summer. So I thought
53:30
Speaker 4: about it really hard. I went home. I mate took
53:34
Speaker 4: out a bunch of cardboard and tools, and I built
53:37
Speaker 4: a perfect replica of a nun fourteen new house wolf trap,
53:42
Speaker 4: complete with double long springs made out of cardboard and
53:45
Speaker 4: a fake chain made like your kids make the Christmas
53:47
Speaker 4: loop chains. And I wrapped it in black electric tape
53:50
Speaker 4: so it looked like it had been dyed black like
53:52
Speaker 4: a real trap. And I got a jar of my
53:54
Speaker 4: stinkiest wolf bait and I crammed it full of cardboard.
53:57
Speaker 4: I drive to his house the next day and I
53:59
Speaker 4: pulled up in the government truck and he comes out
54:02
Speaker 4: in his porch and he kind of stands there it smirks,
54:04
Speaker 4: and he crosses his arm and says, well, you must
54:07
Speaker 4: be the lady wolf trapper. And I said, yes, sir,
54:10
Speaker 4: I am. Please meet you. I'm Diane Boyd. And he says,
54:13
Speaker 4: say you get to take care of my problem wolf.
54:16
Speaker 4: I said, I am. And I walk around the back
54:17
Speaker 4: of my truck and I pull out this cardboard trap
54:21
Speaker 4: and the corrugated cardboard stinky goo. And I walk over
54:24
Speaker 4: and I say, so this this trap, in this bait,
54:28
Speaker 4: will I guarantee we will catch yours particular subspecies of
54:32
Speaker 4: wolf that's causing you your problem. And I reach out
54:35
Speaker 4: with it like this, and he stands there and he
54:37
Speaker 4: looks at me like for Mediani five feet away, and
54:41
Speaker 4: he just kind of stands there, and then finally he breaks.
54:44
Speaker 4: Soon his granny comes over and he puts his hand
54:46
Speaker 4: on my shoulder, says, come on in. The wife just
54:48
Speaker 4: took a pie out of the oven, and I sat
54:52
Speaker 4: there and had blueberry pie with him and tea and coffee,
54:56
Speaker 4: and we chatted quite a bit. And the next week
54:58
Speaker 4: in his column put a photograph of my trap and
55:02
Speaker 4: he said, the lady Trapper come paid me a visit,
55:05
Speaker 4: and my problems taken care of. And you know what,
55:07
Speaker 4: he actually said some nice things about me in his column.
55:10
Speaker 4: With the rest of the summer, when I'd catch a wolf,
55:11
Speaker 4: he'd put it in the column. And so it's like,
55:14
Speaker 4: that's how I work in the community. You can't fight it.
55:18
Speaker 4: Just put your head down, think hard, and move forward
55:21
Speaker 4: and try and do something a little creative. Just you asked.
55:24
Speaker 4: That's just one of the stories.
55:25
Speaker 1: But yeah, that's good career advice for everybody.
55:29
Speaker 4: Just be a pain in the neck.
55:33
Speaker 1: When that was happening and the wolves were coming down,
55:36
Speaker 1: Let's talk about that scenario that you said. You know,
55:39
Speaker 1: we might have eventually landed where we landed. There's no
55:43
Speaker 1: way it would have been the same timeline.
55:44
Speaker 4: Right, Probably not, But you know, once so once we
55:48
Speaker 4: had our first wolf in seventy nine. By nineteen ninety
55:52
Speaker 4: five without any reintroductions, just simply not trapping, poisoning and
55:56
Speaker 4: shooting them. By nineteen ninety five, just before the post
56:00
Speaker 4: wolves in the Yellowstone in central Idol, we had seventy
56:03
Speaker 4: seventy five wolves in eight packs with nobody reintroducing them.
56:07
Speaker 4: Doc northwest Montana Marion nine mile callous spell all through
56:12
Speaker 4: northwestern and western Montana. The Marian wolves became famous because
56:17
Speaker 4: they started killing livestock in the It was about late
56:21
Speaker 4: late eighties, so they were there and because nobody forced
56:26
Speaker 4: them out, they were just kind of existing. In those
56:28
Speaker 4: wolves that cause problems, you know, shoot shovels shot up,
56:31
Speaker 4: and the other ones kind of left to be. So
56:34
Speaker 4: in the nineties there were wolves dispersing.
56:37
Speaker 1: One of my telling those numbers again, so the number
56:40
Speaker 1: of wolves, yeah, pre reintroduction.
56:42
Speaker 4: So by nineteen ninety five there were about seventy to
56:45
Speaker 4: seventy five wolves in Montana in eight packs. And if
56:48
Speaker 4: you go back to the old US fish and Wilife
56:50
Speaker 4: Service website. You can find the data there. It's published.
56:53
Speaker 4: I'm not making this up. I mean I don't. I
56:55
Speaker 4: only talk truth and my book is Stories of Truth.
56:59
Speaker 4: So they were there. They had collars on. Sometimes this
57:02
Speaker 4: one pack was giving a guy at livestock producer problems,
57:06
Speaker 4: but mostly they were just making a living. There were
57:08
Speaker 4: wolves on the Rocky Mountain front. They were moving down
57:12
Speaker 4: and they were as far as Missoula, the Nine Mile Wolves,
57:14
Speaker 4: I'm sure you heard of them. So the wolves before
57:18
Speaker 4: they were introduced them to Yellowstone, there were two wolves
57:21
Speaker 4: that had gotten there already pre nineteen ninety five. One
57:24
Speaker 4: was shot just south of Fox.
57:27
Speaker 1: Creek fire you had gotten a Yellowstone.
57:29
Speaker 4: Yeah, and one was filmed, yes, So that was like
57:31
Speaker 4: nineteen ninety one ninety two. So it's just like Colorado.
57:35
Speaker 4: Those wolves came from Wyoming and Colorado now and they
57:40
Speaker 4: found their way down and they began reproducing, and then
57:44
Speaker 4: the reintroduction happed on top of it, which is what
57:46
Speaker 4: happened with Wyoming. With a Yellowstone in central Idahole. So
57:50
Speaker 4: the wolves were starting to get down and the reintroduction
57:52
Speaker 4: happened on top of them. But the two that were
57:55
Speaker 4: seeing didn't survive long enough to reproduce. They weren't viable,
57:58
Speaker 4: they didn't have packs. They were just sort of passing through,
58:01
Speaker 4: just like we saw in Montana a lot prior to
58:04
Speaker 4: Kishnina and the successful breeding.
58:09
Speaker 1: Uh, it's gonna sound like a dumb question because I
58:12
Speaker 1: know it's probably not too challenging, but uh, when they
58:16
Speaker 1: kill Kyle's what when they kill Kyle's how do they
58:18
Speaker 1: generally approach it?
58:21
Speaker 4: You mean domestic cattle, not Kyle.
58:23
Speaker 1: Sorry, yeah, kill cattle.
58:25
Speaker 4: It depends on how many wolves are, depends on the
58:27
Speaker 4: experience of the wolves. But in every kill is different.
58:29
Speaker 4: I just remember in Minnesota I had to go skin
58:32
Speaker 4: a lot of really disgusting, maggotty carcasses of cows and haffers.
58:35
Speaker 4: If it's a calf, they basically eat at all, so
58:37
Speaker 4: there's not much to fined. You might find an ear
58:40
Speaker 4: tag in a pile of scat or something, it's hard
58:43
Speaker 4: to prove they were there. But the big cole, you
58:46
Speaker 4: find bites. They're pretty effective predators. It again, the hind,
58:53
Speaker 4: the belly, the neck. Sometimes they're not. They're not efficient
58:58
Speaker 4: killers like lions. I mean lions live alone because they
59:02
Speaker 4: can kill an Alkalholm. A wolf pack needs other members
59:05
Speaker 4: because they don't have fit sabers on four pods to
59:07
Speaker 4: help them hold and contain their prey. They just have teeth.
59:11
Speaker 5: Do they key in on calving season for cattle?
59:15
Speaker 4: I have always wondered why they don't more? I mean
59:19
Speaker 4: they can, yeah, because.
59:20
Speaker 5: It seemed like those wolves that were reintroduced in Colorado. Yeah,
59:24
Speaker 5: just this past Calvia, they really that's when they really
59:27
Speaker 5: started to get in some trouble.
59:29
Speaker 4: Yes, and those wolves before they were transplanted, they were
59:34
Speaker 4: livestock killers. So yeah, if there's calves around and cattle wolves,
59:41
Speaker 4: you will know there are wolves there. If you know,
59:43
Speaker 4: if you're gonna have problems, you have them. But not
59:45
Speaker 4: every wolf is a livestock killer. And sometimes they might
59:49
Speaker 4: kill a calf or two and never have a problem.
59:51
Speaker 4: Sometimes they might come in and kill repeatedly until you
59:54
Speaker 4: remove the wolves. It really depends on the situation, and
59:56
Speaker 4: it kind of depends on how their ranchers managing their
1:00:00
Speaker 4: livestock herd. Do they ever heard or out there? Do
1:00:02
Speaker 4: they have guard dogs? Are they turned out in a
1:00:04
Speaker 4: national forest and a grazing lease in May and then
1:00:07
Speaker 4: they're not picked up till October nobody looks at them.
1:00:10
Speaker 4: I mean, you know, it really depends on the management
1:00:12
Speaker 4: of the stock a lot.
1:00:15
Speaker 1: Uh. You just said something that I can't remember with
1:00:19
Speaker 1: the hell you're talking about, but it caught my attention. Oh,
1:00:25
Speaker 1: I know, can can one I guess what I was
1:00:29
Speaker 1: kind of getting at. Can one do it effectively?
1:00:33
Speaker 4: Depends and if you're talking or can they kill it
1:00:35
Speaker 4: one adult? Coll effect?
1:00:36
Speaker 1: Can one wolf kill one adult kyle? Do you ever see?
1:00:38
Speaker 4: That'd be tough. The kyle would probably have to have
1:00:40
Speaker 4: something wrong with it, but it's usually more than one.
1:00:44
Speaker 1: And then you just get a hold of it and
1:00:45
Speaker 1: hang on to it.
1:00:46
Speaker 4: Basically.
1:00:47
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:00:48
Speaker 4: Yeah, When did.
1:00:50
Speaker 1: You say that Colorado put in known livestock killers. Yeah,
1:00:55
Speaker 1: explain what that means. And if that's like you're not
1:00:58
Speaker 1: in your head that is that behavior? Do you feel
1:01:02
Speaker 1: like it's hard to unlearn that?
1:01:03
Speaker 4: What I would say is, if I wanted to reintroduce
1:01:05
Speaker 4: wolves with minimal problems, I would see wolves that have
1:01:09
Speaker 4: only had wild meat. It's like the wolves that were
1:01:12
Speaker 4: introduced to Yellowstone and Central Idaho were taken from Canada
1:01:16
Speaker 4: where they had never been exposed to livestock, but they
1:01:19
Speaker 4: had never been exposed to buffalo either. I mean, they're
1:01:21
Speaker 4: pretty good at killing bison now they had to learn
1:01:23
Speaker 4: it because they're very formidable. I wouldn't want to try
1:01:26
Speaker 4: and kill a bison with my teeth. But so I
1:01:30
Speaker 4: think I don't know all the background and why they
1:01:33
Speaker 4: chose those wolves. They probably had a shortage supplies and
1:01:36
Speaker 4: a shortage of time to get the job done, and
1:01:39
Speaker 4: they had this opportunity to get those wolves. They weren't
1:01:42
Speaker 4: all livestock killers, but the ones that are causing the
1:01:45
Speaker 4: problem now had a history before they were put there.
1:01:50
Speaker 1: What is the I'm a little I haven't followed it
1:01:53
Speaker 1: as closely. What is going on with the ones they
1:01:56
Speaker 1: put in Colorado? Like, how has that gone? How many
1:01:58
Speaker 1: and what are they doing?
1:01:59
Speaker 4: Oh boy, it's a big exact numbers. I couldn't tell you.
1:02:02
Speaker 4: I'm not that involved. But there's a male I forgot
1:02:06
Speaker 4: his number. They put him in and he's paired with
1:02:08
Speaker 4: a female. They had at least one pup, and I
1:02:10
Speaker 4: saw on my news fees this morning they've seen three,
1:02:12
Speaker 4: now three pups in this particular pack, but they had
1:02:16
Speaker 4: only documented one up until yesterday or whatever. And they
1:02:20
Speaker 4: were put in at the end of the year, like
1:02:22
Speaker 4: December or so, and they started killing livestock in April.
1:02:26
Speaker 4: I believe it was when the pups were born. And
1:02:29
Speaker 4: they're now debating how are they going to manage the situation.
1:02:34
Speaker 4: They no matter what CPW does, they aren't be a happy,
1:02:38
Speaker 4: winning outcome, because if they remove all the wolves and
1:02:41
Speaker 4: kill them all, you're gonna have the wolf protectionists screaming
1:02:45
Speaker 4: at him. If they don't do anything, they're gonna have
1:02:47
Speaker 4: the livestock growers scream at him if they take I
1:02:50
Speaker 4: actually had this conversation with the journalist yesterday. He says, well,
1:02:53
Speaker 4: how about if we just take one, say we know
1:02:56
Speaker 4: the male has been a livestock killer, can the female
1:03:00
Speaker 4: survive long and protect and feed those pups without help?
1:03:06
Speaker 4: And I said, well, I can give you two examples.
1:03:08
Speaker 4: In nineteen eighty two, when Kishnina had her first litter
1:03:11
Speaker 4: of pups in the Flathead in fifty years, her mate
1:03:15
Speaker 4: was killed in June and those pups were seven eight
1:03:19
Speaker 4: weeks old, and he was killed accidentally by the Grizzly
1:03:23
Speaker 4: bear trap people. She was caught in a Grizzly bersonaire
1:03:27
Speaker 4: and he subsequently died accidental death and still just as
1:03:32
Speaker 4: dead though, so the female had Yeah, so doesn't him.
1:03:37
Speaker 4: It's kind of like got your dog right. Anyway, the
1:03:40
Speaker 4: female had seven pups to deal with, and he raised kids,
1:03:44
Speaker 4: and you raised dogs. You know how much food they
1:03:47
Speaker 4: start to consume as they become teenagers. Oh my god,
1:03:50
Speaker 4: talk about a full time job trying to feed seven
1:03:53
Speaker 4: growing pups that are fifty sixty pounds by fall, and
1:03:56
Speaker 4: I thought they're not can never make it. They all
1:03:58
Speaker 4: made it through winter. We were seeing tracks of eight
1:04:02
Speaker 4: wolves in the snow. So there's one example. The other
1:04:05
Speaker 4: example was so that was keeping the female remaining. And
1:04:08
Speaker 4: then in the nine Mile in the early recolonization, those
1:04:11
Speaker 4: wolves got to nine Mile, Montana on their own near Missoula.
1:04:15
Speaker 4: The male and female had pups. The mother was poached
1:04:18
Speaker 4: over Memorial Day, which is pretty early. So those little
1:04:21
Speaker 4: guys were maybe four maybe five weeks old. They were
1:04:25
Speaker 4: probably still drinking milk from mom, but they already had
1:04:28
Speaker 4: getting regurgitated food certainly, so it only had the male
1:04:32
Speaker 4: to raise the whole litter of pops. And Mike and
1:04:34
Speaker 4: Mannis who was studying him at that time, and Barto,
1:04:37
Speaker 4: Gary University, do you know, bloody bart Barto Gary. He's
1:04:42
Speaker 4: passed now, but he was the most vary, the most
1:04:45
Speaker 4: voracious hunter right now.
1:04:46
Speaker 7: We loved him. He's a university exactly.
1:04:48
Speaker 4: We call him Bloody Bart.
1:04:50
Speaker 7: I can tell you stories.
1:04:51
Speaker 4: He whatever he shot, he would kill. So he had
1:04:53
Speaker 4: the had permission to go shoot deer or pick up
1:04:56
Speaker 4: roadkill to supplemently feed those pups because they were fully
1:05:00
Speaker 4: in danger. This would be like nineteen eighty eight or
1:05:02
Speaker 4: so to do anything fishing. Walley Service was mandated under
1:05:07
Speaker 4: the essay to do what they could to keep them
1:05:09
Speaker 4: alive as an endangered species. So they got these permits
1:05:12
Speaker 4: to go do that. That male raise those pups without
1:05:15
Speaker 4: a female, and they all survived. So yes, the wolves
1:05:18
Speaker 4: are incredibly resilient. So then this journalist asked me yesterday,
1:05:21
Speaker 4: so should they take the male or the female? I'm like,
1:05:24
Speaker 4: oh my god, you're asking me a Sophie's choice question.
1:05:27
Speaker 7: I can't tell you.
1:05:30
Speaker 4: And you know, we talked about it at length. And
1:05:34
Speaker 4: starting with two wolves adults that have both been killing livestock,
1:05:38
Speaker 4: and then you're going to take one wolf away to
1:05:41
Speaker 4: try and hopefully minimize it, you might be causing more
1:05:44
Speaker 4: of a problem because the remaining parent now has the
1:05:47
Speaker 4: burden solely of feeding hungry pops, and maybe it's going
1:05:51
Speaker 4: to kill more livestock because of that.
1:05:53
Speaker 5: And those pups are going to learn to do it too.
1:05:55
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is the problem. So it's I just think
1:06:00
Speaker 4: maybe thinking ahead a little bit ahead of time may
1:06:04
Speaker 4: have headed this problem off. But it's amazing to me
1:06:08
Speaker 4: that all those wolves they put out, they only had
1:06:10
Speaker 4: one reproducing pack. You think they would have had more.
1:06:13
Speaker 4: But this is a problem.
1:06:14
Speaker 1: How many did they put down?
1:06:15
Speaker 5: Ten total? I think?
1:06:17
Speaker 1: And then are all ten still alive?
1:06:19
Speaker 5: One of them got killed by a mountain lion, which
1:06:21
Speaker 5: is kind of ironic. It's usually the.
1:06:23
Speaker 1: Other way around.
1:06:24
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, but I'm not there may have been another
1:06:28
Speaker 5: one that died somehow.
1:06:29
Speaker 1: The mountain lion got one. I think I knew that.
1:06:31
Speaker 5: Maybe I forgot it, but I think most of them
1:06:33
Speaker 5: are still.
1:06:34
Speaker 1: There, and they formed one reproducing pack.
1:06:36
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's surprising to me because they did it before
1:06:39
Speaker 4: breeding season and then they'll be reintroducing more wolves. And
1:06:42
Speaker 4: of course you heard Washington State is now refusing to
1:06:45
Speaker 4: give them more wolves. It's becoming this huge political.
1:06:48
Speaker 1: But they got I thought they got him from the
1:06:49
Speaker 1: nets person there.
1:06:50
Speaker 5: They got him from Oregon originally and one of the
1:06:54
Speaker 5: well not the state, might have been the nests person
1:06:56
Speaker 5: that originally said yes, we'll contribute to but that just
1:06:59
Speaker 5: got They just said we're not doing it right.
1:07:04
Speaker 4: One they had from Oregon, I think state in the state,
1:07:09
Speaker 4: but I wasn't the new ones. Weren't they going to
1:07:11
Speaker 4: get the next batch from Washington? Wasn't it was?
1:07:14
Speaker 5: I think it was it was a tribe where that
1:07:18
Speaker 5: whoever it was, just said Nope, we're out.
1:07:21
Speaker 1: We're not doing What is the argument to not let
1:07:23
Speaker 1: them have them?
1:07:25
Speaker 4: Politics?
1:07:25
Speaker 1: I'm sure explain the politics. You know it's politics, but
1:07:33
Speaker 1: you don't know what.
1:07:35
Speaker 2: She doesn't study politics.
1:07:38
Speaker 4: So I'm just saying every decision made about wolves is
1:07:41
Speaker 4: based on politics. It's not based on biology.
1:07:44
Speaker 1: So why of course, because biology is largely politics. When
1:07:51
Speaker 1: people say like I don't want to be political or everything's.
1:07:54
Speaker 4: Political, everything is political.
1:07:56
Speaker 1: There's nothing that's not political, right, I mean every decision
1:08:00
Speaker 1: is political. I know, creating national Force was intensely political. Yeah, Like,
1:08:06
Speaker 1: what's not political? I mean most actions are taken by
1:08:09
Speaker 1: elected representatives in this country or appointed appointed by elected.
1:08:16
Speaker 4: Everything is I know, we don't have to go there.
1:08:20
Speaker 1: No I mean, but it's like I don't like earlier,
1:08:22
Speaker 1: I had a headache and I took two ivy profen
1:08:24
Speaker 1: that are like two hundred and fifty milligram ibuprofene. The
1:08:26
Speaker 1: fact that you can go by two hundred fifty gram
1:08:29
Speaker 1: milligram ivy profen is I don't know the history on it.
1:08:32
Speaker 1: That's probably political, Oh, no, doubt.
1:08:36
Speaker 4: So I would guess because there's I would guess that
1:08:38
Speaker 4: because the Colorado reintroduction has had a lot of problems.
1:08:43
Speaker 1: The Native Americans say yeah, I'm sorry, and.
1:08:45
Speaker 4: The Native Americans are probably saying, you know, we just
1:08:48
Speaker 4: don't want to deal with it. So I wrote A
1:08:50
Speaker 4: I was telling you honest. I wrote A was asked
1:08:52
Speaker 4: to write a document for the National Walley Federation about
1:08:57
Speaker 4: Wolve's returning to Colorado. And it's basically called less and
1:09:00
Speaker 4: is learned from everywhere else for the Colorado can use
1:09:04
Speaker 4: as a base as a template for reintroductions, and sixty
1:09:08
Speaker 4: pages long. It's on It's on the Colorado Parks and
1:09:10
Speaker 4: Wildlife website.
1:09:11
Speaker 1: Is that in a in your book?
1:09:13
Speaker 4: No, No, it's not.
1:09:16
Speaker 1: It's stabled into the end of your book.
1:09:17
Speaker 4: No.
1:09:18
Speaker 6: Maybe you can read the audio version of that when.
1:09:22
Speaker 4: God anyway, it laid out all of the problems that
1:09:26
Speaker 4: challenges people have had elsewhere where the wolves are coming
1:09:29
Speaker 4: back on their own or reintroduced, How agencies federal and
1:09:33
Speaker 4: state dealt with them, how local communities dealt with them,
1:09:36
Speaker 4: how conservation groups and and uh a DC or animal
1:09:41
Speaker 4: it's no longer that. Now it's wildlife services work together
1:09:44
Speaker 4: sometimes or not. Just all these things. There's a template.
1:09:48
Speaker 4: There's nothing that needs to be reinvented about wolves being
1:09:51
Speaker 4: on the landscape. It's it's old hat.
1:09:54
Speaker 5: So this is pretty interesting. The Colorado things, Yeah, the
1:09:58
Speaker 5: they were going to get them from the Colville Nation
1:10:00
Speaker 5: fifteen of the moment, that's Washington, Washington. The Colville Nation
1:10:05
Speaker 5: said no because Colorado Parks and Wildlife wouldn't agree to
1:10:09
Speaker 5: give the Southern You Tribe like management over wolves on
1:10:14
Speaker 5: the Southern You tribes.
1:10:16
Speaker 1: Oh, political out of tribal solid area.
1:10:21
Speaker 4: That that's an interesting point. Thank you for clear that clarification.
1:10:24
Speaker 4: I knew it had something to do with people, and
1:10:26
Speaker 4: I knew it wasn't.
1:10:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, I bet it had something to do always. I
1:10:34
Speaker 1: want to get back into some of this. I want
1:10:35
Speaker 1: to ask you another question that that Karin highlighted, it's
1:10:39
Speaker 1: a good one. Uh, you're familiar with the like with
1:10:44
Speaker 1: grizzly bears, you're from with the distinct population segments. Okay,
1:10:48
Speaker 1: that there's so they it's kind of like looking at
1:10:52
Speaker 1: part of this whole idea is with grizzly bears is
1:10:55
Speaker 1: being like, Okay, when we're talking about grizzly bears being
1:10:57
Speaker 1: on the landscape, where could they actually be? Like what
1:11:02
Speaker 1: areas could actually support bears? Right?
1:11:05
Speaker 4: I mean ecologically?
1:11:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean there's a handful of everythings. But
1:11:08
Speaker 1: I was gonna bring up that there's a there's a
1:11:10
Speaker 1: distinct population segment that doesn't have bears, but it could
1:11:15
Speaker 1: where it's.
1:11:16
Speaker 4: The bitter Well they've taken getting there.
1:11:20
Speaker 7: Yeah, they're getting there.
1:11:22
Speaker 1: And there was at a time there's talk of putting
1:11:24
Speaker 1: them there. Yes, Okay, so if you were gonna maybe
1:11:33
Speaker 1: I set that up the wrong way. Let me just
1:11:34
Speaker 1: let me skip all that crap about the DPS. Okay,
1:11:37
Speaker 1: if if you were going to make a map, if
1:11:40
Speaker 1: you were going to make a map of the United States,
1:11:47
Speaker 1: all of it, Okay, and and I said, uh, Diane,
1:11:52
Speaker 1: go in and and and color in the areas where
1:11:57
Speaker 1: you think there's a chance of having viable wolf populations,
1:12:04
Speaker 1: meaning there's enough habitat, enough wild food, low enough chance
1:12:12
Speaker 1: of intense friction. Right, how would you start to color
1:12:17
Speaker 1: that map?
1:12:18
Speaker 4: Well, the last qualifier just put on is the deciding
1:12:21
Speaker 4: factor for everything. I mean there's oh god, yeah, I
1:12:24
Speaker 4: mean so historically wolves had the widest distribution of any
1:12:29
Speaker 4: mammal in the world except for humans. I mean they
1:12:31
Speaker 4: live from the Arctic to the desert. They live in
1:12:34
Speaker 4: every biome, every habitat. They can eat anything their habitat. Journalists,
1:12:40
Speaker 4: they're food generalists. They're like a you know, one hundred
1:12:42
Speaker 4: pound kayah that way. So they can live anywhere, I
1:12:46
Speaker 4: mean they did. I mean they covered the entire United States,
1:12:48
Speaker 4: so where could they live. They would live anywhere where
1:12:51
Speaker 4: us humans will tolerate them. And they're trying to get back.
1:12:55
Speaker 4: I mean wolves are showing up in Illinois and Missouri
1:12:57
Speaker 4: and you know they just get shot, and but they
1:13:01
Speaker 4: would be there. I mean they would. They would find
1:13:05
Speaker 4: a way to live in Central Park if we didn't
1:13:08
Speaker 4: kill them. They'd be eating poodles and whatever out there.
1:13:11
Speaker 4: But there's not who knows, so squirrels RFK.
1:13:14
Speaker 1: You have to lay it dead one of those, yeah,
1:13:18
Speaker 1: on the trail.
1:13:20
Speaker 4: So that's a hard question because they would live everywhere,
1:13:23
Speaker 4: So we don't have to color in a map because
1:13:25
Speaker 4: they just color and everything.
1:13:27
Speaker 1: I mean, I get to that last qualifier.
1:13:29
Speaker 4: Yeah, then then you have to constrict it. So the
1:13:31
Speaker 4: wolves has shown us now in Montana. Anyway, Let's pick
1:13:35
Speaker 4: Montana because they're all sitting here and thinking about Montana.
1:13:38
Speaker 4: So wolves basically live in the western one third or
1:13:41
Speaker 4: one quarter, and they've been doing this for decades now
1:13:45
Speaker 4: because that's where we tolerate them. But they keep showing
1:13:48
Speaker 4: up at Miles City and I Galaca and they get
1:13:52
Speaker 4: shot and they don't make it. That's not an ecological
1:13:56
Speaker 4: issue at all. They would live there. They did, so
1:14:00
Speaker 4: I don't know.
1:14:01
Speaker 1: Well they did under different circumstances. Okay, let me let
1:14:05
Speaker 1: me requalify. Okay, let me requalify, because it's going to
1:14:08
Speaker 1: throw out. Did you say Cleveland earlier? Did I make
1:14:10
Speaker 1: that up?
1:14:11
Speaker 6: I didn't hear Cleveland.
1:14:13
Speaker 1: You said something Missouri, she said, Let me let me read.
1:14:17
Speaker 1: Let me read you my qualification and not live on that.
1:14:22
Speaker 1: Somehow we make this deal. Humans can't kill them, but
1:14:28
Speaker 1: they can't eat any human generated food sources. Cool, now.
1:14:34
Speaker 4: Hit me, there would be nowhere. No, I'm serious, because
1:14:40
Speaker 4: the only pack that I'm aware in Montana that has
1:14:45
Speaker 4: never come into contact with livestock is the one up
1:14:49
Speaker 4: in northwest corner Glacia National Park. And there is livestock
1:14:53
Speaker 4: in his southern portion of the Norfolk or there was
1:14:56
Speaker 4: Ladenburg sold this stuff. But other than that, the can
1:15:00
Speaker 4: always come into contact with people who are raising sled dugs,
1:15:03
Speaker 4: people of lama farms, people of livestock, chickens, whatever. Just
1:15:08
Speaker 4: because we've taken over all the while life.
1:15:10
Speaker 5: Happened at could they make a go of it without
1:15:12
Speaker 5: causing too much trouble? And like Maine New Hamps, like
1:15:16
Speaker 5: the Upper.
1:15:17
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm not going to give up on this map idea.
1:15:20
Speaker 2: I can.
1:15:20
Speaker 5: It seems like main they could. There's certainly plenty of white.
1:15:24
Speaker 4: Tails there, right, they'd have to get there.
1:15:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, Okay, stop being so obstructionist. Somebody you understand what
1:15:36
Speaker 1: I'm trying to ask.
1:15:37
Speaker 4: No, I don't. Actually, I'm not.
1:15:39
Speaker 5: Steve coming semi full of wolves loose and Maine where
1:15:44
Speaker 5: can moose?
1:15:44
Speaker 1: Okay, let me let me say this. Okay, I'm not
1:15:47
Speaker 1: trying to I'm trying to color in the country of
1:15:51
Speaker 1: where however you want to put it? Man, where could
1:15:53
Speaker 1: you visualize? Where do you think when the dust is
1:15:57
Speaker 1: settled in a hundred years, And don't don't hit me
1:16:01
Speaker 1: with like, well, you know, is there a zombie apocalypse
1:16:04
Speaker 1: or in a hundred years? Where are wolves?
1:16:08
Speaker 4: If they lived where there weren't human conflicts?
1:16:11
Speaker 1: No, no, no, forget all those, OK, meaning new direction? Yeah,
1:16:16
Speaker 1: meaning it appears that it wound up being that northwest
1:16:21
Speaker 1: Montana was a suitable place for wolves.
1:16:24
Speaker 4: Yeah, it is right.
1:16:25
Speaker 1: It wound up being that the northern Great Lakes, Yeah,
1:16:29
Speaker 1: the northern third of Minnesota, the northern third of Wisconsin,
1:16:34
Speaker 1: the northern third of Michigan wound up being like a
1:16:37
Speaker 1: pretty good like it is from the wolves perspective, a
1:16:39
Speaker 1: good place for wolves.
1:16:40
Speaker 2: Yeah.
1:16:41
Speaker 1: What are the chunks that are probably like that that
1:16:45
Speaker 1: don't yet but could.
1:16:49
Speaker 4: It's it's hard to answer because I'm not Anvoidum. I'm
1:16:53
Speaker 4: just saying they go everywhere, and they get shot, they
1:16:56
Speaker 4: go to eastern Montana, So I would color in eastern Montana.
1:16:59
Speaker 4: They don't make one hundred years from out, They're not
1:17:01
Speaker 4: going to make it either.
1:17:02
Speaker 7: So I met him.
1:17:03
Speaker 4: I'm at a lost kind. I'm not trying to avoid.
1:17:05
Speaker 4: I'm at a loss how to answer. They would live
1:17:07
Speaker 4: in Illinois, they would live in Missouri because there's plenty
1:17:10
Speaker 4: of places where there's enough habitat for them. They just
1:17:14
Speaker 4: for habitat all. They needed someplace where they find large hooftungulates,
1:17:18
Speaker 4: they don't get shot by people, and they have a
1:17:21
Speaker 4: secure place to raise pups. There's plenty of places throughout
1:17:24
Speaker 4: the country like that.
1:17:26
Speaker 5: Do you think we've reached, like we've filled in the
1:17:30
Speaker 5: areas that people well, that people are going to tolerate,
1:17:33
Speaker 5: Like they're where they are now, and they're probably not
1:17:36
Speaker 5: going to be in a lot of new places.
1:17:38
Speaker 1: I disagree.
1:17:39
Speaker 5: No, I'm asking like, like will there like are they
1:17:44
Speaker 5: where they are now? And that's probably all the space.
1:17:47
Speaker 4: I think there would be more wolves expanding across Montana, certainly.
1:17:50
Speaker 4: I mean they're showing up in the Snowy's and they're
1:17:52
Speaker 4: showing up all over and if they can get a
1:17:55
Speaker 4: foothold and have a pack, then at some point, if
1:17:57
Speaker 4: you're hunting and trapping them, there always be a few remaining.
1:18:01
Speaker 4: But this stronghold is the western portion because it's mountainous,
1:18:04
Speaker 4: because they're not seen because there's less road access, because
1:18:06
Speaker 4: there's the Bob, the Glacier Park, to scapegoat wilderness. Those
1:18:10
Speaker 4: are all those things that these wolves need to live.
1:18:13
Speaker 4: I don't see that. There's a lot of places that
1:18:16
Speaker 4: are very wild across the eastern Montana bird hunt, an
1:18:19
Speaker 4: lo hunt. But there's always a conflict there. There just
1:18:23
Speaker 4: always is with livestock, with hunters, with whatever goes on.
1:18:28
Speaker 4: And I'd love to hear what you think. So in
1:18:30
Speaker 4: terms of mapping, right now, wolves are all the way
1:18:32
Speaker 4: through Minnesota. You got wolves around the Twin Cities. Now
1:18:34
Speaker 4: you don't know maybe you don't know that, but they're
1:18:37
Speaker 4: filling into southern Wisconsin. They are moving south. It's a
1:18:40
Speaker 4: really slow wave. Nobody's reintroducing them. I got to point
1:18:43
Speaker 4: that out. It's on their own and they have been
1:18:46
Speaker 4: making it to the other states but get killed. So
1:18:49
Speaker 4: what because I don't kind of totally maybe get your question,
1:18:52
Speaker 4: or maybe I'm less optimistic than you, where do you
1:18:55
Speaker 4: see them going where they aren't? Oh, Utah would be
1:18:59
Speaker 4: a place about it.
1:19:00
Speaker 1: It's funny you say that. It's funny you say Utah
1:19:02
Speaker 1: because I was at an event. I was at an
1:19:06
Speaker 1: event this winter and Utah's governor spoke at the event,
1:19:11
Speaker 1: and Utah's governor made a pledge to the audience that
1:19:15
Speaker 1: there would be no wolves in Utah. And I remember thinking,
1:19:20
Speaker 1: I don't know that that's your call.
1:19:24
Speaker 6: What he mean that he means.
1:19:30
Speaker 1: He was saying and addressing the audience, which was an
1:19:34
Speaker 1: audience of of uh people that do a lot of
1:19:39
Speaker 1: work for big game habitat improvement, right, big horns, sheet
1:19:44
Speaker 1: mule deer or whatever, putting it, putting ungulates on the ground,
1:19:47
Speaker 1: putting game animals on the ground. He made a pledge
1:19:50
Speaker 1: that there will be no wolves in Utah, and I
1:19:51
Speaker 1: remember thinking.
1:19:53
Speaker 8: Like, don't worry hunters.
1:19:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, but I remember thinking, well, the way it sits
1:19:56
Speaker 1: now with federal protection, that's not really your call. And
1:20:00
Speaker 1: I don't know what. I appreciate the sentiment, but I
1:20:02
Speaker 1: don't know what tools you have at your disposal.
1:20:05
Speaker 4: So I get that what you're saying, but that agrees
1:20:08
Speaker 4: with what I say, because wolves have made it to Utah.
1:20:12
Speaker 4: And we had a wolf go from Yellowstone, go all
1:20:15
Speaker 4: the way to the Grand Canyon and started on its
1:20:18
Speaker 4: way back, a colored wolf from Wyoming from Yellowstone and
1:20:21
Speaker 4: they got shot on the way home. They get shot.
1:20:23
Speaker 4: I don't know how to better tell you, but they
1:20:26
Speaker 4: just get So maybe.
1:20:27
Speaker 1: He said that he was just saying if they come,
1:20:30
Speaker 1: we can. Wasn't that he's going to do something, that's
1:20:32
Speaker 1: just someone's going to shoot.
1:20:34
Speaker 7: But I think that's what he's writing.
1:20:36
Speaker 4: Yeah, people will kill them.
1:20:37
Speaker 6: I think what you're saying too, though, is that I
1:20:40
Speaker 6: mean there are areas of the country that have other
1:20:44
Speaker 6: than Northwest Montana, that have sufficient habitat security, like you
1:20:50
Speaker 6: in a hundred years, you know, I would imagine all
1:20:54
Speaker 6: the way down the spine of.
1:20:55
Speaker 1: The Rockies right.
1:20:59
Speaker 6: Over maybe the Cascades down I don't know that they
1:21:02
Speaker 6: go down the Sierras, you know, like they have Like
1:21:05
Speaker 6: that's what.
1:21:05
Speaker 2: I question is California. Yeah, California would be maybe a
1:21:09
Speaker 2: little more tolerant. They have they have six packs or something.
1:21:16
Speaker 1: And if I asked you my question twenty years ago
1:21:18
Speaker 1: that you're trying to like dodge and obfuscate, I'm not
1:21:21
Speaker 1: if I had asked that question twenty years ago, would
1:21:23
Speaker 1: you have said, would you have said Lake Tahoe.
1:21:27
Speaker 4: I think wolves have a good chance of being in
1:21:29
Speaker 4: Utah except people kill them. So I don't know if
1:21:31
Speaker 4: that's a yes or no, that's a yes, okay, And
1:21:35
Speaker 4: I'm really trying to it's not I'm not squirming, I'm
1:21:38
Speaker 4: not uncomfortable. I'm just saying I have lived with wolf
1:21:42
Speaker 4: killing for so long, and where they're going to be
1:21:44
Speaker 4: tolerated is where they're at. And wolves getting in California's great,
1:21:48
Speaker 4: but they're going to start killing people's pets and they're
1:21:51
Speaker 4: going to be not tolerated as well.
1:21:53
Speaker 5: What about like the wolves? If the Colorado plan goes,
1:21:57
Speaker 5: is they some people would like it to go. They're
1:22:00
Speaker 5: they're gonna push into New Mexico, Arizonah. Yeah, So my
1:22:04
Speaker 5: question is what happens to those Mexican wolves then?
1:22:07
Speaker 4: So I love this question and half a finger and
1:22:10
Speaker 4: I will disagree on this.
1:22:11
Speaker 1: So okay, can you guys, can one of you make
1:22:13
Speaker 1: the question really clear for people? Because I think a
1:22:15
Speaker 1: lot of people aren't to understand.
1:22:16
Speaker 5: What they're I think she's probably the better.
1:22:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, do you mind, like why we're even asking that?
1:22:21
Speaker 1: Like what we're talking about.
1:22:21
Speaker 4: As I explained about the Mexican wolves there, they are
1:22:24
Speaker 4: a unique subspecies. It's the only population really that's got
1:22:27
Speaker 4: its separate subspecies classification for protection other than the red wolves,
1:22:31
Speaker 4: which are a different animal. So they come from a
1:22:34
Speaker 4: very unique gene pool of seven founding members. They're trying
1:22:39
Speaker 4: to protect that gene pool. So if you read I
1:22:41
Speaker 4: mean every time a Mexican wolf starts to go north,
1:22:44
Speaker 4: it disperses like a wolf is gonna do. They live
1:22:47
Speaker 4: by their feet and they go north, they go and
1:22:50
Speaker 4: catch them and bring them back. They don't allow them.
1:22:53
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, they don't allow them to travel out of
1:22:56
Speaker 4: the recovery area. What you could google the on, but
1:23:00
Speaker 4: they don't allow it because that if.
1:23:03
Speaker 1: One of the Mexican wolves out of Mexican Wolf area,
1:23:06
Speaker 1: they fetch it and bring it home.
1:23:08
Speaker 4: Yes, it's a defined zone and so and so because
1:23:13
Speaker 4: number one, that was the promise early on with the plan.
1:23:15
Speaker 4: But they've expanded the Mexican Wolf Recovery area slightly, but
1:23:18
Speaker 4: they don't want those wolves to mix with other gene pools.
1:23:22
Speaker 4: And those Colorado wolves will eventually make it down to
1:23:26
Speaker 4: four corners and come down and they will approach and
1:23:29
Speaker 4: get in. I would soon get to the Mexican wolf population.
1:23:33
Speaker 4: And then what are people going to do. They're going
1:23:35
Speaker 4: to start killing one wolf species subspecies to protect the
1:23:38
Speaker 4: other one. I think I mean, you've had some really
1:23:42
Speaker 4: good genetic people on your programs. I've so enjoyed their discussions.
1:23:45
Speaker 4: If you were trying to preserve a rare species with
1:23:48
Speaker 4: a unique genetic pool that was highly inbred, like the
1:23:52
Speaker 4: iroil ones were, and then they all went to extinction
1:23:55
Speaker 4: because they were two in bread, wouldn't you want to
1:23:57
Speaker 4: have some gene flow from the most similar population adjoining
1:24:01
Speaker 4: and bringing new genes.
1:24:02
Speaker 5: Because historically the.
1:24:05
Speaker 7: Right but it was it.
1:24:07
Speaker 4: But even though there was all connected all the way
1:24:09
Speaker 4: to Mexico to Central Mexico, they were still had unique
1:24:13
Speaker 4: genetic markers because they have a different habitat than the
1:24:16
Speaker 4: rest of the wolves. It's a different habitat, so they're
1:24:19
Speaker 4: been isolated on their own way. But that's my humble opinion.
1:24:23
Speaker 4: I'm a lumper, not a splitter, and I think it
1:24:25
Speaker 4: would behoove Mexican wolves to have some new gene flow.
1:24:29
Speaker 4: And I am not in a maybe a majority opinion,
1:24:31
Speaker 4: but I think people who have genetics background would agree
1:24:38
Speaker 4: it's going to happen. They won't be able to stop.
1:24:39
Speaker 1: It, well, sounds like they will maybe try.
1:24:42
Speaker 4: They will try, They're already trying. They do move all
1:24:45
Speaker 4: these wolves back every time they go out of the.
1:24:47
Speaker 1: Rescoveries are they getting them?
1:24:49
Speaker 4: They catch them everyone, everyone of them collared.
1:24:51
Speaker 1: Just about so they have no idea.
1:24:54
Speaker 4: And also when a wolf is in an area, you do.
1:24:57
Speaker 1: A little baby and like you put the baby in
1:24:59
Speaker 1: the mill of room the while it crawls away and
1:25:01
Speaker 1: you go get it and set it back. And they
1:25:02
Speaker 1: thought about it. Get an invisible.
1:25:06
Speaker 6: Fence, right, I mean, that's how we deal with dogs wondering.
1:25:09
Speaker 4: I don't think that would work for them, but anyway,
1:25:12
Speaker 4: And when wolves go to an area, they leave scatt
1:25:15
Speaker 4: they kill things. People see them. Everybody's got trail gameras
1:25:18
Speaker 4: everybody and the brothers all looking for the biggest delcor water.
1:25:21
Speaker 4: You see them, You see him, right, you know they're there.
1:25:24
Speaker 4: They're not small and sneaky like lions. They're just not.
1:25:27
Speaker 4: They instead of sneaking around and hiding in a rock crevices,
1:25:30
Speaker 4: they come into town in Harley's I mean wolves animals.
1:25:36
Speaker 1: That's a T shirt. That's a T shirt. There's two
1:25:39
Speaker 1: I want to talk about, just to give you a
1:25:41
Speaker 1: little taste of what's common. I want to talk about
1:25:43
Speaker 1: mountain lions, Okay, difference mountains and wolves. Yep, I want
1:25:49
Speaker 1: to talk about why wolves don't kill people.
1:25:52
Speaker 4: That's a good one, But first I.
1:25:55
Speaker 1: Want to talk a little bit more about Colorado. Okay,
1:25:58
Speaker 1: crystal Ball for me, and you're totally excused, like like
1:26:01
Speaker 1: this is just crystal Ball land. This is if you
1:26:04
Speaker 1: had to make a guess. Yeah, what is Give me
1:26:09
Speaker 1: a timeframe. What's going on in twenty years in Colorado?
1:26:13
Speaker 1: Just take a wild stab. I'm gonna known. Diane Boyd
1:26:17
Speaker 1: is taking a wild stab. This is not an academic exercise.
1:26:21
Speaker 1: She's taking a wild stab. Twenty years what's the wolf land?
1:26:26
Speaker 1: What's the landscape in Colorado? What's going on?
1:26:29
Speaker 4: People will still be fighting where their wolves should be
1:26:32
Speaker 4: or should not be there, And despite our human intentions,
1:26:34
Speaker 4: they will continue to expand their populations and fill up
1:26:37
Speaker 4: appropriate habitat in Colorado, and they will have to kill
1:26:40
Speaker 4: some for killing livestock, and the other ones that aren't
1:26:43
Speaker 4: killing livestock will continue to find habitat and reproduce. And
1:26:46
Speaker 4: I think there'll be more wolves.
1:26:48
Speaker 6: So it'll be Montana twenty years after nineteen ninety six.
1:26:51
Speaker 5: What about the hunting season? You see that happen eventually
1:26:54
Speaker 5: hunting for wolves?
1:26:55
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think that when you get enough wolves to
1:26:57
Speaker 4: create social tolerance. Season is a good idea. It's probably
1:27:02
Speaker 4: not such a good idea for individual wolves, but in
1:27:05
Speaker 4: terms of creating tolerance on the landscape, and I think
1:27:08
Speaker 4: you have to give the tools to livestock producers that
1:27:12
Speaker 4: they can take care problems themselves. I mean, that's what
1:27:14
Speaker 4: they did in Montana early on. I just say follow
1:27:17
Speaker 4: the model that worked in Montana. It's worked pretty well.
1:27:20
Speaker 4: I mean we went from one wolf to you know,
1:27:22
Speaker 4: thousand wolves pretty quickly.
1:27:24
Speaker 1: And then in your crystal Ball can you extend that
1:27:27
Speaker 1: crystal Ball scenario to the Mexican gray wolf. They're all
1:27:32
Speaker 1: making love and they're just mixed in together.
1:27:37
Speaker 4: Should have hefelfinger here too?
1:27:38
Speaker 1: So well, yeah, but this isn't what you want to have. Yeah,
1:27:43
Speaker 1: this is just your guess work.
1:27:44
Speaker 4: People will still be fighting over Mexican wolves, and Mexican
1:27:48
Speaker 4: wolves may hit I'm just trying to think, they may
1:27:52
Speaker 4: hit a critical mass where they're not all colored, and
1:27:55
Speaker 4: then some of them will escape beyond the the geo
1:27:58
Speaker 4: fencing of their their loud recovery zone and began going elsewhere.
1:28:03
Speaker 4: But if they continue to heavily, heavily handle and manage
1:28:07
Speaker 4: the wolves and collar everyone that well, they're not all collared,
1:28:11
Speaker 4: but manage its a significant portion population. It's going to
1:28:14
Speaker 4: be really hard for those wolves to sneak through, but
1:28:17
Speaker 4: that's going to be And I just think the wolves
1:28:19
Speaker 4: from the north will come down and start integrating. I'm
1:28:22
Speaker 4: hoping they will. And I think Mike Phillips would disagree
1:28:26
Speaker 4: with that too. But the other people I know, biologists,
1:28:28
Speaker 4: we talk about this. It's like, yeah, let them, let
1:28:30
Speaker 4: them blend, Let's see what happens. It's sort of like
1:28:33
Speaker 4: this this animal of the northeast, the Koi wolf dog thing.
1:28:38
Speaker 4: Nobody really knows what it is, but that animal has
1:28:40
Speaker 4: made a really successful living. It's found a niche that
1:28:43
Speaker 4: was partially formed but what we tolerate and how we
1:28:46
Speaker 4: modified the landscape, so this animal that lives there now
1:28:49
Speaker 4: is doing really well well. Mexican wolf gray wolf mix
1:28:54
Speaker 4: probably be the same way. At least they'll have more
1:28:56
Speaker 4: genetic variation. They probably won't go extinct due to inbreeding.
1:29:00
Speaker 4: Who knows, but you asked my crystal ball. I think
1:29:03
Speaker 4: there would be more wolves. I think they will fill
1:29:06
Speaker 4: in more places and there will always be the battles
1:29:09
Speaker 4: to have them on the landscape always.
1:29:12
Speaker 1: I feel like, you know how there's sports betting. I
1:29:15
Speaker 1: think there should be a way that you could like
1:29:17
Speaker 1: that we could run like a bookie thing and have
1:29:20
Speaker 1: uh Colorado wolf betting. H I mean you got them.
1:29:26
Speaker 6: You can bet on anything though, Yeah, I mean I
1:29:29
Speaker 6: wouldn't be surprised if you could get odds on Colorado's
1:29:33
Speaker 6: wolf population in ten years.
1:29:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, and people could make like bets and you could
1:29:37
Speaker 1: win money and lose money.
1:29:39
Speaker 4: I think to the more the more radical people get,
1:29:44
Speaker 4: I think it will cause more people to feel sort
1:29:47
Speaker 4: of moved towards the metal. Like this fellow over in
1:29:51
Speaker 4: where was it Daniel Wyoming who ran over the wolf
1:29:53
Speaker 4: with the snowmobile this winter? You must have And he
1:29:56
Speaker 4: crippled it so couldn't get away, and then he ties
1:29:58
Speaker 4: it up and brings it into a b All of
1:30:00
Speaker 4: this is illegal, which is a minor thing, but it's
1:30:03
Speaker 4: really immoral. And he brings into a bar and people
1:30:05
Speaker 4: are laughing with it and getting their pictures taken in
1:30:07
Speaker 4: and finally hauls it out back and shoots it. Well,
1:30:10
Speaker 4: that's just one animal, but it had huge ripples throughout
1:30:13
Speaker 4: the country, and that's affecting wolf policy because of one
1:30:17
Speaker 4: guy's action. And I think those people that maybe didn't
1:30:20
Speaker 4: really care about wolves or maybe dislike them somewhat moderately,
1:30:24
Speaker 4: see that is that is not fair, Chase, that is
1:30:27
Speaker 4: not acceptable to me as a hunter or a human being,
1:30:31
Speaker 4: and we have to put brakes on that. I kind
1:30:34
Speaker 4: of see the more radical people get. I'm hoping that
1:30:37
Speaker 4: people come to the middle more. That's my hope.
1:30:43
Speaker 1: Why don't wolves kill people? Because they do it Romania,
1:30:47
Speaker 1: I've wondered that for a long time.
1:30:48
Speaker 4: Well, sometimes come on, So it's not more common there, No,
1:30:54
Speaker 4: But there's all those like crazy old stories about.
1:30:57
Speaker 1: That's not None of that's true.
1:30:58
Speaker 4: So in my book, I could read you a little
1:31:01
Speaker 4: paragraph about statistics, but do you want me to find it.
1:31:05
Speaker 4: I'll have to look for it for a moment when
1:31:07
Speaker 4: you're talking. I'll look for it. But wolves have occasionally
1:31:10
Speaker 4: killed people in modern times. Documented Kenton Carnegie was killed
1:31:14
Speaker 4: up in northern Saskatchewan and in the eighties early nineties
1:31:18
Speaker 4: by He was at a remote camp and these wolves
1:31:21
Speaker 4: were coming into the dump. So think of think dump
1:31:23
Speaker 4: bear not afraid of people. And he went out one
1:31:26
Speaker 4: evening alone with his camera and he was found the
1:31:30
Speaker 4: next morning, I believe, and he had been killed and
1:31:32
Speaker 4: partially consumed, and it appeared to be wolves. There was
1:31:35
Speaker 4: wolves and bears both feeding on him, but it looked
1:31:37
Speaker 4: like the wounds were wolf probably, So that's one guy.
1:31:41
Speaker 4: And then there was a woman jogger in Alaska who
1:31:44
Speaker 4: was jogging and she was attacked members killed. I don't
1:31:47
Speaker 4: think she was consumed. I don't remember on that, but
1:31:51
Speaker 4: it was definitely predation they killed her. And there's been
1:31:55
Speaker 4: a few, I guess attacks encounters of wolves that have
1:32:00
Speaker 4: been habituated, especially like on some of the islands off
1:32:04
Speaker 4: of British Columbia and Washington where people kayak and they're
1:32:08
Speaker 4: feeding wolves out on the beaches and wolves get friendly
1:32:11
Speaker 4: and they come in and bite somebody in their sleeping bag.
1:32:12
Speaker 4: Because they don't stuff like that Algonquin Park habituated wolves
1:32:18
Speaker 4: that becomes a problem. So those are the cases that
1:32:21
Speaker 4: I know of. And then Mark mcnae wrote a really
1:32:24
Speaker 4: long document published you could google his name, Mark McNee
1:32:28
Speaker 4: of all the wolf encounters that he could find that
1:32:30
Speaker 4: were verifiable olden days. A lot of wolves were rabid.
1:32:36
Speaker 4: I mean a lot. I shouldn't say that. A lot
1:32:39
Speaker 4: of the encounters with wolves that had bitten were rabbid. Okay,
1:32:42
Speaker 4: that happens with every species, bats, foxes, it doesn't matter.
1:32:45
Speaker 4: But if you look at what other predators attack humans,
1:32:50
Speaker 4: people are killed every year by black bears, grizzly bears,
1:32:54
Speaker 4: some deer, some elk, mountain lions, coyotes. That's not true
1:32:59
Speaker 4: with wolves. And so you say, why don't why don't
1:33:02
Speaker 4: people kill wolves more often? Oh? My, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, right.
1:33:06
Speaker 2: That's what I mean.
1:33:07
Speaker 1: And there I think it's an interesting question because they could.
1:33:09
Speaker 4: Oh absolutely. I look at any of us in this room.
1:33:12
Speaker 4: If one of us was out in the woods by
1:33:14
Speaker 4: ourselves and a pack of eight wolves came along, we'd
1:33:17
Speaker 4: be toast.
1:33:18
Speaker 2: Yeah, I could handle three, but eight probably.
1:33:22
Speaker 5: Domestic dogs kill all kinds of people, Yes, but they could.
1:33:26
Speaker 2: Right, So what what is your hypothesis as to why not?
1:33:32
Speaker 4: My thought about that is, well, we, first of all,
1:33:34
Speaker 4: when we domesticated dogs, we changed the gene pool. They
1:33:38
Speaker 4: have the dogs here, but he's on my foot right now, Okay,
1:33:43
Speaker 4: I'll make sure doesn't pull any cables. Over the course
1:33:45
Speaker 4: of time we have When we started domesticating livestock about
1:33:49
Speaker 4: eleven thousand years ago, we changed our relationship with wolves.
1:33:54
Speaker 4: Prior to that, it wasn't much. There was no reason
1:33:57
Speaker 4: I have conflict. As a matter of fact, I talk
1:34:00
Speaker 4: about some archaeologists, some ancient people study wolves, and anciently
1:34:06
Speaker 4: they their theory was that humans in primitive times would
1:34:13
Speaker 4: watch wolves haunt successfully. So wolves and humans live in
1:34:16
Speaker 4: the same family structure group of animals that are related.
1:34:19
Speaker 4: Usually they would watch them hunt and they end up
1:34:22
Speaker 4: learning that if they could follow the wolves, they could
1:34:26
Speaker 4: steal meet from them. So they would watch the wolves,
1:34:30
Speaker 4: and when wolves picked out something, then the wolves humans
1:34:33
Speaker 4: really humans could go over there with their adladdles or spears,
1:34:35
Speaker 4: drive the wolves away, take the meat they wanted, and
1:34:38
Speaker 4: then leave, and then the wolves clean up the scraps.
1:34:40
Speaker 4: This was their hypothesis, so they actually it was no
1:34:44
Speaker 4: way a synergetic or altruistic relationship. It's brutes arrival, but
1:34:50
Speaker 4: they sort of collaborated and out of that, eventually we
1:34:54
Speaker 4: learned that we could make dogs, I guess, but I
1:34:56
Speaker 4: think over time, once we started to desticate animals, especially livestock,
1:35:02
Speaker 4: those wolves that were aggressive towards people were weeded out
1:35:07
Speaker 4: and killed. And I think that gene pool has been
1:35:09
Speaker 4: so heavily selected against. I think the behavior is still there.
1:35:13
Speaker 4: That's the only thing I can think of, because how
1:35:15
Speaker 4: many people have successfully domesticated allions made a different animal
1:35:18
Speaker 4: out of it, or bears or coiotes, right, these other
1:35:21
Speaker 4: things that kill us people haven't And we've spent so
1:35:25
Speaker 4: much time competing with wolves of their livestock and killing
1:35:28
Speaker 4: them that I just think that aggression towards people is
1:35:33
Speaker 4: no longer there. And maybe with the crystal ball, maybe
1:35:36
Speaker 4: three hundred yards from now and we haven't been killing wolves,
1:35:38
Speaker 4: maybe that'll change. I don't know. I don't know, but
1:35:42
Speaker 4: it is an interesting question.
1:35:44
Speaker 8: I was gonna just wanted to weigh. In episode four
1:35:47
Speaker 8: sixty six Dire Wolves and Ancient Hunting Dogs, we touch
1:35:51
Speaker 8: on some of what you just mentioned Kith Angela Perry
1:35:53
Speaker 8: and what does she say that same thing we talked
1:35:57
Speaker 8: about that?
1:35:57
Speaker 4: Okay, I'm gonna have to look that one up. I
1:35:59
Speaker 4: didn't hear it.
1:36:00
Speaker 5: Whe do they fall? Like maybe this is a weird question,
1:36:03
Speaker 5: but where do they fall on the intelligent scale scale
1:36:05
Speaker 5: compared to like a bear or a mountain lion or
1:36:08
Speaker 5: like like would that play a role and they're like
1:36:12
Speaker 5: understanding of how to interact with humans, like, are they
1:36:16
Speaker 5: smarter than.
1:36:16
Speaker 4: A bear or Ah, the bear researchers would say hell no, right,
1:36:20
Speaker 4: but I can tell you. I mean I've trapped a
1:36:23
Speaker 4: lot of animals in my life, everything from weasels to grizzlies,
1:36:26
Speaker 4: and the wolves are the hardest animal to catch. Bears
1:36:29
Speaker 4: are not hard at all because they don't need to be.
1:36:31
Speaker 4: They're the top thing and they eat everything. Wolves have
1:36:34
Speaker 4: had to learn to sneaker on strict nine baits guns,
1:36:39
Speaker 4: and because they're a social species, they have to communicate well,
1:36:43
Speaker 4: they have to collaborate. They're different. I mean, none of
1:36:46
Speaker 4: these other predators that we've been talking about are social
1:36:49
Speaker 4: and living groups. And I believe that gives wolves a
1:36:53
Speaker 4: need evolutionarily to be high intelligence. They have to work,
1:36:59
Speaker 4: I do they I mean you can look at your dog,
1:37:01
Speaker 4: which is kind of a challenged version of a wolf.
1:37:05
Speaker 4: I mean, they're not that good at anything, and they're
1:37:10
Speaker 4: incredibly bright. I'm trying to use the right political term here,
1:37:14
Speaker 4: but they're incredibly brilliant. I mean, if you look at
1:37:16
Speaker 4: what you can train a Melania or a border Collie
1:37:18
Speaker 4: to do, and the wolves are much smarter than that.
1:37:21
Speaker 4: They just are so that's my humble opinion. But again
1:37:25
Speaker 4: the Baar researchers would argue that, and case you have to.
1:37:27
Speaker 4: I mean, we're looking at a human lens to value intelligence.
1:37:33
Speaker 1: That's really interesting, man. That's to say that a wolf
1:37:37
Speaker 1: is smarter than your pet dog.
1:37:39
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, they don't have to be smart. We feed them,
1:37:43
Speaker 4: we house them.
1:37:44
Speaker 10: They don't need.
1:37:45
Speaker 4: To be smart.
1:37:46
Speaker 3: They don't have to kill an elk every couple of days, right,
1:37:49
Speaker 3: and yeah, it's.
1:37:51
Speaker 6: Like a wolf with a restrict plate or something.
1:37:56
Speaker 1: Our dog is not an exceptional dog. It's totally fine
1:38:00
Speaker 1: that everybody lif loves it, but it's not exceptional anyway,
1:38:04
Speaker 1: used to for whatever reason, would like to chew on
1:38:06
Speaker 1: rose bushes and chew on raspberry bushes. It like the
1:38:09
Speaker 1: for whatever reason, the thorniness of it. And I have
1:38:12
Speaker 1: one time just took my kids out and we put
1:38:17
Speaker 1: a bunch of cayenne in the dirt around a rose
1:38:20
Speaker 1: bush and she went up to it and got a
1:38:23
Speaker 1: nose full of that. Right, has never ever gone.
1:38:27
Speaker 4: Near same thing with you know e callers and training
1:38:30
Speaker 4: and no dogs are.
1:38:31
Speaker 1: Sorry when you think about how getting hard to catch
1:38:35
Speaker 1: the dog's like, dude, you know, to make that connection, right,
1:38:39
Speaker 1: So you think it's something being hard to trap, like
1:38:42
Speaker 1: you sting its toe one time, and there's just something
1:38:44
Speaker 1: about that situation.
1:38:46
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean the old timers when they're read the books,
1:38:49
Speaker 4: the Last of the Loaners and the last renegade wolves
1:38:52
Speaker 4: and guys trying to catch them, the stuff they did
1:38:54
Speaker 4: to try not smart these wolves. Sometimes. Well, one of
1:38:57
Speaker 4: the worst things I read was they've been trapping this this,
1:39:00
Speaker 4: this couple of wolves, the last ones in the Southwest,
1:39:03
Speaker 4: and they just couldn't catch the male, and so they
1:39:06
Speaker 4: ended up catching the female and then they took her
1:39:08
Speaker 4: and used her for bait, and the wolf went in
1:39:10
Speaker 4: the next day. That was it. He was done and
1:39:12
Speaker 4: they spent. Yeah, kind of sad.
1:39:16
Speaker 1: And Cormick McCarthy's the Crossing. He's trying to catch a
1:39:19
Speaker 1: Mexican gray wolf, which he then brings back across the border,
1:39:23
Speaker 1: but he winds up he can't catch it, and eventually
1:39:27
Speaker 1: makes a set in his fire pit because he would
1:39:31
Speaker 1: see that a wolf now and then come and sniff around.
1:39:33
Speaker 1: So instead of making sets normal sets, he made a
1:39:36
Speaker 1: set in his fire, let this fire burn down, cool off,
1:39:40
Speaker 1: and then made a set in there. I think that's
1:39:42
Speaker 1: how he catches it. That's how he gets it, gets it,
1:39:44
Speaker 1: I don't know. Then he brings it back to Mexico
1:39:48
Speaker 1: because he can't bring himself to kill it, Like he's
1:39:50
Speaker 1: supposed to catch it and kill it, but can't. He
1:39:51
Speaker 1: brings it back to Mexican and it quickly dies. Anyways,
1:39:55
Speaker 1: that's how Corny McCarthy soone kills it. Anyways.
1:40:00
Speaker 4: Wow, that's a cheerful story. Well, I mean, when it
1:40:03
Speaker 4: comes to wolves, there's no good ends for any large
1:40:08
Speaker 4: carnivore in the wild, you know. I mean, they don't
1:40:11
Speaker 4: end isn't good for them, no matter what it is.
1:40:13
Speaker 4: But they try and live a really full life, and
1:40:14
Speaker 4: most importantly they dry and leave their jeans behind. If
1:40:17
Speaker 4: they can do that, they've succeeded.
1:40:19
Speaker 6: But you're saying they don't move to a golf course.
1:40:21
Speaker 6: Watch a lot of network telling there.
1:40:23
Speaker 4: Was Okay, this is not in my book, but we
1:40:26
Speaker 4: my last couple of years of working, we got a
1:40:28
Speaker 4: call from somebody living in a gated community between Whitefish
1:40:31
Speaker 4: and Callous Spell and called up said we've got some
1:40:34
Speaker 4: wolf pups in our driveway. And it's like, oh, okay, great, thanks,
1:40:38
Speaker 4: I'm thinking it's got to be skyotes. Yeah, they're living
1:40:41
Speaker 4: in this gated community in an urban area. So anyway,
1:40:44
Speaker 4: I said, I said, we took some videos. I said, great,
1:40:47
Speaker 4: can you send me the video? So they email me
1:40:49
Speaker 4: the video. It's like, oh my god, those are wolf pups,
1:40:52
Speaker 4: no kidding, in their driveway next to their mailbox and
1:40:55
Speaker 4: they're playing in the culvert that goes under their driveway.
1:40:57
Speaker 4: It's like wow. So we go out there and talk
1:41:00
Speaker 4: to other neighbors and several people had seen them. And
1:41:03
Speaker 4: so this is a gated community with people with huge houses.
1:41:08
Speaker 4: They're all realthy. They love wildlife. That's where they live there.
1:41:11
Speaker 4: There's huge amounts of green space in the community. There's
1:41:14
Speaker 4: white tails everywhere because no hunting is allowed. Talk about
1:41:17
Speaker 4: Nirvana for wolves. They're protected, they got endless food resources.
1:41:22
Speaker 4: No one's going to hurt them. So we tried to
1:41:25
Speaker 4: catch the adults through a male and female. Had no luck.
1:41:29
Speaker 1: These are what reasons did you want to catch put
1:41:31
Speaker 1: a collar on it?
1:41:31
Speaker 4: Oh, I want to know what happened at the end
1:41:33
Speaker 4: of the summer. Okay, So what happens what's going to
1:41:36
Speaker 4: happen when they leave this? You know, ten square mile
1:41:38
Speaker 4: gated community. We couldn't catch them. They were so smart
1:41:42
Speaker 4: about people. We had them on trail cameras, couldn't get
1:41:45
Speaker 4: them to step on the magic pan the size you
1:41:48
Speaker 4: know of an oreo cookie. Literally. And then after summer
1:41:51
Speaker 4: came and the wolves went on and they left and
1:41:54
Speaker 4: they have to disperse the bigger happy hunting grounds square
1:41:57
Speaker 4: miles on average for a pack they just won by
1:42:01
Speaker 4: one got shot gone, So but they can't live in
1:42:05
Speaker 4: ten square miles. They have to move on. But it
1:42:08
Speaker 4: was so interesting to me that those wolves set up
1:42:11
Speaker 4: in that community. Yeah, so, I mean they will try
1:42:14
Speaker 4: to live.
1:42:14
Speaker 2: That wasn't by accident.
1:42:16
Speaker 4: I don't know how smart is a wolf.
1:42:18
Speaker 2: I don't know, yeah, smarter than Can you contextualize that
1:42:22
Speaker 2: a little bit more about how there's no good ending
1:42:25
Speaker 2: for a wolf because I think we all in this
1:42:27
Speaker 2: room understand what that means when you say that, but
1:42:30
Speaker 2: I think that a lot of people out there are
1:42:32
Speaker 2: When you say that, it almost sounds like you're saying, oh,
1:42:34
Speaker 2: they're all going to end up getting shot. But that's
1:42:36
Speaker 2: not what you're saying.
1:42:37
Speaker 4: No, I mean, a wolf is an apex predator, top predator.
1:42:41
Speaker 4: It's always hunting to hunt. It's always having to compete
1:42:45
Speaker 4: for food, so they get In Yellowstone Park, the largest
1:42:48
Speaker 4: cause immortality is wolves killing other wolves protecting their territory.
1:42:53
Speaker 4: They trespass and they get killed outside of the park,
1:42:57
Speaker 4: even when I was doing my work when they were
1:42:59
Speaker 4: still protected. Eighty five percent of mortality is caused by humans.
1:43:05
Speaker 4: They don't live very long. Take a guess and how long.
1:43:08
Speaker 4: So if we put together the data from Yellowstone Park
1:43:10
Speaker 4: in Minnesota and Montana, take a guess in the average
1:43:13
Speaker 4: longevity of a wolf from the time they're detected, because
1:43:17
Speaker 4: some die in the den young, so by the time
1:43:19
Speaker 4: they're four or five weeks old in their scene until
1:43:21
Speaker 4: they die, take a guess annual mortality. Take an average
1:43:25
Speaker 4: average age at which they die.
1:43:28
Speaker 1: Four eighteen months.
1:43:29
Speaker 2: I'm going to go six months, four point.
1:43:33
Speaker 4: Three, four point three.
1:43:35
Speaker 1: Did you read that? No? I didn't.
1:43:36
Speaker 4: You're right on the money four point three.
1:43:38
Speaker 6: I was gonna go with four point six, but then
1:43:39
Speaker 6: I hedged my bets and you thought you were going
1:43:41
Speaker 6: to surprise us.
1:43:42
Speaker 4: Randall for the four he gets the trip four point
1:43:46
Speaker 4: three years.
1:43:47
Speaker 2: Oh, it's years years.
1:43:49
Speaker 4: So they most of them don't live long enough to
1:43:52
Speaker 4: reproduce what is the like to randal ding ding ding.
1:43:57
Speaker 1: A doctrine he does, and are you out? Like so
1:44:01
Speaker 1: do I?
1:44:03
Speaker 5: Not including Yellowstone perhaps, but like, what is the survival
1:44:08
Speaker 5: rate of say a litter of six pups, how many
1:44:10
Speaker 5: of them will reach sexual maturity? Is that a pretty
1:44:14
Speaker 5: high survival rate if.
1:44:16
Speaker 4: They make it to the till like the second year,
1:44:19
Speaker 4: they do pretty well. The first year when they go
1:44:22
Speaker 4: between a year and two years, when they're starting to
1:44:24
Speaker 4: dispersal and they're starting to look around them, the pups themselves,
1:44:28
Speaker 4: like they pups generally make it. Generally when the time
1:44:31
Speaker 4: they're little till their first year, they do really well
1:44:33
Speaker 4: because they're all protected, their fed until they get trapped
1:44:37
Speaker 4: or shot during hunting seasons or or if they get
1:44:40
Speaker 4: Sometimes humans have introduced parbo virus in distemper in an environment,
1:44:44
Speaker 4: and if that gets into the litter, mortality is very high.
1:44:48
Speaker 5: Do they ever do that thing that bears sometimes do
1:44:52
Speaker 5: where a male come in and kill No, they don't
1:44:55
Speaker 5: do that.
1:44:55
Speaker 2: Nope. Yeah, I was gonna ask other than humans, what's
1:44:58
Speaker 2: killing wolves?
1:45:00
Speaker 4: Deer elk avalanches? The first wolves? The wolves kill each other? Yeah,
1:45:06
Speaker 4: I just said that in Yellowstone, So like the first mortality,
1:45:09
Speaker 4: Recorded Mortality and Yellowstone Park I was told was a
1:45:15
Speaker 4: UPS driver killing a wolf when he ran it over.
1:45:17
Speaker 4: I thought, could you imagine being that ups? Turf's like,
1:45:20
Speaker 4: oh my god, I just killed the national icon about it.
1:45:25
Speaker 1: I hope is hiring.
1:45:28
Speaker 4: So yeah, and they get killed by lions, they starve.
1:45:35
Speaker 4: I did have one wolf dining an avalanche.
1:45:37
Speaker 2: What about bears? The bears get after him.
1:45:40
Speaker 4: They can if it's one on one, but when you
1:45:42
Speaker 4: had a whole wolf pack. Yeah, wolves kill, wolves kill
1:45:45
Speaker 4: black bears. Wolves will kill a grizzly cub if they can,
1:45:48
Speaker 4: but usually they can't. But one on one, I think, Well,
1:45:52
Speaker 4: wolves are pretty fast.
1:45:53
Speaker 1: Do they go way out of their way to kill
1:45:54
Speaker 1: coyotes in places?
1:45:57
Speaker 4: They do? Yeah? In Yellowstone Park they filled them digging
1:46:00
Speaker 4: up coyote dens and killing the pups. Pretty gruesome.
1:46:04
Speaker 1: Do they got it in for Red Fox too?
1:46:06
Speaker 4: No? So there's this yeah in the book, so trophic
1:46:11
Speaker 4: cascades we're going to get in a little bit. And
1:46:13
Speaker 4: I just want you to know that before I wrote
1:46:15
Speaker 4: this book, or while I was writing this book, I
1:46:18
Speaker 4: ended up working with Jim Hafflefinger, Dave oz Been. I mean,
1:46:22
Speaker 4: it was really a hell of a good team. I
1:46:24
Speaker 4: was asked to be the senior author for the latest.
1:46:27
Speaker 4: We did an update on everything known about wolves in
1:46:30
Speaker 4: North America. We ended up being forty thousand words long
1:46:35
Speaker 4: and an eight hundred reference bibliography. It was a scientific work.
1:46:40
Speaker 4: It was grueling, it was interesting, difficult. This was my
1:46:45
Speaker 4: anecdote for writing that this book, so because this was
1:46:51
Speaker 4: more fun and personal. But the science is in that book.
1:46:55
Speaker 4: It's a major chapter. You can get it online. But
1:46:59
Speaker 4: I learned a lot. We had Dean Cloth from Canada.
1:47:02
Speaker 4: We had Joey yet And who does the Red wolves.
1:47:04
Speaker 4: We had Brent Patterson who does the Algonquin wolves. We
1:47:07
Speaker 4: had Adrian Wineban who does the Midwestern wolves. People from
1:47:11
Speaker 4: every social I mean every segment of the population. I
1:47:15
Speaker 4: learned a lot. So in terms of getting back, we
1:47:18
Speaker 4: all wonder why don't wolves kill people more often? But
1:47:23
Speaker 4: what was the question? I'm sorry, I'm rambling. Foxes. Yeah,
1:47:26
Speaker 4: so Tofa Cascades. So they documented Yellowstone like ooh, this
1:47:30
Speaker 4: is big earthshaking information that coyotes had kind of taken
1:47:34
Speaker 4: over the cana and niche in Yellowstone and kept the
1:47:37
Speaker 4: foxes population subdued, and then wolves came back and killed
1:47:41
Speaker 4: lots of coyotes, and then the fox population responded by
1:47:45
Speaker 4: increasing because wolves don't really care about fox they're not
1:47:48
Speaker 4: really a competitor, and foxes benefit from wolves they clean
1:47:51
Speaker 4: up kills. We documented that earlier in the North Fork years,
1:47:55
Speaker 4: because when I arrived in the North Fork there was
1:47:58
Speaker 4: we never saw fox anywhere up there. The first fifteen
1:48:01
Speaker 4: years we had people out all winter tracking on the snow.
1:48:05
Speaker 4: We never saw a fox track. I never caught a
1:48:07
Speaker 4: fox in a trap. And then when the wolves started
1:48:10
Speaker 4: building up populations, I was collaring and studying coyotes at
1:48:13
Speaker 4: the same time, and the coyote population. As the wolves
1:48:17
Speaker 4: went up, the coyotes went down, and then we started
1:48:20
Speaker 4: seeing fox. I got fox standing on my property. Now
1:48:23
Speaker 4: fox are everywhere, Wolves are everywhere, Coyotes not so much so.
1:48:27
Speaker 1: He's a wolf sees that kyote and he just recognizes
1:48:30
Speaker 1: it as a competitor.
1:48:31
Speaker 4: You think something to get rid of, and.
1:48:33
Speaker 1: He sees a fox and he just doesn't get too
1:48:35
Speaker 1: worked out.
1:48:35
Speaker 7: It's kind of a nuisance.
1:48:37
Speaker 4: It's a difference.
1:48:37
Speaker 6: That's funny because I've I feel like I've heard people
1:48:40
Speaker 6: make that observation just in different parts of the West,
1:48:44
Speaker 6: like in Idaho specifically, people say, the coyotes have really
1:48:49
Speaker 6: dropped in numbers and we're seeing foxes now and we
1:48:51
Speaker 6: never really saw him before.
1:48:52
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, that's that's interesting too, because in Michigan where
1:48:56
Speaker 1: I grew up, it was always fox like, you know,
1:48:59
Speaker 1: trappers targeted red fox. That's just when coyotes came in
1:49:03
Speaker 1: in the early nineties when they really exploded in that area.
1:49:06
Speaker 1: I mean, the fox vanished.
1:49:08
Speaker 4: Man, do you need more wolves?
1:49:10
Speaker 1: What's sounds like.
1:49:15
Speaker 2: A mutual friend of ours likes to use that as
1:49:18
Speaker 2: an analogy to humans, where he's like a wolf likes
1:49:23
Speaker 2: to go around the landscape and go that ain't good
1:49:26
Speaker 2: for me and mine getting rid of it. And we're
1:49:30
Speaker 2: on a landscape going, oh no, let's bring in more wolves.
1:49:33
Speaker 2: We might have less elk or less this or that,
1:49:37
Speaker 2: but let's keep them around. And he's saying, like, why
1:49:40
Speaker 2: are we the only sort of apex predator that would
1:49:43
Speaker 2: tolerate or even think of having competition as like a
1:49:47
Speaker 2: good thing, instead of saying, let's just get rid of
1:49:49
Speaker 2: all of them like a wolf might do, so that
1:49:52
Speaker 2: there's it's better for it for it's its species.
1:49:56
Speaker 1: You know, that's a good point, like like wolf a
1:50:00
Speaker 1: it's wolf lovers love all these things about wolves, but
1:50:03
Speaker 1: they don't like to see it in people.
1:50:06
Speaker 4: M M.
1:50:08
Speaker 1: You know, if you're like man, that could be a
1:50:10
Speaker 1: lot of competition. I don't want that here, just thinking
1:50:14
Speaker 1: like a.
1:50:14
Speaker 4: Wearable I have a question for you. So when Krinn
1:50:19
Speaker 4: called me, she said, you have experienced increased enthusiasmic excitement, hatred,
1:50:28
Speaker 4: whatever wolf issue has been building still, like we see
1:50:32
Speaker 4: it all the time in Montana.
1:50:33
Speaker 1: I've seen this.
1:50:34
Speaker 8: Well, well we talk about this, we talk about right
1:50:37
Speaker 8: now and then on the podcast and then yeah, people right,
1:50:40
Speaker 8: I mean the feelings.
1:50:41
Speaker 4: Are feelings are running higher about wolves now than they
1:50:44
Speaker 4: were twenty years old.
1:50:44
Speaker 1: Well, no, no, no, I would say that. I would say
1:50:47
Speaker 1: that feelings, whatever high running feelings there are are high
1:50:53
Speaker 1: running only because of what's going on in Colorado. And
1:50:58
Speaker 1: then that reignited the entire debate. But I would not
1:51:02
Speaker 1: say generally, well, okay, there's a there's another hot area.
1:51:07
Speaker 1: Another hot area is in Minnesota, Wisconsin, my home state
1:51:13
Speaker 1: of Michigan. I just came from and got a lot
1:51:15
Speaker 1: of earfolds about this. Hunters are really disappointed in the
1:51:22
Speaker 1: collapse of deer numbers and then not and then the
1:51:26
Speaker 1: states not having any authority to come in and do
1:51:29
Speaker 1: any kind of wolf control. And there's a little bit
1:51:32
Speaker 1: of a question of like how bad does it have
1:51:34
Speaker 1: to get and do we really need to like trade
1:51:36
Speaker 1: our deer hunting for wolves, and we can't seek a
1:51:38
Speaker 1: compromise and more of a balance them being like I
1:51:43
Speaker 1: don't want to be apologetic about liking the deer hunt.
1:51:46
Speaker 1: I want to be able to deer hunt and have success.
1:51:48
Speaker 4: So what are what are this? I mean, Wisconsin had
1:51:52
Speaker 4: a huge wolf season and they really kill a lot
1:51:54
Speaker 4: of wolves, And what is the wolf season in Michigan?
1:51:57
Speaker 1: And well there's none because they got put back on the.
1:52:00
Speaker 5: Sea to protect them.
1:52:01
Speaker 4: Yeah, so an their back.
1:52:02
Speaker 5: They've closed it. They've had it, they've closed it.
1:52:05
Speaker 4: So we've had this discussion about should should wolves be
1:52:08
Speaker 4: listed or not? Right everywhere where they've come back, all
1:52:13
Speaker 4: of them in Western states, Midwestern states, some of the
1:52:18
Speaker 4: western states, they have exceeded way beyond expectations of delisting criteria. Yes,
1:52:26
Speaker 4: four years on end. So what is the value of
1:52:29
Speaker 4: the Endangered Species Act if you don't follow the rules
1:52:33
Speaker 4: of the criteria.
1:52:34
Speaker 1: And I'm not saying I can tell you what it is.
1:52:36
Speaker 1: It's not anymore. It is my favorite animal protection Act.
1:52:42
Speaker 5: It's very valuable to the people who that's how, you know,
1:52:46
Speaker 5: create lawsuits.
1:52:47
Speaker 1: They don't want to talk about the numbers. They don't
1:52:49
Speaker 1: care about the numbers.
1:52:49
Speaker 4: I've had lots of people ask me when I do
1:52:52
Speaker 4: public texts, do you feel wolf should be relisted? And
1:52:55
Speaker 4: I say relisted like in Montana? Do you feel wolf
1:52:58
Speaker 4: should be realisted? They're delisted in Montana? Yeah, And I
1:53:01
Speaker 4: say then I say, okay, geographically which area Montana? And
1:53:05
Speaker 4: I say, well, you know, I don't like to see dead,
1:53:08
Speaker 4: bleeding wolves hanging off of tailgates, but they have exceeded
1:53:12
Speaker 4: recovery standards. There are approximately a quarter million of wolves worldwide.
1:53:17
Speaker 4: There are how many whooping cranes, how many blackfooted ferrets?
1:53:21
Speaker 4: And I can't say biologically that we have any reason
1:53:24
Speaker 4: to have Montana wolves or Midwestern wolves on the endangered
1:53:28
Speaker 4: species lifts where they're connected to Canadian populations that go
1:53:31
Speaker 4: into tens of thousands. On the other hand, do I
1:53:36
Speaker 4: like what I see going on with the management of
1:53:38
Speaker 4: wolves in Montana in particular, and the very strong anti
1:53:41
Speaker 4: wolve sentiments. No, But does it mean that they should
1:53:46
Speaker 4: go back on the list. No, so can people through
1:53:52
Speaker 4: increased harvest intentsive harvest knock wolves down to from the
1:53:57
Speaker 4: spout a thousand now or nine hundred two one hundred
1:54:00
Speaker 4: and fifty, which is the trigger point at which the
1:54:03
Speaker 4: ESA says, ooh, you've now endangered this population and we're
1:54:06
Speaker 4: going to put them back on the endangered species list.
1:54:09
Speaker 4: It would be really difficult because right now people can
1:54:12
Speaker 4: hunt trap night shoot predator called dig dens. I mean,
1:54:16
Speaker 4: you can do almost anything with wolves for half the year.
1:54:19
Speaker 5: We've talked about this before, like in the case of
1:54:21
Speaker 5: Montana or Wyoming or Idaho, like it would never be
1:54:26
Speaker 5: in the state's best interest to knock them back to
1:54:29
Speaker 5: that point because then the FEDS would come back in
1:54:32
Speaker 5: and exactly.
1:54:33
Speaker 4: But what I'm saying is people are the pro wolf public.
1:54:37
Speaker 4: I sit in the middle, but I'm obviously passionate about wolves.
1:54:42
Speaker 4: So the pro wolf public thinks that by increasing all
1:54:46
Speaker 4: of these parameters to allow more take I don't like
1:54:50
Speaker 4: the word harvests more kill, that we're going to put
1:54:53
Speaker 4: them down one hundred and fifty. I think you can't
1:54:56
Speaker 4: do that without poison.
1:54:58
Speaker 2: Because you're right that's the point you're is it. Even
1:55:01
Speaker 2: as liberal as it is here for six months out
1:55:03
Speaker 2: of the year, we're still not able to knock them
1:55:05
Speaker 2: back that much.
1:55:06
Speaker 4: Right, We've caught them back some, and I mean, like
1:55:09
Speaker 4: this guy in Daniel's Montaneo, Dianuel Wyoming, it just is disgusting.
1:55:15
Speaker 4: I just you shouldn't do that with an elk, with
1:55:16
Speaker 4: a bear. With a wolf, should just behave like that
1:55:18
Speaker 4: with a wild animal. But with the liberal seasons we've got,
1:55:22
Speaker 4: and this year they did increase, their harvest is up
1:55:25
Speaker 4: to I think two hundred and eighty six for the
1:55:26
Speaker 4: last license year, which is a little more than the
1:55:29
Speaker 4: year before. But we've had years where there's been three hundred.
1:55:33
Speaker 4: The population isn't changing a lot. But on the other hand,
1:55:38
Speaker 4: using the method they used to estimate wolf populations through palm,
1:55:44
Speaker 4: I think patch occupancy model, it's an integrated patchcy model.
1:55:51
Speaker 4: Occupancy models are designed to estimate occupancy where they are.
1:55:57
Speaker 4: They're not designed to estimate abundance or numbers, so they're
1:56:01
Speaker 4: using a model for not what is designed to do.
1:56:04
Speaker 4: So I don't know that it's a real good representative.
1:56:06
Speaker 4: What I would say is I'm sorry, no go ahead.
1:56:09
Speaker 4: There's other factors to look at, like go to the
1:56:12
Speaker 4: Livestock Loss Board website. It's public information for Montana or
1:56:16
Speaker 4: any agency or the USDA, you know, Wildlife services, and
1:56:20
Speaker 4: you can look at the number of livestock losses by predator.
1:56:24
Speaker 4: They list them by predator or by death cause, and
1:56:27
Speaker 4: you will see, especially in Montana, the number of livestock
1:56:32
Speaker 4: depredations in Montana is getting was less in twenty twenty
1:56:36
Speaker 4: three than it was for the previous years. The number
1:56:39
Speaker 4: of complaints was less, the number of wolves taken for
1:56:42
Speaker 4: killing livestock was less. If there are wolves on the
1:56:46
Speaker 4: landscape Montana and there's livestock, they will kill them occasionally.
1:56:51
Speaker 4: So I would say these other indices should be incorporated
1:56:55
Speaker 4: into the model because I think when you see less
1:56:58
Speaker 4: and less and less depredation, it's because there's less wolves.
1:57:02
Speaker 4: Even though people are killed more this year, and if
1:57:04
Speaker 4: you look at the percentage statistically, it's probably not real significant.
1:57:09
Speaker 4: But maybe more people were out hunting last year to
1:57:11
Speaker 4: hind kill wolves because it was a milder winter. We
1:57:13
Speaker 4: don't know, We can't.
1:57:14
Speaker 5: Did you say it was to eighty six that were
1:57:17
Speaker 5: killed or it was two eighty six was the quota.
1:57:19
Speaker 4: No, that was what was killed between shooting and trapping. Yeah,
1:57:23
Speaker 4: I think that's the current number. You can look it
1:57:25
Speaker 4: up and it just that was just released. But there's
1:57:29
Speaker 4: many things to look at. But what I can say
1:57:31
Speaker 4: is there's there's adequate wolves, and I'd say there's adequate prey.
1:57:36
Speaker 4: And I was looking, did you see that chidge who
1:57:39
Speaker 4: Just in Fergus County near Lewistown, several several large landowners
1:57:45
Speaker 4: got together and wanted the state to kill fifty thousand
1:57:51
Speaker 4: elk because the elk are taking over the private large
1:57:57
Speaker 4: landowner's habitat and they don't allow people to come in
1:58:01
Speaker 4: and shoot them. So they're all these elk and they
1:58:03
Speaker 4: wanted to have this power to kill fifty thousand elk
1:58:07
Speaker 4: extra outside of normal hunting season.
1:58:09
Speaker 1: Fifty thousand five.
1:58:11
Speaker 5: That was that United Property Owners thing.
1:58:14
Speaker 7: Right back, BHA YAH and BHA.
1:58:17
Speaker 4: And Montana Sportsman's Alliance and all these hunting groups said no,
1:58:22
Speaker 4: you have to create access. And I think if people
1:58:26
Speaker 4: are really concerned about elk numbers, because if you look
1:58:28
Speaker 4: at the tables the statistics, there are more elk in
1:58:30
Speaker 4: Montana now then there's been in a long time. And
1:58:33
Speaker 4: in Wyoming they're issuing unlimited number of elk takes in
1:58:36
Speaker 4: twenty twenty three, I believe, or twenty twenty four. It
1:58:39
Speaker 4: seems from my perspective, you would know more you guys
1:58:42
Speaker 4: deal with your hunting company. It seems to be more
1:58:44
Speaker 4: of an access issue than it does a predator issue.
1:58:47
Speaker 4: And if I were a hunting big part of a
1:58:51
Speaker 4: hunting conservation promotion group, I would be working on the
1:58:54
Speaker 4: access issue more and working with our legislators more and
1:58:58
Speaker 4: our governors more. Know you know what these rich out
1:59:03
Speaker 4: of state guys or whoever own these ranches said, they're
1:59:05
Speaker 4: not letting us on. I would I would be really
1:59:07
Speaker 4: concerned about it. What do you guys feel about that?
1:59:10
Speaker 1: I mean, I think that's the in some areas that's
1:59:12
Speaker 1: the biggest conversation around elk numbers is you have just
1:59:20
Speaker 1: you have elk that are learning over time. Elk are
1:59:24
Speaker 1: learning safe zones. There are big acreages where hunting's not allowed,
1:59:29
Speaker 1: and there are big acreages where people have an objective
1:59:34
Speaker 1: of getting a couple of big bulls and they don't
1:59:38
Speaker 1: want something to mess up those big bulls. They don't
1:59:40
Speaker 1: want people to push them off. They kind of like
1:59:44
Speaker 1: them during hunting season. They don't like them when they're
1:59:46
Speaker 1: doing crop damage, and they're reluctant to have Joe Blow
1:59:52
Speaker 1: running around on their place. And they kind of want
1:59:56
Speaker 1: the best of both worlds. They want they want individual access,
2:00:01
Speaker 1: then they want state help. And what they don't want
2:00:04
Speaker 1: is a sign saying come one call right.
2:00:09
Speaker 4: They need more wolves.
2:00:10
Speaker 7: Just kidding, I'm just kidding on that.
2:00:14
Speaker 4: But you see the problem again, it's always humans. But
2:00:19
Speaker 4: if you look at the species keep responsible for killing
2:00:24
Speaker 4: sheep and cattle, it's number one. Grizzly bears kill almost
2:00:27
Speaker 4: three times as many livestock animals as both lions and wolves,
2:00:31
Speaker 4: and lions generally kill a few more than wolves, but
2:00:35
Speaker 4: it's hard to confirm totally.
2:00:36
Speaker 1: Because lions kill more livestock than wolves.
2:00:39
Speaker 4: The confirmed kills. The hard thing is when a wolf
2:00:42
Speaker 4: kills a cattle or a calf or whatever, there's six
2:00:45
Speaker 4: or eight them feeding on it, so there's often not
2:00:47
Speaker 4: enough evidence less to determine which predator responsible. So there's
2:00:51
Speaker 4: a lot more probables for wolves than there are lions,
2:00:54
Speaker 4: but confirmed it's more lions and wolves.
2:00:58
Speaker 1: Where you got wolves and mountain lion overlapping, what's killing most.
2:01:01
Speaker 4: Of the game lions. Do you look at the Bitter
2:01:04
Speaker 4: at Elk study. Yeah, so it's surprising to me. So
2:01:08
Speaker 4: there's been three studies that Fish, Wildlife and Parks has done.
2:01:11
Speaker 4: And this is an agency that's not real pro wolf, right,
2:01:14
Speaker 4: let's just say so, they do these studies. And when
2:01:17
Speaker 4: I was looking at the research study plan and the results,
2:01:21
Speaker 4: I was shocked because I thought wolves would be the
2:01:24
Speaker 4: primary predator. But you can go on the FWP website
2:01:27
Speaker 4: google the data. They did three studies that were long term,
2:01:31
Speaker 4: multi region studies, one for moose, one for mule deer,
2:01:34
Speaker 4: and one for elk. And they looked at the populations
2:01:37
Speaker 4: of this the game animals three different areas over multiple years,
2:01:40
Speaker 4: and they put a lot of callers out and they
2:01:42
Speaker 4: looked at mortality. So and the bitter at Elk study,
2:01:46
Speaker 4: probably all familiar lions killed more. And when they increased
2:01:50
Speaker 4: the harvest on black bears and wolves lions still.
2:01:54
Speaker 7: That had no effect.
2:01:56
Speaker 4: And the more they were just lions killing everything.
2:01:58
Speaker 1: They thought the same thing in Idaho. Wives your way out.
2:02:00
Speaker 4: Killing wolves, yes, and when So when they did the
2:02:03
Speaker 4: moose study, what do you think the number one killer
2:02:05
Speaker 4: of moose was it was grompy.
2:02:07
Speaker 2: What you think lions?
2:02:09
Speaker 5: No, black, No, it was tis.
2:02:14
Speaker 4: It was climate and habitat exactly they killed like it
2:02:18
Speaker 4: was fifty six percent of the most mortalities documented. The
2:02:21
Speaker 4: rerelated to climate. That would be ticks, uh, mostly probably
2:02:25
Speaker 4: ticks and things related. Predation was a very small section
2:02:29
Speaker 4: of the pie, and I was surprised of the predation section.
2:02:33
Speaker 4: So you beans killed almost the same percentage almost as
2:02:36
Speaker 4: the predators a little less of the predation section. It
2:02:39
Speaker 4: was wolves first, I think bear a second, lions there,
2:02:43
Speaker 4: but wolves was slightly more. But yeah, the environment changing.
2:02:47
Speaker 1: The habitat Milder's got way lions was lions.
2:02:51
Speaker 4: So why do people want to keep increasing.
2:02:53
Speaker 1: Wolf because the lions were because the lions were always here.
2:02:56
Speaker 1: That was kind of the thing that we talked about
2:02:58
Speaker 1: with Idaho. Is you had you had? I don't. I'm
2:03:01
Speaker 1: gonna butcher not. These are not the right numbers, but
2:03:03
Speaker 1: it paints a somewhat accurate portrait. It'd be like prior
2:03:08
Speaker 1: to wolves coming into the Idaho Panhandle. I don't. Again,
2:03:12
Speaker 1: this is not the exact number, but it's not crazy.
2:03:14
Speaker 1: It'd be that lines are killing thirty out of one
2:03:18
Speaker 1: hundred elk calves. Let's say, yeah, okay, something like that.
2:03:23
Speaker 1: But that had always been true, and everything about elk
2:03:27
Speaker 1: abundance and everything about what like what statically normal, right,
2:03:31
Speaker 1: just normal life that was going on, and then something
2:03:35
Speaker 1: comes in and it adds ten. Okay, So now forty
2:03:40
Speaker 1: out of one hundred elk calves are dying from predation
2:03:44
Speaker 1: because there's this new additive thing, and socially and otherwise
2:03:49
Speaker 1: with the population, it winds up being that ten percent
2:03:53
Speaker 1: tips of balance that we'd become used to. And so
2:03:56
Speaker 1: you know, people had seen it's always been normal, yeah,
2:04:00
Speaker 1: and then now it's not normal no more. What happened different?
2:04:03
Speaker 1: This new thing that the baseline had always burned? Right,
2:04:07
Speaker 1: You'd always lost those thirty yepp and you had an
2:04:10
Speaker 1: elk population that reflected that level of predation, and all
2:04:13
Speaker 1: of a sudden, now you have an elk population that
2:04:15
Speaker 1: doesn't reflect that. It reflects something new, and it's going
2:04:18
Speaker 1: to be lower.
2:04:18
Speaker 4: So you're saying, all the wolf coming back is the additive,
2:04:21
Speaker 4: none of its compensatory mortality.
2:04:24
Speaker 1: Man, I know the terms you're using, but I can't
2:04:27
Speaker 1: answer that.
2:04:28
Speaker 4: So you're not seeing lion populations diminishing down to twenty
2:04:33
Speaker 4: percent of the elk caves say instead that the oh
2:04:36
Speaker 4: that the wolves are now taking ten percent that the
2:04:39
Speaker 4: lions would.
2:04:40
Speaker 1: Take it must have been additive, because how else can
2:04:43
Speaker 1: you explain the map. I mean, like, this is the
2:04:45
Speaker 1: thing that that people have to accept, Like the really
2:04:48
Speaker 1: pro wolf people have to accept that this is true.
2:04:51
Speaker 1: And when they're when they're kind of being honest, they
2:04:53
Speaker 1: acknowledge it. Meaning on one hand, they like think hunters
2:04:59
Speaker 1: blow it out, everything out of proportion, and hunters are like, oh,
2:05:01
Speaker 1: we're gonna lose all of our dear and l right,
2:05:04
Speaker 1: and they criticize hunters for that. At the same time,
2:05:06
Speaker 1: they'll say, oh, if CWD is from having two dens
2:05:10
Speaker 1: of populations, wolves will help. And you're like, well, I
2:05:14
Speaker 1: thought that you're saying that hunters are wrong and that
2:05:16
Speaker 1: wolves don't lower game numbers. Now you're saying they do.
2:05:19
Speaker 1: Or they'll say deer and elk are over browsing, right,
2:05:25
Speaker 1: wolves will help. It's like, homet let's back up, because
2:05:27
Speaker 1: earlier you told me it doesn't matter the ways, that
2:05:30
Speaker 1: doesn't matter for deering out numbers, so it does matter
2:05:33
Speaker 1: for deering out numbers. Right. It's like you can't argue,
2:05:36
Speaker 1: and you know this better than me, but you can't argue.
2:05:39
Speaker 1: Like in the Greater Yellstone ecosystem, when wolves came in
2:05:42
Speaker 1: in the mid nineties, there's no other word for it.
2:05:46
Speaker 1: Elk numbers collapsed.
2:05:47
Speaker 4: They collapsed.
2:05:48
Speaker 3: But and the.
2:05:48
Speaker 1: Panhandle Idaho elk numbers just like there's no other word
2:05:51
Speaker 1: for what happened. They collapsed.
2:05:53
Speaker 4: But do you know about the winters that the wolves
2:05:55
Speaker 4: came into. Idoh is the heaviest winters ever recorded. The
2:05:59
Speaker 4: wolves came into Yells and twenty thousand elk on the
2:06:02
Speaker 4: northern range of Lamar is not a normal range of
2:06:05
Speaker 4: numbers of animals that should be there anyway.
2:06:08
Speaker 1: Okay, I mean you know all that.
2:06:10
Speaker 4: I think we talked about this last time. But the
2:06:12
Speaker 4: winters of ninety six ninety seven, that was the second
2:06:14
Speaker 4: winter they put in. I thought that you can sit there,
2:06:18
Speaker 4: maybe you can, but tell me that thirty wolves are
2:06:20
Speaker 4: going to kill ten thousand outs.
2:06:22
Speaker 1: No, it wasn't. I don't think that it was. I
2:06:24
Speaker 1: think that it was very long term. Yeah it was.
2:06:26
Speaker 1: It wasn't that year. It wasn't like the ones they
2:06:28
Speaker 1: brought in. Yeah, yeah, I mean, but correct me if
2:06:30
Speaker 1: I'm wrong. Like you know it better than me. But
2:06:33
Speaker 1: is it not fair? Is it not fair to say that,
2:06:36
Speaker 1: let's talk about the Idaho Panhandle.
2:06:38
Speaker 4: I don't know about the idol Pana. I can talk
2:06:39
Speaker 4: about the lamar pretty.
2:06:40
Speaker 1: Good, Okay. Wherever the lamar.
2:06:43
Speaker 4: Yeah, Yellowstone, Northern Herd.
2:06:46
Speaker 1: Okay, bad winners or not? I mean, come on, that
2:06:52
Speaker 1: had unless I'm wrong, that had the incoming wolves and
2:06:57
Speaker 1: the expansion of wolf populations. Elk had a big change
2:07:00
Speaker 1: on elk because that's also if we remember, we're all
2:07:03
Speaker 1: supposed to celebrate them for bringing the beavers back, which
2:07:06
Speaker 1: has now been walked back and not true. So it
2:07:09
Speaker 1: did something to elk, right.
2:07:12
Speaker 4: Yeah, and you could pull up the table. But the elk,
2:07:13
Speaker 4: the alk numbers fell off really fast in that hard winter.
2:07:17
Speaker 4: And like in Montana in ninety six ninety seven, Carolyn
2:07:21
Speaker 4: sim was doing white tail deer study in northwest Montana
2:07:24
Speaker 4: and forty percent of the white tail died win or
2:07:27
Speaker 4: die off and had nothing to do without Okay. So
2:07:29
Speaker 4: I'm just saying with wolves.
2:07:32
Speaker 5: It couldn't like And in the case of the bitter,
2:07:35
Speaker 5: the way someone described it to me, I can't remember
2:07:37
Speaker 5: who was Like the elk, there could sustain like some
2:07:41
Speaker 5: certain level of predation and maintain a certain r number.
2:07:47
Speaker 5: But when you put it the wolf on top of it,
2:07:50
Speaker 5: that was like just enough to be a tipping point
2:07:54
Speaker 5: to push.
2:07:54
Speaker 4: Them over the edge or push them on a private
2:07:56
Speaker 4: land where people don't allow them. You're hunted. That's what's
2:07:58
Speaker 4: happening in.
2:07:59
Speaker 5: The bitter But like in the case of like a
2:08:01
Speaker 5: bad winner, you stack wolves on top of that, maybe
2:08:05
Speaker 5: the elk, yeah could have you know what I mean,
2:08:08
Speaker 5: Like it's just one more thing they've got to deal with.
2:08:11
Speaker 4: So I mean, I just read the scientific literature and
2:08:13
Speaker 4: I'm a hunter too, But in Yellowstone there are so
2:08:17
Speaker 4: many factories. It's really I would say it's unfair to
2:08:21
Speaker 4: say one is to blame. It's a huge puzzle with
2:08:23
Speaker 4: many factors. And since the wolves come back, the olk
2:08:26
Speaker 4: numbers have definitely decreased. But I think they're actually had
2:08:29
Speaker 4: a better sustainable lever. I mean, do you know in
2:08:31
Speaker 4: the sixties they're in their gunning and killing elk because
2:08:34
Speaker 4: there were too many elk and there were not enough predators.
2:08:36
Speaker 4: They were shooting them like a thousand a year or whatever.
2:08:38
Speaker 4: They don't have to do that anymore. There's what six
2:08:41
Speaker 4: sixty five hundred elk in the northern herd now versus
2:08:44
Speaker 4: twenty thousand, and it's kind of stabilized at that. And
2:08:47
Speaker 4: the wolves have stabilized at about one hundred, and they've
2:08:51
Speaker 4: switched to bison. They a lot of their food value
2:08:53
Speaker 4: now is bison, which I must mind modeling me. I'm
2:08:57
Speaker 4: not saying they can't limiting. I'm just saying there's a
2:09:00
Speaker 4: lot of things going on, and I think the humans
2:09:03
Speaker 4: really got used. I've been on one of those late
2:09:05
Speaker 4: gardener hunts and.
2:09:06
Speaker 7: Oh my god, what is zoo in the eighties.
2:09:09
Speaker 4: Yeah, because there were too many elk they had to
2:09:11
Speaker 4: do that. Well, they don't do it anymore, and people
2:09:13
Speaker 4: are pissed off about it because I want to go
2:09:15
Speaker 4: down there and get my late gardener hunt. Well, that
2:09:17
Speaker 4: is not a sustainable population to have to have people
2:09:20
Speaker 4: go in and kill starving elk in February. I mean,
2:09:24
Speaker 4: we can look at it anywhere you want.
2:09:25
Speaker 1: Can we go back to our crystal ball in Colorado?
2:09:27
Speaker 4: Oh?
2:09:27
Speaker 1: God, yes, was it a twenty year? We were talking
2:09:30
Speaker 1: about ten ten twenty years. Okay, let me hit you
2:09:32
Speaker 1: with this. Yeah, let's say there are one hundred deer
2:09:38
Speaker 1: in elk in Colorado today? How many deer in elk
2:09:42
Speaker 1: are there in twenty years.
2:09:46
Speaker 4: Due too?
2:09:47
Speaker 1: Because of wolves?
2:09:48
Speaker 4: Oh, because of wolf.
2:09:49
Speaker 1: There's one hundred now, Yeah, one hundred deer elk are
2:09:51
Speaker 1: in Colorado now. And you do your twenty year crystal ball.
2:09:54
Speaker 1: Where has that population settled out?
2:09:57
Speaker 4: Eighty or ninety maybe might be one hundred. The other
2:10:00
Speaker 4: is people population. We keep growing in and building. Well,
2:10:04
Speaker 4: it is part of it because people build an elk
2:10:06
Speaker 4: winter range. Look at the Paradise Valley, for God's sakes,
2:10:09
Speaker 4: they've destroyed a lot of elk wind arrange where they
2:10:11
Speaker 4: elk used to doing.
2:10:11
Speaker 5: Well, that's where the wolves could do that tipping point there. Yeah,
2:10:14
Speaker 5: get because like Colorado's elk or like in places, their
2:10:18
Speaker 5: numbers are already crashing because of black bear predation and
2:10:22
Speaker 5: elk calves. And then you get like development of winter
2:10:25
Speaker 5: range and then a huge amount of recreation like hiking
2:10:29
Speaker 5: and biking, and then you throw wolves on top of that,
2:10:33
Speaker 5: and it's like you could look at it that way,
2:10:36
Speaker 5: you know what's going to happen.
2:10:38
Speaker 4: I just look at what's going on in Montana, where
2:10:41
Speaker 4: we had wolves for forty years. In Wyoming they've had
2:10:43
Speaker 4: wolves for years, and elk numbers are higher than they've
2:10:46
Speaker 4: ever been, So I don't know how. I mean, you
2:10:49
Speaker 4: could look at whatever end of the scale you want
2:10:51
Speaker 4: to look at. I'd like to kind of come to
2:10:52
Speaker 4: the middle. There'll be places where wolves can impact populations.
2:10:55
Speaker 4: Lions certainly have, bears have people have Because we're building
2:11:00
Speaker 4: holding up into habitat that is absolutely critical. For those
2:11:03
Speaker 4: on gillets in the winter, they don't have it anymore.
2:11:06
Speaker 4: So where do they go They become victims to prey
2:11:08
Speaker 4: animals or they get hit on the roadway. My god,
2:11:11
Speaker 4: driving down from Livingston to Gardner and the winters like
2:11:15
Speaker 4: slaloming through white tail and elk everywhere. It's awful. So
2:11:19
Speaker 4: we could pick whatever data set you want to use.
2:11:22
Speaker 4: But they've co existed long before we were ever in
2:11:25
Speaker 4: the landscape, That's all I'm going to say. And before
2:11:28
Speaker 4: when Lewis and Clark came to this country on the
2:11:31
Speaker 4: with the West, wolves a lot of wolves and grizzlies,
2:11:34
Speaker 4: and there was never more wildlife than there's ever been.
2:11:36
Speaker 4: Because we've changed everything and we have an expectation to
2:11:39
Speaker 4: have it perfect, you're never going to have that.
2:11:40
Speaker 1: When I when I encounter rapidly anti wolf people. Yeah, right, Yeah,
2:11:47
Speaker 1: and then they'll tell me how they want to go
2:11:48
Speaker 1: hunt in Alaska. Yeah, but you wouldn't like.
2:11:51
Speaker 6: It, buddy, because.
2:11:54
Speaker 1: Because it's ninety seven percent of historic wolf habitat is
2:11:58
Speaker 1: occupied by wolves, you wouldn't like it. There's no hunting
2:12:00
Speaker 1: there wolves. What's the hunt in Alaska?
2:12:03
Speaker 4: Does that what you tell them?
2:12:05
Speaker 9: Yeah?
2:12:05
Speaker 4: Is that true?
2:12:06
Speaker 1: No, of course it's not true. Okay, I'm demonstrating absurdity
2:12:09
Speaker 1: by being absurd. Thank you, Steve.
2:12:12
Speaker 7: I'm shocked. Okay.
2:12:13
Speaker 1: It's my favorite. I mean, I love it. It's my
2:12:15
Speaker 1: favorite place to go. But I'm just saying I point
2:12:17
Speaker 1: out to them, like, don't lay it on me that
2:12:20
Speaker 1: they're incompatible, because tell that to right, That's that everybody
2:12:24
Speaker 1: dreams of going on hunting Alaska. It's like, well, let
2:12:25
Speaker 1: me tell you something wolves while something moves there. A
2:12:29
Speaker 1: couple of years ago, we'd watched how many do we
2:12:31
Speaker 1: see one night? Fifteen pretty much every evening fifteen to
2:12:35
Speaker 1: come through.
2:12:36
Speaker 4: Wow.
2:12:37
Speaker 1: Right, So I'm just saying it that that perspective, and
2:12:41
Speaker 1: every time, like every time we talk about predators and
2:12:45
Speaker 1: every time we talk about wolves, I always feel the
2:12:47
Speaker 1: need to clarify like my perspective on it, I think
2:12:52
Speaker 1: it is. I think it's immoral to remove native species
2:12:59
Speaker 1: from native habitat. I just think it's like playing God
2:13:03
Speaker 1: in a way that, however you want to conceive of God,
2:13:06
Speaker 1: it's playing God in the way that God would not
2:13:08
Speaker 1: agree with. Right, It's like it's immoral, I think to
2:13:12
Speaker 1: eliminate species from Earth. I like seeing the tracks. I
2:13:19
Speaker 1: like hearing them. I like seeing them. I do not
2:13:23
Speaker 1: think they should be eradicated. I like to try to
2:13:27
Speaker 1: achieve a balance of holding a bunch of different people's
2:13:33
Speaker 1: interests in mind, because it's the only way we're going
2:13:35
Speaker 1: to survive and live as humans. I think that what
2:13:39
Speaker 1: as you said, I think that what's been achieved here
2:13:45
Speaker 1: in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. It's not perfect, but it's working,
2:13:51
Speaker 1: and I think you would alleviate a ton of the
2:13:54
Speaker 1: social stress in the Upper Great Lakes if they were
2:13:58
Speaker 1: allowed to pursue a similar path with regulated hunting. I
2:14:05
Speaker 1: don't know anybody when when wolves walked into Colorado, of
2:14:09
Speaker 1: the people I hang out with and associate with, and
2:14:11
Speaker 1: hunt with and talk with all the time, when wolves
2:14:13
Speaker 1: showed up in Colorado, I don't know anybody who said
2:14:17
Speaker 1: to me they ought to get down there with helicopters
2:14:20
Speaker 1: right now and find those wolves and kill them. No
2:14:22
Speaker 1: one said that to me, right h With the reintroduction,
2:14:28
Speaker 1: I've had people basically say that if they could do that,
2:14:30
Speaker 1: they would do that. It was like there's something about
2:14:33
Speaker 1: it that just burns people. Of course you don't want
2:14:36
Speaker 1: to there's something about it that they don't want to
2:14:39
Speaker 1: them because it's like it's like there's a way that
2:14:41
Speaker 1: we accept things that we perceive to be natural, and
2:14:44
Speaker 1: there's a way we accept people accept things that perceive
2:14:47
Speaker 1: to be something getting shoved down their throat, uh and
2:14:50
Speaker 1: wolves walking into Colorado. People kind of had a huh oh.
2:14:55
Speaker 2: They they had like a doctorate degree and pushing that
2:14:57
Speaker 2: ship down their throats down there. I couldn't believe when
2:15:00
Speaker 2: I read that stat of like Grant County is where
2:15:03
Speaker 2: they released the first group, right, and I think that
2:15:05
Speaker 2: was one of the few counties that overwhelmingly voted against it.
2:15:10
Speaker 2: It was like a sixties high sixties, maybe seventy percent
2:15:14
Speaker 2: against it, and that was the county they chose to
2:15:17
Speaker 2: here you go, But they couldn't.
2:15:19
Speaker 4: Reintroduce him into Boulder and Denver.
2:15:21
Speaker 2: I mean that's where the boat was while we're on
2:15:24
Speaker 2: Colorado again. I think it'd be great. It'd be great
2:15:27
Speaker 2: to get your thoughts, as you know, a biologist with
2:15:31
Speaker 2: so much experience on the ballot box biology that they're
2:15:36
Speaker 2: proposing down there, and just I guess in general, what
2:15:40
Speaker 2: your thoughts are on ballot box biology and if you
2:15:45
Speaker 2: think that's going to be a and even you can
2:15:48
Speaker 2: leave the Mountain lion ban alone, hunting band alone, but
2:15:51
Speaker 2: just in general that if you think that that works
2:15:55
Speaker 2: as a way to manage wildlife in our country, well.
2:15:57
Speaker 4: Obviously you feel strongly one way. That's a quite loaded question,
2:16:00
Speaker 4: but I the way you put it, I you'll read
2:16:04
Speaker 4: in my book.
2:16:05
Speaker 2: Well, the reason I'm interested is because I feel like
2:16:08
Speaker 2: you do sit in the middle and you connect with
2:16:11
Speaker 2: a lot of people that I would like to connect to,
2:16:14
Speaker 2: and I feel that we would probably land somewhere on
2:16:16
Speaker 2: the on the same end of the spectrum and want
2:16:20
Speaker 2: the same outcome. So I'd like to hear how you
2:16:23
Speaker 2: talk to people about this.
2:16:25
Speaker 4: So I I've never been in favor of wolf for
2:16:27
Speaker 4: introductions anywhere because they come back on their own and
2:16:30
Speaker 4: there I feel strongly we can never now test it
2:16:33
Speaker 4: because it's too late. But I feel strongly that there's
2:16:36
Speaker 4: a better social tolerance just what you're saying if they
2:16:39
Speaker 4: come back on their own, like they have done most
2:16:41
Speaker 4: places in the world and in the Midwest. But now
2:16:44
Speaker 4: that they're here, you can't go backwards. And wolves got
2:16:47
Speaker 4: to Oregon, Washington, Utah, Colorado, California, it's through dispersal, but
2:16:55
Speaker 4: they were dispersed animals from a reintroduced population, so they
2:16:59
Speaker 4: will never be thought is native either, which I think
2:17:02
Speaker 4: that's a shame. If we would have let natural recovery
2:17:06
Speaker 4: happens just like three you did in Montana, like it
2:17:09
Speaker 4: started doing Colorado, like it's done in the Midwest, I
2:17:12
Speaker 4: think we would be further ahead politically, but we'd have
2:17:14
Speaker 4: less wolves by this point in time. But how many
2:17:17
Speaker 4: years I mean, they were introduced those wolves almost twenty
2:17:20
Speaker 4: thirty years ago. Now would we be at the level
2:17:23
Speaker 4: we're at now? Probably pretty close, because once wolves hit
2:17:26
Speaker 4: critical mass, they take off without the social baggage. That's
2:17:30
Speaker 4: how I feel. You asked, That's how I feel, So
2:17:34
Speaker 4: I don't know if I answered your question or not.
2:17:37
Speaker 2: Well, I guess as someone that's worked with wolves, like
2:17:44
Speaker 2: did you like having in your toolbox. I don't know.
2:17:47
Speaker 2: Did you ever consider yourself a manager of wolves?
2:17:50
Speaker 4: I'm not, was never up at the top level I've managed.
2:17:54
Speaker 4: I've done some going out and putting out propane cannons
2:17:57
Speaker 4: and hanging flattery. Yeah, I've done some of that.
2:18:00
Speaker 2: But you advise people that sort of set management strategy.
2:18:04
Speaker 4: Yes, And I've come and asked to be a anonymous
2:18:07
Speaker 4: commentator on various federal plans.
2:18:09
Speaker 2: Yes. So is it nice to have in your toolbox
2:18:13
Speaker 2: hunting as a way to manage these animals?
2:18:17
Speaker 4: I think socially you have to have it. I'm not
2:18:19
Speaker 4: a wolf hunter. I have no desire to ever have
2:18:23
Speaker 4: to kill a wolf. I don't It's just not who
2:18:25
Speaker 4: I am. Is it a socially acceptable tool? Does it
2:18:28
Speaker 4: creation social tolerance? That's that's what people are pushing and believing,
2:18:33
Speaker 4: And I think with reintroductions that may be true. It's
2:18:39
Speaker 4: a tough one. Like I said, I don't want to
2:18:41
Speaker 4: shoot wolves, and I take lots of dead wolves on tailgates.
2:18:44
Speaker 4: When I was working for fishwallfe parks, they come in.
2:18:46
Speaker 4: I tagged lions and otters and martins and wolves, and
2:18:49
Speaker 4: I always ask the people the story how did you
2:18:52
Speaker 4: get the wolf? Tell me the story of how you
2:18:54
Speaker 4: hunted it. That made a difference to me when I
2:18:57
Speaker 4: looked at it dead wolves, a dead wolf. But when
2:18:59
Speaker 4: I heard some he said it was amazing. I had
2:19:01
Speaker 4: an Elk tagnose out and I heard the wolves howling,
2:19:04
Speaker 4: and this wolf walked out, and I thought, my god,
2:19:06
Speaker 4: that's a magnificent animal. I really want to I really
2:19:09
Speaker 4: want to have it. I want to have a pelt
2:19:11
Speaker 4: or whatever. I could understand that. And then people come
2:19:15
Speaker 4: and say, these hate, these bastards, we should shoot everyone
2:19:17
Speaker 4: them in the state. That really was difficult. And when
2:19:21
Speaker 4: I think of that kind of management that I feel
2:19:25
Speaker 4: doesn't do justice to us as hunters or biologists or
2:19:28
Speaker 4: to the wildlife itself. And I really think a big
2:19:31
Speaker 4: push we should have is working with the public on
2:19:35
Speaker 4: educating I hate that term, on exchanging ideas with people
2:19:39
Speaker 4: what wolves are and are not. I think there's not
2:19:42
Speaker 4: enough information out there for average person who wonders, well,
2:19:46
Speaker 4: how many yolk does a wolf coiller? Or are the
2:19:48
Speaker 4: impacting game? Put out all the information unbiased in a
2:19:52
Speaker 4: format that people can use. I don't care if it's
2:19:54
Speaker 4: a rock amount on Elk Foundation Google or Outdoor Life
2:19:57
Speaker 4: or whatever. Montana magazine put put it in a format
2:20:01
Speaker 4: that's available for people to read and understand. They better
2:20:05
Speaker 4: at ELK study.
2:20:05
Speaker 2: They did.
2:20:06
Speaker 4: They put quite a bit of information out, but that's
2:20:09
Speaker 4: fade ay. The wolves are still killing all the Elk.
2:20:11
Speaker 4: It's like, way, did you.
2:20:13
Speaker 5: Read the article?
2:20:14
Speaker 4: But people are biased because of their culture, so I
2:20:18
Speaker 4: but I just think enough information helps helps calm down
2:20:23
Speaker 4: the flames on both ends. I am a believer in that,
2:20:25
Speaker 4: and I hate the term edgy. I hate it say
2:20:28
Speaker 4: we need to educate so and so about that. It's like,
2:20:30
Speaker 4: oh God, can.
2:20:31
Speaker 1: We know what that means? That means I need to
2:20:32
Speaker 1: tell that person what I think.
2:20:34
Speaker 4: That's right, that's right, but to exchange information, that's what well,
2:20:39
Speaker 4: the public needs to be educated.
2:20:41
Speaker 7: No, I don't.
2:20:41
Speaker 4: I hate that term, and I heard agencies promote that
2:20:44
Speaker 4: all the time. But anyway, cuts of your book, my book,
2:20:49
Speaker 4: I want to hold it up, doctor Diane boy I'm
2:20:57
Speaker 4: teasing about randall.
2:21:00
Speaker 1: Have PhD written out there?
2:21:01
Speaker 4: Of course not, but it's in the back under the
2:21:03
Speaker 4: bio because I don't want I don't want people to
2:21:06
Speaker 4: see doctor Dian Boyd and not buy it because they
2:21:08
Speaker 4: their biases. They just see it's diyanboid. There you go,
2:21:12
Speaker 4: that's a bias. Definitely.
2:21:13
Speaker 1: They'd be like, oh.
2:21:18
Speaker 4: That one.
2:21:19
Speaker 1: They'd be like some Berkeley egg ahead.
2:21:21
Speaker 7: Telling me about please exactly, Diane K.
2:21:25
Speaker 1: Boyd not a doctor. There you go, she's a doctor
2:21:34
Speaker 1: back here, Yeah, Diane K. Boyd, a woman among wolves.
2:21:38
Speaker 1: My journey through forty years of wolf covery. I haven't
2:21:41
Speaker 1: read it. Uh, I will read it.
2:21:44
Speaker 4: I'll give you a personal copy.
2:21:46
Speaker 1: I will read it, read it and again.
2:21:50
Speaker 8: Uh.
2:21:51
Speaker 1: When we talked before and I loved it. It's so
2:21:54
Speaker 1: good to hear your perspective on these things. I think
2:21:59
Speaker 1: a lot of what you're saying, I think you're gonna
2:22:03
Speaker 1: what you're saying is going to be is going to
2:22:04
Speaker 1: be very challenging. Two people, no matter what how they
2:22:09
Speaker 1: look at wolves. You you offer a very challenging perspective
2:22:13
Speaker 1: because it doesn't fall in line. It doesn't fall in
2:22:18
Speaker 1: line with the narratives that you would get depending on
2:22:23
Speaker 1: your culture. It's like you're you're offering a really educated,
2:22:30
Speaker 1: nuanced view of things that have come from being in
2:22:34
Speaker 1: the room for a lot of discussions over the year.
2:22:37
Speaker 1: I'm not like, I can't say that you know. I
2:22:41
Speaker 1: can't say that someone would be able to go and
2:22:43
Speaker 1: determine that everything you've said is exactly true or right.
2:22:48
Speaker 1: But it's a challenging, like you're offering a challenging, pretty gracious,
2:22:55
Speaker 1: highly educated perspective on how to think about predators, and
2:22:59
Speaker 1: I appreciate you coming with us and doing that.
2:23:01
Speaker 4: Well.
2:23:01
Speaker 7: Thanks.
2:23:02
Speaker 1: Help people find your book and read it.
2:23:04
Speaker 4: Thanks. When I wrote it, I was not allowed to
2:23:06
Speaker 4: put in scientific references or footnotes. I have my list
2:23:09
Speaker 4: at the end of suggested readings. But I wrote it
2:23:12
Speaker 4: so that anybody can pick it up, whether you like
2:23:14
Speaker 4: wolves or don't like wolves, or don't care, regardless of
2:23:16
Speaker 4: your outdoor experience. Anybody can pick that up and get
2:23:20
Speaker 4: something from it. And I don't preach. I tell through
2:23:24
Speaker 4: stories and I wave science and let the reader come
2:23:28
Speaker 4: to their own conclusions about certain aspects of wolves being
2:23:31
Speaker 4: on the landscape. So it's a different kind of a book.
2:23:34
Speaker 4: And I lived it. I lived these wolves. This is
2:23:36
Speaker 4: my story, and then it morphs into present time in
2:23:41
Speaker 4: twenty twenty three. And if you just like a good
2:23:42
Speaker 4: adventure story, there's a lot of stories. I could read
2:23:44
Speaker 4: you a short thirty second paragraph if you want. Hell.
2:23:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's close with that.
2:23:48
Speaker 4: Close it the opening introduction.
2:23:50
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're going to close with this. So she's gonna
2:23:52
Speaker 1: get done. You're gonna go buy the book. We're just
2:23:54
Speaker 1: going to end the show. Phil's gonna turn the machine
2:23:56
Speaker 1: off when it's done. But this will give you a
2:23:57
Speaker 1: taste of how it's written, and I'm looking forward to it.
2:24:00
Speaker 4: This is probably thirty five years ago. My pickup banged
2:24:03
Speaker 4: and rattled along the potholed inside road in the northwest
2:24:06
Speaker 4: corner of Glacier National Park. Boxes of wolf trap and
2:24:09
Speaker 4: jars of bait slid across the truck bed. I was
2:24:12
Speaker 4: in a hurry, my mind focused on the wolf cotton
2:24:14
Speaker 4: a trap somewhere ahead in the Lodgepole Pine Forest. Out
2:24:17
Speaker 4: of the corner of my eye, I noticed motion in
2:24:20
Speaker 4: my rear view mirror. I looked up to catch the
2:24:23
Speaker 4: glassy reflection of vivid yellow eyes framed by a wolf's
2:24:26
Speaker 4: black face looking over my shoulder from the back seat.
2:24:30
Speaker 4: How did I get here? Opening paragraph, Diane, You you
2:24:37
Speaker 4: got to come back. Appreciate it, thank you, thank you.
2:24:42
Speaker 1: Honest.
2:24:42
Speaker 5: You got to keep your shoes on during this podcast,
2:24:49
Speaker 5: I'm still recorded.
2:24:57
Speaker 11: The koyas away wone shooting start with shut swell being
2:25:12
Speaker 11: sign of breakfast, and we laid down the bed it's
2:25:19
Speaker 11: been on day and nin.
2:25:21
Speaker 10: Windyll them cotting with trees lost step lesly every breeze.
2:25:34
Speaker 11: Master footsteps that I took.
2:25:40
Speaker 1: You on.
2:25:40
Speaker 2: The noise was wide like a live Brian.
2:25:47
Speaker 1: Learn more from namn trees before.
2:25:50
Speaker 9: Everybod than ever made shiver shoot swept.
2:26:01
Speaker 1: Waves up in.
2:26:04
Speaker 9: My reading up here. Sometimes you're burning up. Sometimes you're
2:26:12
Speaker 9: going with because you mean you're the fever.
2:26:18
Speaker 1: Ragon, don't you Mainer.
2:26:23
Speaker 9: The fur Bagon.
2:26:43
Speaker 12: Go on through the plain still called Basbley in greens.
2:26:51
Speaker 7: Gets there all out in them wield.
2:26:56
Speaker 9: You smileings the you rye all and your minds be surprised.
2:27:05
Speaker 2: That old river.
2:27:07
Speaker 12: Minyl fever makes you shiver, That fever makes you sweet, wakes.
2:27:19
Speaker 9: You up in babing permade of you. Sometimes you're burning up.
2:27:28
Speaker 9: Sometimes they're gold man with because you Mainer fever w
2:27:38
Speaker 9: only you anger the fer bging that fear macey shiver,
2:28:17
Speaker 9: that fere amazing sweat wis you have and min be
2:28:24
Speaker 9: pernain unjust. Sometimes you're burning up. Sometimes you're colding w because.
2:28:35
Speaker 1: You made yourr feeder cry.
2:28:45
Speaker 10: You may you may CA, You ain't time.
2:28:59
Speaker 8: You wait.
2:29:00
Speaker 9: Turded favor, domag wait fav