Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 033

Transcript

Ep. 033 · The MeatEater Podcast

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: This is me Eat Your Podcast coming in you shirtless,
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: severely folk bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast.
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: You can't predict anything. Hey, everyone, welcome to the Me
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: Eat Your Podcast. This is as high as we've ever
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: been in that we're in the nineteenth four of a
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: hotel right now, Seattle, Washington, the Western Um. Yeah, this
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: is the Yeah, as high as we've ever been, looking
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: out on Puget Sound. And I'm here with couple folks.
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: But the most important one right now is are you
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: still go by professor? You can't be a professor anymore.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: I'm not a professor anymore. Now, So what are you now? Uh?
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: Just a citizen, right, I guess? Oh yeah, I can
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: say that. We're here with the writer Dan. Now. We
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: had this debate earlier because I had always thought I
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: had always like floorries. That's correct, Okay, I thought this
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: this guy, your former student, doesn't know that. What were
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: you trying to tell me? It was? I've always heard flores, yeah,
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: within Flores, yeah, Flores. Yeah, it's uh, it's because it's
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  Speaker 1: pronounced uh with a Louisiana French accent, like it's floor. Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: So writer and citizen Dan Flores who I met when
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  Speaker 1: he was Professor Dan Flores years ago. I was in
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  Speaker 1: graduate school and I had to. I think it was
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  Speaker 1: part of the recordment. You take a seminar or something
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  Speaker 1: outside of your discipline. I was a writing, a writing student,
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  Speaker 1: and I took a class. Um, I took your class.
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  Speaker 1: What was your that class called? You remember the when
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  Speaker 1: I was in it was it was an environment all
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: writing seminar, I think is what you took. Yeah, And
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  Speaker 1: I was just humiliated in it. Um, way out of
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  Speaker 1: my league. All these guys I knew all about writing
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  Speaker 1: about things that they were sure happened instead of things
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  Speaker 1: you thought might have happened. Um. Which is part of
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  Speaker 1: the being a historian. I think that they try to
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  Speaker 1: train you and that I recall you might have that class. Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: but I was like I was out gone. There was
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  Speaker 1: some good students in there. Man. But I met Dana
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  Speaker 1: took that class, and it was just had a profound
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  Speaker 1: impact on me. Um. The body of literature that you know,
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: we looked at and just like a way of thinking
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  Speaker 1: about things. Um. We had your student on who Who's here?
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  Speaker 1: Randa Williams on talking about his dissertation he did, and
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  Speaker 1: you were involved in that as an advisor. Yea, um,
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  Speaker 1: but just just again, can you hit what um in
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  Speaker 1: your own words, like what an environmental historian is and
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  Speaker 1: does and looks at. It's not it's that terms not
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: a term people are familiar with outside of academics and scenes. Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: it's a it's a kind of term that you end
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  Speaker 1: up explaining to people in bars quite a bit, uh
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  Speaker 1: when they ask you, you know what you do or
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  Speaker 1: what you write about? I mean, basically, it's a it's
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  Speaker 1: a way of thinking about their relationship between people in
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  Speaker 1: the natural world. And so it's and and doing it
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  Speaker 1: using history, which of course causes you to to examine
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  Speaker 1: changes over time. And so it's a environmental history and
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  Speaker 1: it's only been around for about thirty five or forty
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  Speaker 1: years now as a as a field of study. In fact,
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  Speaker 1: we're in Seattle right now because the American Society for
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  Speaker 1: Environmental History is meeting here. This is its annual conference,
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  Speaker 1: and it held its first one in nineteen seventy six,
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  Speaker 1: So they'll give you an idea of how recent this
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  Speaker 1: feel has been around. But it's basically a way to
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  Speaker 1: uh to look at the history of how people have
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  Speaker 1: interacted with nature and that's a broad enough, uh spectrum
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  Speaker 1: of study that you just get the right and think
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  Speaker 1: about all kinds of things, you know, not just the
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  Speaker 1: environmental movement itself or the history of conservation Teddy Roosevelt.
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  Speaker 1: But uh, I mean in Randall's case, for example, he
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  Speaker 1: he got to think and write about how hunters have
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  Speaker 1: played a role in American culture in the twentieth century.
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  Speaker 1: And the thing I've been interested in most in the
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  Speaker 1: last few years has been, uh, animals and the relationship
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  Speaker 1: between people and animals. Yeah, and you have two books
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  Speaker 1: coming out right now? How many books? How many like
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  Speaker 1: book length manuscripts have you published? Uh? These two will
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  Speaker 1: be the ninth and tenth. Uh so, and that dates
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  Speaker 1: back to about four My first book came out in
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  Speaker 1: hundreds of academic papers, well hundreds. But I've written an
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  Speaker 1: academic popular and academic articles. Yeah, a lot of a
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  Speaker 1: lot of popular things. I probably have published more popular
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  Speaker 1: things than academic pieces, but I've done I don't know,
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  Speaker 1: actually I'm just having a hazard guess, but maybe two
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  Speaker 1: or three dozen academic papers and peer reviewed kind of journals,
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  Speaker 1: and then I often spun off, you know, popular article
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  Speaker 1: or two from those kinds of things. Oh that is
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  Speaker 1: that how you work generally, Like you'll find stuff through
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  Speaker 1: your research that would be like, you know, would be
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  Speaker 1: suitable to a popular audience. Yeah, so you know, I mean,
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  Speaker 1: writing for academic journals is a wonderful things. How you
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  Speaker 1: make your reputation in a field and get a professorship
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  Speaker 1: and and all that sort of stuff. But uh, they
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  Speaker 1: don't pay you any money for those kinds of things.
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  Speaker 1: And I always I mean, I started out as a
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  Speaker 1: magazine writer before I ever became an academic, so I
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  Speaker 1: always had in my mind when I would do an
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  Speaker 1: academic piece, so how can I spend this off somehow
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  Speaker 1: as a you know, as a popular article and uh
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  Speaker 1: reach a bigger audience with it for one thing. Uh,
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  Speaker 1: make a little bit of change from it as well,
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  Speaker 1: but primarily kind of reach more people. And so yeah,
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  Speaker 1: a lot of the things I've done is as academic
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  Speaker 1: and scholarly things have ended up, as you know, either
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: getting absorbed into a book or or published as a
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: as a popular article. So what are what are the
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  Speaker 1: two books you have now? And why in the world
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  Speaker 1: are you published in two books at the same time. Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: that's an unusual thing. Um, So the books are American Serengetti,
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  Speaker 1: which is UM just a day or two away from
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  Speaker 1: officially being out UH. And the subtitle of that book
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  Speaker 1: is UM the Last Big Animals of the Great Plains.
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  Speaker 1: And the other book is called Coyote America Unnatural and
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: Supernatural History. And that book comes out about the middle
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: of May. And you're writing them both at the same time. Well,
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  Speaker 1: I wasn't really And you know, the truth is, the
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: books are connected to one another because UM the Coyote
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  Speaker 1: Book or a Coyote Book was originally contracted to the
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  Speaker 1: publisher of the American Serengetti book, and which was a
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  Speaker 1: university press publisher. And I've retired from the University of
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: Montana two years ago, and as I got close to retirement,
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: I realized that, so there's not really much point in
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  Speaker 1: writing books for university presses anymore. I mean, that's really
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  Speaker 1: great when you're a professor and you get rewarded by
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  Speaker 1: your university for doing that and in the field for
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  Speaker 1: doing that. But I knew I was about to retire,
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  Speaker 1: and so to reach bigger audiences, I wanted to do
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  Speaker 1: a book. UM start writing books basically for UH commercial presses,
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  Speaker 1: And so I had acquired an agent who asked me
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: about three or four years ago, so what are you
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  Speaker 1: working on now? Said, well, I've got a coyote book
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  Speaker 1: that's contracted to the University of Kansas Press, and uh.
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  Speaker 1: He said, well, why don't you write a proposal out
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  Speaker 1: of that and let me take it to New York
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  Speaker 1: and see if I can sell it? And I did
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  Speaker 1: and he did. Uh. The problem was, so that was
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  Speaker 1: all great, but the problem was University of Kansas Press
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  Speaker 1: didn't take all that kindly to us sort of taking
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  Speaker 1: their book away from them. And so the only way
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  Speaker 1: to kind of resolve things with with Kansas was to
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  Speaker 1: promise them another book, which, yeah, which they agreed to,
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  Speaker 1: but they also said, okay, that's fine, we want to
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  Speaker 1: keep the same deadline you had with us, however, And
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  Speaker 1: so basically this time last year, I had a deadline
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  Speaker 1: for the Coyote Book in New York of January, and
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  Speaker 1: I had a deadline for the American Sarrangetty Book in Lawrence,
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  Speaker 1: Kansas of May the first. So I finished up the
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  Speaker 1: Coyote book and uh, in hailed a couple of times,
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  Speaker 1: took a couple of deep breaths, and uh, since I
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: was already used to getting up every day and writing
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: four or five or six hours. I just kept ongoing
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  Speaker 1: and in another four months or so, managed to finish
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  Speaker 1: off that. Yeah, that American sarrang Getty book. But in
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  Speaker 1: a way, you've been researching that book for your entire career. Indeed,
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  Speaker 1: I had, and I you know, and I had, I
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  Speaker 1: had written some of it actually, um already, I mean
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  Speaker 1: I ended up I ended up revising pretty considerably the
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  Speaker 1: things that I've already written. But yeah, I had worked
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  Speaker 1: on Buffalo. Uh years ago. I had written a kind
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  Speaker 1: of a major scholarly peace about Buffalo that sort of reimagined,
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  Speaker 1: reconceptualized what happened to him in the nineteenth century. That
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  Speaker 1: became a pretty successful academic article. Yeah, I've I've had
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  Speaker 1: a lot of great luck just telling that story for you,
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  Speaker 1: being like you know what I was reading. Yeah. I
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  Speaker 1: always credit you, though, man, Yeah, well, I mean yeah,
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  Speaker 1: and you uh you did credit me, and I appreciated
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  Speaker 1: that in your in your Buffalo book. But I so
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  Speaker 1: that story I kind of uh you know, I knew
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  Speaker 1: pretty well, and that provided me with a starting point
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  Speaker 1: for the chapter that's on Buffalo in this American Staring
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  Speaker 1: Getty book. But Leo the premise of the American when
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  Speaker 1: you say the last big ones, you mean the last
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  Speaker 1: big ones that are here now? Are the last big
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  Speaker 1: ones like the ones we lost at the end of
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  Speaker 1: the Places scene. Yeah, that's an excellent question. I mean,
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  Speaker 1: I actually talk about both versions of the American Serengetti.
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  Speaker 1: The Pleistocene version um doesn't get as much coverage as
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  Speaker 1: the historic version of the American Serengetti, but I spend
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  Speaker 1: a good bit of time talking about it because down
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  Speaker 1: to ten thousand years ago, I mean, we really we
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  Speaker 1: had an African analog on the American Great Plains. Uh,
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  Speaker 1: with all the the charismatic megafauna that we're here. I mean,
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  Speaker 1: we had elephants in the form of mammoths. We had uh,
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  Speaker 1: we had camels. We had of course, huge herds of
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  Speaker 1: giant bison that were sort of the counterpart to wildebeest
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  Speaker 1: herds in Africa. We had a lion, the step Line,
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  Speaker 1: which was actually a larger lion than the African lion.
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  Speaker 1: We had giant and very grass isisle short faced bear
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  Speaker 1: that was down to about twelve years ago was probably
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  Speaker 1: one of the most formidable predators anywhere in the world.
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  Speaker 1: Some people think that humans weren't able to to migrate
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  Speaker 1: to North America until about fifteen thousand years ago because
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  Speaker 1: these short faced bears were there at the bearing straight
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  Speaker 1: and they presented such a formidable barrier uh to humans
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  Speaker 1: that we basically they had to become extinct before humans
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  Speaker 1: were able to get to North America. So there was
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: this large beast she area of animals down to ten
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  Speaker 1: thousand years ago. A giant hunting, very fast hunting hyena. Uh.
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  Speaker 1: There were cheetah like cats that were related to cougars
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  Speaker 1: um cougars are kind of their descendants, but they were uh,
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  Speaker 1: curved fang cats, one called a scimitar cat. And of course, uh,
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: you know, the the these cats that we imagine from
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  Speaker 1: the plies to saying running down the calves of of mammoths.
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  Speaker 1: But most of that beast sherry, with the exception of
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  Speaker 1: five or six animals, when extinct about ten thousand years
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  Speaker 1: ago in an extinction scenario frankly that we still don't
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  Speaker 1: quite understand. I mean like we don't understand it temporarily.
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  Speaker 1: We don't understand it temporarily or in terms of costs.
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  Speaker 1: For example, one of the most common creatures of the Pleistocene,
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  Speaker 1: American Serenghetti were bands of wild horses. Some biologists believe
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  Speaker 1: that they comprised as much as twenty of the biomass
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  Speaker 1: of grazing animals on the Great Plains down to about
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  Speaker 1: eight or nine thousand years ago. And they the thing
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  Speaker 1: about horses is they migrated across the Bearing Strait and
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  Speaker 1: they ended up in Asia and in Africa, where they
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  Speaker 1: became zebras and quaggas and and related animals, uh and
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  Speaker 1: European horses. And they survived in all those places. But
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  Speaker 1: for some reason that we don't grasp, about eight or
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  Speaker 1: nine thousand years ago, all those horses became extinct in
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  Speaker 1: North America. And so we lost this giant biomass of
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  Speaker 1: grazing animals in the form of wild horses that completely
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  Speaker 1: disappeared from the Pleistocene serengetti. And we don't know exactly why.
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  Speaker 1: I mean, some of the speculation is that they contracted diseases. Um.
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: Some of some of these is the blitz Creek hypothesis
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  Speaker 1: totally out of fashion, though it is not out of fashion. Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: and so there's a paleog Yeah. The so the ideas
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: range from the Blitzkrieg that you mentioned, which was popularized
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: by a paleo biology saying Paul Martin now Paul Martin
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: at the University of Arizona, who wrote a bunch of
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: really compelling books. The most the last one he wrote
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  Speaker 1: was called Twilight of the Mammoths, and his argument was
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: that about fifteen thousand years or so ago, humans began
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: migrating out of Asia into North America, confronting a bit
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: of animals that had never seen human predators before. And
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: these these people were very accomplished predators with a very
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: sophisticated tool kit, and the Blitzkrieg model speculates that in
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: a period of less than three hundred years, these people
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  Speaker 1: expanded from Siberia into the America's all the way down
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  Speaker 1: to the tip of South America and wiped out most
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  Speaker 1: of these speed She's that we're confronting human predators for
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  Speaker 1: the first time and just sort of collapsed in the
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: wake of this assault. It's out on one hand, it's outlandish.
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  Speaker 1: On the other hand, when you look at the if,
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: when you look at how where things went extinct win
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: and when people showed up there, and then you have
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: things like Mammoth's on Wrangle Island, up until four thousand
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: years ago, and no one had ever stepped foot on wrangle.
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  Speaker 1: It just gets weird, man, it does get weird, and
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: it's Martin argued, and other people have argued that as
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: humans spread out of Africa, we actually kind of did
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: this all over the world. Uh. You know, some of
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: the really good examples of it are, for example, in
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: the islands of Polynesia, where as soon as humans arrive,
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: um for instance in a y uh thirty, some species
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: of flightless birds become extinct within a couple of hundred
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  Speaker 1: years because they're such easy targets for human hunters. And
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: humans usually arrived with dogs and sometimes with hawks, and
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: this suite of animals that we bring along with us
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: as domestic that's sort of play a role. And and
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: the simplification of the ecologies of all these far flung
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: places that we get into. Yeah, in Europe. And I'm
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: not arguing, like I don't know enough to argue for
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: it against it, but I'm just talking about the parts
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: that are compelling is that Europe had versions of all
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: these things we're talking about in the American when what
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: you describe as the American serengetti, but they went through
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: it thirty years ago, and we know that humans were
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: like that. You know that the human hunters like basically us,
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: like people that were they alive today, could fly an airplane.
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: You know that they arrived there around those times and
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: you saw the same thing happened again. But on the
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: other hand, it's just like, how in the world could
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: you kill them all? Yeah, it's uh, it's it's with
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: atladdles and that's the primary su primary weapon they had
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: at laddles and sometimes just stabbing spears, but lay the
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: other ones out. I kind of hijacked it with the
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: blitz screen thing is so fascinating. It's not as fun
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: as it's more fun than the things like the disease.
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah it is. And so uh, the best evidence, by
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: the way, for the blitzkrieg is in North America is
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: with mammoths. I mean we we've only recently, for instance,
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: actually discovered kill sites of horses in North America from
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: there have been some discovered in the last seven or
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: eight ten years. Yeah, and those are the first one.
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: So part of the problem with the blitzkrieg model is that, Okay,
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: so if that's your model, then you expect to go
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: out there and archaeology paleoarchaeology is going to yield up
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: all these sites with slaughtered animals, sort of the way
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: it does in Europe. At with horses in France. I mean,
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: there's a spot in France where something like thirty or
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: forty thousand horse carcasses were killed and butchered by human
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: hunters driving off cliffs. Well, I mean, that was the
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: speculation for a long time. It looks like what they
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: were actually doing was driving them into corrals. They were
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: driving them into corral. Such a horrific vision driven off
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: a cliff's yeah, it's a horrific vision. And there's a
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: there's a wonderful nineteenth century illustration of horses pouring off
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: a cliff in France. But it looks as if what
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: they actually were doing were billing corrals and crawling them
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: and then then kill them. Some people argue, in fact
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: that the reason we have modern horses, which most of
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: which spring from European and African sources, is because about
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: six thousand years ago we domesticated them before we could
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: kill them all off. We finally domesticated them, and that's
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: what enabled them to serve in the mythology of plains
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: tribes horses sometimes play a role, or am I wrong?
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: I remember someone pointing out that, like the like this
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: idea of of the mounted planes hunter was a two
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: was like a brief phenomenon's it started to years ago.
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: But they're like, how could it be so ingrained? How
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: could the horse become so quickly so ingrained in the mythology.
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: It just had such a profound impact on them. Well,
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: I mean, some some tribes. I saw an exhibit in
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: in Calgary several years ago that was curated by the
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: Blackfoot Confederacy and at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, and
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: and these Blackfoot elders said in the text of this
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: exhibit that there mythological stories remembered horses from thousands of
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: years ago, and so they argued that they had preserved
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: a memory of horses from back in the Plies to Saine,
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: and when in the seventeen hundreds they encountered European horses,
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: they were able to draw on some mythology about these animals. Um,
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: you hear the term collective memory, Yeah, and a collective
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: tribal memory is I mean, you know, I don't denigrate
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: that at all. It's it's entirely possible that that was
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: the case. But I would say that Martin's argument about
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: a blitzkrieg is most evident with mammoths, where we do
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: have kill sites with projectile points like Clovis points embedded
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: in the skeletal material of the recovered animals, and they're
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: there are a lot of of Clovis sites with mammoths.
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: Do you remember that you and I visited one of
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: those slights together, Well, I wrote about that. That's sort
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: of like that's how the American Serengetti book opens, In fact,
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: is when that with that visit that you and I
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: made over to Blackwater Draw, uh and sort of giving
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: ourselves our own personal tour because I were called. We
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: drove all the way over there from Santa Fe and
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: the place was close, so we just hopped over the
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: fence and and gave ourselves a tour. But uh, yeah,
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: so the Blackwater Draw, I mean, that's that's the the
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: the original Clovis site in North America where butchered mammoths
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: were first found with with evidence of human hunting. But
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: there's not much evidence for the other animals. I mean,
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: you'd think that there would be all these camel sites
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: out there with butchered remains and points and horse sits
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: and and so that's been one of the problems more
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: recently last ten or fifteen years with the Blitz Creeg
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: model is that there's not there aren't the sites out there.
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: Maybe we just haven't found them, but except for the
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: mammoth site, there's not much out there. There's a I
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: believe at Lyndenmeyer, the Lindenmeyer site near Fort Collins, Colorado,
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: there was a foreshaft made from a camel bone. Yeah. Yeah,
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: So there's evidence obviously that they were using yeah, picking
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: it up. They were at least exploiting the remains of camus,
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: whether they were camels where they were killing or not.
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: So what is the horse sight that turned up? It's one.
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: It's one near Boulder, Uh, Colorado. Uh. And I've not
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: read much about it or visited it, but it's one
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: that uh was unearthed I don't know, maybe seven eight
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: years ago. So there is a horse sight near Boulder
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: that shows evidence of human butchering and evidently human kills
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: of horses. The problem with that, of course, is that
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: you'd think if the horse comprised thirty of the biomass
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: of all these grazing animals. There would be scores of
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: sights like that, and we've struggled to try to find
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: any at all. So that's led some people to say, Okay,
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: what actually happened to these animals was a changing climate.
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: We know that about the time, so two things happened.
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: A copy said about the time all these animals disappeared,
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: humans arrived from Asia and the climate started changing, and
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: the climate was cycling into a much warmer and drier regime.
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: And so one of the arguments about what happened to
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: all these original American Serengeti animals is that they basically
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: succumbed to a changing climate. They were evolved to kind
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: of an ice age climate, and when the climate turned
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: warm and dry, uh, it basically dried up their habitat,
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: and so they disappeared as a result of that. And
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: then one of the more most recent explanations is a
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: disease explanation, which is so far mostly speculative because we
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: don't other than people saying, Okay, we can't figure this out.
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: There's got to be some other reason, and maybe it's disease.
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: The problem is that right, carnivore exactly and I think
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: people focus on all these large animals, but we lost
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: many many small animals, lost a lot of small animals,
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: although at least in In Martin's argument, it's mostly the
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: large animals and a lot of the small animals are intact.
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: But Martin even argues that I mean, so, for instance,
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: some of the I mean horses specialized in stiper grasses
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: and needle and thread grasses, and those grasses are still
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: all over the West. So it's like the fodder that
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: they were grazing is still there, but the animals disappeared.
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: So the truth is right now. This is one of
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: the great mysteries of North American environment. I would too,
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: I'd love to know anybody had to keep the secret,
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: but we have not figured it out yet. All we
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: know is that that version, that much uh African like
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: version of the Serengetti disappeared between eight and twelve thousand
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: years ago. So what do you call in the Serengetti like?
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: Lay it off me. In terms of geography, it's the
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: It's basically the American Great Plains, so the Hunter Meridian
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: to the Rockies. Yeah, it's the hundredth meridian. Uh. In
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: some instances for some species slightly further east. Uh, but
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: basically about the hundredth meridian to the Rockies and from
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: Texas uh into Alberta and Saskatchewan. So just for people
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: to get a grasp on it to be like the
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: Texas Panhandle, right western Oklahoma, western Kansas exactly, kind of
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: all of the Colorado, all of the Dakotas, yeah, all
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: the all the dakotassa, portions of New Mexico, Yeah, eastern
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: New Mexico and up into a handful of Canadian provinces,
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: right yeah, up, And basically the plains sort of start
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: grading as you go farther north, they begin to grade
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: into aspen motts uh at about oh, I don't know,
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: maybe the fifty second parallel fifty one or fifty second
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: parallel as you go north, and the Canadian US border
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: is the parallel. So a couple of degrees north of
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: the Canadian border, you start losing the savannah's the grasslands,
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: and you began to have that country broken up by
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: copses of trees. So that's basically it. So it's this,
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: it says long north south stretching uh province east of
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: the Rocky Mountains that stretches about fifteen to sev hundred
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: miles north and south, and from the Rockies eastward goes
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: maybe four hundred miles. So it's that area, and that
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: area for eight hundred thousand years has been one of
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: the marvels of the world in terms of enormous numbers
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: of big animals, grazers and all the predators that that
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: preyed on them. And yeah, so that's it. So earlier
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: you're talking about I asked you if you meant the
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: ones that used to be here are the ones that
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: you here? Now you're taking like the whole dynamic view
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: of it. What's here? What's here? Now? Do you get
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: into who lived and why do they live? I guess
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: because you can't. You can't say why they lived if
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: you don't know what why the other ones succumbed. I mean,
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: it's uh. You know, this is one of the things
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: about sort of ecological history or environmental history is that,
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: you know, as John Muir said about things, everything is
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: connected everything else, and so it becomes kind of impossible
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: to just look at a snapshot, say the nineteenth century,
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: when we know there were millions of buffalo and the
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: Great Plains without understanding how they got there, and the
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: reason they were there in our historical account from the
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: nineteenth century is because of that extinction that happened ten
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: thousand years ago. Only a small handful of animals survived
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: that extinction. Bison were one of the primary survivors of it.
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: Gray wolves became a primary survivor, grizzly bears, uh, coyotes,
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: elk of course, pronghorn antelope, which is really one of
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: the most fascinating animals of the Great Plains, because those
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: animals are still completely adapted to the Pleistocene serengetti they are.
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: They're able to outrun Pronghorns can outrun today their fastest
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: pursuers by twenty And the reason they run so much
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: faster than gray wolves do, for instance, is because they
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: evolved to outrun cheat us and hunting hyenas. And so
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: here they are ten thousand years later, still adapted to
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: out running all these animals that disappeared thousands and thousands
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: of years ago. You know, I was I touched on
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: this a little bit in something I did recently, and
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: I pointed out there uh great reluctance to jumping. Yeah,
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: and it had many many people come forward with videos
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: and photos of them in fact jumping, but a great
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: reluctance to jump, great reluctance because they evolve done on
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: grassland plains without the necessity of jumping very very little timber.
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: And that's one of the reasons why when you if
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: you watch prong horns, I mean, their technique for going
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: through a barbed wire fence usually is to turn sideways
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: and go through the strands. I mean, they don't do
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: what you would think looking at them, a gazelle would do,
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: which would be too easily bound over it, or what
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: a mule deer does. Instead, they'll they'll go at a
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: fence and go through the strands of barbed wire, sometimes
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: in a big cloud of hair. But all those those
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: creatures then survived, and the reason, for instance, prong horns
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: and bison become so numerous is because they inherited grasslands
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: where most of their grazing competitors have vanished. And so
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: it's possible for bison, for instance, which ten thousand years
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: ago probably I mean bison were maybe only five million strong,
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: but with all the other grazing animals gone, it's possible
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: for bison to expand their populations into the thirty million
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: animals that we're here, uh in the nineteen hundreds are
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: the eighteen hundreds, and so it's a it's a version
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: of the American Serengetti that sort of is the next
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: step down historical timeline, with a smaller contingent of animals,
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: but nonetheless one that had so much magic and poetry
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: to it that when Europeans began traveling to the Great
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: Plains in the early nineteenth century, the early eighteen hundreds,
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: I mean, one of the most common literary motifs of
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: the nineteenth century West are these rhapsodies about the multitudes
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: of animals that people were were encountering so much that
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: I mean European sportsman Uh Sir William Drummond Stewart in
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: the eighteen thirties, uh Sir George Gore in the eighteen
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: fifties took on a little John, bloody little John. These
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: guys came over and they basically they conducted uh safaris
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: on the great Planes at the almost slashes at the
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: same time that the first safaris were happening in Africa,
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: when British sportsmen were going into South Africa in the
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: eighteen thirties, At the same time that William Drummond Stewart
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: was was doing these high end guided safari hunts in
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: the American West out on the Great Plains, and uh,
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: I mean the stories of those are pretty remarkable. Give
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: a snapshot of the abundance of some of the animals
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: besides the ones we hear about, like you know, everyone's heard, yeah,
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: I mean just you know that looked like clouds moving
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: and took days for the herds of the past. But
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: you never hear someone articulate like how many you know
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: a prong horner antelope we're on the landscape, or how
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: many big horn sheep? Were people ever encountering those in
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: a way that would be surprising to us? Now, Oh
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: yeah they were. I mean one of my favorite descriptions
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: of those animals is uh John James Otto Buns in
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: eighteen forty three. I mean, here, you've got a guy,
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: you know who is the most celebrated, uh nature painter
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: in the United States. Uh. He had just completed in
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: eight thirty eight The Birds of America that made him
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: a worldwide literary and artistic figure. Had gone on a
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: book tour of Europe with his hair cascading down around
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: his shoulders and dressed in Buckskins is kind of the
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: classic American noble savage. And he returns to the United
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: States after this very successful book tour and decides he's
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: gonna do the same thing for the mammals of America
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: that he had just done for the birds. He had
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: painted four and thirty five American birds, all life size
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: on the page, and so he decides he can't obviously
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: paint elk and buy some life size on a page,
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: but he's going to try to do something similar. He's
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: gonna try to to portray all the great native creatures
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: of North Americ Okay. In order to do that, he's
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: got to make a trip to the west. So he
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: and his sons Um and a couple of companions in
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: three go up the Missouri River and he gets into
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: western North Dakota um approaching the Montana border, and right
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: some of the most extraordinary descriptions of the multitudes of
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: animals that he's seeing that I've ever read. I mean,
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: he says that no one could conceive of the numbers
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: of animals of many different varieties that they were seeing
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: day after day after day from the proudest steam vessel,
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: the Omega that was pushing up to Fort Union, and
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: he closed one of my favorite lines of his. He
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: wrote his wife a letter and he closed it with
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: he was writing late at night, and he was describing
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: for all these animals. He was saying. Every day, he said,
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: I've never seen so many wolves in my life. I mean,
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: we're going up the river and there's a wolf lying
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: on the sandbar. There's another one climbing up the bank
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: on the other side. There's some sitting out on sandbars
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: in the middle of the river watching us like dogs.
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: There was a picturesque heard of bison at the same time,
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: cantering along and in front of us in the river.
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: I heard of about thirty elk or swimming the river.
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: And the racks of the bulls are projecting out of
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: the water, and the tips are sweeping along the surface,
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: and their mountain rams. And he just goes on and on,
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: and he finally says to her, I've got to stop writing.
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: I'm not gonna be able to go to sleep. I'm
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: too excited to keep going. I just I can't write anymore.
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: And he he gives you this, you know, this lived
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: sense of what it was like to see all these animals.
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: Now you know what I've done and in the book
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: is okay, I've provided the what we think what biologists
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: think were the numbers of these animals. We think there
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: were probably, depending on the climate, between twenty million and
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: thirty million bison. Thirty million when the climate was good
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: there were plenty of rains and the grass was lush,
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: probably twenty million when there were droughts. And so it's
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: it's not a static figure. It obviously it's consistent of
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: what we see today with wild the numbers I mean
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: lesser versions, but I mean it's it's nothing to have
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: populations increase and decrease like that, absolutely, and I mean
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: pretty on a pretty short time scale and a short
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: time scale. And that's how that's exactly how it functioned.
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: It's it's more a an algebraic kind of equation than
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: it is some static figure. But the static figure that
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: we have, and the same thing happened with these animals too,
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: for prong horns, is about fifteen million UM four we've
• 37:59
  Speaker 1: got at present, let's say about six hundred thousand. Yeah,
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: so from fifteen million, and I mean the one of
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: the stories I tell in the book is that the
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: Yano Sticado Plateau of West Texas eastern New Mexico. That's
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: the country where you and I went to look at
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: the Black Water draw elephants side. Uh, that was one
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: of the best pronghorn ranges in the West. It probably
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: had during the heyday of pronghorns, as many as two
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: and a half three million pronghorns. Vernon Bailey of the
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: United States Biological Survey made a trip across the Yanno
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: Staccato in and at that point he counted thirty two
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: thirty two of them were left in eight h in
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: that particular part of the of the Great Plains. So
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: what happened to all those I mean, you hear like
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: we've gone into such a scruciating detail by what happened
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: all the Yeah, you know, like all the facts that
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: went into the near extermination of the buffalo or bison,
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: and and uh, you know where what they were being
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: used for in the commodification of them. You never read
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: about some guy just stacking up a shipload antelope and
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: sending the hides and tongues off in rail cards. But
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: they did that. They did exactly that. And the reason
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: they did that was because after the Civil War, I mean,
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: you've got this this large contingent of young American men
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: who have fought in the war for both the Union
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: and the Confederacy, who no weapons, very well, they know
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: how to shoot. And many of them return home, especially
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: the Confederates, to a devastated region where you couldn't really
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: make a living. And one of the things they did,
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: we think probably as many as twenty thousand of them
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: probably did this is they went out onto the Great
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: Plains and for as long as the animals lasted, they
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: hunted for a living. They hunted for the market, and
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: once the bison were gone, they turned to each of
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: the other animals in turn supplying supplying meat locally and
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: export and export that's right, hides, uh, dried flesh, whatever,
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: whatever you could basically get by shooting these animals down
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: and selling them to the American or the Canadian or
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: the European market. And so once the bison were gone,
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: they turned their hand to prong horns and began doing
• 40:42
  Speaker 1: exactly what they had done with bison. Two prong horns,
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: I mean, they shot them down. They one of the
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: things you could do with prong horns. They were reluctant
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: to leave their ranges, their home ranges, and you could
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: get a band of them running and they would not
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: exit their home range, and people, these hunters on horses
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: could just work their way around in the center of
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: this this running herd of antelope. And after they would
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: make the rounds of about a ten or twelve or
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: fifteen mile home range three or four times, they were
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: completely exhausted, and at that point you could almost walk
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: up to them and club them in the head. And
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: so using techniques like that and also UH in places
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: like the Black Hills, they would surround prong wars in
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: the winter when the snow was too deep for them
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: to get away, and just kill them by I mean
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: like like hunters killed harp seals uh in the twentieth
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: century and just clubbed them down and basically ripped their
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: hides off the Sometimes they would sell the meat, but
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: mostly they were selling the hides. But it's not a
• 41:51
  Speaker 1: good it's not a quality high high, but it was
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: what was left the bicenter gone. And so they do
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: this in turn to to prong horns to elk um
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: and I mean by nine five the big horn rams
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: of the Great Plains UH, the mountain sheep are gone
• 42:11
  Speaker 1: to in places like the Northern Plains bad lands, they're gone. Yeah,
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: and in the and in that case, you also have
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: like you we mentioned earlier, like there's always this idea
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: that disease may have played a role. I think with
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: big horn sheep. As sheep came out, you also have
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: doubt about it. And you know you have pneumonia which
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: may with that particularly am one might have been more devastating,
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: like people now and then try to make the case
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: that what happened that you can't explain what happened to
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: the buffalo unless you look at disease. I don't know
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: if that that just seems to be an idea that's
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: sort of always out there. No, it's definitely there, and
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: I think it's it's correct. The problem with it, And
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: I mean, so here's an example of it. We know
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: that the last eight hundred to a thousand bison that
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: we're out there that were being rounded up to provide
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: the nucleus of the herds we have today, they almost
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: hall all had bovine tuberculosis. Uh. They were infected with that.
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: Some of the herds ended up uh getting brucellosis by
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: nine hundred. Not all of them did, but some of
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: them ended up with brucellosis, which is another exotic disease.
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: And one of the diseases that we don't know much
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: about the impact of but probably didn't have some impact
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: because there's sure evidence that it was out there is
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: that sometime after eighteen hundred, anthrax probably got among the
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: western bison herds. And so these are all Eurasian livestock
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: disease with non native animals. Yeah, and especially when when
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: oxen and cattle were being driven over the immigrant trails
• 43:54
  Speaker 1: through the Buffalo range from the twenties, possibility disease transmition down.
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: There's a possibility as they transfer, and it almost certainly happened.
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: The problem with it is that it's really hard to quantify.
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: We don't really know what what kind of effect it had,
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: except that it probably had a pretty considerable effect. So
• 44:13
  Speaker 1: very very obviously the same thing happened with sheep. So
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: what what's the time frame like there? When guys, when
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: when you say that you had all these market hunters
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: who are making money and sometimes good money, hunting for
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: the buffalo hide market, when they had turned their attention
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: to analop or turned her attention to helt it still
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: it probably took decades, right, I mean, to get things
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: to such a depleted To get things so depleted that
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: we started to take legal action to try to protect
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: animals and regulate hunting didn't happen as slowly as you
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: would think. I mean, it was pretty quick because there
• 44:48
  Speaker 1: were a lot of guys out there, and a lot
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: of them had become very skilled in doing this. Uh,
• 44:55
  Speaker 1: they knew the weaknesses of the animals. And I mean,
• 44:59
  Speaker 1: I'll give you one example, and uh, there's a cowboy
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: named George Wolfforth who is rounding up stray cattle um
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: on the Texas Yano Esticado in a canyon where I
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: used to live, and I lived in West Texas, Yellow
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: House Canyon. He he rides up one morning out of
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: Yellow House Canyon, and of course there's this gigantic plateau
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: out in front of him that stretches a hundred and
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: fifty miles east and west and north and south about
• 45:28
  Speaker 1: three hundred miles and at a slight pitch to from
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: west to east, that's right. And he rides up on
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: this out of the canyon, up on this plateau and
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: it's a foggy morning, and he's sitting on his horse
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: looking for strays and sees the fog beginning to lift,
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: and as it lifts, and this is night, this is
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: as it lifts. What he sees, he says, as far
• 45:53
  Speaker 1: as the eye could see, and the fog made it
• 45:55
  Speaker 1: this sort of mystical, unreal kind of image. All he
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: could see on the plane where there were no more buffalo,
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: he saw no more wolves, he saw no bears, he
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: saw no elk. All he could see were bands of
• 46:14
  Speaker 1: prong horns and bands of wild horses. Those were the
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: last two surviving animals. And when it was only prong
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: horns left, when the elk had either been killed or
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: driven into the rockies. Because that's what happened to some
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: of these animals, uh, They basically fled to the mountains
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: from this kind of pressure. When it's nothing but wild
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: horses and prong horns left, the hunters went after the
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: prong horns, and mustangers went after the horses. And I
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: mean we know, for example, after the horses for what, well,
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: not meat, No, no, not meat. They were after them
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: for two things. Basically, they were especially hired cowboys from
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: the ranches that were then beginning to populate the great planes.
• 47:04
  Speaker 1: We're shooting them down because they were competition for grass,
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: for Yeah, for cattle, and so they were cowboys were
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: hired just to go out and shoot them down. But
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: by about nineteen fifteen or so. Uh. And you know
• 47:21
  Speaker 1: you have to when you think about wild horses, now,
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: what you have to realize is that wild horses, remember,
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: had gone extinct in the place to scene, but we
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: had reintroduced them. We Europeans had reintroduced them to the
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: America's uh in the fifteen hundreds. And one of the
• 47:40
  Speaker 1: remarkable environmental stories in North America is the success of
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: the horse when it's reintroduced to the place where horses
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: had evolved. Because North America's where horses had evolved fifty
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: six million years of horse evolution. So what factor drove
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: in to extinction that then went away in time for
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: them to come back, We have no I did, but
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: when they were bazaars l But when they were reintroduced,
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: they went feral across the Great Plains, I mean in
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: an instant. You've written about that, like you've written about
• 48:13
  Speaker 1: the the routes they were through trade and theft and wandering. Yeah,
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: they got primarily the horses got loose in the West
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: as a result of what's called the Pueblo revolt of
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: six eighty in New Mexico. It's when the Pueblo Indians
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: drive the Spaniards out of New Mexico for a dozen
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: years and capture all their hurts. I mean they trade,
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: for example, sheep and goats to the Navajos, which is
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: what creates the modern Navajo economy of of hurting those animals.
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: And they traded horses up the Rockies. Within about fifty years,
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: horses had gotten from New Mexico all the way into Canada,
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: traded up both sides of the Rocky, both sides of
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: the Rockies, which is what creates the Great Plains horse
• 48:55
  Speaker 1: riding Indians. But a lot of horses got away and
• 48:59
  Speaker 1: scattered in to the Plains as a result of the
• 49:01
  Speaker 1: Pueblo revolt. And so that's sixteen eighty. We think by
• 49:06
  Speaker 1: eighteen hundred, wild horse urge on the Great Plains probably
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: numbered as high as between one and two million animals.
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: I mean, they became the basis of a major economy
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: in the West for about a century. How many horses
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: live in the US now not wild horses? Uh No,
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: I don't know. I probably knew that figure at some point,
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: but I don't recall how many, but we've got about
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: forty to fifty thousand wild horses. But one of the
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: interesting things about that that's a controversial animal. It's controversial animal.
• 49:40
  Speaker 1: And one of the reasons is because it's not the
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: Great Plains where they are. They're out in the sagebrush deserts,
• 49:46
  Speaker 1: so the Great Basin, particularly in Nevada, and so it
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: was the Great Plains where they really went feral when
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: they were returned here. And we think probably by nineteen
• 49:59
  Speaker 1: hundred the number may have been as high as three
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: million wild horses on the Great Plains. But about nineteen
• 50:06
  Speaker 1: fifteen we discovered, uh that Americans had sort of created
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: a new economy with pet dogs and cats that needed food,
• 50:18
  Speaker 1: and so the Midwest, especially the Kettle Ration Company, began
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: to build pet food plants. And what happened to most
• 50:28
  Speaker 1: of the wild horses in the West by the late
• 50:31
  Speaker 1: teens and twenties was that they ended up getting caught
• 50:35
  Speaker 1: by mustangers and shipped by rail to Illinois and turned
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: into cans of dug food. In Illinois kept kept slaughtering
• 50:45
  Speaker 1: horses up until very recently. Up until very recently, now, JR. Simplot,
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: you know when you buy a French fry you know,
• 50:54
  Speaker 1: very likely came off, you know the result of j R.
• 50:57
  Speaker 1: Simplos work. JR. Simplot got his start. Can you explain that?
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: I'm sorry? Like like he's a simp. JR. Simplot as
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: a major provider of seed potatoes, and I think they
• 51:09
  Speaker 1: do a lot of they do, my rights that they
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: don't know what they still do provide like McDonald's French. Yeah,
• 51:16
  Speaker 1: he got you know, he got his start. He bought
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: uh a bunch of teachers somewhere We're getting paid with
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: these bonds because of some school funding shortages, and he started.
• 51:28
  Speaker 1: He bought the bonds at fifty cents on the dollar
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: or something like that and used and then when the
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: bonds mature, turned around using to buy a bunch of
• 51:37
  Speaker 1: piglets and went out in the desert and fattened all
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: those piglets on wild horse meat. And that was sort
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: of the start of Simplot. Then, I when I was
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: when I lived in Miles City, Montana, we had a
• 51:49
  Speaker 1: guy in his nineties and lived next to us, and
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: in the thirties he had been a must are well.
• 51:55
  Speaker 1: He was raising pigs on horse and he said that
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: they would have the most beautiful sheen the pigs would
• 52:04
  Speaker 1: get the most beautiful sheen, he said, a very tight
• 52:07
  Speaker 1: curl in the tail, perfectly erect ears like every sign
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: of a well fed pig. He was reluctant to send
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: the pigs to slaughter with meat in their belly. He
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: would finish them on barley, just to clean their system out.
• 52:21
  Speaker 1: He said, they would visibly deteriorate quality and before his
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: eyes and barley and he would take a horse, take
• 52:28
  Speaker 1: it into the pig pen, shoot the horse tied off
• 52:31
  Speaker 1: to a fence post, pull the hide of the tractor,
• 52:33
  Speaker 1: and sell the hide for three bucks. Then he'd give
• 52:36
  Speaker 1: the pigs a day or two and they'd eat it
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: down to the bone. And then before the bones was
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: splinter he'd going to throw all the bones out of there.
• 52:44
  Speaker 1: One day, him and his brother were cutting wood and
• 52:48
  Speaker 1: he cut his thumb off on the saw. His better
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: flicked dead into the pig pen. Pigs eight that send
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: those off. That's a great storys day. And he was
• 53:00
  Speaker 1: just like, what did finger that? THO? I don't know
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: how to fathom up. Yeah, so someone bought a pig
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: that had actually been eating folks. But um, it's just
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: like the picture he paints like how horses were used
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: and viewed is bizarre. Well, yeah, that's so that's one, uh,
• 53:19
  Speaker 1: one way that they were used. I mean, I can
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: tell you to others. There was an attempt actually in
• 53:25
  Speaker 1: the eighteen nineties to use horse meat in the United
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: States to feed the poor in the eighteen nineties. Yeah,
• 53:33
  Speaker 1: there's a I've got a newspaper article from nine seven.
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: In fact, it's over here on the Pacific coast, I think,
• 53:38
  Speaker 1: let's see it from Seattle, someone arguing that's what we
• 53:42
  Speaker 1: ought to do in order to to feed America's poor,
• 53:46
  Speaker 1: is that we should feed them because we've got a
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: lot of horses, with plenty of wild horses too, And
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: that's what one good use of horse meat would be,
• 53:55
  Speaker 1: is to feed the poor. But one one way that
• 54:00
  Speaker 1: I guarantee you lots of wild horses ended up sacrificing
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: their lives for kind of a dual good as people
• 54:07
  Speaker 1: saw it in those days, was they would be caught
• 54:11
  Speaker 1: and led out, shot and then laced with stryct nine
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: in order to kill the one last big animal, charismatic
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: animal of the old American serengetti, which was gray wolves.
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: And so the technique that the biological survey used for
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: the teens and twenties and into the thirties when there
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: were still plenty of horses around in order to poison wolves,
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: uh in large numbers, and to try to eradicate coyotes
• 54:45
  Speaker 1: as well, was to lead horses out and shoot them
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: and lace the carcass. You'd inject before the vastar system
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: shut down, you'd inject the strict nine in there to
• 54:54
  Speaker 1: to distribute it, so it would distribute it through the
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: through the body. That's right. Yeah, And that was again
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: for better grades, for better cattle country to get rid of,
• 55:04
  Speaker 1: to get rid of, but on cattle, yeah, for the
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: for the sake certainly for the sake of converting that
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: landscape into a working agricultural society. And you know, I mean,
• 55:19
  Speaker 1: one of the things I say in this book is
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: first of all, thinking about the great planes as uh,
• 55:27
  Speaker 1: this grand wildlife spectacle that you could without any stretch whatsoever,
• 55:35
  Speaker 1: referred to as the American Serengeti. Is a kind of
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: a way to reconceptualize it. To me, in the proper
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: ecological way, this did exist, because we've kind of in
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: a way forgotten that it existed. The only story that
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: we've preserved out of any of this really is the
• 55:51
  Speaker 1: story of of bison, and we haven't really preserved the
• 55:55
  Speaker 1: story of all the grizzly bears that were out on
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: the Great Plans, for example, feeding on the bison surplus,
• 56:02
  Speaker 1: and the dead animals that bison that drowned in the
• 56:04
  Speaker 1: rivers and so forth. We haven't thought too much about wolves,
• 56:08
  Speaker 1: or of driving elk into the mountains, or of the
• 56:10
  Speaker 1: prong horns slaughter, or of what happened to the wild horses.
• 56:14
  Speaker 1: We've just thought about bison. But if you think of
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: it in the hole, it's easier to conceptualize it as
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: this really was an American Serengetti that we had, And
• 56:24
  Speaker 1: what's so striking about it to me is that we
• 56:27
  Speaker 1: almost wholesale converted it into this agricultural, privatized landscape, agricultural empire,
• 56:33
  Speaker 1: whereas the colonial powers in Africa they didn't really do that.
• 56:38
  Speaker 1: I mean, they made sure that we ended up with
• 56:41
  Speaker 1: Serengeti National Park and the Massimer National Preserve and Kruger
• 56:47
  Speaker 1: National Park in the Veld in South Africa. So in
• 56:50
  Speaker 1: Africa we ended up with these big game parks to
• 56:54
  Speaker 1: preserve the African version of this and in North America
• 56:58
  Speaker 1: he declared it fly over country. Declared a fly over country,
• 57:01
  Speaker 1: and a place that you just ignored that really wasn't
• 57:05
  Speaker 1: interesting enough for people to even stay there. I mean,
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: it's been. One of the stories of the Great Plains
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: is that unlike any other region of the United States
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: and the twenty twenty first centuries, it endlessly is hemorrhaging
• 57:19
  Speaker 1: population and losing people. So one of the I mean,
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: the way I end this book is that, um so
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: that it's not a complete downer about what we did
• 57:30
  Speaker 1: and it's just all gone. Is that. I mean, one
• 57:34
  Speaker 1: of the really uplifting parts of this story is that
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: you get to the twenty first century and in Montana
• 57:40
  Speaker 1: along the Missouri River, we've got this organization called the
• 57:44
  Speaker 1: American Prayer Reserve that is so far raised about a
• 57:49
  Speaker 1: hundred million dollars in the last ten or twelve years
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: in order to try to tie together uh two big
• 57:57
  Speaker 1: public lands, the Charlie Russell National wild Life Refuge and
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: the Missouri Breaks National Monument with the private lands that
• 58:05
  Speaker 1: lie in between them. And what they're trying to do
• 58:07
  Speaker 1: is to as ranches come up for sale, to try
• 58:11
  Speaker 1: to buy them with yeah, and willing buyers with the
• 58:16
  Speaker 1: idea that we can ultimately create this this preserve uh
• 58:23
  Speaker 1: that will kind of be really uh a Yellowstone of
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: the Great Plains, I mean, and they're hoping for an
• 58:32
  Speaker 1: aerial extent that's gonna be twice the size of Yellowstone. Also,
• 58:35
  Speaker 1: it's two million acres. They're hoping. American Prairie Reserve is
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: hoping for as much as three and a half to
• 58:41
  Speaker 1: four million acres of land where we actually can do
• 58:45
  Speaker 1: what has happened in the parks in Africa and recreate
• 58:48
  Speaker 1: this American serengetti with all these these animals restored grizzly
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: bears and gray wolves and prong horns and bison of course,
• 58:58
  Speaker 1: and you know, possibly uh the full suite of animals
• 59:03
  Speaker 1: that were there hundred and fifty years ago. Are they
• 59:05
  Speaker 1: seeking a park designation? And you know, no, they're not,
• 59:09
  Speaker 1: at least they're not saying they are now. They're they're
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: sort of arguing at this point that uh, it's going
• 59:16
  Speaker 1: to be uh, it's gonna be private enterprise that creates it.
• 59:21
  Speaker 1: It's gotta be accessible to the public. Um, they're running
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: black management right now on some of it. Yeah, public
• 59:30
  Speaker 1: access hunting we'll see, you know, just to editorialize a
• 59:35
  Speaker 1: little bit, I think they'll find tremendous amounts of support
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: um with outdoors and if they are ticking, if they
• 59:41
  Speaker 1: clarify and articking that that a little bit, but which
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: might do them some good. It would do them some good.
• 59:47
  Speaker 1: It would bring a constituency that they may not have anticipated,
• 59:52
  Speaker 1: I think, because unfortunately just to I don't know if
• 59:55
  Speaker 1: it's editorializing or not. But when I hear that, I
• 59:58
  Speaker 1: can already hear the voices of you know, a lot
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 1: of people that we deal with every day. When they
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 1: hear that, they're going take it all the way from me.
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: But you gott understand that they're dealing with in the
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 1: private land. They're dealing with private land, already deeded land, right,
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 1: So I mean, in some way you could argue what
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 1: they're doing right now. They're not decreasing access. Um. I
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 1: want to I want to move on to the to
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 1: your your coyote. Yeah, but first I want to ask
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 1: you something because this has always bothered me. Is there
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: a proof that there were not elk in the mountains.
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 1: I always hear that this idea that elk were pushed
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 1: into the mountains. Don't you think that it was? There
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: was elk across the entire range. They were eradicated in
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 1: some areas and continue to survive in some areas. I
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 1: think there were elk in the mountains. Yeah, yeah, like
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 1: people when people say, I I hear that so much,
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 1: but just doesn't make sense to me. I think, you know,
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 1: there were grizzlies in the mountains, There were elk in
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 1: the mountains. There were there were big horns sheep in
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: the mountains. Obviously those animals were also out on the
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: Great plains, and they ended up the ones that were
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: on the Great Plains ended up either being killed or
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 1: or fleeing to the mountains, but just gradually pushed by pressure,
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 1: because I mean you can you can push animals. I
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 1: mean we see it today, like pressure moves animals. But
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 1: I just have a hard time imagine that they very quickly, Yeah, yeah,
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 1: to to like an alpine environment. I'm guessing that they
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 1: were just evenly distributed, and you saw the great abundance.
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 1: Now we think of him as a mountain animal, but
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 1: they were planes animals. Oh man, they were planes animal
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 1: for sure. Yeah, there's no doubt. All right, So layoff
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 1: the Kyote Book. I call m coylets. I know the
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 1: proper terms maybe coyote. Well, I call it wildly coyote.
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 1: I don't call him wildly coyote. You know, you don't
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 1: say wild coyote. You know. It's funny. My kids been
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: watching Um I let him watch Looney Tunes just because
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 1: I relate to it, and m they watched a lot
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 1: of road running wildly coyote. And outside of my house
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 1: was a phone pole that like provides part of my
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 1: house that's leaning at a precipitous angle. And my brother
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: was visiting. He commented how that phone pole is gonna
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 1: tip over, and my son asked, well, the whole house
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: tip over too, And my brother said, I think these
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: kids watch too much. They learned physics from Wiley. And
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 1: while Yoe, of course, can fall off the highest cliff
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: in the solar system and it, you know, it flattens him.
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 1: But he who gets up and walks away from you
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 1: can't teach your kids the natural laws but water that show.
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 1: But yeah, so, so lay out the Kyote book for me.
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna call him kyotes just for consistency. Yeah so,
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 1: and but but what I will say about that is
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 1: and I tell the story and two places in the
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 1: introduction and then in a chapter called prairie Wolves, which
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: is what they were originally called in America the books
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 1: Kyote America. The book is called Coyote America, A Natural
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 1: and Supernatural History. But I lay out the story in
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 1: two different places in that book. Why you say coyote
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 1: and I say kyote. Yeah. And I always said, anybody
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 1: who's ever killed one, say yeah, Well, that's that's served.
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: That's sort of it. People who killed them, who managed them,
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 1: who attempted to poison them to extermination back in the nineties,
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 1: I'll call them coyotes. And the origin of that too
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 1: syllable pronunciation goes back to the mountain men who were
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: in the uh Southwest in the southern Rockies in the
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 1: eighteen thirties and eighteen forties, because they for the first time,
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 1: we're encountering a name other than prairie wolf. Everybody in
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 1: America who first encountered coyotes in the early nineteenth century,
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 1: starting with Lewis and Clark, That's the name Lewis and
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: Clark gave them, was prairie wolf. That's what everybody calls
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 1: his old trapping books refuses that name. Yeah, and I
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 1: would be like, what in the healthy time about the
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 1: one day had occurred to me that he talk about,
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 1: But he was writing, Yeah, that's right. And there I've
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 1: seen examples and by nineteen fifteen or so where people
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: are still using the term prairie wolf, that was the
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: Anglo American name for an animal that they had never
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: seen before. Because coyotes, I mean, they back up with
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 1: their evolution a little bit, and because this is a
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: really they've got the probably the most fascinating biography of
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 1: any animal in North America. And it is uh a
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 1: surprising and unexpected story really that coyotes have. They are
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: part of the evolution of the canad family that took
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 1: place in North America beginning five point three million years ago,
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: and that produced all the wolves, all the jackals, and
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 1: the coyote east of North America all around the world.
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 1: So all the jackals of Africa and southern Europe, all
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 1: the wolves of the entire globe all come from the
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 1: evolution of a North American family of animals, the canad family,
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 1: that evolved five point three million years ago. Yeah, and
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 1: so what's so for one thing, it makes coyotes, I
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 1: mean they're a distinctively North American animal in part because
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 1: they not only evolved here, we think probably in the
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 1: southwest is where this family of animals evolved. But unlike
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 1: jackals and wolves, coyotes never left North America. They remained here. Wolves,
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 1: on the other hand, became cosmopolitan, followed the big herds
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 1: of animals that were migrating across the Bearing Strait and
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 1: across the the Connectivity Bridge to Europe and ended up
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 1: in Europe and Asia and everywhere else. Jackals ended up
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 1: about a million years ago, separating from the coyote line
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 1: and and getting into Africa and southern Europe. Coyotes never left.
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 1: They stayed in North America, and they were found only
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 1: in the West, from the Great Plains westward when America
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 1: is like Lewis and Clark first encountered them, so nobody
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: who was settling Plymouth or Jamestown ever encountered a coyote.
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 1: Lewis and Clark get to what is now Nebraska in
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 1: the fall of eighteen o four, and in the stretch
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 1: of about it's about three weeks, they encounter all the
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 1: classic animals of the American West. They encounter the first bison,
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 1: they've ever seen. Uh. This is in middle of August
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 1: of eighteen o four. They counter pronkorn antelope they encounter,
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 1: they say, a deer with strangely large ears that hops
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: rather than runs. The mule deer. Uh. And then they say,
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 1: and we keep seeing this fox, a kind of fox
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 1: that nobody has ever seen before. And after about a
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 1: week or so of describing seeing this fox, one of
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 1: the hunters in the party finally shoots one, and William
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: Clark lays it out on the grass and he starts
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 1: looking at it, and he says, this is not a fox.
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 1: This is some kind of wolf. It's a small wolf.
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 1: But but this is a wolf. And he says, I
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 1: think the best name for it, since we're out in
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 1: the prairies is a prey wolf, And so Lewis and
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 1: Clark name it a prairie wolf. And for more than
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 1: a hundred years many Americans refer to coyotes as prai wolves.
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 1: But in the eighteen thirties and eighteen forties, Americans start
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 1: going across the plains to Santa Fe. After, for example,
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: Mexico becomes independent of Spain. In one they open up
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 1: the trade between Missouri and Santa Fe. And so all
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 1: of these traders are going from St. Louis to Santa Fe,
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 1: and along with them go mountain men to trap the
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 1: beaver streams like kick Carson. And when these guys get
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 1: to Santa Fe and they start pointing out there goes
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 1: a prairie wolf. The people in Santa Fe say, no,
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 1: that's a coyote. And so these Americans listen to that
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 1: word coyote, and what they're actually hearing is a Spanish
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 1: version of a no waddle Indian word. And or nowat
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 1: is the name of the language. No what is the
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 1: language that the Aztecs spoke. And some of the settlers
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 1: who had gone to to found Santa Fe in sixteen
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 1: had been either Aztec or know what speakers, Indians who
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 1: had been probably subjugated by the Aztecs and forced to
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 1: speak the Essex language. And so they got to Santa
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 1: Fe and they saw these animals. They used the old
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 1: Aztec word for them, which was the original pronunciation, was coyote.
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 1: The Spaniards heard coyot, the Indian word, they converted it
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 1: to coyote in a Latin pronunciation. And then Anglo Americans
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 1: started showing up in the eighteen thirties and they they
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 1: hear coyote and his Frederick Ruxton, one of the chroniclers
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 1: of the mountain man life and the Southern Rockies, says,
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 1: as we all sat around the campfires in the Southern
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 1: Rockies in the thirties and the eighteen forties, you could
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 1: hear the mex that can say coyote. The Indians say coyote,
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 1: and all the trappers would say they couldn't pronounce that
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 1: with three syllables. They would say coyote. And of course
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 1: those guys went back to Kentucky and Virginia and Illinois,
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 1: and when they heard people say, so, did you see
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 1: any prairie wolves out there, they would say, so, you
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 1: mean coyotes. What we've ended up with, then is kind
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 1: of a a bifurcatid pronunciation where rural people in America,
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 1: and as you said a minute ago, people who tend
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 1: to shoot coyotes, that's what they say. I just that's
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 1: a coyote. But in the sort of more literary circles
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 1: of urban places, yeah, they used the term. They used
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 1: the term coyote as the as the classic pronunciation, and
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 1: I think it's probably what they're trying to do is
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 1: to pay homage to the Spanish pronunciation. Nobody says coyote anymore,
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 1: but but a lot of a lot of people say coyote.
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 1: That's fascinating, man, I had no idea. Yeah, so they're
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 1: So that's one of many gems that's in your book. Yeah,
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 1: that's one of the things that you're going to discover.
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 1: You're also going to discover, as I said, that these
• 1:11:17
  Speaker 1: are North American animals that evolved more than five million
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 1: years ago, and one of the fascinating uh consequences of
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 1: that today is one of the things we've got going
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 1: on in the eastern United States is the emergence of
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 1: an animal called the coy wolf, and it's an intermixture
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 1: and interbreeding between coyotes that, under persecution by the federal
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 1: government and state governments over the last seventy or so years,
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 1: have expanded their range out of the West all over
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 1: North America, and not just all over North America, not
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 1: just a Maine and Florida and Virginia, but into all
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 1: the major cities of the United States. They've done that
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 1: because they've been persecuted, but it's taken coyotes into places
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 1: where there are remnant Eastern wolves. And one of the
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 1: things that's happened is that they are freely interbreeding with
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 1: the red wolves, the endangered red wolf of the South,
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 1: and with these Eastern wolves that are still found in
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 1: eastern Canada and creating a new predator that is on Minnesota,
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 1: Wisconsin and New York and Virginia and the Deep South.
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 1: They're creating this animal where they run into Eastern wolves.
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 1: That's where they run into from the Great Lakes, basically
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 1: eastward in Canada, and thens are going, yeah, when when
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 1: they how does of work is it? Is it a
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 1: male wolf female kyote? It's yeah, it's usually that way. Yeah,
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 1: it's usually uh, male wolf and female coyote. But evidently
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 1: there have been crosses that have gone the other way.
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 1: They produced viable offspring. And the reason they do is
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 1: because red wolves and Eastern wolves are also from this
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 1: North American wolf stock that never left North America, and
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 1: so they're closely related biological aid coyotes, and so they
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 1: easily interbreed. But in the West where we have gray wolves.
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 1: Gray wolves, for example, in Yellowstone, when they were introduced
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 1: into Yellowstone in ninety six, the first thing that happened
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 1: was that gray wolves knocked the coyote population back in
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 1: Yellowstone by fifty They gray wolves do not interbreed with coyotes.
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 1: They kill them. They attack them. And the reason we
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 1: think this is happening is because gray wolves are are
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 1: a set of wolves. There are five subspecies of them
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 1: that left North America, evolved for a couple of million years,
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 1: probably in Asia and in Europe, and then only began
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 1: returning to North America about twenty thousand years ago. So
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 1: they had had enough separate evolution and another part of
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 1: the globe that by the time they returned to North America,
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 1: they no longer recognized any biological ties with with coyotes
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 1: or with American wolves like red wolves, and their reaction
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 1: to coyotes has not been to interbreed with them, but
• 1:14:51
  Speaker 1: to basically attack them and kill them. Yeah, and Kyle's
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 1: returned to favor on foxes. A lot of red fire,
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 1: there's a lot of gray foxes. And and that's when
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 1: they roll in. That's that's right. It's the big dog,
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 1: little dog thing, and it happens at every every level.
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 1: But I mean, I was telling you, I mean before
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 1: we we started on air here that what we think
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 1: explains the cleverness, the wiliness, and the survivability of coyotes.
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 1: I mean, if you think about this for a second,
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 1: we managed to wipe wolves out in North America. We
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 1: extra pated wolves, We did everything we could, even including
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 1: passing a law in one that earmark coyotes for total
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 1: extermination in the United States, and have not been able
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 1: to do it. Despite spending billions of dollars and developing
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 1: a whole witches brew of poisons to try to eradicate them,
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 1: we have never been able to do that. So one
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 1: of the things about the coyotes story is that this
• 1:16:05
  Speaker 1: is a story that turns upside down. Are our notion
• 1:16:10
  Speaker 1: about the human relationship to nature, where we think we
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 1: arrive and everything goes ship bang because nothing in nature
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 1: is able to resist us. The coyote story is completely
• 1:16:23
  Speaker 1: the opposite. These guys have forecundity. It's attributed to the
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 1: fact that for the last twenty thousand years they have
• 1:16:32
  Speaker 1: been persecuted by gray wolves, and they evolved an ability
• 1:16:37
  Speaker 1: to survive under persecution and even to colonize new areas
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 1: under persecution. So what we think is going on is
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 1: that coyotes haven't evolved their wiliness and their ability to
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 1: survive and our in our presence and under our persecution.
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 1: Just as a result of the last two hundred years
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 1: of us trying to wipe them out, they brought to
• 1:16:59
  Speaker 1: bear these evolutionary adaptations that go back at least twenty
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 1: thousand years as a result of their interaction with gray
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 1: wolves and what they evolved or it was a whole
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 1: suite of these kind of remarkable adaptations. One of them
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 1: that's probably the most important one is called fishing fusion adaptation. Now,
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 1: what it means is coyotes and they're only about nineteen
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 1: mammal species around the world that can do this. One
• 1:17:30
  Speaker 1: of the other ones happens to be us. We do this,
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 1: and what it means is they have the ability to
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 1: exist both communally in the in coyote terms and packs
• 1:17:43
  Speaker 1: or as singles and pairs and so, whereas wolves are
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 1: only pack animals. And it became kind of their Achilles
• 1:17:53
  Speaker 1: hill when the government was trying to poison them out,
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 1: because you could kill one wolf out of a pack
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 1: and use the scent glands of that wolf to bait
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 1: your your meat cubes, and you would in turn, in
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 1: a few days, kill every single animal in the pack,
• 1:18:10
  Speaker 1: as they would be drawn to the scent of that
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 1: lost companion. But coyotes, when you try to do that,
• 1:18:17
  Speaker 1: their response is to go into this fish and fusion
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 1: kind of adaptation and they just scattered to the winds.
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 1: And what they do is when you're persecuting them and
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 1: driving their populations down, one of the things coyotes, I mean,
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 1: we all love how coyotes howl. What they're actually doing
• 1:18:37
  Speaker 1: with those howls is they're taking a census of the
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 1: coyote population in a territory. And if they howl at
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 1: night and they don't hear responsive house from other pairs
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 1: or packs of coyotes, that triggers an autogenic response to
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 1: hormonal response in them, so that they have larger litters.
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 1: And so as you drive the population of them down
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 1: and they take this howling sensus and don't hear other
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 1: coyotes in the landscape, they produced larger litters. And what
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 1: these larger litters often prompt them to do is to
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 1: go into what's called colonization mode. So they start going
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 1: out to the ages of their territory and expanding and colonizing.
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 1: And what it's meant that is that once we started
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 1: trying to eradicate them. That produced the spread of coyotes
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 1: all over North America. I mean, in response to our persecution,
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 1: they scattered everywhere. I once watched a movie, a documentary
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 1: that was highly critical of coyote hunting, okay, and it
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 1: was like a pro kyote movie, highly critical of Kyle hunting.
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 1: And the thing he makes the point, he's like, the
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 1: more you hunt them, the more we're gonna have. But
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 1: then I want to think it o. So if that's true,
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 1: then I would think that you would welcome hunting because
• 1:20:04
  Speaker 1: you like them, and it makes more of them. It does. Indeed,
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 1: if you live in and you want them, you should
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 1: send your cousin in Nebraska. That's right, go out and
• 1:20:18
  Speaker 1: go out and blast away at them. Yeah, it's so
• 1:20:21
  Speaker 1: they you know, they make up this this creature that
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 1: in a lot of ways throws environmentalists for a loop.
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 1: I mean, I had a conversation a few months ago
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 1: with a couple of women who wanted to do a
• 1:20:34
  Speaker 1: coyote documentary, and we sat down over the conversation and
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 1: it emerged fairly quickly that what they wanted to do
• 1:20:40
  Speaker 1: was to do a documentary to save the coyote, and
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 1: so I had to say to them, so you realize
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 1: that they don't need your help. They are perfectly capable,
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 1: thank you of saving themselves and go about it in
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 1: a completely nonchalant manner, trotting by looking at you with
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 1: those yellow eyes and sort of see you later. You know,
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 1: so long, it's been good to know you. And they
• 1:21:05
  Speaker 1: don't really need your help. Uh, they can do it
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 1: very well on their own. So it's it's not the
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 1: hand of the handful of a small handful of species
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 1: like that. Yeah, very small handful of Canada geese. And
• 1:21:20
  Speaker 1: these guys are you know. The truth is, and if
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 1: we thought of them this way, I think it might
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 1: change the way people think of them. I mean, what
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 1: they are is they're a wolf. They're a small species
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 1: of wolf. And so what you know, if you if
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 1: you sit in back East in your study and you
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 1: lament the loss of wolves in America and you would
• 1:21:44
  Speaker 1: love to see wolves return to America and a coyote
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 1: trots through your backyard, that's cause for celebration because the
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 1: fact is that's what they are, and they have managed
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 1: to uh to re inhabit our landscapes, including our biggest cities.
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 1: I mean, one of the great recent stories of coyote
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 1: was a group of people walking out of a bar
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 1: in Queen's Last Spring and looked up. They heard a
• 1:22:14
  Speaker 1: sound and looked up and a coyote was on the
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 1: roof of the bar and queens looking down at them,
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 1: and they snapped pictures with their phones, and somebody, of
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 1: course calls the police, who alert animal control, and the
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 1: animal control people arrived. The coyote is just sort of
• 1:22:32
  Speaker 1: walking back and forth along the roof of the bar,
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 1: and people by now gathered out in the street, traffics
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 1: going by. Here's this kyote a few feet away, And
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 1: as soon as the animal control truck comes around the
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 1: corner with lights on, the coyote looks back behind him.
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 1: There's an abandoned building with broken glass in the windows,
• 1:22:49
  Speaker 1: and sort of like some Hollywood action hero, he just
• 1:22:52
  Speaker 1: sort of hops off the roof of the bar through
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 1: the broken glass of them. If the building has got
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 1: that's great man, you know, uh, I kind of we're
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 1: getting We're I'm gonna wrap it up, but I want
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 1: to remind remind you something that you said all those
• 1:23:08
  Speaker 1: years ago when I was in your class. I'm trying
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 1: to think of what year it would have been somewhere
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 1: here or something like that. Yeah, we were talking about
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 1: a famous battle, um Adobe Walls. Tell everyone what the
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 1: Battle of Adobe Walls was. I know there's like part
• 1:23:25
  Speaker 1: one in part two. But you you were getting you
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 1: were driving out a story about where one of the
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 1: participants from the Indian side, from the Native American side,
• 1:23:34
  Speaker 1: one of the participants described what went wrong at that battle.
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 1: Jock supposed to the narrative of what went wrong from
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 1: them from the Euro American side, So you can. I'll
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 1: remind you later what it was. But you just at
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 1: the stage for what that battle was. Yeah, well, I
• 1:23:52
  Speaker 1: mean and I remember the story. I tell you too.
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 1: They the Battle of Adobe Walls was battle between buffalo
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 1: hunters and the Texas Panhandle who were holed up in
• 1:24:04
  Speaker 1: this old trading fort, uh which is up above the
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 1: present day Amarillo on the Canadian River, and a group
• 1:24:12
  Speaker 1: of Comanches and Southern Cheyennes, who, by the Treaty of
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 1: Medicine Lodge Creek of eighteen sixty eight, knew that buffalo
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 1: hunters weren't supposed to be below the Arkansas River. The
• 1:24:27
  Speaker 1: Treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek, the Indians that insisted the
• 1:24:30
  Speaker 1: buffalo hunters have to stay north of the Arkansas in Kansas.
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 1: And yeah, so here these guys were, these buffalo hunters
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 1: had crossed the deadline and had gone down into the
• 1:24:42
  Speaker 1: Texas Panhandle where they weren't supposed to be. And so
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 1: this group of Comanches and Southern Cheyennes felt perfectly justified
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 1: in attacking this buffalo hunter camp. And so they mounted
• 1:24:56
  Speaker 1: up a war party, and about have o'clock in the morning,
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 1: just as as it was starting to get light, they
• 1:25:04
  Speaker 1: decided to make a raid on this camp and wipe
• 1:25:07
  Speaker 1: these guys out. And from the side of the story
• 1:25:13
  Speaker 1: of the buffalo Hunters, some guy gets up at about
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 1: four thirty or five in the morning, he's got to
• 1:25:19
  Speaker 1: go outside and take a whizz, and he's as he's
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 1: taking a whizz, he looks up on the ridge and
• 1:25:24
  Speaker 1: he sees silhouetted in the coming twilight of the morning,
• 1:25:29
  Speaker 1: this group of Indians getting ready to ride down on them.
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 1: That's one version of what happened. Another is that, uh,
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 1: this was an old fort and uh a vega or
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 1: one of the roof beams cracked and it woke somebody
• 1:25:44
  Speaker 1: up and I walked outside and we're looking around to
• 1:25:49
  Speaker 1: see what had happened, and looked at old adobe, old
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 1: adobe building, and this roof beam cracked, and so it
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 1: woke a couple of them up, and they walked outside
• 1:26:00
  Speaker 1: and they saw anyway, the Indians launched an attack, which
• 1:26:03
  Speaker 1: they thought was going to be a surprise attack on
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 1: the sleeping camp, and it turned out some of these
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 1: guys were already up, and so they repulse the attack,
• 1:26:13
  Speaker 1: and the Indians, in attempting to explain it later, so
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 1: we'll see if this is how you remember. The Indians,
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 1: in attempting to explain it later, used their own cause
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 1: effect logic to explain why this had happened the way
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 1: it had. And their logic was not that damn, we
• 1:26:37
  Speaker 1: were gonna launch a surprise attack, and some of those
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 1: guys were already up, and they alerted everybody else. Their
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 1: logic was on the way to the attack. That morning,
• 1:26:46
  Speaker 1: one of the Cheyen's has shot a skunk, and it
• 1:26:51
  Speaker 1: was taboo to arrow a skunk, and so that had
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 1: screwed the medicine for the whole band, and so when
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 1: they launched that attack, they no longer had the right
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 1: medicine with them and in their cause and effect explanation,
• 1:27:08
  Speaker 1: which we would call a supernatural explanation for why it failed.
• 1:27:15
  Speaker 1: This was the reason a taboo had been broken, the
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 1: animals had turned against them, and therefore the attack was
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 1: a failure. It took me ten years to understand what
• 1:27:26
  Speaker 1: that story means. I resisted it at first. That's not
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 1: what happened. What happened was but but when you were
• 1:27:34
  Speaker 1: telling you, you you were making the point of we have
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 1: our ways of explaining things, and we have these things
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 1: that are true to us, you know. And I'm like,
• 1:27:46
  Speaker 1: a decade later, I'm like, you know, I do I
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 1: Finally I'm old enough now or I've been around enough now,
• 1:27:51
  Speaker 1: I'm like, he was right. He's right. It's because the
• 1:27:53
  Speaker 1: god damn s gone. So you worry about that for
• 1:27:56
  Speaker 1: ten years. I would return to it periodically. Uh yeah,
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 1: you never said anything. Ran You didn't say much. Concluding
• 1:28:06
  Speaker 1: thoughts Man Too Million name one of my favorite podcast today.
• 1:28:11
  Speaker 1: I think, Um, I have a clarifying question. Well, I
• 1:28:15
  Speaker 1: have a couple of things. Well, I'm wondering if we
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 1: have enough time, because I think we could if it's
• 1:28:19
  Speaker 1: all right with you, if you can chat a little
• 1:28:21
  Speaker 1: bit longer. I would love to hear to talk about
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 1: just the bit if we could get like the very
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 1: abridge version of the bison, the bison story story, but
• 1:28:31
  Speaker 1: his his influential paper here, and then coyotes. It's always
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 1: kind of this myth that you hear about, like the
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 1: more you shoot him, the more there's gonna be. So really,
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 1: what what what what you explain that is to be true?
• 1:28:47
  Speaker 1: Like there they are going to produce more offspring the
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 1: more pressure you're putting on them whatever poisoning shooting. Yeah,
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 1: So one of the ways that we know it's different
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 1: from what it could be is that we had about
• 1:29:02
  Speaker 1: seventy years in Yellowstone, for example, of healthy coyote population,
• 1:29:08
  Speaker 1: nobody hunting them, no wolves there because wolves are eliminated
• 1:29:13
  Speaker 1: from Yellowstone by about and we don't get wolves there
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 1: again until we have this period of about seventy years
• 1:29:23
  Speaker 1: where there's a coyote population that biologists can study that
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 1: don't get pressured either by people or by gray wolves.
• 1:29:31
  Speaker 1: And what they did is very interesting. Their population rose
• 1:29:36
  Speaker 1: to this carrying capacity plateau and it never got any bigger.
• 1:29:42
  Speaker 1: And so as soon as wolves arrived, what happened was
• 1:29:47
  Speaker 1: the kyote population dropped by almost half, but then under
• 1:29:52
  Speaker 1: wolf pressure, it has begun to build back to its
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 1: original size and large, and they have scattered out of
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 1: the park. So it's almost like this test case of
• 1:30:07
  Speaker 1: the theory of whether or not it's pressure that causes
• 1:30:11
  Speaker 1: them both to colonize and expand their range and also
• 1:30:14
  Speaker 1: caused their causes their population to rise. And so the
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 1: guy who's done this study also did UM for his
• 1:30:22
  Speaker 1: PhD dissertation. He studied UH the Hanford Preserve around Hanford,
• 1:30:29
  Speaker 1: where the same thing was true. There were no wolves,
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 1: people weren't shooting, trapping, or poisoning. It's in Washington State,
• 1:30:37
  Speaker 1: it's the Handford Nuclear site. And what he discovered was
• 1:30:43
  Speaker 1: the same phenomenon that without pressure, their populations rise to
• 1:30:49
  Speaker 1: this caring capacity level and then they they don't get
• 1:30:53
  Speaker 1: any bigger. And the reason they don't is because it's
• 1:30:57
  Speaker 1: not so much the litter sizes fall. They followed to
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 1: maybe four or five pups, whereas when they're under pressure
• 1:31:04
  Speaker 1: sometimes they'll have thirteen or fourteen pups. But the litter
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 1: size were followed about four or five pups. And because
• 1:31:10
  Speaker 1: the UH, the population of coyotes was at the carrying
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 1: capacity of the resources, they would not often be able
• 1:31:19
  Speaker 1: to get all those pups raised without losing a couple
• 1:31:24
  Speaker 1: of them or maybe three of them, because there just
• 1:31:27
  Speaker 1: wasn't weren't enough resources out there to raise the entire litter,
• 1:31:31
  Speaker 1: and so that seemed to be the the what provided
• 1:31:35
  Speaker 1: the ceiling um. So, I mean, we actually do have
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 1: a couple of these sort of test cases where you
• 1:31:42
  Speaker 1: can observe what happens if they don't have any pressure
• 1:31:45
  Speaker 1: on them, and Yellowstone is probably the best one. But
• 1:31:49
  Speaker 1: as I said, there's this this at least one other
• 1:31:51
  Speaker 1: one too that people have studied. Because he hasn't got
• 1:31:57
  Speaker 1: he wanted him to explain that, I know, the fog
• 1:32:00
  Speaker 1: question with the coyote the then does that flip like
• 1:32:05
  Speaker 1: the whole freederor control thing to like basically, kill more
• 1:32:08
  Speaker 1: coyotes equals more big bucks. How does that relate to
• 1:32:12
  Speaker 1: that you're not and just the research that you've done
• 1:32:16
  Speaker 1: and your yeah, well, I mean there's a so for example,
• 1:32:20
  Speaker 1: state of Utah um with a Mule Deer Protection Act
• 1:32:24
  Speaker 1: few years ago, you know, created a bounty on let
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 1: stay bounty on coyotes. They did that almost two years
• 1:32:34
  Speaker 1: to the day after a major study came out on
• 1:32:41
  Speaker 1: coyote effects on mule deer populations in Idaho. It was
• 1:32:45
  Speaker 1: a result of about a ten year study on coyotes
• 1:32:49
  Speaker 1: and mule deer, and the conclusion of this study, authored
• 1:32:52
  Speaker 1: by about fifteen or sixteen biologists, was that coyotes had
• 1:32:56
  Speaker 1: virtually no effect on mule deer populations. And I mean,
• 1:33:02
  Speaker 1: this is one of those classic instances, almost like like
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 1: climate science or something, some major study comes out and
• 1:33:10
  Speaker 1: next door, the neighboring state completely ignores it and nonetheless
• 1:33:17
  Speaker 1: goes ahead and puts a bounty on coyotes in order
• 1:33:20
  Speaker 1: to save mutle here. So the science that's out there
• 1:33:24
  Speaker 1: indicates I mean, and this science goes back to the
• 1:33:26
  Speaker 1: nineteen thirties really when the Murray brothers were studying coyote
• 1:33:31
  Speaker 1: depredations in Yellowstone and in Jackson Hole. Because the biological
• 1:33:36
  Speaker 1: survey actually they wiped out wolves. They decided, I mean,
• 1:33:40
  Speaker 1: you know, you can kind of see the transparency of it.
• 1:33:42
  Speaker 1: It's the government bureau, our major target is gone. We
• 1:33:47
  Speaker 1: gotta survive some way. So they proclaim the coyote is
• 1:33:52
  Speaker 1: the arch predator of our time. It turns out, actually
• 1:33:55
  Speaker 1: most of that predation that was going on that was
• 1:33:57
  Speaker 1: really coyotes and not wolves. So we need government needs
• 1:34:00
  Speaker 1: to keep funding us, and we need to continue to
• 1:34:03
  Speaker 1: to do this predator control thing. And they send the
• 1:34:06
  Speaker 1: Murray brothers out to study coyote predation on game animals
• 1:34:13
  Speaker 1: as the arch predator of our time in Yellowstone and
• 1:34:16
  Speaker 1: Jackson Hole, and both the Murray brothers, o Loss and
• 1:34:21
  Speaker 1: Adolph both argue that we have no evidence that coyotes
• 1:34:30
  Speaker 1: are causing the population of sheep, muled ere, prong horns,
• 1:34:37
  Speaker 1: big horns, elk, any of those animals to go down.
• 1:34:42
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's true and bad winners. They will sometimes
• 1:34:46
  Speaker 1: manage to kill a calf, and you can certainly find
• 1:34:50
  Speaker 1: as the Bureau had as hunters had arguable, we can
• 1:34:53
  Speaker 1: open their stomachs up after we poise them and it's
• 1:34:55
  Speaker 1: got elk meat. But the Mury brothers watched them close
• 1:34:59
  Speaker 1: enough to realize it's scavenged. I mean, these elkers are
• 1:35:03
  Speaker 1: then bad winners, their animals dying, and for sure the
• 1:35:06
  Speaker 1: coyotes are going out and scavenging on the dead animals,
• 1:35:10
  Speaker 1: but they're not out there hauling down elk in packs
• 1:35:15
  Speaker 1: of little coyotes nipping at their heels. The same conversations
• 1:35:18
  Speaker 1: happened right now in the East with white tails, where
• 1:35:20
  Speaker 1: a lot of even though study after study keeps coming
• 1:35:24
  Speaker 1: out saying, you know, I think that the white tailed
• 1:35:27
  Speaker 1: decline we've been seeing in the last you know, five six,
• 1:35:29
  Speaker 1: seven years is contemporaneous with coyotes coming in. UM. It
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 1: seems that maybe it's not what's really going on here.
• 1:35:37
  Speaker 1: There could be other factors that play. And there's a
• 1:35:39
  Speaker 1: great reluctance with people to accept that because it's it's
• 1:35:44
  Speaker 1: a it's just it's clean. Yeah, we like, we love skapegoats.
• 1:35:49
  Speaker 1: You know, it's clean. It's clean to think that way.
• 1:35:51
  Speaker 1: I got friends in Wisconsin, good friends who on one hand,
• 1:35:55
  Speaker 1: advocate and we need to shoot more white tails. We've
• 1:35:57
  Speaker 1: got too many white tails. That's we've got unhealth. They heard,
• 1:36:00
  Speaker 1: there's too much risk of disease transmission. I gotta shoot
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 1: coyotes because they're going after the deer. So well, they
• 1:36:10
  Speaker 1: don't want the coyote to get the deer. You know,
• 1:36:13
  Speaker 1: they want to they want to put their tag on it.
• 1:36:15
  Speaker 1: But but I do, you know, I do. I had
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 1: a guy recently telling me that the thing he and
• 1:36:23
  Speaker 1: he see, he's a very student observer of the natural
• 1:36:27
  Speaker 1: world in his area in Kentucky, and he was saying,
• 1:36:29
  Speaker 1: he's he says, I'll tell you one thing that happened
• 1:36:32
  Speaker 1: when coyotes came in here. He says, fucking groundhogs vanished.
• 1:36:38
  Speaker 1: No one else is crying for groundhogs. But he's like,
• 1:36:40
  Speaker 1: that's one thing I do think is exactly attributable, because
• 1:36:44
  Speaker 1: I think they came in and just hammered the groundho
• 1:36:47
  Speaker 1: I'm sure they probably did that, you know. And what
• 1:36:49
  Speaker 1: people in in in New York and Chicago and Denver
• 1:36:53
  Speaker 1: and l A I'll argue is that you know your
• 1:36:55
  Speaker 1: pets aren't safe when coyotes are in town. That's the
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 1: that's that that argument is the least interesting to me. Yeah, well,
• 1:37:02
  Speaker 1: that's just that's you know, for for a lot of
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 1: people living in the suburbs. That's the thing that I mean.
• 1:37:06
  Speaker 1: I just saw online the other day a couple that
• 1:37:10
  Speaker 1: had invented a coyote vest and you put it on
• 1:37:15
  Speaker 1: your little dog and it's got these spikes coming out
• 1:37:19
  Speaker 1: of the vest and some sort of quills that come
• 1:37:23
  Speaker 1: up off the back of its neck, and it's supposed
• 1:37:25
  Speaker 1: to repel coyote attacks. And I mean they're advertising on
• 1:37:29
  Speaker 1: the internet that they've got these coyote vest that you
• 1:37:32
  Speaker 1: can buy. But I mean, what's actually going on is
• 1:37:37
  Speaker 1: it's not everybody thinks. What's happening is that coyotes in
• 1:37:40
  Speaker 1: urban situations, you know, they're scarvenging. They're scavenging garbage from
• 1:37:45
  Speaker 1: the back of the McDonald's and the burger king, and
• 1:37:47
  Speaker 1: they're they're eating cats, and they're eating poodles and stuff.
• 1:37:52
  Speaker 1: I mean, the truth is what they do in urban
• 1:37:54
  Speaker 1: areas is the same thing they do in rural areas.
• 1:37:56
  Speaker 1: They basically go after mice and rats. Operation they eat
• 1:38:00
  Speaker 1: a lot of grassopers, a lot of fruit, and primarily
• 1:38:03
  Speaker 1: mice and rats. And although they do kill cats and
• 1:38:06
  Speaker 1: they do kill small dogs, it's not because they're eating them.
• 1:38:10
  Speaker 1: It's because they regard them as intra guild competitive predators.
• 1:38:15
  Speaker 1: And they see a cat or a small dog out there,
• 1:38:17
  Speaker 1: and their response to that is that this is another
• 1:38:20
  Speaker 1: predator that's invaded my territory, and so they will kill them.
• 1:38:24
  Speaker 1: But I mean, very rarely will they haul them off
• 1:38:27
  Speaker 1: and chow down on them. I mean, this is just
• 1:38:30
  Speaker 1: another one of the urban myths about coyotes that's out
• 1:38:34
  Speaker 1: there from the perspective of the pet owner, it probably
• 1:38:37
  Speaker 1: doesn't matter. So it doesn't matter the animal is dead,
• 1:38:42
  Speaker 1: or it might be better actually if they haul the
• 1:38:44
  Speaker 1: cat down to the den of pups. And actually the
• 1:38:47
  Speaker 1: cat gott was made some use of. But yeah, coyote vests,
• 1:38:52
  Speaker 1: so you can you can acquire one, no doubt soon
• 1:38:57
  Speaker 1: for your cat as well as your dog. That was
• 1:39:01
  Speaker 1: your follow up question. You wanted to know about bison
• 1:39:04
  Speaker 1: though the story, well, the the chapter that I do
• 1:39:10
  Speaker 1: in American Serengetti on Bison, uh is a it's a
• 1:39:14
  Speaker 1: new take, and so it's not the it's not a
• 1:39:18
  Speaker 1: regurgitation of my original story, although I do I do
• 1:39:23
  Speaker 1: build on that. And what that story argued was that
• 1:39:27
  Speaker 1: what we've thought about what happened to bison is far
• 1:39:30
  Speaker 1: too simple. I mean, we've basically always argued that, you know,
• 1:39:34
  Speaker 1: they they were still sixty million of them at the
• 1:39:36
  Speaker 1: end of the Civil War, and these buffalo hunters go
• 1:39:39
  Speaker 1: out in the space of twenty years, they managed to
• 1:39:43
  Speaker 1: wipe out sixty million animals in the market hunt, and
• 1:39:47
  Speaker 1: that's what happened to him. And what I argued in
• 1:39:49
  Speaker 1: that piece back in was that the truth is uh
• 1:39:55
  Speaker 1: the bison herds. For one thing, we're never that big.
• 1:39:59
  Speaker 1: They were only about how that size. And secondly, they
• 1:40:02
  Speaker 1: were dwindling visibly as early as eighteen fifty because of
• 1:40:09
  Speaker 1: a whole group of causes that kind of came together
• 1:40:15
  Speaker 1: like a perfect storm in the fourties and eighteen fifties.
• 1:40:19
  Speaker 1: And UH one of them certainly was the market hunt,
• 1:40:22
  Speaker 1: although it wasn't the hide the American hide hunters who
• 1:40:27
  Speaker 1: responsibly primarily was Indians being caught up in the the
• 1:40:31
  Speaker 1: buffalo robe trade that was sponsored by the fur companies.
• 1:40:38
  Speaker 1: Hides with hair on right and and tanned by Indian
• 1:40:41
  Speaker 1: women who were who were the processors, who were the
• 1:40:44
  Speaker 1: labor force, and the men would go out and and
• 1:40:48
  Speaker 1: procure the animal, and the women would take the pelt
• 1:40:52
  Speaker 1: off and then tan the the robe and produced this
• 1:40:55
  Speaker 1: marketable commodity that was then traded to UH, to the
• 1:40:58
  Speaker 1: fur trade company. So there was there was blankets and
• 1:41:04
  Speaker 1: for all kinds of things, primarily primarily as people were
• 1:41:09
  Speaker 1: sort of competing for the last big buffalo hunting grounds.
• 1:41:13
  Speaker 1: In many instances, UH, what they were getting in trade
• 1:41:18
  Speaker 1: were firearms and ammunition and powder. UH, metal goods of
• 1:41:24
  Speaker 1: all kinds, certainly textile blankets and beads and things, but
• 1:41:29
  Speaker 1: often firearms and ammunition because there was a there was
• 1:41:34
  Speaker 1: a competition for these last grounds of of huntable animals.
• 1:41:39
  Speaker 1: I mean the Lakota people, the Western Lakotas were driving
• 1:41:43
  Speaker 1: across the Great Plains from east to west during all
• 1:41:45
  Speaker 1: these times, taking away the buffalo grounds of the Pawnees,
• 1:41:51
  Speaker 1: the buffalo ultimately the buffalo grounds of the crows Uh
• 1:41:55
  Speaker 1: in order to to exploit the herds themselves. So it
• 1:41:58
  Speaker 1: was kind of this capitalist market fueled inner tribal competition
• 1:42:04
  Speaker 1: for the the last remaining resource. So that was one
• 1:42:07
  Speaker 1: of the causes, but there were others. One was the
• 1:42:11
  Speaker 1: spread of horses across the plains, again, which ate the
• 1:42:15
  Speaker 1: same grass uh drank the water that bison drank, and so,
• 1:42:20
  Speaker 1: and the horse numbers were becoming high enough that the
• 1:42:23
  Speaker 1: competition between horses and bison was getting to draw down
• 1:42:27
  Speaker 1: the size of the buffalo herds. And there was as
• 1:42:31
  Speaker 1: well the fact that diseases, exotic bovine diseases whose impact
• 1:42:38
  Speaker 1: we can't really quantify, but things like bovine tuberculosis and
• 1:42:42
  Speaker 1: anthrax were having an impact by the eight forties because
• 1:42:45
  Speaker 1: of the immigrant trails that were going across the plains.
• 1:42:48
  Speaker 1: And then perhaps the one that's uh the easiest to
• 1:42:54
  Speaker 1: to assess in terms of quantifying is the change in
• 1:42:59
  Speaker 1: climate that was happening in the eighteen forties and eighteen fifties.
• 1:43:03
  Speaker 1: And what what was going on was that what we
• 1:43:06
  Speaker 1: called the Little Ice Age, about a two hundred and
• 1:43:09
  Speaker 1: fifty year period of much cooler, wetter temperatures in the
• 1:43:13
  Speaker 1: northern hemisphere, was coming to an end in the eighteen
• 1:43:18
  Speaker 1: fourties and eighteen fifties, and as it came to an end,
• 1:43:21
  Speaker 1: it was producing a series of droughts. Uh, there was
• 1:43:24
  Speaker 1: a a drought on the Great Plans in the eighteen
• 1:43:27
  Speaker 1: fifties and early eighteen sixties that was probably the most
• 1:43:29
  Speaker 1: severe drought that we have a record of in the
• 1:43:32
  Speaker 1: last thousand years. And as it drew down the carrying
• 1:43:35
  Speaker 1: capacity of the grasslands, what this meant was that buffalo
• 1:43:39
  Speaker 1: didn't have as much grass to eat, and so the
• 1:43:41
  Speaker 1: numbers were plummeting as a result of deteriorating environmental conditions
• 1:43:48
  Speaker 1: for them. And one final thing that I talked about,
• 1:43:52
  Speaker 1: I talked about all of these causes in this article,
• 1:43:54
  Speaker 1: which argued for this multiplicity of causes The one other
• 1:43:58
  Speaker 1: one I talked about was the fact that in the past,
• 1:44:01
  Speaker 1: when conditions like this had prevailed on the Great Plains,
• 1:44:05
  Speaker 1: Buffalo had tended to migrate westward into the mountains where
• 1:44:09
  Speaker 1: there was more grass and lusher conditions, and eastward out
• 1:44:13
  Speaker 1: into the prairies towards the Mississippi River, where there would
• 1:44:16
  Speaker 1: be more more grass and more rainfall. But by the
• 1:44:20
  Speaker 1: eighteen forties, American Indian policy had basically placed something like
• 1:44:27
  Speaker 1: five thousand Eastern Indians in Kansas and Oklahoma in the
• 1:44:34
  Speaker 1: Indian Territory as a part of the removal policy, most
• 1:44:38
  Speaker 1: famous aspect of which is the Cherokee Trail of Tears,
• 1:44:42
  Speaker 1: where they're taken out of the southeast and put out
• 1:44:45
  Speaker 1: in Oklahoma. And that puts this body of people right
• 1:44:50
  Speaker 1: in the way of where Buffalo would formally have spread
• 1:44:54
  Speaker 1: eastward in order to to sort of relieve the pressure
• 1:44:58
  Speaker 1: of a drought out on the pla. So they don't
• 1:45:01
  Speaker 1: have any refuges to expand into anymore, and they're just
• 1:45:05
  Speaker 1: kind of caught out in a deteriorating Great Plains landscape
• 1:45:09
  Speaker 1: with all these other effects. And so the argument became
• 1:45:14
  Speaker 1: that by eighteen fifty, I mean we actually probably only
• 1:45:17
  Speaker 1: have maybe twelve fourteen million buffalo left on the Great Planes,
• 1:45:23
  Speaker 1: not sixty million, So by the end of the Civil War,
• 1:45:26
  Speaker 1: that makes it quite a bit easier for the white
• 1:45:29
  Speaker 1: hight hunters to arrive and sort of shoot down the
• 1:45:32
  Speaker 1: remaining animals. So that was the story that I did
• 1:45:36
  Speaker 1: in and I certainly fold a good bit of that
• 1:45:39
  Speaker 1: into the chapter on Buffalo. But I try to tell
• 1:45:42
  Speaker 1: a sort of a bigger story in in this chapter
• 1:45:47
  Speaker 1: in American Serengetti about Buffalo and and the main thing
• 1:45:50
  Speaker 1: that I take on is our supposition that we all have.
• 1:45:55
  Speaker 1: I mean, you can go online and find find t
• 1:45:57
  Speaker 1: shirts that sort of argue for this that it was
• 1:46:01
  Speaker 1: a conspiracy between the federal government and the American military
• 1:46:06
  Speaker 1: that wiped out the Buffalo. People still, yeah, they still
• 1:46:12
  Speaker 1: talk about it, and the scapegoat of it is Philip Sheridan.
• 1:46:18
  Speaker 1: And Philip Sheridan you can go online right now and
• 1:46:21
  Speaker 1: find a T shirt with this quote on the front
• 1:46:24
  Speaker 1: of it. Philip Sheridan is supposed to have made this
• 1:46:29
  Speaker 1: speech in Austin, Texas in the early eighteen seventies when
• 1:46:34
  Speaker 1: the Texas legislature. As the story is told over and
• 1:46:38
  Speaker 1: over again, was considering a bill to outlaw the hide
• 1:46:42
  Speaker 1: hunt in the Texas Panhandle, and Sheridan supposedly goes to
• 1:46:47
  Speaker 1: Austin and stands up in front of Texas legislature and says,
• 1:46:51
  Speaker 1: you can't do this. What you should be doing, in fact,
• 1:46:55
  Speaker 1: is making sure that those animals are wiped out in
• 1:47:00
  Speaker 1: order to be able to put the Indians on reservations
• 1:47:04
  Speaker 1: and open up the planes to the festive cowboy and
• 1:47:08
  Speaker 1: the speckled cattle. And he goes on to say, instead
• 1:47:12
  Speaker 1: of uh detigrating these buffalo hunters, you should give them
• 1:47:18
  Speaker 1: a medal. They should be recognized as American heroes. And
• 1:47:22
  Speaker 1: the medal should have a discouraged planes Indian on one
• 1:47:26
  Speaker 1: side and a dead buffalo on the other side. And
• 1:47:29
  Speaker 1: so this story gets told, I mean, amazingly enough, no
• 1:47:34
  Speaker 1: historian had ever looked at the origin of this story.
• 1:47:37
  Speaker 1: It's told by a buffalo hunter in nineteen oh five,
• 1:47:42
  Speaker 1: during the conservation period of Teddy Roosevelt, at a time
• 1:47:46
  Speaker 1: when we were trying to save buffalo and a lot
• 1:47:48
  Speaker 1: of people thought of these buffalo hunters as having been
• 1:47:52
  Speaker 1: murderers of all these animals. And this buffalo hunter named
• 1:47:56
  Speaker 1: John Cook writes a memoir published in nineteen o five
• 1:48:00
  Speaker 1: called The Border in Buffalo, and he produces this speech
• 1:48:05
  Speaker 1: which is something like patents speech. At the beginning of
• 1:48:08
  Speaker 1: that movie. You can almost see the American flag rippling
• 1:48:12
  Speaker 1: behind Sheridan as he says all this. And historians, journalists,
• 1:48:19
  Speaker 1: the buffalo field campaign up in Yellowstone have just bought
• 1:48:24
  Speaker 1: this thing, hook, hook, line and sinker, and nobody has
• 1:48:27
  Speaker 1: ever bothered to go back and say, first of all,
• 1:48:32
  Speaker 1: the Texas ever actually trying to pass a law to
• 1:48:38
  Speaker 1: outlaw the buffalo hunt in the Panhandle. Did Philip Sheridan
• 1:48:42
  Speaker 1: ever actually go to Austin, Texas and make a speech
• 1:48:46
  Speaker 1: in front of the Texas legislature. And the answer to
• 1:48:50
  Speaker 1: both those is, Texas never considered such a law. And
• 1:48:54
  Speaker 1: in fact, when a law like this came up in
• 1:48:56
  Speaker 1: the national legislature, it was the Texas component that thought
• 1:49:01
  Speaker 1: it tooth and nail at the national level. Philip Sheridan,
• 1:49:05
  Speaker 1: we have no record that he ever went to Austin,
• 1:49:07
  Speaker 1: Texas and made such a speech. And the source of
• 1:49:12
  Speaker 1: the story, then you realize, is this buffalo hunter who's
• 1:49:17
  Speaker 1: writing his memoir at a time when buffalo hunters are
• 1:49:19
  Speaker 1: being castigated. And when you look closely at the story,
• 1:49:22
  Speaker 1: he even starts it out with this disclaimer of it
• 1:49:26
  Speaker 1: is said that the Texas legislature was considering. So he
• 1:49:32
  Speaker 1: does this kind of removes himself from it. It's not me,
• 1:49:36
  Speaker 1: it is said, however, And so I tell this story
• 1:49:41
  Speaker 1: in this chapter in order to try to disabuse people.
• 1:49:44
  Speaker 1: Dispatch a grand student down the guy who would you
• 1:49:49
  Speaker 1: remember this because that happened when you were at Montana,
• 1:49:53
  Speaker 1: Dan Brewsters his name. He is now the director of
• 1:49:57
  Speaker 1: the Buffalo Field Campaign. Yeah, and is now the director
• 1:50:01
  Speaker 1: of And he's the grad student who went down to
• 1:50:03
  Speaker 1: Austin to try to find all this and came back
• 1:50:05
  Speaker 1: from his spring break in a week of being down there.
• 1:50:08
  Speaker 1: He was working for the Buffalo Field Campaign then and said, man,
• 1:50:11
  Speaker 1: I gotta say it's not there. And so a friend
• 1:50:17
  Speaker 1: of mine who works in the National Archives, knowing that
• 1:50:20
  Speaker 1: I was working on this, dug up for me the
• 1:50:25
  Speaker 1: sort of the ultimate sort of reversal of this. I mean,
• 1:50:31
  Speaker 1: I don't know if this will rescue Philip Sheridan's reputation
• 1:50:34
  Speaker 1: or not, but Philip Sheridan was in Montana Territory in
• 1:50:40
  Speaker 1: eighteen seventy eight, and heard about buffalo hunters shooting down
• 1:50:45
  Speaker 1: buffalo right and left, and wrote a telegram to Washington saying,
• 1:50:52
  Speaker 1: I want this buffalo hunting stuff stopped right now. We
• 1:50:58
  Speaker 1: are going to end up with Indians who don't have
• 1:51:02
  Speaker 1: a bite to eat this summer because these white guys
• 1:51:05
  Speaker 1: are shooting down all these animals. We've got to stop
• 1:51:08
  Speaker 1: this bubble. I'm not shooting you. And so I quote
• 1:51:13
  Speaker 1: Shardan's exact opposite story than what he's been credited as
• 1:51:20
  Speaker 1: saying in history, this story is everywhere. It's everywhere. When
• 1:51:25
  Speaker 1: I was kind of immersed in this whole world, it
• 1:51:27
  Speaker 1: was like, it's just like, oh, I had already know,
• 1:51:29
  Speaker 1: excepted I've heard about that, and I just like always
• 1:51:33
  Speaker 1: dismayed about how many people point that out. Yeah, it's everywhere.
• 1:51:37
  Speaker 1: So one of the things, it's a comfortable, easy thing.
• 1:51:43
  Speaker 1: Well it's I mean, so think about it. We tried
• 1:51:47
  Speaker 1: to claim that, you know, in the aftermath of the
• 1:51:49
  Speaker 1: Civil War, that the Civil War is not about slavery.
• 1:51:53
  Speaker 1: It's about the Southern way of life. It's about preserving
• 1:51:58
  Speaker 1: a culture in the South. I have a brother back
• 1:52:01
  Speaker 1: in in Texas who still argues this, And so I
• 1:52:07
  Speaker 1: mean That's the reason these kinds of stories are comfortable
• 1:52:11
  Speaker 1: to us is that it removed the responsibility for the
• 1:52:15
  Speaker 1: action in history from us to some agency out there,
• 1:52:19
  Speaker 1: like the federal government that everybody is always quick to
• 1:52:23
  Speaker 1: take aim at. And so it wasn't we. We didn't
• 1:52:28
  Speaker 1: do it. The federal government in the military did this,
• 1:52:33
  Speaker 1: I mean, and the truth is, of course we did it.
• 1:52:37
  Speaker 1: American citizens did it. The market hunt did it. Unrestrained
• 1:52:41
  Speaker 1: capitalism did it. I've tried. When I was writing about
• 1:52:45
  Speaker 1: high Hunters and in my Buffalo book, I don't think.
• 1:52:50
  Speaker 1: I don't know if I ever, I don't think I
• 1:52:51
  Speaker 1: actually wrote this. But when I was talking about it,
• 1:52:53
  Speaker 1: I would say, let's let's it sound like I'm condemning
• 1:52:56
  Speaker 1: these guys. I want to say, in all honesty, I
• 1:52:59
  Speaker 1: would have been right out there with them. Yeah, there
• 1:53:02
  Speaker 1: were a lot of guys who were broke after the
• 1:53:05
  Speaker 1: How in the world would they have even like you
• 1:53:10
  Speaker 1: got some guy pushing the plow, he said, the Ohio
• 1:53:14
  Speaker 1: Valley or coming out of Pennsylvania right next to no
• 1:53:18
  Speaker 1: education or no education quite possibly illiterate, has never been
• 1:53:23
  Speaker 1: out there, did It's like that? He's like, I'll go
• 1:53:27
  Speaker 1: out there and fix them Indians and shop. It's just like,
• 1:53:30
  Speaker 1: not what he's going out there for. He was going
• 1:53:35
  Speaker 1: out there for under like money, adventure. You know. It's
• 1:53:40
  Speaker 1: like the grand picture wasn't there. I would like as
• 1:53:44
  Speaker 1: much as like I grew up, you know, I saw one.
• 1:53:46
  Speaker 1: It's earlier today. I grew up shopping for a trap
• 1:53:48
  Speaker 1: line in Canada. It's like if I was alive at
• 1:53:51
  Speaker 1: that time, If I was alive at that time, I
• 1:53:53
  Speaker 1: would have been like, you're ship me, let's go before
• 1:53:58
  Speaker 1: they're gone. Well, it's hell, you what, I can't say
• 1:54:01
  Speaker 1: that I wouldn't have been right out there too. Uh,
• 1:54:04
  Speaker 1: it's impossible to say at the time. But it's like, yeah,
• 1:54:07
  Speaker 1: it's a simple you know. You take these like kind
• 1:54:10
  Speaker 1: of like everyday motivations, the kinds of things people still
• 1:54:13
  Speaker 1: do and still think about, and apply it in that
• 1:54:16
  Speaker 1: context at that time, and that's yeah, the kinds of
• 1:54:20
  Speaker 1: things you wind up with. There were some of these
• 1:54:24
  Speaker 1: buffalo hunters like John Cook, the guy who wrote this
• 1:54:27
  Speaker 1: memoir who I mean, they defended it all to the end,
• 1:54:29
  Speaker 1: even when society had turned against it. Um. I mean.
• 1:54:33
  Speaker 1: There was a guy down in Texas, Jay Wright Moore,
• 1:54:36
  Speaker 1: who used to lead parades in his buffalo hunter outfit.
• 1:54:39
  Speaker 1: And he had this book, Buffalo Bone Days, and that's right,
• 1:54:42
  Speaker 1: Buffalo Bone Days. And his stock speech was that all
• 1:54:46
  Speaker 1: the buffalo between the Brazis River and the Platte didn't
• 1:54:51
  Speaker 1: amount to one homesteader family somewhere in Kansas, and so
• 1:54:56
  Speaker 1: don't go mourning all those buffaloes. That didn't amount to
• 1:55:00
  Speaker 1: a single thing, one homestead or family in Manita more
• 1:55:03
  Speaker 1: than that. But there were some of them buffalo Jones,
• 1:55:07
  Speaker 1: you know, in in Kansas. I mean, you know about
• 1:55:10
  Speaker 1: this guy, Steve, I know, I mean, he sort of
• 1:55:12
  Speaker 1: spent the rest of his life stricken with guilt about
• 1:55:16
  Speaker 1: what he had done. He said, I spent my entire
• 1:55:19
  Speaker 1: youth trying to wipe these animals out, and now I'm
• 1:55:22
  Speaker 1: gonna try to atone for that wickedness by attempting to
• 1:55:26
  Speaker 1: save some of them for America in the twentieth century. Yeah,
• 1:55:29
  Speaker 1: he'd ride out, try to rope up calves and then
• 1:55:33
  Speaker 1: put them on cow that's right, put him on cows
• 1:55:36
  Speaker 1: to get milk. Yeah. And he knew from his hunts
• 1:55:39
  Speaker 1: where some buffalo, even when everybody thought they were all gone,
• 1:55:44
  Speaker 1: he knew there's some of them left in the Texas
• 1:55:46
  Speaker 1: Panhandle where used to hunting those brakes along the automoskado.
• 1:55:49
  Speaker 1: I guarantee I can go down and find something. He did.
• 1:55:51
  Speaker 1: He went down and found a group of about sixty
• 1:55:54
  Speaker 1: And this was seven or eight years after everybody was
• 1:55:57
  Speaker 1: convinced that there were no more buffalo on the other planes.
• 1:56:01
  Speaker 1: I mean, but these guys, you know, they knew how
• 1:56:04
  Speaker 1: to hunt, and they knew guns, and a lot of
• 1:56:06
  Speaker 1: times that's all they knew how to do. And so
• 1:56:10
  Speaker 1: here was an opportunity to make some money from it,
• 1:56:13
  Speaker 1: and they went out and and did it. But when
• 1:56:16
  Speaker 1: you got twenty thousand of them out there on the
• 1:56:17
  Speaker 1: planes and doing it, the ultimate result is ultimate result
• 1:56:22
  Speaker 1: is in our time we only get to read books
• 1:56:28
  Speaker 1: about this or see movies about it. And one of
• 1:56:31
  Speaker 1: the things that kind of excites me about the idea
• 1:56:34
  Speaker 1: of the American Prairie Reserve and recreating the Americans Serengetti,
• 1:56:39
  Speaker 1: is I want to experience it myself. I don't want
• 1:56:44
  Speaker 1: to just read a book about what it was like
• 1:56:47
  Speaker 1: or see go see The Revenant to see what the
• 1:56:51
  Speaker 1: West was like. I mean, I want to, you know,
• 1:56:53
  Speaker 1: as thora said, I wanna I want an entire heaven
• 1:56:57
  Speaker 1: and an entire earth. I don't want to think that
• 1:56:59
  Speaker 1: some demigo has come along before me and pluck the
• 1:57:02
  Speaker 1: best of the stars out of the sky. Yeah, so
• 1:57:11
  Speaker 1: you're rooting for it, the return of the American Serengetti
• 1:57:14
  Speaker 1: a man. Absolutely, it's a noble cause there's a lot
• 1:57:21
  Speaker 1: of you know, there's a lot of arguing. A lot
• 1:57:27
  Speaker 1: of arguing needs to happen in Phillips County, Montana. I
• 1:57:30
  Speaker 1: think there's a lot of a lot of arguments gonna happen.
• 1:57:35
  Speaker 1: I certainly agree, Yeah, I certainly agree with the goal. Um,
• 1:57:39
  Speaker 1: it's gonna be like all worthwhile things, it's gonna it's
• 1:57:43
  Speaker 1: gonna amount to a fight, you know. Yeah, Well getting
• 1:57:47
  Speaker 1: Yellowstone was you know, that was that was not a
• 1:57:51
  Speaker 1: huge fight, but it was something of the fun we
• 1:57:53
  Speaker 1: all everyone listen, everyone's come to agree. Roosevelt is great man.
• 1:57:57
  Speaker 1: Everything you do is great. You think at the time
• 1:58:00
  Speaker 1: when he says, hey, I got an idea, Yeah, people
• 1:58:03
  Speaker 1: were piss well, they were living about the Grand King.
• 1:58:08
  Speaker 1: And you know when he when he made it into
• 1:58:10
  Speaker 1: a national monument. I mean, people were furious about that,
• 1:58:14
  Speaker 1: especially in Arizona and uh In Arizona Territory. I mean,
• 1:58:18
  Speaker 1: they were absolutely furious about it. But as Roosevelt said,
• 1:58:21
  Speaker 1: you know, nothing man is going to be able to
• 1:58:25
  Speaker 1: do to it is going to improve improve what it is.
• 1:58:29
  Speaker 1: The ages have been at work on it, and so
• 1:58:33
  Speaker 1: all we can do is detract from it. The best
• 1:58:35
  Speaker 1: thing to do is is to preserve it as it is.
• 1:58:38
  Speaker 1: And I think in this American Serengetti issue, it's not
• 1:58:42
  Speaker 1: that we have a remnant thing that we can preserve.
• 1:58:46
  Speaker 1: We're gonna have to recreate that and that's gonna be
• 1:58:49
  Speaker 1: That's an even that's an even bigger task. Yeah, it's
• 1:58:53
  Speaker 1: different than setting something Christine aside. Yeah, recreating something is
• 1:58:57
  Speaker 1: a bigger project. But it's kind to me on the
• 1:59:00
  Speaker 1: scale of of setting you know, the world's first national
• 1:59:04
  Speaker 1: park aside in the form of Yellowstone. Uh. And so
• 1:59:08
  Speaker 1: it's kind of a one of these big vision things
• 1:59:10
  Speaker 1: for our time, the way Yellowstone was for people in
• 1:59:14
  Speaker 1: the nineteenth century. Yeah, there's a it's coming up now,
• 1:59:22
  Speaker 1: like just in in the political environment where people look
• 1:59:25
  Speaker 1: at chunks of wild land and like the wild land
• 1:59:29
  Speaker 1: sort of has to justify its existence. It's like, well,
• 1:59:33
  Speaker 1: it's sitting there doing nothing as though every minute wild
• 1:59:40
  Speaker 1: places they're supposed to be like to lay out their
• 1:59:42
  Speaker 1: ledgers improve at any given moment, like what their value
• 1:59:46
  Speaker 1: is in the moment when I think that the more
• 1:59:49
  Speaker 1: accurate way of thinking about wild places is it's like
• 1:59:53
  Speaker 1: money in the bank. What am I doing with it
• 1:59:54
  Speaker 1: right now? It's setting there, and that ship is getting
• 1:59:57
  Speaker 1: more and more valuable every minute, and I don't know.
• 2:00:00
  Speaker 1: I might not cash it, my children might not cash it,
• 2:00:02
  Speaker 1: my grandparents might not cash it, right or my grandchildren
• 2:00:05
  Speaker 1: might not cash it. But at the same time, it's
• 2:00:07
  Speaker 1: just something they're getting exponentially more valuable as time it
• 2:00:11
  Speaker 1: goes by. And it's like disgusting to me that somehow
• 2:00:13
  Speaker 1: people look at chunk or ground and it has to
• 2:00:15
  Speaker 1: justify itself in terms of in terms jobs. All the
• 2:00:19
  Speaker 1: leopold he had this line where he said that, uh, America,
• 2:00:24
  Speaker 1: just in case. All the Leopold's are one of the
• 2:00:27
  Speaker 1: fathers of the modern conservation movement, and Avid Hunter and Fisherman,
• 2:00:31
  Speaker 1: and he had this line where he said that we've
• 2:00:34
  Speaker 1: become like hypochondriacs about our economic health, where we're incapable
• 2:00:40
  Speaker 1: of being healthy, where we view our economic health as
• 2:00:44
  Speaker 1: like you know, soul full of anxiety about it that
• 2:00:47
  Speaker 1: we can't realize that we're actually okay, you know, And
• 2:00:51
  Speaker 1: I think that the way wild lands need to just
• 2:00:53
  Speaker 1: like in sort of some kind of petty economic way,
• 2:00:57
  Speaker 1: account for what they're doing in the job cycle, all right,
• 2:01:01
  Speaker 1: Like who's creating more jobs. It's a thing like in
• 2:01:04
  Speaker 1: hunting and fishing right now, so many people are starting
• 2:01:06
  Speaker 1: starting saying like, okay, we gotta do we should do
• 2:01:08
  Speaker 1: conservation work because look at the economic imprint of hunters
• 2:01:14
  Speaker 1: and fishermen. You know, we contribute all these billions of
• 2:01:17
  Speaker 1: dollars to the economy every year. And I went up
• 2:01:20
  Speaker 1: thinking to myself, okay, so let's say you did that
• 2:01:23
  Speaker 1: same math and realized that having clean air and clean
• 2:01:26
  Speaker 1: water and wild places is costing us money. Does that
• 2:01:29
  Speaker 1: mean we feel differently about it? Like that doesn't change
• 2:01:32
  Speaker 1: my perspective on it. I'm not like, oh, yeah, you're right,
• 2:01:36
  Speaker 1: we should have wilderness because we're making money off it.
• 2:01:38
  Speaker 1: It's just like, you know, I hear that. I'm like,
• 2:01:40
  Speaker 1: you know, that's great, but it doesn't change my opinion
• 2:01:42
  Speaker 1: one way or the other. I don't like it less
• 2:01:44
  Speaker 1: or more. Now that you've justified it's value. To me,
• 2:01:49
  Speaker 1: that's that's trying to think in about values that are
• 2:01:53
  Speaker 1: sort of outside economic determinism and trying to insert them
• 2:01:58
  Speaker 1: into that kind of model. But I mean there's some
• 2:02:00
  Speaker 1: things that you don't put price tax on. I mean,
• 2:02:04
  Speaker 1: there are a lot of the It seems to me
• 2:02:06
  Speaker 1: the finer sentiments in the human spirit are not really
• 2:02:11
  Speaker 1: things that you add up in ledgers. Um. Yeah, I mean,
• 2:02:16
  Speaker 1: you know, I still believe in that old, that great
• 2:02:18
  Speaker 1: old Wallets Stigner line about the geography of Hope. That's
• 2:02:23
  Speaker 1: kind of to me what wild places represent. So I mean,
• 2:02:28
  Speaker 1: we we've as our population grows around the globe, I mean,
• 2:02:31
  Speaker 1: we're gonna be putting more pressure on wild places and
• 2:02:35
  Speaker 1: shrinking the possibility of biodiversity. Uh. And that's the theme
• 2:02:41
  Speaker 1: of the modern era. So every opportunity, it seems to
• 2:02:45
  Speaker 1: me when you can take a stand against that and
• 2:02:49
  Speaker 1: even reverse it with something like this American prairie reserve idea,
• 2:02:54
  Speaker 1: I mean, I'm that that makes me want to endorse
• 2:02:58
  Speaker 1: it and and work on behalf of it, because I
• 2:03:01
  Speaker 1: think the the primary theme is in the other direction.
• 2:03:06
  Speaker 1: So yeah, this this American Serengetti, American Prairie Reserve Project
• 2:03:14
  Speaker 1: is kind of an opportunity to do good in the
• 2:03:17
  Speaker 1: classic old Aldo Leopold Teddy Roosevelt fashion. And it's probably
• 2:03:23
  Speaker 1: one of the reasons that, you know, groups like the
• 2:03:26
  Speaker 1: National Geographic for instance, and the Grosvenor family are really
• 2:03:30
  Speaker 1: excited about it because it does have a little bit
• 2:03:33
  Speaker 1: of a whiff of that old time big vision conservation.
• 2:03:39
  Speaker 1: Uh thinking, did you know, Uh, Leopold's kid is a hydrologist.
• 2:03:45
  Speaker 1: I believe I've never I don't think i've ever met him.
• 2:03:50
  Speaker 1: I could be messing up. I think he has a son, Luna. Yeah,
• 2:03:56
  Speaker 1: I could be. I could messing this up too, but
• 2:03:57
  Speaker 1: I think it's kind of right. He says, Uh. Rivers
• 2:04:01
  Speaker 1: are the gutters through which run the ruins of continents.
• 2:04:05
  Speaker 1: It's a good one. Yeah, that's a good one too.
• 2:04:09
  Speaker 1: We could toss good clothes for these guys are after
• 2:04:11
  Speaker 1: a long time. All Right, I don't have any concluding thoughts.
• 2:04:15
  Speaker 1: That was a fine conclusion. Now, thank you for your time.
• 2:04:20
  Speaker 1: Former professor, current author Dann Floor. He's going and find
• 2:04:24
  Speaker 1: your books. You can get him on Amazon, pre order
• 2:04:27
  Speaker 1: them or order them, order one, pre order one. Yeah,
• 2:04:29
  Speaker 1: I think that's the way it is. Now you can
• 2:04:31
  Speaker 1: order American Serengetty and pre order Coyote America and Kaudy
• 2:04:35
  Speaker 1: America is not very far away, about six weeks or so. Yeah,
• 2:04:39
  Speaker 1: order now, you get it early, all right, Thanks man,
• 2:04:42
  Speaker 1: you're bad. Thanks asstsstssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss