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Speaker 1: As native animals. Wolves shape American ecologies for millions of

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Speaker 1: years and impressed early travelers with their numbers and tameness,

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Speaker 1: but were rapidly destroyed in the West when old world

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Speaker 1: stock raising replaced an Indian managed world. I'm Dan Flores

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Speaker 1: and this is the American West, brought to you by

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Speaker 1: Velvet Buck Wine. Where the hunt meets the harvest. A

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Speaker 1: portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers.

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Speaker 1: Limited supply available at Velvetbuck Vineyards dot com.

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Speaker 2: Enjoy responsible Wolf West.

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Speaker 1: At the midpoint of the nineteenth century, when Americans were

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Speaker 1: regularly traveling through the West, but except for spotty locales

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Speaker 1: in the Southwest and on the West Coast, had yet

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Speaker 1: to settle it, aspects of the ancient Indian managed continent

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Speaker 1: were still in place across much of the western country.

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Speaker 1: Judging by the accounts of those who witnessed this period,

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Speaker 1: the Catlans Bodmer's Autumns, this native West would have been

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Speaker 1: something to see, one of the spectacles of the world.

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Speaker 1: No element of this surviving version of Western America amazed

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Speaker 1: travelers as much as the staggering abundance of wild animals

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Speaker 1: and for people used to the civilized conditions of the

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Speaker 1: East or Europe. No Western animal imparted as much shock

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Speaker 1: and awe as wolves. Michael Steck, a physician traveling the

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Speaker 1: Santa Fe Trail in the early eighteen fifties, was one

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Speaker 1: of many who offers us a glimpse of what life

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Speaker 1: in a fully wolfed West was like. Steck and his

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Speaker 1: party found that any time they got among bison herds,

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Speaker 1: wolves became so astonishingly numerous that, as he wrote, we

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Speaker 1: see immense numbers of them. A common thing is to

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Speaker 1: see fifty at a sight in the daytime. We are

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Speaker 1: never out of sight of them, see hundreds in a day.

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Speaker 1: That comported with wildlife painter John James Ottoman's comment on

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Speaker 1: the Upper Missouri River that if ever there was a

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Speaker 1: country where wolves are surpassingly abundant, it's the one we

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Speaker 1: are now in. But here's the thing.

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Speaker 2: Today.

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Speaker 1: You could drive repeatedly across the country where Steck wrote

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Speaker 1: of seeing hundreds of wolves a day, or along the Missouri,

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Speaker 1: where Autobun reported the most abundant wolf population he had

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Speaker 1: ever encountered, and never see a single wolf, not one.

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Speaker 1: Our erasure of them in the years from eighteen fifty

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Speaker 1: to nineteen twenty five was that thorough until about nineteen

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Speaker 1: twenty five, though, the American West was, and for five

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Speaker 1: five million years had been, wolf country. Consider that for

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Speaker 1: a moment and understand what an anomaly the past almost

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Speaker 1: wolf three hundred years has been to a story like that.

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Speaker 1: The West wolves were from a family of animals, the Canaday,

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Speaker 1: that evolved in North America, and although some of them

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Speaker 1: migrated elsewhere and took on their present forms in Asia

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Speaker 1: and Europe before they returned to America until the nineteen twenties,

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Speaker 1: there was never a time when wolves were not America's

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Speaker 1: keystone predators. Before humans first got here twenty two thousand

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Speaker 1: or so years ago, wolves probably shaped life in America

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Speaker 1: more profoundly than any other mammal. Wolves, in other words,

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Speaker 1: played a crucial role in Western nature for millions of

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Speaker 1: years before we ever set foot on the continent. Long

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Speaker 1: before we Old Worlders arrived with our peculiar hatred of predators,

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Speaker 1: virtually every ecology in the West was shaped from the

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Speaker 1: top down by the presence of wolves. The Canaday family

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Speaker 1: first appears in the fossil record of the American Southwest

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Speaker 1: about five and a half million years ago. Like American

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Speaker 1: evolved wild horses, our early wild canids became geographically cosmopolitan

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Speaker 1: by crossing the land bridges connecting America to Eurasia. At

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Speaker 1: the same time, there were other wolves at stayed home,

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Speaker 1: giving rise to animals that became Eastern wolves and spawning

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Speaker 1: the intriguing red wolf of the South.

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Speaker 2: As well as coyotes. As we all know.

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Speaker 1: Now from this year's the Extinction announcement from Colossal Bioengineering

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Speaker 1: and full disclosure, I'm a member of Colossal's Conservation Advisory Board,

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Speaker 1: the supersized American direwolf was also part of the candid

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Speaker 1: mix in ancient America. There's still unresolved science dire wolves.

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Speaker 1: A twenty twenty one article in Nature arguing that dire

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Speaker 1: wolves may be different enough from other American wolves to

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Speaker 1: belong in a genus other than Canus, one called Ainoscion.

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Speaker 1: Before about twenty five thousand years ago, when gray wolves

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Speaker 1: began loping home to America from Eurasia, very large and

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Speaker 1: very white dire wolves dominated the wolf story in America.

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Speaker 1: At Rancho Lebrea Tarpits in California, more than four thousand

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Speaker 1: of these burly one hundred and fifty pound wolves died

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Speaker 1: in the asphalt seeps. Their remains there outnumber those of

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Speaker 1: gray wolves by one hundred to one. Game of Thrones

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Speaker 1: and George R. R.

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Speaker 2: Martin.

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Speaker 1: Notwithstanding, dire wolves were not faded to survive the extinction

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Speaker 1: crash that ended the American places, saying ten thousand years ago.

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Speaker 1: During that great extinction pulse, smaller gray wolves somehow out

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Speaker 1: competed dire wolves, but direwolf extinction still left America with

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Speaker 1: a soup of several wolf types, including coyotes. There were

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Speaker 1: no survivors of the direwolf genus. Ain't no psion though,

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Speaker 1: until colossal scientists added into a gray wolf genome twenty

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Speaker 1: specific genes of direwolf DNA from remains that were seventy

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Speaker 1: two thousand and thirteen thousand years old, then, through a

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Speaker 1: surrogate mother, scientist birth Romulus Remus and Callisi in late

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Speaker 1: twenty twenty four and early twenty twenty five. As for

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Speaker 1: gray wolves, once they joined the other American canids in

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Speaker 1: the late Pleistocene, they decidedly made their presence felt. Big

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Speaker 1: five to six foot long pack hunters weighing eighty to

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Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty pounds, gray wolves outmatched their long

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Speaker 1: lost relations Eastern and red wolves and coyotes in both

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Speaker 1: size and packing stings. Once direwolves disappeared from the continent,

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Speaker 1: gray wolves were left at the swaggering big dogs. Everywhere,

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Speaker 1: including the West, gray wolves seem to have migrated home

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Speaker 1: to America in distinctive waves half a century ago. Biological

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Speaker 1: taxonomy designated a wopping twenty three species of Canus loupus.

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Speaker 1: In twenty eleven, though, the US Fish and Wildlife Service

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Speaker 1: decided to come to terms with modern genetic research on

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Speaker 1: wolves and concluded that North America's wolves sprang from two origins.

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Speaker 1: Eastern wolves, red wolves, and coyotes all represented American wolf

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Speaker 1: evolution animals that never left the continent. Gray Wolves, on

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Speaker 1: the other hand, constituted animals that had started here, spent

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Speaker 1: some millions of years in Eurasia, then returned in several

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Speaker 1: separate distinct waves of animals during the Pleisocene. This taxonomic

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Speaker 1: rethink has shrunk the number of gray wolf subspecies from

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Speaker 1: the twenty three of the nineteen forties down to only four.

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Speaker 2: Arctic white wolves.

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Speaker 1: Canus lupus arctos, found in the extreme north of the

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Speaker 1: continent were probably the last to come home to America.

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Speaker 1: The rocky mountain wolf Canus Lupus occidentalis, found from the

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Speaker 1: Montana Rockies northward to Alaska, was likely another late arrival

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Speaker 1: from Asia. The small gray wolves of Mexico and the

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Speaker 1: American Southwest Canus Lupus bailei, the Mexican wolf, may have

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Speaker 1: led the migrations home. But the wolf that occupied more

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Speaker 1: of America than any other, extending from the Pacific across

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Speaker 1: the Great Plains, onto the western Great Lakes, and northward

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Speaker 1: through much of the eastern half of Canada, was Canus

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Speaker 1: lupus nubilus. This was the famed buffalo wolf, the Lobo

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Speaker 1: loafer or white wolf of the plains of so much

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Speaker 1: Western history. All these gray wolves arrived in time for

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Speaker 1: one of the grandest predator barbecues in world history. Before

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Speaker 1: the Pleistocene ended, gray wolves joined short face bears, saber

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Speaker 1: tooth and scimitar cats, false cheetahs, step lions, and running

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Speaker 1: hyenas to chase and pull down camels, sloths, horses, longhorned bison,

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Speaker 1: and perhaps mammoth calfs in an Africa like world that

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Speaker 1: almost seems like science fiction to us now. After the

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Speaker 1: Pleascistine extinctions took out all the giants. A reconstituted western

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Speaker 1: Bestieri bequeathed to Western gray wolves their classic place in

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Speaker 1: American ecology, with buffalo the only western grazer still standing.

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Speaker 1: After the extinctions, bison numbers skyrocketed to between twenty to

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Speaker 1: thirty million animals, some one and a half to two

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Speaker 1: million buffalo wolves served as their primary predators in this

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Speaker 1: new order, As famed Western trader and author Josiah Gregg

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Speaker 1: put it in the eighteen forties, although the buffalo is

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Speaker 1: the largest, he has by no means the control among

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Speaker 1: the prairie animals. The scepter of authority has been lodged

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Speaker 1: with the large gray wolf as keystone predators. Wolves apparently

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Speaker 1: influence continental ecology and ways that ripple through nature, affecting

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Speaker 1: not just populations of prey species, but also other predators

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Speaker 1: and scavengers, even down to the kind of vegetation like

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Speaker 1: aspens or cottonwoods found on a landscape. With gray wolves present,

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Speaker 1: coyote populations went down and fox numbers went up, and

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Speaker 1: a kind of bigger dog beats up littler dog equation.

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Speaker 1: Wolf predation exerts strong evolutionary pressures on the behaviors and

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Speaker 1: even habitat selections of wolf prey species. Such was the

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Speaker 1: scepter of authority the gray wolf wielded on Western landscapes

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Speaker 1: a century ago, and for multiple millions of years before that,

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Speaker 1: Wild America was a world in.

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Speaker 2: Good part created by wolves. In a North America.

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Speaker 1: Inhabited by native people who never domesticated or herded wild ungulates,

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Speaker 1: and who thought of all wolves as kin teachers and

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Speaker 1: totem animals. Wolves were free to play their top of

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Speaker 1: the pyramid roles as keystone predators, shaping ecologies down to

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Speaker 1: the birds that sang and the plants that grew. But

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Speaker 1: four hundred years ago, the arrival of Old worlders at

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Speaker 1: once challenged that ancient algorithm from the Old World's foothold

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Speaker 1: in Massachusetts, Bostonian William Wood wrote of the wolf from

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Speaker 1: the very beginning as a special and confusing problem for colonizers.

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Speaker 1: The confusion came from America's wolves not acting the way

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Speaker 1: Europeans had been told wolves should act. In America, Wood wrote,

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Speaker 1: it was never known yet that a wolf ever set

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Speaker 1: up on a man or a woman. That seemed impossible,

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Speaker 1: given the folk traditions about wolves in the Old World.

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Speaker 1: All those folk tales and biblical passages about ravening wolves

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Speaker 1: left colonists disoriented when America's wolves showed no aggression towards people.

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Speaker 1: But wolves in the numbers of America held were still unexpected,

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Speaker 1: and that led to a certain despair in sixteen thirties

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Speaker 1: New England, since, as Wood put it, there's little hope

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Speaker 1: of their utter destruction. So from the start the wolf

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Speaker 1: was an animal of special concern for Europeans. But why

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Speaker 1: Partly there was their lack of familiarity with the real thing.

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Speaker 1: England's own wolves hadn't lasted beyond the fourteen hundreds. Virginians

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Speaker 1: and New Englanders were living among wolves for the first

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Speaker 1: time in their lives, and, as Wood implied, they didn't

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Speaker 1: like it in the least. Then there were their imported

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Speaker 1: cultural traditions. When you had hearded domesticated animals for eight

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Speaker 1: thousand years, as these old worlders had, and was your

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Speaker 1: way of understanding how the world worked, there was a

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Speaker 1: natural tendency to see wolves as a supernatural malediction. For Christians.

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Speaker 1: Adams fall from the Garden of Eden into an earth

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Speaker 1: compromised by evil struck them as the self evident origin

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Speaker 1: of wolves, After all, didn't wolves share the yellow eyes

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Speaker 1: medieval illustration gave to Satan. Some of America's wolves were

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Speaker 1: even black, a coloring that to Europeans was suspicious in

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Speaker 1: the sixteen twenties. The actual explanation for black wolves lay

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Speaker 1: in scientific work four centuries in the future. A genomic

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Speaker 1: study from our time indicates that black coachs in America's

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Speaker 1: wolves sprang from a hybridization event between wolves and domestic

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Speaker 1: dogs in the northwest of the continent approximately thirteen thousand

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Speaker 1: years back during Clovis times. The mutation conferred a fitness advantage,

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Speaker 1: perhaps in disease resistance, that other wolves sensed, so the

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Speaker 1: visual clue of blackness affected mating choice, allowing at least

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Speaker 1: some black wolves to greet Europeans. Thousands of years later,

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Speaker 1: Native people admired wolves, whatever their color, for their bravery,

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Speaker 1: hunting skills, and devotion to mates and packs. Europeans saw

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Speaker 1: those same animals as bloodthirsty monsters, evil actors in a

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Speaker 1: fallen world. Folk stories of were wolves dim memories of

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Speaker 1: part human, part animal fantasies from the Paleolithic still circulated

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Speaker 1: in colonial times and fed a suspicion that wolves might

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Speaker 1: be avatars of a residual animality in humans, so the

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Speaker 1: unsuspecting animals were soon to enjoy the full colonial experience

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Speaker 1: of a wolf war.

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Speaker 2: The reality was that wolf.

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Speaker 1: Social lives and ecological roles were so similar to our

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Speaker 1: own that it was no accident that tamed wolves had

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Speaker 1: become our first domesticated animals twenty five thousand years before.

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Speaker 1: Wolf societies were much like human hunter gatherer bands. In both,

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Speaker 1: the leadership was usually matriarchal. The alpha female wolf directs

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Speaker 1: a pack's movements, while the larger males, especially those between

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Speaker 1: about two and five years old, are the primary hunters.

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Speaker 1: As highly social creatures, wolves are members of family packs

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Speaker 1: led by high status breeders who avoid breeding with close kin,

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Speaker 1: so a pack's grown pups eventually move out in search

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Speaker 1: of mating opportunities. While they're individualistic, wolf pups like young humans,

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Speaker 1: learned from their elders, they are steep in pack culture.

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Speaker 1: Wolves have strong emotional attachments. After absences, they greet by

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Speaker 1: standing on their hind legs, a greeting known as a rally.

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Speaker 1: They also interact with a remarkable range of body language

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Speaker 1: and facial expressions, howling, which is contagious for wolves is

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00:16:08,760 --> 00:16:11,840
Speaker 1: one of their common ways to express their emotional states,

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Speaker 1: and it enables them to recognize distant wolves from the

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Speaker 1: harmonic structure of their voices. No one knows how many

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Speaker 1: wolves were in colonial America, but since food determines pup survival,

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Speaker 1: the population of wolves in any given setting rested on

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Speaker 1: food availability. This means that packs competed with one another

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Speaker 1: for prime prey territories. In fact, before Old Worlders arrived,

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Speaker 1: the main mortality in wolves came from other wolves. Europeans

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Speaker 1: imagined America's wolves as vicious slaughterers of helpless prey. In

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Speaker 1: the real world, something different was playing out. Chasing down

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Speaker 1: in neck wrestling big animals armed with hooves and antlers

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Speaker 1: is dangerous in the extreme despite their wrong jaw muscles.

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Speaker 1: The geometry of wolve's long muzzles actually inhibits their bite

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Speaker 1: force so impossible, they go for low hanging fruit. Highly

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Speaker 1: perceptive about cost benefit, they scavenge animals already dead on

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Speaker 1: the hunt. They try for fawns and young animals are injured, diseased,

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Speaker 1: or old ones. Their strategy is to test prey in

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Speaker 1: search of those least dangerous and easiest to run down.

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Speaker 2: Even then, wolf chase.

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Speaker 1: Success dips as low as ten percent. One of Western

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Speaker 1: painter George Catlan's memorable observations was about how dearly a

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Speaker 1: wolf pack won a meal. Even an old or sick buffalo,

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Speaker 1: he wrote, was a huge and furious animal, and would

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Speaker 1: often deal death by wholesale to his canine assailants, as

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Speaker 1: Catlan put it, which he is tossing into the air

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Speaker 1: or stamping to death under his feet. Catlan's painting White

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Speaker 1: Wolves Attacking Buffalo showed such a scene with an aging

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Speaker 1: bull fighting a wolfpack with such resolution that, as Catlan wrote,

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Speaker 1: his eyes were entirely eaten out of his head, the

256
00:18:14,800 --> 00:18:18,000
Speaker 1: grizzle of his nose was mostly gone, his tongue was

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Speaker 1: half eaten off, and the skin and flesh of his

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Speaker 1: legs torn almost literally into strings. Yet even with the

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00:18:24,600 --> 00:18:28,520
Speaker 1: bull in that condition, numerous wolves, as Catlan said, were

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Speaker 1: crushed to death by the feet or horns.

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Speaker 2: Of the bull.

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Speaker 1: This kind of wolf natural history was invisible to the

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Speaker 1: new colonists, because all the settlers really cared about was

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Speaker 1: fashioning a wolf free America. In fact, Woods, Massachusetts Colony

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00:18:46,480 --> 00:18:51,800
Speaker 1: passed the first environmental law in colonial American history. It

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Speaker 1: was a bounty on the continents wolves. When Western travelers

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Speaker 1: like Meriwether Lewis, George Catlin, and John James Ottoman first

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Speaker 1: observed wolves in the West, they referred to them as

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Speaker 1: the shepherds of the buffalo herds. Josiah Gregg said of

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00:19:12,280 --> 00:19:16,720
Speaker 1: plains lobos that although there were immense numbers of them

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Speaker 1: upon the prairies, their presence in the landscape was often

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Speaker 1: determined by bison herds. In this regard, Western wolves resembled

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Speaker 1: grizzly bears, always found in largest numbers where they could

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Speaker 1: scavenge buffalo drowned in rivers, or where weak animals were

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00:19:33,840 --> 00:19:38,760
Speaker 1: easier to attack. William Clark observed the most common wolf

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Speaker 1: hunting technique for buffalo in April of eighteen oh five,

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Speaker 1: when Lewis and Clark were ascending the Missouri through what

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Speaker 1: is now North Dakota. Lewis wrote that Captain Clark informed

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Speaker 1: me that he saw a large drove of buffalo pursued

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Speaker 1: by wolves today that they at length caught a calf

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Speaker 1: which was unable to keep up with the herd. An

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Speaker 1: old Pawnee adage, in fact, was that wolves ran down

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Speaker 1: and devoured four out of every ten bison calves born

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Speaker 1: an ancient American equation that left both species healthy across

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Speaker 1: at least half a million years. One trade everyone commented

286
00:20:19,680 --> 00:20:22,639
Speaker 1: on when they were first among the West wolves was

287
00:20:22,680 --> 00:20:26,000
Speaker 1: how tame they were, Having no reason to fear wolves.

288
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Speaker 1: Native people had long let them hang around camps and villages,

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00:20:30,560 --> 00:20:34,000
Speaker 1: so Audubon had marveled at how wolves would lie on

290
00:20:34,119 --> 00:20:38,360
Speaker 1: the banks as their steamboat passed, yawning at them like dogs.

291
00:20:38,920 --> 00:20:43,080
Speaker 1: William Clark had an unconcerned wolf walk by so near

292
00:20:43,320 --> 00:20:46,480
Speaker 1: that he impulsively stabbed it with the ban at on

293
00:20:46,560 --> 00:20:50,960
Speaker 1: the muzzle of his rifle. At Fort Union, Audubon's party

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Speaker 1: was met by the American Fur Company's Alexander Culbertson, whose

295
00:20:55,560 --> 00:20:59,400
Speaker 1: chief hobby, when boredom set in, was running down wolves

296
00:20:59,400 --> 00:21:04,639
Speaker 1: on his Indian pony. As Audubon's companion Edward Harris described it,

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Speaker 1: with wolves in constant view, the trader offered their party

298
00:21:09,160 --> 00:21:11,000
Speaker 1: a little wolf entertainment.

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Speaker 2: Mister Culbertson, Harris tells us.

300
00:21:14,240 --> 00:21:18,880
Speaker 1: Started his beautiful blackfoot pied mare at full speed when

301
00:21:19,000 --> 00:21:21,919
Speaker 1: within half a mile of the wolf, who turned and

302
00:21:22,080 --> 00:21:26,720
Speaker 1: galloped off leisurely until mister Culbertson was within two or

303
00:21:26,760 --> 00:21:29,560
Speaker 1: three hundred yards of him when he started.

304
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Speaker 2: Off at the top of his speed.

305
00:21:31,440 --> 00:21:34,080
Speaker 1: Within the time it took Harris to scribble his account,

306
00:21:34,440 --> 00:21:37,280
Speaker 1: Culbertson was back at the post with the wolf draped

307
00:21:37,320 --> 00:21:40,520
Speaker 1: across the saddle horn shot through its shoulders as the

308
00:21:40,560 --> 00:21:44,560
Speaker 1: trader had chased him at breakneck speed across the prairie.

309
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Speaker 1: It was an impressive performance, no doubt, so long as

310
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Speaker 1: you hadn't experienced it from the wolf end of the show.

311
00:21:53,119 --> 00:21:56,480
Speaker 1: Centuries of peaceful relations with native peoples had taught the

312
00:21:56,520 --> 00:22:01,560
Speaker 1: West wolves not to fear humans right old world folklore,

313
00:22:01,920 --> 00:22:07,000
Speaker 1: Western bar talk, and Hollywood's sensationalism. Today, like Liam Neeson's

314
00:22:07,040 --> 00:22:10,880
Speaker 1: twenty eleven film The Gray, the truth is that, except

315
00:22:10,880 --> 00:22:14,560
Speaker 1: in the rare rabies case, the West wolves were in

316
00:22:14,680 --> 00:22:18,239
Speaker 1: no way aggressive towards people. In fact, it was a

317
00:22:18,280 --> 00:22:22,960
Speaker 1: Western trope that both wolves and coyotes were rank howards

318
00:22:23,080 --> 00:22:27,879
Speaker 1: around humans. While scornful of canine cowardice, early observers in

319
00:22:27,920 --> 00:22:31,359
Speaker 1: the West never tired of commenting about how trusting wolves

320
00:22:31,359 --> 00:22:33,919
Speaker 1: seem to be trotting in front of their horses like

321
00:22:34,040 --> 00:22:38,960
Speaker 1: dogs are sitting and watching curiously as travelers passed within feet,

322
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Speaker 1: But soon enough, with everyone traveling the West's armed to

323
00:22:43,960 --> 00:22:47,479
Speaker 1: the teeth and taking shots at almost every wolf they saw,

324
00:22:47,640 --> 00:22:51,160
Speaker 1: wolves learned to keep their distance. Rifle fire was an

325
00:22:51,200 --> 00:22:55,119
Speaker 1: initial and casual wolf persecution, but it was merely a

326
00:22:55,200 --> 00:22:58,560
Speaker 1: hint of the changes about to come. In rapid succession

327
00:22:58,920 --> 00:23:03,440
Speaker 1: across the nineteen shi century, with a wild animal products

328
00:23:03,480 --> 00:23:07,439
Speaker 1: industry well established in the West and many thousands of

329
00:23:07,600 --> 00:23:11,480
Speaker 1: overland migrants crossing the region every year, what should have

330
00:23:11,520 --> 00:23:15,960
Speaker 1: been canine good times actually ushered in the end game

331
00:23:16,280 --> 00:23:20,679
Speaker 1: for the wolf West. In eighteen seventy two, the Brooklyn

332
00:23:20,760 --> 00:23:25,879
Speaker 1: painter John Gast distilled an important assumption about both Indians

333
00:23:26,240 --> 00:23:31,720
Speaker 1: and the country's wild animals into a famous visual image.

334
00:23:32,080 --> 00:23:37,840
Speaker 1: Gas American Progress painting portrayed a blonde, giant and angelic

335
00:23:37,960 --> 00:23:43,640
Speaker 1: white garb striding across the West, stringing telegraph wires behind her,

336
00:23:44,000 --> 00:23:48,480
Speaker 1: with wagons of settlers in her wake. Disappearing off the

337
00:23:48,720 --> 00:23:52,000
Speaker 1: edges of the canvas were the native people, but also

338
00:23:52,240 --> 00:23:56,320
Speaker 1: herds of buffalo and packs of wolves consigned to the

339
00:23:56,359 --> 00:24:00,199
Speaker 1: margins of the future. Viewers of American Progress seen to

340
00:24:00,280 --> 00:24:04,200
Speaker 1: understand in an America modeled on Europe, not just the

341
00:24:04,320 --> 00:24:08,920
Speaker 1: native people, but all those iconic wild animals had to go.

342
00:24:09,720 --> 00:24:13,000
Speaker 1: Most Americans appeared to assume that in an America making

343
00:24:13,040 --> 00:24:16,320
Speaker 1: itself a clone of the old world, a fate of

344
00:24:16,359 --> 00:24:20,800
Speaker 1: animals like this was inevitable. Buffalo stood first in the

345
00:24:20,880 --> 00:24:25,800
Speaker 1: rank of those incompatible with civilization. Wolves well the plans

346
00:24:25,800 --> 00:24:30,600
Speaker 1: since colonial times had been their total eradication. Eventually, other animals,

347
00:24:30,680 --> 00:24:35,520
Speaker 1: grizzly bears, cougars, jaguars, wild horses, eagles, and, judging by

348
00:24:35,520 --> 00:24:39,199
Speaker 1: the reaction to their extinction, even passenger pigeons joined the

349
00:24:39,280 --> 00:24:46,200
Speaker 1: ranks of species. Civilization would not tolerate their destruction. Gas painting, implied,

350
00:24:46,480 --> 00:24:51,200
Speaker 1: was no one's fault. Simply enough, Ancient America's time was over.

351
00:24:51,880 --> 00:24:57,320
Speaker 1: Incompatibility was a shame, but it seemed to comfort us.

352
00:24:57,359 --> 00:25:01,679
Speaker 1: Distilled from the imported nuts of East India tree, a

353
00:25:01,760 --> 00:25:06,760
Speaker 1: substance called strychnine ushered in this new order. It became

354
00:25:06,800 --> 00:25:11,040
Speaker 1: available in America when a firm in Philadelphia began offering

355
00:25:11,200 --> 00:25:16,160
Speaker 1: cheap packages of strychnine in crystal form in eighteen thirty four.

356
00:25:17,240 --> 00:25:19,880
Speaker 1: Since there were few predators left in the East by then,

357
00:25:20,240 --> 00:25:23,600
Speaker 1: most of the poison went west, sold in bulk in

358
00:25:23,760 --> 00:25:28,200
Speaker 1: every store and trading post. Naturally, there were no restrictions

359
00:25:28,200 --> 00:25:32,000
Speaker 1: of any kind on its use. It was cheap, unregulated,

360
00:25:32,200 --> 00:25:36,280
Speaker 1: and it was lethal chemical warfare. Western travelers used it

361
00:25:36,359 --> 00:25:39,160
Speaker 1: both to collect pelts and just to see its effects.

362
00:25:40,119 --> 00:25:44,199
Speaker 1: In an age inured to carnage, it was a horrifying killer.

363
00:25:44,600 --> 00:25:47,800
Speaker 1: Inside a few minutes, a white tablet gulped down from

364
00:25:47,800 --> 00:25:52,440
Speaker 1: a bated carcass launched a victim into waves of convulsive cramping.

365
00:25:53,000 --> 00:25:57,480
Speaker 1: Poisoned wolves died from asphyxiation, but strychnine wrenched the body

366
00:25:57,600 --> 00:26:01,639
Speaker 1: so violently as to leave a signature death pose, a

367
00:26:01,760 --> 00:26:06,200
Speaker 1: corpse with a sharply arched spine and a tail frazzled

368
00:26:06,359 --> 00:26:10,879
Speaker 1: as if the animal had been electrocuted on the frontier.

369
00:26:11,200 --> 00:26:14,840
Speaker 1: People who did this for a living were called wolfers,

370
00:26:15,119 --> 00:26:19,760
Speaker 1: a Western occupation we've probably deliberately left in the dust

371
00:26:19,840 --> 00:26:22,320
Speaker 1: bin of history so we didn't have to look at

372
00:26:22,320 --> 00:26:27,360
Speaker 1: it too closely. Poisoning animals didn't even require a wolfer

373
00:26:27,520 --> 00:26:31,280
Speaker 1: to be present, and unlike trapping, poisoning didn't call for

374
00:26:31,359 --> 00:26:34,520
Speaker 1: any sort of skill. You just baited a carcass or

375
00:26:34,600 --> 00:26:37,320
Speaker 1: put out chunks of meat laced with poison, and then

376
00:26:37,359 --> 00:26:40,040
Speaker 1: headed a camp to enjoy life while the strychnine did

377
00:26:40,080 --> 00:26:44,560
Speaker 1: his work. Teams of wolfers driving ox dron wagons began

378
00:26:44,720 --> 00:26:48,720
Speaker 1: laying out strychnine in the Yellowstone Country as early as

379
00:26:48,760 --> 00:26:53,880
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty four. Approaching a buffalo or horse carcass that baited,

380
00:26:54,240 --> 00:26:59,240
Speaker 1: wolfers would start finding victims appearing sprayed across the landscape

381
00:26:59,320 --> 00:27:02,960
Speaker 1: as if by some spinning centrifuge a half mile from

382
00:27:02,960 --> 00:27:06,359
Speaker 1: their bait animal. The targets were wolves and coyotes, but

383
00:27:06,560 --> 00:27:13,360
Speaker 1: the poison killed everything interested in a rotting piece of meat. Eagles, vultures, ravens, magpies,

384
00:27:13,520 --> 00:27:18,800
Speaker 1: red foxes, gray foxes, swift foxes, tiny kit foxes, skunks.

385
00:27:19,520 --> 00:27:24,880
Speaker 1: As these animals died, their convulsive vomiting sprayed poison across

386
00:27:24,920 --> 00:27:30,120
Speaker 1: the grass. Poison grass could take out collateral victims like horses.

387
00:27:30,960 --> 00:27:34,000
Speaker 1: When Native people lost ponies this way, they developed a

388
00:27:34,119 --> 00:27:38,639
Speaker 1: special hatred for wolfers. This kind of poisoning preyed on

389
00:27:38,720 --> 00:27:43,439
Speaker 1: a wolf's inclination to scavenge and avoid injury in a hunt,

390
00:27:43,760 --> 00:27:48,440
Speaker 1: and astonishing forty dead wolves per bated carcass was common.

391
00:27:49,040 --> 00:27:52,720
Speaker 1: One party in the Texas Panhandle picked up sixty four

392
00:27:52,800 --> 00:27:56,360
Speaker 1: wolves one morning, barely a mile from their camp. They

393
00:27:56,359 --> 00:28:00,240
Speaker 1: made four thousand dollars in one winter, and can this.

394
00:28:00,640 --> 00:28:04,600
Speaker 1: James Mead once poisoned eighty two wolves in a single

395
00:28:04,640 --> 00:28:09,280
Speaker 1: baiting in the Texas Panhandle. Into the eighteen nineties, Wolfer's

396
00:28:09,440 --> 00:28:14,320
Speaker 1: Jack Abernathy Alan Stagg, and Alec Lewis averaged two hundred

397
00:28:14,560 --> 00:28:18,240
Speaker 1: monsters that was their nickname for gray wolves a year,

398
00:28:18,800 --> 00:28:21,600
Speaker 1: killing two hundred and ninety six one year on a

399
00:28:21,640 --> 00:28:26,600
Speaker 1: single giant ranch the Xit. For more than two decades,

400
00:28:26,760 --> 00:28:30,240
Speaker 1: wolf and coyote pelts traded as money in the West,

401
00:28:30,600 --> 00:28:33,400
Speaker 1: worth a dollar apiece and two dollars if you could

402
00:28:33,400 --> 00:28:34,600
Speaker 1: get the pelts all the way.

403
00:28:34,440 --> 00:28:34,960
Speaker 2: To New York.

404
00:28:35,840 --> 00:28:39,240
Speaker 1: There are no figures for this most disgusting of all

405
00:28:39,320 --> 00:28:43,640
Speaker 1: wild animal economies, and for good reason, it's little remembered

406
00:28:43,680 --> 00:28:46,800
Speaker 1: in the story of America. But there's every likelihood that

407
00:28:46,880 --> 00:28:51,280
Speaker 1: from the eighteen sixties through the eighteen nineties, poisoning wildlife

408
00:28:51,280 --> 00:28:55,360
Speaker 1: for money killed Western animals in numbers that competed with

409
00:28:55,520 --> 00:29:01,840
Speaker 1: the death tolls of Buffalo. For a couple of decades

410
00:29:01,880 --> 00:29:05,400
Speaker 1: after the Civil War, while US Indian policy herded the

411
00:29:05,440 --> 00:29:09,719
Speaker 1: tribes under reservations and Western market hunts produced the most

412
00:29:09,720 --> 00:29:14,200
Speaker 1: devastating slaughter of wildlife and world history. Wolves continued to

413
00:29:14,320 --> 00:29:18,680
Speaker 1: thrive despite strychnine, but with most of their prey animals

414
00:29:18,720 --> 00:29:22,600
Speaker 1: now erased, wolves were forced to turn to domesticated cattle

415
00:29:22,760 --> 00:29:26,920
Speaker 1: and sheep as prey, except those were the property of

416
00:29:27,080 --> 00:29:31,400
Speaker 1: ranchers who stood on eight thousand years of history of

417
00:29:31,520 --> 00:29:37,000
Speaker 1: battling predators, so now as hated symbols of wild America.

418
00:29:37,360 --> 00:29:41,120
Speaker 1: Wolves from the eighteen eighties through the nineteen twenties became

419
00:29:41,320 --> 00:29:46,200
Speaker 1: special targets in the in game wolf War. One stockman

420
00:29:46,320 --> 00:29:49,640
Speaker 1: launched to convert the ancient world that acquired into a

421
00:29:49,680 --> 00:29:54,160
Speaker 1: money making pasture for cow's sheep and the market. From

422
00:29:54,200 --> 00:29:57,360
Speaker 1: the founding of the American colonies through the last decades

423
00:29:57,400 --> 00:30:01,160
Speaker 1: of the eighteen hundreds, bounties paid eight on wolf scalps

424
00:30:01,280 --> 00:30:07,320
Speaker 1: became the basic military strategy against wolves. Western stock associations

425
00:30:07,360 --> 00:30:11,200
Speaker 1: paid bounties in every Western state and territory, and bounties

426
00:30:11,200 --> 00:30:16,080
Speaker 1: on predators became a primary and acceptable act of governments too.

427
00:30:16,680 --> 00:30:21,680
Speaker 1: In Montana, the territorial government sometimes used up two thirds

428
00:30:21,720 --> 00:30:26,880
Speaker 1: of its annual budgets paying bounties on predators. Between eighteen

429
00:30:26,960 --> 00:30:31,520
Speaker 1: eighty three and nineteen twenty eight, Montana's governments paid bounties

430
00:30:31,680 --> 00:30:35,680
Speaker 1: on a staggering one hundred eleven thousand, five hundred and

431
00:30:35,720 --> 00:30:39,440
Speaker 1: forty five wolves and eight hundred eighty six thousand, three

432
00:30:39,560 --> 00:30:45,280
Speaker 1: hundred sixty seven coyotes, subsidizing both ranchers and wolfers. As

433
00:30:45,360 --> 00:30:49,600
Speaker 1: late as eighteen ninety nine, the state paid out bounties

434
00:30:49,760 --> 00:30:54,600
Speaker 1: on a whopping twenty three thousand, five hundred seventy five wolves.

435
00:30:55,640 --> 00:30:58,960
Speaker 1: It didn't stop there or even slow down. The war

436
00:30:59,000 --> 00:31:02,760
Speaker 1: against wolves and coyotes in Montana even produced a state

437
00:31:02,920 --> 00:31:07,720
Speaker 1: law passed in nineteen oh five ordering veterinarians to infect

438
00:31:07,800 --> 00:31:11,880
Speaker 1: any wild canines that came their way with sarcoptic mange,

439
00:31:12,280 --> 00:31:16,120
Speaker 1: then released them to spread the disease among the wild populations.

440
00:31:16,680 --> 00:31:21,160
Speaker 1: As a result, wild canids in Montana and Wyoming still

441
00:31:21,280 --> 00:31:25,520
Speaker 1: suffer from a strikingly high mange infection rate even today.

442
00:31:26,080 --> 00:31:29,680
Speaker 1: With this kind of multi pronged pressure, wolf populations went

443
00:31:29,760 --> 00:31:33,760
Speaker 1: under so dramatically that after bountying more than twenty three

444
00:31:33,800 --> 00:31:38,280
Speaker 1: thousand wolves in eighteen ninety nine, Montana paid for only

445
00:31:38,480 --> 00:31:43,480
Speaker 1: seventeen dead gray wolves in the year nineteen twenty, and

446
00:31:43,600 --> 00:31:49,080
Speaker 1: this ability to kill animals on mass Americans were absolutely unmatched.

447
00:31:50,840 --> 00:31:54,959
Speaker 1: By the twentieth century, ranchers and wolfers were naming the

448
00:31:55,080 --> 00:32:00,160
Speaker 1: last individual wolves still alive in Montana the last This

449
00:32:00,160 --> 00:32:03,800
Speaker 1: one was called Snowdrift. In the Dakotas, the last one

450
00:32:03,880 --> 00:32:08,760
Speaker 1: was the custuerwolf, an animal charge with livestock depredations a

451
00:32:08,880 --> 00:32:12,360
Speaker 1: t rex couldn't have pulled off. At the beginning of

452
00:32:12,400 --> 00:32:16,880
Speaker 1: the century, a Canadian writer named Ernest Thompson Seton, who

453
00:32:16,920 --> 00:32:21,520
Speaker 1: had extensive outdoor experience and also employed scientific methodology in

454
00:32:21,560 --> 00:32:25,520
Speaker 1: his work, tried to take on the huge implications of

455
00:32:25,600 --> 00:32:30,480
Speaker 1: the new Darwinism in the world around him. Setan moved

456
00:32:30,520 --> 00:32:33,719
Speaker 1: to New Mexico and began to write books, books that

457
00:32:33,840 --> 00:32:37,920
Speaker 1: strongly appealed to the new centuries readers. To counter the

458
00:32:38,000 --> 00:32:42,560
Speaker 1: so called nature read in tooth and claw conclusions that

459
00:32:42,720 --> 00:32:47,640
Speaker 1: others had drawn from Darwinian evolution, writers like Seton and

460
00:32:47,760 --> 00:32:52,160
Speaker 1: Jack London looked for examples among wild creatures of traits

461
00:32:52,400 --> 00:32:58,920
Speaker 1: humans admired, individuality, compassion, cooperation, loyalty, and an ability to

462
00:32:58,960 --> 00:33:04,680
Speaker 1: transfer culture learning across generations. One of Setan's most popular

463
00:33:04,760 --> 00:33:09,040
Speaker 1: stories employing this approach was about one of those legendary

464
00:33:09,160 --> 00:33:14,440
Speaker 1: last wolves in New Mexico's case a wolf Setan called Lobo,

465
00:33:14,840 --> 00:33:19,800
Speaker 1: King of Carumpa. Lobo was a male wolf Setan had

466
00:33:19,840 --> 00:33:22,880
Speaker 1: known years before he became a writer, when he was

467
00:33:22,960 --> 00:33:27,120
Speaker 1: himself a trapper and wolf hunter who had finally captured Lobo.

468
00:33:27,880 --> 00:33:30,800
Speaker 1: He had done that by baiting his traps with the

469
00:33:30,920 --> 00:33:35,840
Speaker 1: scent of Lobo's mate, a female wolf the ranchers called Blanca,

470
00:33:36,280 --> 00:33:40,920
Speaker 1: a beautiful animal Setan had trapped and killed while listening

471
00:33:41,000 --> 00:33:44,920
Speaker 1: to Lobo howling mournfully in the distance to no reply.

472
00:33:46,120 --> 00:33:50,400
Speaker 1: As Setan described him, Lolo was an amazingly canny wolf,

473
00:33:50,680 --> 00:33:55,680
Speaker 1: but with one fatal flaw. That flaw was Lobo's fidelity

474
00:33:55,760 --> 00:33:59,640
Speaker 1: to his mate. Setan caught Lobo in traps laced with

475
00:33:59,680 --> 00:34:04,080
Speaker 1: Blockeka scent, and the ranchers then hauled Lobo alive to

476
00:34:04,160 --> 00:34:07,320
Speaker 1: a ranch yard and chained him there as a prize

477
00:34:07,360 --> 00:34:12,239
Speaker 1: to show the community. Within days, Lobo died, looking off

478
00:34:12,239 --> 00:34:14,840
Speaker 1: at the New Mexico planes that had been his and

479
00:34:14,920 --> 00:34:21,200
Speaker 1: Blanca's world. Lobo's and Blanca's story first appeared in Setan's

480
00:34:21,200 --> 00:34:24,640
Speaker 1: book Wild Animals I Have Known, and it was one

481
00:34:24,640 --> 00:34:28,240
Speaker 1: of the stories that gave that famous book its running theme.

482
00:34:28,880 --> 00:34:31,800
Speaker 1: Those in America who celebrated the destruction of the West

483
00:34:31,840 --> 00:34:36,400
Speaker 1: wolves sneered, but Setan's book was pointing towards a different

484
00:34:36,520 --> 00:34:40,959
Speaker 1: kind of future. The theme of wild animals I have known,

485
00:34:41,200 --> 00:34:46,279
Speaker 1: he wrote was simple, we and the beasts are kN.

486
00:35:05,239 --> 00:35:08,040
Speaker 3: So Dan, thinking about wolves. One of the points that

487
00:35:08,080 --> 00:35:12,960
Speaker 3: you raise in this episode is that the perception of

488
00:35:13,080 --> 00:35:17,319
Speaker 3: wolves coming from the old world doesn't match up with

489
00:35:17,360 --> 00:35:21,360
Speaker 3: the reality of wolves in the New world. And it

490
00:35:21,400 --> 00:35:23,239
Speaker 3: got me thinking about when we were working on our

491
00:35:23,280 --> 00:35:25,960
Speaker 3: Long Hunter project and our Mountain Man project. We do

492
00:35:26,080 --> 00:35:30,480
Speaker 3: have instances of guys being bitten by wolves, and it's

493
00:35:30,520 --> 00:35:33,080
Speaker 3: always when they're sleeping around a campfire, and I had

494
00:35:33,120 --> 00:35:36,600
Speaker 3: sort of read that as we're working on it. I'd

495
00:35:36,640 --> 00:35:40,319
Speaker 3: read that as like evidence of wolves being all over

496
00:35:40,360 --> 00:35:44,759
Speaker 3: the place and just a presence on the landscape. And

497
00:35:44,800 --> 00:35:48,560
Speaker 3: then in light of your episode had caused me to

498
00:35:48,600 --> 00:35:54,160
Speaker 3: rethink it. These wolves are sneaking in and you know,

499
00:35:54,280 --> 00:35:58,760
Speaker 3: they're not super aggressive, they're just approaching guys when they're asleep.

500
00:36:00,760 --> 00:36:03,239
Speaker 3: I don't know that there's a question there necessarily, but

501
00:36:03,960 --> 00:36:04,959
Speaker 3: I mean with.

502
00:36:04,840 --> 00:36:08,359
Speaker 2: The Long Hunter instance, it was a rabbit wolf. Yeah,

503
00:36:08,360 --> 00:36:09,800
Speaker 2: and there's there's a rabbit there's.

504
00:36:09,600 --> 00:36:11,640
Speaker 1: A rabbit wolf rabbit mountain man at one of the

505
00:36:11,640 --> 00:36:14,560
Speaker 1: rendezvous too. Yeah, there's a wolf that runs around at

506
00:36:14,560 --> 00:36:17,319
Speaker 1: a rendezvous in the eighteenth things and bites people.

507
00:36:17,360 --> 00:36:19,000
Speaker 3: I guess it strikes me because you read it, you

508
00:36:19,040 --> 00:36:21,680
Speaker 3: write accounts from those periods, and you're like, Wow, wolves

509
00:36:21,680 --> 00:36:24,840
Speaker 3: were everywhere, wolves were biting people. And then when you

510
00:36:24,880 --> 00:36:27,120
Speaker 3: take a step back and you sort of contextualize it

511
00:36:27,160 --> 00:36:30,719
Speaker 3: with how many wolves there were, there are sort of

512
00:36:30,760 --> 00:36:34,120
Speaker 3: these rare, very rare instances that jump out to us.

513
00:36:35,200 --> 00:36:38,799
Speaker 3: But in the grand scheme of things, the wolves are

514
00:36:39,560 --> 00:36:41,160
Speaker 3: pretty much off on their own.

515
00:36:41,200 --> 00:36:42,600
Speaker 2: And yeah, you.

516
00:36:42,560 --> 00:36:45,120
Speaker 4: Can find guy after guy after guy after guy that

517
00:36:45,200 --> 00:36:47,600
Speaker 4: gets tore up by a grizzly bear. Yeah, No, guys

518
00:36:47,600 --> 00:36:49,240
Speaker 4: are getting tore up by wolves, right.

519
00:36:49,680 --> 00:36:50,239
Speaker 2: No, they're not.

520
00:36:50,520 --> 00:36:52,840
Speaker 1: And uh, I mean one of the reasons I wanted

521
00:36:52,880 --> 00:36:58,319
Speaker 1: to include that quote from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. This

522
00:36:58,440 --> 00:37:02,840
Speaker 1: is in William Woods's book that he publishes in sixteen

523
00:37:02,920 --> 00:37:06,680
Speaker 1: thirty two, when he's running through the accounts of all

524
00:37:06,800 --> 00:37:12,520
Speaker 1: these new animals that are in the Americas, he makes

525
00:37:13,320 --> 00:37:19,600
Speaker 1: that statement that I, as far as I can find,

526
00:37:19,800 --> 00:37:25,920
Speaker 1: remains true all through American history, certainly through the West

527
00:37:26,200 --> 00:37:30,279
Speaker 1: and the West wolves. He makes that statement that there

528
00:37:30,360 --> 00:37:35,160
Speaker 1: has not been an instance where a wolf has set

529
00:37:35,480 --> 00:37:39,480
Speaker 1: upon a man or a woman in our colony, and

530
00:37:39,920 --> 00:37:43,120
Speaker 1: he's already said there are wolves around all over the place,

531
00:37:43,840 --> 00:37:46,280
Speaker 1: but there has not been an instance. And the reason

532
00:37:46,360 --> 00:37:49,800
Speaker 1: he said that, I'm pretty certain is because these people

533
00:37:49,840 --> 00:37:52,760
Speaker 1: came out of Western Europe. For one thing, England hadn't

534
00:37:52,800 --> 00:37:56,200
Speaker 1: had wolves since the fourteen hundreds, so there have been

535
00:37:56,320 --> 00:37:58,920
Speaker 1: multiple generations of people who the only thing they know

536
00:37:58,960 --> 00:38:02,360
Speaker 1: about wolves is, you know, these fairy tales and folk

537
00:38:02,400 --> 00:38:08,040
Speaker 1: tales that they've hurt handed down. Is they are expecting

538
00:38:08,160 --> 00:38:10,839
Speaker 1: once they hear that there are wolves in North America,

539
00:38:10,960 --> 00:38:13,560
Speaker 1: that wolves are going to be tearing people limb from limb,

540
00:38:14,440 --> 00:38:19,400
Speaker 1: and suddenly the reality is, wow, there's not been a

541
00:38:19,560 --> 00:38:22,879
Speaker 1: single instance where a wolf has set upon a man

542
00:38:23,000 --> 00:38:26,479
Speaker 1: or a woman in our experience. And that's kind of

543
00:38:26,520 --> 00:38:32,000
Speaker 1: what tracks through the story here, especially in the West.

544
00:38:32,680 --> 00:38:35,840
Speaker 1: What most people in the nineteenth century in the West,

545
00:38:35,960 --> 00:38:39,279
Speaker 1: especially after they had had generations of this kind of

546
00:38:39,560 --> 00:38:43,520
Speaker 1: interaction with wolves, what their reaction to wolves was is

547
00:38:43,640 --> 00:38:47,200
Speaker 1: wolves are cowards. Wolves are not aggressive and are going

548
00:38:47,200 --> 00:38:51,960
Speaker 1: to attack you. They're cowards, and that became the detegration

549
00:38:52,520 --> 00:38:55,880
Speaker 1: that people levied against them. You know, the Native people

550
00:38:55,920 --> 00:38:59,160
Speaker 1: think am as boy wolves are these wonderful animals. They're

551
00:38:59,200 --> 00:39:04,120
Speaker 1: loyal to their families and you know, and they're brave,

552
00:39:04,400 --> 00:39:09,400
Speaker 1: and and the European euro American perspective was because the

553
00:39:09,480 --> 00:39:11,799
Speaker 1: wolves who are not of aggressive there are a bunch

554
00:39:11,800 --> 00:39:15,200
Speaker 1: of cowards and that's that's how they.

555
00:39:15,120 --> 00:39:16,600
Speaker 2: That's how they respond.

556
00:39:16,800 --> 00:39:21,439
Speaker 4: There's a lot of I hesitate to say evidence because

557
00:39:21,440 --> 00:39:23,880
Speaker 4: I don't know that I've seen it in evidentiary form.

558
00:39:24,280 --> 00:39:27,440
Speaker 4: You hear people say that the wolves of Europe, the

559
00:39:27,440 --> 00:39:30,200
Speaker 4: wolves in Romania, wolves in other places, that it's a

560
00:39:33,000 --> 00:39:38,040
Speaker 4: there is a there's a legacy of greater aggression and

561
00:39:38,080 --> 00:39:40,880
Speaker 4: like a higher propensity to attack people with some of

562
00:39:40,880 --> 00:39:44,440
Speaker 4: these Eurasian wolves, more livestock depredation.

563
00:39:44,560 --> 00:39:46,640
Speaker 2: Do you know that? Do you know that to be true?

564
00:39:46,719 --> 00:39:47,080
Speaker 4: Or is that?

565
00:39:47,440 --> 00:39:48,680
Speaker 2: Is that not true?

566
00:39:50,080 --> 00:39:52,959
Speaker 1: I know that that's what's thought to be true. That's

567
00:39:53,000 --> 00:39:57,680
Speaker 1: what the folklore of the wolf is has always been,

568
00:39:58,160 --> 00:40:02,319
Speaker 1: and that folklore was brought to them America. So that's

569
00:40:02,400 --> 00:40:04,640
Speaker 1: one of the you know, and it's still I mean,

570
00:40:04,680 --> 00:40:07,040
Speaker 1: I encountered people, you know, when I was living in

571
00:40:07,040 --> 00:40:10,040
Speaker 1: the Bitterroot Valley. Back a decade ago, I had a

572
00:40:10,040 --> 00:40:14,000
Speaker 1: neighbor who when wolves were recovering in the Sapphire Mountains

573
00:40:14,080 --> 00:40:16,960
Speaker 1: right above us, and I would occasionally see a pack

574
00:40:17,080 --> 00:40:19,080
Speaker 1: run across the road. As I would come home from

575
00:40:19,320 --> 00:40:21,880
Speaker 1: a graduate class at night at ten o'clock, pack of

576
00:40:21,880 --> 00:40:24,400
Speaker 1: wolves would run across the road. I could go outside,

577
00:40:25,200 --> 00:40:27,280
Speaker 1: usually two or three times a year, and I'd hear wolves.

578
00:40:27,320 --> 00:40:30,080
Speaker 1: How I had a neighbor who had grown up in

579
00:40:30,160 --> 00:40:32,920
Speaker 1: California who walked up to the house one day and

580
00:40:33,000 --> 00:40:35,640
Speaker 1: said something like, well, I guess you know that these

581
00:40:35,680 --> 00:40:39,120
Speaker 1: wolves are probably I mean, we're in mortal danger. These

582
00:40:39,160 --> 00:40:42,520
Speaker 1: wolves are close, and these things they're going to tear

583
00:40:43,080 --> 00:40:47,120
Speaker 1: my wife off the front porch and maul her in

584
00:40:47,160 --> 00:40:50,719
Speaker 1: the yard. I can't let my son and his granddaughter

585
00:40:50,760 --> 00:40:52,800
Speaker 1: come over because I know they're going to get my granddaughter.

586
00:40:53,440 --> 00:40:55,640
Speaker 4: And you know, I was trying to tell you they

587
00:40:55,680 --> 00:40:58,480
Speaker 4: haven't got man the tree, haven't got anybody.

588
00:40:58,960 --> 00:41:02,319
Speaker 1: They have, there's no but it did not work. I

589
00:41:02,400 --> 00:41:05,960
Speaker 1: told him that, and I could tell he was completely unconvinced.

590
00:41:06,440 --> 00:41:09,879
Speaker 1: And so these stories, I mean, they go obviously back

591
00:41:09,920 --> 00:41:12,040
Speaker 1: a long way into the old world. I mean, they

592
00:41:12,040 --> 00:41:14,799
Speaker 1: are still current with us where you know. And I

593
00:41:14,840 --> 00:41:18,000
Speaker 1: went to a wolf conference in southern New Mexico and

594
00:41:18,080 --> 00:41:21,640
Speaker 1: Las Crusis one time, about twenty years ago, and there

595
00:41:21,880 --> 00:41:25,920
Speaker 1: was a woman who was representing the livestock industry who

596
00:41:26,160 --> 00:41:29,560
Speaker 1: showed our asseymbol throng of an audience of two hundred

597
00:41:29,600 --> 00:41:34,120
Speaker 1: and fifty people or so, how deadly Mexican wolves were

598
00:41:34,160 --> 00:41:36,360
Speaker 1: and how scary they were to have them on the ground.

599
00:41:36,680 --> 00:41:40,200
Speaker 1: And what she showed us was a photograph of a

600
00:41:40,280 --> 00:41:44,800
Speaker 1: cowboy in full shaps and hat and everything, his boots

601
00:41:45,320 --> 00:41:49,319
Speaker 1: running towards a front porch, running towards the photographer and

602
00:41:49,440 --> 00:41:53,480
Speaker 1: he's really balling the jack and back in the background

603
00:41:53,520 --> 00:41:55,799
Speaker 1: maybe one hundred yards away, so far away. She had

604
00:41:55,840 --> 00:41:58,279
Speaker 1: to draw a circle around it to make sure that

605
00:41:58,320 --> 00:42:01,560
Speaker 1: the audience saw it was a wolf standing in the road.

606
00:42:02,320 --> 00:42:05,359
Speaker 1: And she said, this is an example of how bloodthirsty

607
00:42:05,400 --> 00:42:06,120
Speaker 1: these wolves are.

608
00:42:06,600 --> 00:42:07,239
Speaker 2: Had he not.

609
00:42:07,400 --> 00:42:10,440
Speaker 1: Run for the porch, this wolf was going to pull

610
00:42:10,520 --> 00:42:13,960
Speaker 1: him down. Yeah, And it's a wolf standing curiously in

611
00:42:14,000 --> 00:42:17,440
Speaker 1: the road watching a cowboy in shaps run up the

612
00:42:18,080 --> 00:42:18,759
Speaker 1: up the dirt road.

613
00:42:18,920 --> 00:42:21,719
Speaker 4: There's a great way of looking at the risk. And

614
00:42:21,760 --> 00:42:24,040
Speaker 4: you see it with grizzly bears, And it'd be interesting

615
00:42:24,040 --> 00:42:27,360
Speaker 4: to look at it with contemporary Europe, you know, or

616
00:42:27,600 --> 00:42:28,719
Speaker 4: in your aging countries to.

617
00:42:28,760 --> 00:42:32,600
Speaker 2: Have wolves would be like, what are the odds.

618
00:42:32,440 --> 00:42:38,080
Speaker 4: Than in a given year any individual, Yeah, acts will

619
00:42:38,160 --> 00:42:41,880
Speaker 4: have a violent altercation with a human, you know. And

620
00:42:41,840 --> 00:42:44,879
Speaker 4: then when you look at like the menagerie of North

621
00:42:44,880 --> 00:42:47,280
Speaker 4: American wildlife, it's like grizzlies.

622
00:42:46,800 --> 00:42:49,560
Speaker 2: Are grizzlies are mountain lions? Yeah?

623
00:42:49,600 --> 00:42:54,000
Speaker 4: Are well, Yeah, grizzlies are high and every and everybody

624
00:42:54,000 --> 00:42:55,920
Speaker 4: else is kind of like inconsequential. But I would be

625
00:42:55,920 --> 00:42:59,560
Speaker 4: curious to know, like if the europe if that European

626
00:42:59,640 --> 00:43:02,279
Speaker 4: sense which you see cited all the time when it

627
00:43:02,320 --> 00:43:07,360
Speaker 4: talks about the American the immediate American hatred of wolves

628
00:43:08,080 --> 00:43:13,560
Speaker 4: coming from this big bad wolf in Europe thing to

629
00:43:13,719 --> 00:43:16,440
Speaker 4: just be interesting to look at and be like, was

630
00:43:16,480 --> 00:43:19,160
Speaker 4: it any more was it any more true in Europe

631
00:43:19,280 --> 00:43:23,600
Speaker 4: than here? Or was it just as untrue there as

632
00:43:23,600 --> 00:43:29,040
Speaker 4: it was here? About the human health risk with wolves, Yeah,

633
00:43:29,080 --> 00:43:31,520
Speaker 4: not the inconvenience of livestock, but the health risk I.

634
00:43:31,440 --> 00:43:33,280
Speaker 1: Think, you know. And there's a guy who's who's written

635
00:43:33,440 --> 00:43:36,799
Speaker 1: a recent book which I just blurbed for him on

636
00:43:37,320 --> 00:43:39,400
Speaker 1: Europe's wolves. And what he did was there was a

637
00:43:39,440 --> 00:43:44,840
Speaker 1: wolf in Romania that tracked sort of a you know,

638
00:43:44,920 --> 00:43:50,520
Speaker 1: one of these single colonizing wolves, that tracked three or

639
00:43:50,520 --> 00:43:55,799
Speaker 1: four hundred miles from southern southeastern Europe towards France. And

640
00:43:55,880 --> 00:43:59,440
Speaker 1: this guy, a couple of years later, went out and

641
00:43:59,480 --> 00:44:03,759
Speaker 1: he that exact route that this wolf had taken and

642
00:44:03,800 --> 00:44:06,320
Speaker 1: wrote a book about it. And one of the things

643
00:44:06,440 --> 00:44:08,480
Speaker 1: he said that struck me because I.

644
00:44:08,440 --> 00:44:09,200
Speaker 2: Didn't know this.

645
00:44:10,360 --> 00:44:14,359
Speaker 1: Europe now has more wolves in it than the United

646
00:44:14,400 --> 00:44:19,600
Speaker 1: States does. The United States, accepting Alaska, the lower forty eight,

647
00:44:20,280 --> 00:44:24,239
Speaker 1: Europe has more wolves than the Lower forty eight, and

648
00:44:24,840 --> 00:44:30,160
Speaker 1: Europe is attempting to be as welcoming of wolves as possible. Now, Obviously,

649
00:44:30,800 --> 00:44:33,800
Speaker 1: according to this guy's journey, he was running into people,

650
00:44:34,200 --> 00:44:37,799
Speaker 1: you know, every few days who were outraged, just as

651
00:44:37,840 --> 00:44:40,879
Speaker 1: a lot of Montana ranchers are outraged that there were

652
00:44:40,880 --> 00:44:44,320
Speaker 1: wolves returning to Europe, and so some of those same sensibilities.

653
00:44:44,640 --> 00:44:47,520
Speaker 1: But it's going to require somebody doing a book to

654
00:44:48,000 --> 00:44:52,000
Speaker 1: try to find whether or not evidence actually exists, because

655
00:44:52,120 --> 00:44:55,160
Speaker 1: some of the things I've read about wolf attacks in

656
00:44:55,239 --> 00:44:58,760
Speaker 1: Europe are well okay, So there's always the rabid animal

657
00:44:59,320 --> 00:45:03,839
Speaker 1: that's that could be involved, and there were evidently a

658
00:45:03,960 --> 00:45:10,319
Speaker 1: lot of wolf dog hybrids and those animals, at least

659
00:45:10,360 --> 00:45:13,520
Speaker 1: some people have argued, may have been responsible for some

660
00:45:13,560 --> 00:45:18,080
Speaker 1: of the attacks that have so anyway, it's that kind

661
00:45:18,120 --> 00:45:21,680
Speaker 1: of story. And obviously in the nineteenth century when people

662
00:45:21,760 --> 00:45:24,160
Speaker 1: are coming west. I mean, what I tried to get

663
00:45:24,160 --> 00:45:26,839
Speaker 1: across this episode is that hell wolves have been They

664
00:45:26,840 --> 00:45:29,319
Speaker 1: had been in the West and in America for five

665
00:45:29,440 --> 00:45:34,880
Speaker 1: million years. All of the wildlife, the way trees and

666
00:45:35,080 --> 00:45:38,960
Speaker 1: grass grew was sort of dependent on there being this

667
00:45:39,200 --> 00:45:42,279
Speaker 1: keystone predator at the top of everything. So it's a

668
00:45:42,280 --> 00:45:45,839
Speaker 1: little bit like taking the beavers out or taking the

669
00:45:45,880 --> 00:45:50,680
Speaker 1: sea otters out. When you do that, the ecologies start

670
00:45:50,760 --> 00:45:55,000
Speaker 1: scrambling and changing because you've got in place this animal

671
00:45:55,000 --> 00:45:59,480
Speaker 1: that's been there for millions of years and producing its

672
00:45:59,520 --> 00:46:02,799
Speaker 1: effect the world. And yet you know, we come from

673
00:46:02,800 --> 00:46:06,200
Speaker 1: the old world with this kind of wolf hostility, and

674
00:46:06,320 --> 00:46:09,319
Speaker 1: our task immediately is to try to get rid of

675
00:46:09,360 --> 00:46:10,880
Speaker 1: them is just as fast as we can.

676
00:46:12,840 --> 00:46:17,600
Speaker 3: I think one thing that I've gotten from your work

677
00:46:17,760 --> 00:46:23,320
Speaker 3: in terms of just how I conceptualize and certain animals,

678
00:46:23,760 --> 00:46:29,120
Speaker 3: this relationship between coyotes and wolves and they look alike,

679
00:46:29,680 --> 00:46:33,160
Speaker 3: but there's obvious differences. But this idea that you know,

680
00:46:33,520 --> 00:46:36,520
Speaker 3: wolves go up, coyotes go down, foxes go up, and

681
00:46:36,560 --> 00:46:41,520
Speaker 3: it's sort of this continuous balancing act between these. I

682
00:46:41,520 --> 00:46:44,080
Speaker 3: don't know if you can sort of talk about the

683
00:46:44,160 --> 00:46:47,440
Speaker 3: coyote story because that's obviously an area of expertise, but

684
00:46:47,520 --> 00:46:49,560
Speaker 3: how that relates to the wolf story, because there's some

685
00:46:49,880 --> 00:46:54,160
Speaker 3: interesting parallels, but then obviously those two animals, their histories

686
00:46:54,200 --> 00:46:55,720
Speaker 3: diverge in very clear ways.

687
00:46:56,600 --> 00:46:56,839
Speaker 2: Yeah.

688
00:46:56,880 --> 00:47:00,759
Speaker 1: So I've done obviously the Old Man America episode on

689
00:47:00,960 --> 00:47:05,520
Speaker 1: you know, the Native stories about coyote with a capital

690
00:47:05,560 --> 00:47:08,080
Speaker 1: C as the deity figure, and I'm going to do

691
00:47:08,200 --> 00:47:12,719
Speaker 1: one more episode later in the year that's going to

692
00:47:12,800 --> 00:47:17,799
Speaker 1: be about the sort of the coyote story because the coyote,

693
00:47:18,239 --> 00:47:22,279
Speaker 1: unlike wolves, Europeans had no familiarity with coyotes, and so

694
00:47:22,360 --> 00:47:25,520
Speaker 1: they didn't actually know what to think about them, and

695
00:47:25,560 --> 00:47:29,759
Speaker 1: it took, you know, some time, It took particularly you know,

696
00:47:29,880 --> 00:47:33,920
Speaker 1: Mark Twain in roughing it sort of giving Americas on

697
00:47:34,280 --> 00:47:37,239
Speaker 1: America's an idea of how to think about coyotes, and

698
00:47:37,239 --> 00:47:42,279
Speaker 1: and it was not a favorable and appraisal unfortunately. But

699
00:47:42,360 --> 00:47:45,520
Speaker 1: coyotes and wolves obviously go back a long way. They

700
00:47:45,560 --> 00:47:49,960
Speaker 1: are closely related. They can hybridize, although one of the

701
00:47:50,000 --> 00:47:53,319
Speaker 1: interesting things that's happening these days is that coyotes will

702
00:47:53,360 --> 00:47:56,840
Speaker 1: readily hybridize and the wolves will too, with eastern wolves

703
00:47:56,880 --> 00:48:00,439
Speaker 1: and red wolves, but not gray wolves. And the gray

704
00:48:00,480 --> 00:48:03,680
Speaker 1: wolves that are in the West seem to be sort

705
00:48:03,719 --> 00:48:07,640
Speaker 1: of mortal enemies of coyotes, and we have some explanations

706
00:48:07,640 --> 00:48:09,319
Speaker 1: for that, and I can talk about them a little

707
00:48:09,360 --> 00:48:15,200
Speaker 1: later in the series. But they're closely related, they're related

708
00:48:15,280 --> 00:48:20,640
Speaker 1: enough to hybridize. But I had a biologist at the

709
00:48:20,680 --> 00:48:24,560
Speaker 1: Predator Research Facility in Logan, Utah tell me one time

710
00:48:24,640 --> 00:48:31,919
Speaker 1: that they had deliberately induced a pregnancy and a coyote

711
00:48:32,440 --> 00:48:39,359
Speaker 1: with wolf sperm, and when she had this litter, she

712
00:48:39,400 --> 00:48:40,799
Speaker 1: immediately killed every one of them.

713
00:48:41,320 --> 00:48:41,840
Speaker 2: Wow.

714
00:48:42,120 --> 00:48:46,239
Speaker 1: Yeah, she killed every one of them within a day,

715
00:48:47,800 --> 00:48:48,720
Speaker 1: her own pups.

716
00:48:48,880 --> 00:48:53,080
Speaker 4: Her hatred wolves greater than her love of her own children.

717
00:48:53,400 --> 00:48:56,200
Speaker 1: Yeah, her love of her own pups.

718
00:48:57,200 --> 00:49:01,919
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think the end of a book. Yeah, read

719
00:49:01,960 --> 00:49:05,560
Speaker 2: that to my kids at night. Yeah, they love that.

720
00:49:05,680 --> 00:49:08,120
Speaker 2: Not that and she ate them.

721
00:49:08,840 --> 00:49:11,040
Speaker 1: Yeah, but you know, I mean one of the stories

722
00:49:11,040 --> 00:49:13,440
Speaker 1: I obviously told in this this particular episode is about

723
00:49:13,480 --> 00:49:16,600
Speaker 1: the Wolfers, which is uh and I you know, have

724
00:49:16,640 --> 00:49:19,320
Speaker 1: to observe that's not of sort of a Western figure

725
00:49:19,360 --> 00:49:23,080
Speaker 1: that has made it into Hollywood movies. But holy cow,

726
00:49:23,200 --> 00:49:28,799
Speaker 1: these guys they killed untold thousands of animals and not

727
00:49:28,880 --> 00:49:31,880
Speaker 1: just wolves because the baits, the strych nine baits they

728
00:49:31,880 --> 00:49:34,840
Speaker 1: were putting out. They were killing everything that came and

729
00:49:34,880 --> 00:49:38,040
Speaker 1: took the baits. So they were killing eagles and ravens

730
00:49:38,040 --> 00:49:42,080
Speaker 1: and hawks and skunks and raccoons and foxes and coyotes

731
00:49:42,160 --> 00:49:43,960
Speaker 1: and you know, and also wolves.

732
00:49:43,960 --> 00:49:45,759
Speaker 4: I'll tell you another interesting bycatch.

733
00:49:45,760 --> 00:49:47,560
Speaker 2: They would get yeah in.

734
00:49:48,000 --> 00:49:50,239
Speaker 4: Life and Death at the Mouth of the Muscleshell, which

735
00:49:50,280 --> 00:49:51,440
Speaker 4: is like a trader's journal.

736
00:49:51,520 --> 00:49:52,839
Speaker 1: Yeah. Uh.

737
00:49:53,920 --> 00:49:56,959
Speaker 4: They it seems like when they get little free time,

738
00:49:57,360 --> 00:49:59,439
Speaker 4: like the guys in this little community which is now

739
00:49:59,560 --> 00:50:03,239
Speaker 4: under the wa waters of Fort Peck Reservoir, they kind

740
00:50:03,239 --> 00:50:05,600
Speaker 4: of like, as they get a minute or they get

741
00:50:05,600 --> 00:50:07,960
Speaker 4: the right amount of drunk or whatever, it's decided that

742
00:50:08,000 --> 00:50:11,839
Speaker 4: they'll go and lace some baits, just like a fall

743
00:50:11,920 --> 00:50:15,319
Speaker 4: like nothing else nothing better else to fall back is

744
00:50:15,400 --> 00:50:18,919
Speaker 4: lay some baits in it. He talks about, I can't

745
00:50:18,920 --> 00:50:22,320
Speaker 4: even remember what tribe it is. They come in pissed

746
00:50:23,239 --> 00:50:30,759
Speaker 4: because they've lost twenty four of their dogs to a bait. Yeah,

747
00:50:31,440 --> 00:50:33,120
Speaker 4: and they want to raise it. They want to raise

748
00:50:33,120 --> 00:50:33,880
Speaker 4: a fuss about it.

749
00:50:34,000 --> 00:50:35,520
Speaker 2: Yeah, And.

750
00:50:36,920 --> 00:50:41,040
Speaker 1: Of strict nine poisoning because wolves and coyotes would vomit

751
00:50:41,640 --> 00:50:46,560
Speaker 1: the stryct nine onto the grass, and Indian pony herds

752
00:50:46,600 --> 00:50:48,920
Speaker 1: would if they happen to be herded in that spot,

753
00:50:49,400 --> 00:50:53,839
Speaker 1: and aiding that grass horses would suddenly die from being

754
00:50:54,040 --> 00:50:55,000
Speaker 1: killed by strick nine.

755
00:50:55,320 --> 00:50:59,000
Speaker 3: What's the This might be a two technical what's the

756
00:50:59,080 --> 00:51:01,480
Speaker 3: half life or whatever? The appropriate term would be a

757
00:51:01,560 --> 00:51:04,360
Speaker 3: strictionne it seems like one of the like a heavy

758
00:51:04,400 --> 00:51:09,000
Speaker 3: metal almost that is just sort of it's accumulates and yeah,

759
00:51:09,000 --> 00:51:11,160
Speaker 3: like where does it end? The horse eats the grass

760
00:51:11,200 --> 00:51:14,239
Speaker 3: and the horse does then yeah, comes against the horse.

761
00:51:14,320 --> 00:51:15,959
Speaker 1: Yeah, I wish I could answer that question. I don't

762
00:51:15,960 --> 00:51:19,799
Speaker 1: really know, but I do think it remains toxic, you know,

763
00:51:19,920 --> 00:51:24,480
Speaker 1: exposed above ground in a form that another animal can

764
00:51:24,560 --> 00:51:26,160
Speaker 1: get for quite a while. Yeah.

765
00:51:28,760 --> 00:51:31,640
Speaker 4: One last question for you on this. Dire wolves been

766
00:51:31,640 --> 00:51:35,719
Speaker 4: in the news Colossal Bioscience, Colossal Biosciences, where you and

767
00:51:35,719 --> 00:51:41,200
Speaker 4: I are on the conservation advisory board. They've taken they've

768
00:51:41,239 --> 00:51:47,319
Speaker 4: identified some dire wolf genes I believe nineteen, and we're

769
00:51:47,360 --> 00:51:50,880
Speaker 4: able to put them, combine them with a gray wolf,

770
00:51:51,160 --> 00:51:54,040
Speaker 4: and then use surrogate pops to birth some Yeah, and

771
00:51:54,080 --> 00:51:58,319
Speaker 4: it's sparked this huge debate of how you know when

772
00:51:58,320 --> 00:52:01,040
Speaker 4: they when when someone declares it a dire wolves, Like,

773
00:52:01,040 --> 00:52:04,319
Speaker 4: what does it require to say an animal is what

774
00:52:04,360 --> 00:52:06,400
Speaker 4: it is? Does it have to pass the look test?

775
00:52:07,200 --> 00:52:11,120
Speaker 4: Does it have to pass the genetic purity marker?

776
00:52:12,080 --> 00:52:12,319
Speaker 2: Like?

777
00:52:12,320 --> 00:52:14,640
Speaker 4: Like, who gets to say that that's what that is?

778
00:52:15,560 --> 00:52:19,520
Speaker 4: And you and I had talked before about.

779
00:52:20,280 --> 00:52:22,680
Speaker 2: Even if you had, if you knew you had.

780
00:52:22,840 --> 00:52:26,880
Speaker 4: The complete animal, how do you account for the culture?

781
00:52:28,200 --> 00:52:28,360
Speaker 2: You know?

782
00:52:28,400 --> 00:52:31,200
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's the to me, the whole thing. And

783
00:52:31,520 --> 00:52:36,360
Speaker 1: we have talked about it, say, because animals have culture,

784
00:52:36,640 --> 00:52:41,319
Speaker 1: and so particularly for social animals like wolves, I mean,

785
00:52:41,400 --> 00:52:45,920
Speaker 1: they teach their pups what the potential prey is, how

786
00:52:45,920 --> 00:52:49,960
Speaker 1: to function in a landscape. And these are animals that,

787
00:52:50,080 --> 00:52:54,080
Speaker 1: these these dire wolves, if that's what we can call them,

788
00:52:54,760 --> 00:52:57,880
Speaker 1: that are not going to have any culture to rely

789
00:52:57,960 --> 00:52:59,880
Speaker 1: on the culture they're going to be taught basically as

790
00:52:59,880 --> 00:53:04,319
Speaker 1: whatever they're human handlers are exposing them to, you know,

791
00:53:04,360 --> 00:53:06,480
Speaker 1: And the other thing about this. I mean, this is,

792
00:53:06,520 --> 00:53:09,560
Speaker 1: as you and I both know and I've talked about,

793
00:53:09,880 --> 00:53:13,759
Speaker 1: this is a kind of a genetic experiment to see

794
00:53:13,800 --> 00:53:20,959
Speaker 1: if it's possible to de extinct an animal, and canids

795
00:53:21,000 --> 00:53:24,760
Speaker 1: appear to be easier to do this with than anything else,

796
00:53:24,800 --> 00:53:28,800
Speaker 1: and so that's why Colossal ended up doing this wolf

797
00:53:28,840 --> 00:53:34,480
Speaker 1: experiment to begin with. But you can't really say that

798
00:53:34,520 --> 00:53:39,239
Speaker 1: these animals ultimately are dire wolves. They're wolves that are

799
00:53:39,239 --> 00:53:41,440
Speaker 1: going to have some direwolf genetics, and we're going to

800
00:53:41,600 --> 00:53:43,400
Speaker 1: get a chance to see. I mean, one of the

801
00:53:43,440 --> 00:53:47,960
Speaker 1: things obviously that these genetic these spliced in genes have

802
00:53:48,040 --> 00:53:51,320
Speaker 1: done is they've produced animals that are white, and that's

803
00:53:51,680 --> 00:53:55,360
Speaker 1: one of the arguments that dire wolves probably had white coats,

804
00:53:55,440 --> 00:53:58,799
Speaker 1: particularly thick white coats, and these animals have that. I

805
00:53:58,800 --> 00:54:01,400
Speaker 1: think the next testing to be interested in is to

806
00:54:01,440 --> 00:54:06,680
Speaker 1: see exactly how big they get, because our perception, particularly

807
00:54:06,719 --> 00:54:09,440
Speaker 1: from Librea tar pits, where there are just hundreds of

808
00:54:09,520 --> 00:54:12,880
Speaker 1: direwolf skulls available from dire wolves that were caught in

809
00:54:12,920 --> 00:54:16,880
Speaker 1: the tar there is that dire wolves were probably about

810
00:54:17,000 --> 00:54:21,080
Speaker 1: twenty five thirty percent larger than gray wolves, which means

811
00:54:21,600 --> 00:54:25,760
Speaker 1: if these animals get to adulthood, and they do express

812
00:54:25,880 --> 00:54:27,880
Speaker 1: direwolf genetics. I mean they're going to weigh one hundred

813
00:54:27,880 --> 00:54:31,120
Speaker 1: and sixty hundred and sixty five pounds or something. So

814
00:54:31,320 --> 00:54:35,439
Speaker 1: that's going to be I think, an interesting test to see.

815
00:54:36,840 --> 00:54:38,400
Speaker 1: I don't know how it's going to turn out, but

816
00:54:38,520 --> 00:54:39,879
Speaker 1: it's a very fascinating.

817
00:54:40,320 --> 00:54:44,160
Speaker 4: It's it's been just for the debate in the conversation

818
00:54:44,680 --> 00:54:48,640
Speaker 4: that it's inspired about kidding about wildlife and the role

819
00:54:48,680 --> 00:54:52,440
Speaker 4: of wildlife and extinction. My first date with my wife,

820
00:54:52,800 --> 00:54:54,759
Speaker 4: my very first date, we went to Librea tar pit

821
00:54:54,960 --> 00:54:58,120
Speaker 4: it is and they have a display on a wall

822
00:54:58,320 --> 00:55:04,680
Speaker 4: of seventy five wolf skulls, and I have a skull

823
00:55:04,760 --> 00:55:07,160
Speaker 4: shelf in my house that was inspired by the It's

824
00:55:07,160 --> 00:55:10,400
Speaker 4: not lit the same way, but it was inspired inspired

825
00:55:10,400 --> 00:55:12,640
Speaker 4: by that, inspired by that, and I got in trouble

826
00:55:12,640 --> 00:55:14,600
Speaker 4: on my first date because we want you know, they

827
00:55:14,640 --> 00:55:19,200
Speaker 4: play those movies on Circle. Well, I'm sitting there and

828
00:55:19,239 --> 00:55:21,279
Speaker 4: we come in and we watched the end half of

829
00:55:21,320 --> 00:55:25,480
Speaker 4: a movie and I found myself explaining, so what we'll

830
00:55:25,480 --> 00:55:30,560
Speaker 4: do is we'll watch the end half and then it'll

831
00:55:30,600 --> 00:55:35,200
Speaker 4: start over and we'll just watch up to where I started.

832
00:55:35,200 --> 00:55:38,080
Speaker 2: And she's like, oh that this is how that that

833
00:55:38,080 --> 00:55:39,600
Speaker 2: that's how this works. Oh thank you for.

834
00:55:42,120 --> 00:55:44,359
Speaker 4: Thank you for explaining. I was toy lost as how

835
00:55:44,400 --> 00:55:50,359
Speaker 4: we're gonna see the whole movie. Thanks for helping me out.

836
00:55:50,520 --> 00:55:52,840
Speaker 4: I just couldn't visualize how this is gonna work.

837
00:55:55,480 --> 00:56:00,960
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, well guys, thanks for all the question man.

838
00:56:01,040 --> 00:56:03,280
Speaker 2: Yeah this is this has been great fun as always.

839
00:56:03,400 --> 00:56:04,200
Speaker 2: Ye all right

840
00:56:05,880 --> 00:56:20,279
Speaker 4: M mmmmm