Speaker 1: As native animals. Wolves shape American ecologies for millions of
Speaker 1: years and impressed early travelers with their numbers and tameness,
Speaker 1: but were rapidly destroyed in the West when old world
Speaker 1: stock raising replaced an Indian managed world. I'm Dan Flores
Speaker 1: and this is the American West, brought to you by
Speaker 1: Velvet Buck Wine. Where the hunt meets the harvest. A
Speaker 1: portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers.
Speaker 1: Limited supply available at Velvetbuck Vineyards dot com.
Speaker 2: Enjoy responsible Wolf West.
Speaker 1: At the midpoint of the nineteenth century, when Americans were
Speaker 1: regularly traveling through the West, but except for spotty locales
Speaker 1: in the Southwest and on the West Coast, had yet
Speaker 1: to settle it, aspects of the ancient Indian managed continent
Speaker 1: were still in place across much of the western country.
Speaker 1: Judging by the accounts of those who witnessed this period,
Speaker 1: the Catlans Bodmer's Autumns, this native West would have been
Speaker 1: something to see, one of the spectacles of the world.
Speaker 1: No element of this surviving version of Western America amazed
Speaker 1: travelers as much as the staggering abundance of wild animals
Speaker 1: and for people used to the civilized conditions of the
Speaker 1: East or Europe. No Western animal imparted as much shock
Speaker 1: and awe as wolves. Michael Steck, a physician traveling the
Speaker 1: Santa Fe Trail in the early eighteen fifties, was one
Speaker 1: of many who offers us a glimpse of what life
Speaker 1: in a fully wolfed West was like. Steck and his
Speaker 1: party found that any time they got among bison herds,
Speaker 1: wolves became so astonishingly numerous that, as he wrote, we
Speaker 1: see immense numbers of them. A common thing is to
Speaker 1: see fifty at a sight in the daytime. We are
Speaker 1: never out of sight of them, see hundreds in a day.
Speaker 1: That comported with wildlife painter John James Ottoman's comment on
Speaker 1: the Upper Missouri River that if ever there was a
Speaker 1: country where wolves are surpassingly abundant, it's the one we
Speaker 1: are now in. But here's the thing.
Speaker 2: Today.
Speaker 1: You could drive repeatedly across the country where Steck wrote
Speaker 1: of seeing hundreds of wolves a day, or along the Missouri,
Speaker 1: where Autobun reported the most abundant wolf population he had
Speaker 1: ever encountered, and never see a single wolf, not one.
Speaker 1: Our erasure of them in the years from eighteen fifty
Speaker 1: to nineteen twenty five was that thorough until about nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty five, though, the American West was, and for five
Speaker 1: five million years had been, wolf country. Consider that for
Speaker 1: a moment and understand what an anomaly the past almost
Speaker 1: wolf three hundred years has been to a story like that.
Speaker 1: The West wolves were from a family of animals, the Canaday,
Speaker 1: that evolved in North America, and although some of them
Speaker 1: migrated elsewhere and took on their present forms in Asia
Speaker 1: and Europe before they returned to America until the nineteen twenties,
Speaker 1: there was never a time when wolves were not America's
Speaker 1: keystone predators. Before humans first got here twenty two thousand
Speaker 1: or so years ago, wolves probably shaped life in America
Speaker 1: more profoundly than any other mammal. Wolves, in other words,
Speaker 1: played a crucial role in Western nature for millions of
Speaker 1: years before we ever set foot on the continent. Long
Speaker 1: before we Old Worlders arrived with our peculiar hatred of predators,
Speaker 1: virtually every ecology in the West was shaped from the
Speaker 1: top down by the presence of wolves. The Canaday family
Speaker 1: first appears in the fossil record of the American Southwest
Speaker 1: about five and a half million years ago. Like American
Speaker 1: evolved wild horses, our early wild canids became geographically cosmopolitan
Speaker 1: by crossing the land bridges connecting America to Eurasia. At
Speaker 1: the same time, there were other wolves at stayed home,
Speaker 1: giving rise to animals that became Eastern wolves and spawning
Speaker 1: the intriguing red wolf of the South.
Speaker 2: As well as coyotes. As we all know.
Speaker 1: Now from this year's the Extinction announcement from Colossal Bioengineering
Speaker 1: and full disclosure, I'm a member of Colossal's Conservation Advisory Board,
Speaker 1: the supersized American direwolf was also part of the candid
Speaker 1: mix in ancient America. There's still unresolved science dire wolves.
Speaker 1: A twenty twenty one article in Nature arguing that dire
Speaker 1: wolves may be different enough from other American wolves to
Speaker 1: belong in a genus other than Canus, one called Ainoscion.
Speaker 1: Before about twenty five thousand years ago, when gray wolves
Speaker 1: began loping home to America from Eurasia, very large and
Speaker 1: very white dire wolves dominated the wolf story in America.
Speaker 1: At Rancho Lebrea Tarpits in California, more than four thousand
Speaker 1: of these burly one hundred and fifty pound wolves died
Speaker 1: in the asphalt seeps. Their remains there outnumber those of
Speaker 1: gray wolves by one hundred to one. Game of Thrones
Speaker 1: and George R. R.
Speaker 2: Martin.
Speaker 1: Notwithstanding, dire wolves were not faded to survive the extinction
Speaker 1: crash that ended the American places, saying ten thousand years ago.
Speaker 1: During that great extinction pulse, smaller gray wolves somehow out
Speaker 1: competed dire wolves, but direwolf extinction still left America with
Speaker 1: a soup of several wolf types, including coyotes. There were
Speaker 1: no survivors of the direwolf genus. Ain't no psion though,
Speaker 1: until colossal scientists added into a gray wolf genome twenty
Speaker 1: specific genes of direwolf DNA from remains that were seventy
Speaker 1: two thousand and thirteen thousand years old, then, through a
Speaker 1: surrogate mother, scientist birth Romulus Remus and Callisi in late
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four and early twenty twenty five. As for
Speaker 1: gray wolves, once they joined the other American canids in
Speaker 1: the late Pleistocene, they decidedly made their presence felt. Big
Speaker 1: five to six foot long pack hunters weighing eighty to
Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty pounds, gray wolves outmatched their long
Speaker 1: lost relations Eastern and red wolves and coyotes in both
Speaker 1: size and packing stings. Once direwolves disappeared from the continent,
Speaker 1: gray wolves were left at the swaggering big dogs. Everywhere,
Speaker 1: including the West, gray wolves seem to have migrated home
Speaker 1: to America in distinctive waves half a century ago. Biological
Speaker 1: taxonomy designated a wopping twenty three species of Canus loupus.
Speaker 1: In twenty eleven, though, the US Fish and Wildlife Service
Speaker 1: decided to come to terms with modern genetic research on
Speaker 1: wolves and concluded that North America's wolves sprang from two origins.
Speaker 1: Eastern wolves, red wolves, and coyotes all represented American wolf
Speaker 1: evolution animals that never left the continent. Gray Wolves, on
Speaker 1: the other hand, constituted animals that had started here, spent
Speaker 1: some millions of years in Eurasia, then returned in several
Speaker 1: separate distinct waves of animals during the Pleisocene. This taxonomic
Speaker 1: rethink has shrunk the number of gray wolf subspecies from
Speaker 1: the twenty three of the nineteen forties down to only four.
Speaker 2: Arctic white wolves.
Speaker 1: Canus lupus arctos, found in the extreme north of the
Speaker 1: continent were probably the last to come home to America.
Speaker 1: The rocky mountain wolf Canus Lupus occidentalis, found from the
Speaker 1: Montana Rockies northward to Alaska, was likely another late arrival
Speaker 1: from Asia. The small gray wolves of Mexico and the
Speaker 1: American Southwest Canus Lupus bailei, the Mexican wolf, may have
Speaker 1: led the migrations home. But the wolf that occupied more
Speaker 1: of America than any other, extending from the Pacific across
Speaker 1: the Great Plains, onto the western Great Lakes, and northward
Speaker 1: through much of the eastern half of Canada, was Canus
Speaker 1: lupus nubilus. This was the famed buffalo wolf, the Lobo
Speaker 1: loafer or white wolf of the plains of so much
Speaker 1: Western history. All these gray wolves arrived in time for
Speaker 1: one of the grandest predator barbecues in world history. Before
Speaker 1: the Pleistocene ended, gray wolves joined short face bears, saber
Speaker 1: tooth and scimitar cats, false cheetahs, step lions, and running
Speaker 1: hyenas to chase and pull down camels, sloths, horses, longhorned bison,
Speaker 1: and perhaps mammoth calfs in an Africa like world that
Speaker 1: almost seems like science fiction to us now. After the
Speaker 1: Pleascistine extinctions took out all the giants. A reconstituted western
Speaker 1: Bestieri bequeathed to Western gray wolves their classic place in
Speaker 1: American ecology, with buffalo the only western grazer still standing.
Speaker 1: After the extinctions, bison numbers skyrocketed to between twenty to
Speaker 1: thirty million animals, some one and a half to two
Speaker 1: million buffalo wolves served as their primary predators in this
Speaker 1: new order, As famed Western trader and author Josiah Gregg
Speaker 1: put it in the eighteen forties, although the buffalo is
Speaker 1: the largest, he has by no means the control among
Speaker 1: the prairie animals. The scepter of authority has been lodged
Speaker 1: with the large gray wolf as keystone predators. Wolves apparently
Speaker 1: influence continental ecology and ways that ripple through nature, affecting
Speaker 1: not just populations of prey species, but also other predators
Speaker 1: and scavengers, even down to the kind of vegetation like
Speaker 1: aspens or cottonwoods found on a landscape. With gray wolves present,
Speaker 1: coyote populations went down and fox numbers went up, and
Speaker 1: a kind of bigger dog beats up littler dog equation.
Speaker 1: Wolf predation exerts strong evolutionary pressures on the behaviors and
Speaker 1: even habitat selections of wolf prey species. Such was the
Speaker 1: scepter of authority the gray wolf wielded on Western landscapes
Speaker 1: a century ago, and for multiple millions of years before that,
Speaker 1: Wild America was a world in.
Speaker 2: Good part created by wolves. In a North America.
Speaker 1: Inhabited by native people who never domesticated or herded wild ungulates,
Speaker 1: and who thought of all wolves as kin teachers and
Speaker 1: totem animals. Wolves were free to play their top of
Speaker 1: the pyramid roles as keystone predators, shaping ecologies down to
Speaker 1: the birds that sang and the plants that grew. But
Speaker 1: four hundred years ago, the arrival of Old worlders at
Speaker 1: once challenged that ancient algorithm from the Old World's foothold
Speaker 1: in Massachusetts, Bostonian William Wood wrote of the wolf from
Speaker 1: the very beginning as a special and confusing problem for colonizers.
Speaker 1: The confusion came from America's wolves not acting the way
Speaker 1: Europeans had been told wolves should act. In America, Wood wrote,
Speaker 1: it was never known yet that a wolf ever set
Speaker 1: up on a man or a woman. That seemed impossible,
Speaker 1: given the folk traditions about wolves in the Old World.
Speaker 1: All those folk tales and biblical passages about ravening wolves
Speaker 1: left colonists disoriented when America's wolves showed no aggression towards people.
Speaker 1: But wolves in the numbers of America held were still unexpected,
Speaker 1: and that led to a certain despair in sixteen thirties
Speaker 1: New England, since, as Wood put it, there's little hope
Speaker 1: of their utter destruction. So from the start the wolf
Speaker 1: was an animal of special concern for Europeans. But why
Speaker 1: Partly there was their lack of familiarity with the real thing.
Speaker 1: England's own wolves hadn't lasted beyond the fourteen hundreds. Virginians
Speaker 1: and New Englanders were living among wolves for the first
Speaker 1: time in their lives, and, as Wood implied, they didn't
Speaker 1: like it in the least. Then there were their imported
Speaker 1: cultural traditions. When you had hearded domesticated animals for eight
Speaker 1: thousand years, as these old worlders had, and was your
Speaker 1: way of understanding how the world worked, there was a
Speaker 1: natural tendency to see wolves as a supernatural malediction. For Christians.
Speaker 1: Adams fall from the Garden of Eden into an earth
Speaker 1: compromised by evil struck them as the self evident origin
Speaker 1: of wolves, After all, didn't wolves share the yellow eyes
Speaker 1: medieval illustration gave to Satan. Some of America's wolves were
Speaker 1: even black, a coloring that to Europeans was suspicious in
Speaker 1: the sixteen twenties. The actual explanation for black wolves lay
Speaker 1: in scientific work four centuries in the future. A genomic
Speaker 1: study from our time indicates that black coachs in America's
Speaker 1: wolves sprang from a hybridization event between wolves and domestic
Speaker 1: dogs in the northwest of the continent approximately thirteen thousand
Speaker 1: years back during Clovis times. The mutation conferred a fitness advantage,
Speaker 1: perhaps in disease resistance, that other wolves sensed, so the
Speaker 1: visual clue of blackness affected mating choice, allowing at least
Speaker 1: some black wolves to greet Europeans. Thousands of years later,
Speaker 1: Native people admired wolves, whatever their color, for their bravery,
Speaker 1: hunting skills, and devotion to mates and packs. Europeans saw
Speaker 1: those same animals as bloodthirsty monsters, evil actors in a
Speaker 1: fallen world. Folk stories of were wolves dim memories of
Speaker 1: part human, part animal fantasies from the Paleolithic still circulated
Speaker 1: in colonial times and fed a suspicion that wolves might
Speaker 1: be avatars of a residual animality in humans, so the
Speaker 1: unsuspecting animals were soon to enjoy the full colonial experience
Speaker 1: of a wolf war.
Speaker 2: The reality was that wolf.
Speaker 1: Social lives and ecological roles were so similar to our
Speaker 1: own that it was no accident that tamed wolves had
Speaker 1: become our first domesticated animals twenty five thousand years before.
Speaker 1: Wolf societies were much like human hunter gatherer bands. In both,
Speaker 1: the leadership was usually matriarchal. The alpha female wolf directs
Speaker 1: a pack's movements, while the larger males, especially those between
Speaker 1: about two and five years old, are the primary hunters.
Speaker 1: As highly social creatures, wolves are members of family packs
Speaker 1: led by high status breeders who avoid breeding with close kin,
Speaker 1: so a pack's grown pups eventually move out in search
Speaker 1: of mating opportunities. While they're individualistic, wolf pups like young humans,
Speaker 1: learned from their elders, they are steep in pack culture.
Speaker 1: Wolves have strong emotional attachments. After absences, they greet by
Speaker 1: standing on their hind legs, a greeting known as a rally.
Speaker 1: They also interact with a remarkable range of body language
Speaker 1: and facial expressions, howling, which is contagious for wolves is
Speaker 1: one of their common ways to express their emotional states,
Speaker 1: and it enables them to recognize distant wolves from the
Speaker 1: harmonic structure of their voices. No one knows how many
Speaker 1: wolves were in colonial America, but since food determines pup survival,
Speaker 1: the population of wolves in any given setting rested on
Speaker 1: food availability. This means that packs competed with one another
Speaker 1: for prime prey territories. In fact, before Old Worlders arrived,
Speaker 1: the main mortality in wolves came from other wolves. Europeans
Speaker 1: imagined America's wolves as vicious slaughterers of helpless prey. In
Speaker 1: the real world, something different was playing out. Chasing down
Speaker 1: in neck wrestling big animals armed with hooves and antlers
Speaker 1: is dangerous in the extreme despite their wrong jaw muscles.
Speaker 1: The geometry of wolve's long muzzles actually inhibits their bite
Speaker 1: force so impossible, they go for low hanging fruit. Highly
Speaker 1: perceptive about cost benefit, they scavenge animals already dead on
Speaker 1: the hunt. They try for fawns and young animals are injured, diseased,
Speaker 1: or old ones. Their strategy is to test prey in
Speaker 1: search of those least dangerous and easiest to run down.
Speaker 2: Even then, wolf chase.
Speaker 1: Success dips as low as ten percent. One of Western
Speaker 1: painter George Catlan's memorable observations was about how dearly a
Speaker 1: wolf pack won a meal. Even an old or sick buffalo,
Speaker 1: he wrote, was a huge and furious animal, and would
Speaker 1: often deal death by wholesale to his canine assailants, as
Speaker 1: Catlan put it, which he is tossing into the air
Speaker 1: or stamping to death under his feet. Catlan's painting White
Speaker 1: Wolves Attacking Buffalo showed such a scene with an aging
Speaker 1: bull fighting a wolfpack with such resolution that, as Catlan wrote,
Speaker 1: his eyes were entirely eaten out of his head, the
Speaker 1: grizzle of his nose was mostly gone, his tongue was
Speaker 1: half eaten off, and the skin and flesh of his
Speaker 1: legs torn almost literally into strings. Yet even with the
Speaker 1: bull in that condition, numerous wolves, as Catlan said, were
Speaker 1: crushed to death by the feet or horns.
Speaker 2: Of the bull.
Speaker 1: This kind of wolf natural history was invisible to the
Speaker 1: new colonists, because all the settlers really cared about was
Speaker 1: fashioning a wolf free America. In fact, Woods, Massachusetts Colony
Speaker 1: passed the first environmental law in colonial American history. It
Speaker 1: was a bounty on the continents wolves. When Western travelers
Speaker 1: like Meriwether Lewis, George Catlin, and John James Ottoman first
Speaker 1: observed wolves in the West, they referred to them as
Speaker 1: the shepherds of the buffalo herds. Josiah Gregg said of
Speaker 1: plains lobos that although there were immense numbers of them
Speaker 1: upon the prairies, their presence in the landscape was often
Speaker 1: determined by bison herds. In this regard, Western wolves resembled
Speaker 1: grizzly bears, always found in largest numbers where they could
Speaker 1: scavenge buffalo drowned in rivers, or where weak animals were
Speaker 1: easier to attack. William Clark observed the most common wolf
Speaker 1: hunting technique for buffalo in April of eighteen oh five,
Speaker 1: when Lewis and Clark were ascending the Missouri through what
Speaker 1: is now North Dakota. Lewis wrote that Captain Clark informed
Speaker 1: me that he saw a large drove of buffalo pursued
Speaker 1: by wolves today that they at length caught a calf
Speaker 1: which was unable to keep up with the herd. An
Speaker 1: old Pawnee adage, in fact, was that wolves ran down
Speaker 1: and devoured four out of every ten bison calves born
Speaker 1: an ancient American equation that left both species healthy across
Speaker 1: at least half a million years. One trade everyone commented
Speaker 1: on when they were first among the West wolves was
Speaker 1: how tame they were, Having no reason to fear wolves.
Speaker 1: Native people had long let them hang around camps and villages,
Speaker 1: so Audubon had marveled at how wolves would lie on
Speaker 1: the banks as their steamboat passed, yawning at them like dogs.
Speaker 1: William Clark had an unconcerned wolf walk by so near
Speaker 1: that he impulsively stabbed it with the ban at on
Speaker 1: the muzzle of his rifle. At Fort Union, Audubon's party
Speaker 1: was met by the American Fur Company's Alexander Culbertson, whose
Speaker 1: chief hobby, when boredom set in, was running down wolves
Speaker 1: on his Indian pony. As Audubon's companion Edward Harris described it,
Speaker 1: with wolves in constant view, the trader offered their party
Speaker 1: a little wolf entertainment.
Speaker 2: Mister Culbertson, Harris tells us.
Speaker 1: Started his beautiful blackfoot pied mare at full speed when
Speaker 1: within half a mile of the wolf, who turned and
Speaker 1: galloped off leisurely until mister Culbertson was within two or
Speaker 1: three hundred yards of him when he started.
Speaker 2: Off at the top of his speed.
Speaker 1: Within the time it took Harris to scribble his account,
Speaker 1: Culbertson was back at the post with the wolf draped
Speaker 1: across the saddle horn shot through its shoulders as the
Speaker 1: trader had chased him at breakneck speed across the prairie.
Speaker 1: It was an impressive performance, no doubt, so long as
Speaker 1: you hadn't experienced it from the wolf end of the show.
Speaker 1: Centuries of peaceful relations with native peoples had taught the
Speaker 1: West wolves not to fear humans right old world folklore,
Speaker 1: Western bar talk, and Hollywood's sensationalism. Today, like Liam Neeson's
Speaker 1: twenty eleven film The Gray, the truth is that, except
Speaker 1: in the rare rabies case, the West wolves were in
Speaker 1: no way aggressive towards people. In fact, it was a
Speaker 1: Western trope that both wolves and coyotes were rank howards
Speaker 1: around humans. While scornful of canine cowardice, early observers in
Speaker 1: the West never tired of commenting about how trusting wolves
Speaker 1: seem to be trotting in front of their horses like
Speaker 1: dogs are sitting and watching curiously as travelers passed within feet,
Speaker 1: But soon enough, with everyone traveling the West's armed to
Speaker 1: the teeth and taking shots at almost every wolf they saw,
Speaker 1: wolves learned to keep their distance. Rifle fire was an
Speaker 1: initial and casual wolf persecution, but it was merely a
Speaker 1: hint of the changes about to come. In rapid succession
Speaker 1: across the nineteen shi century, with a wild animal products
Speaker 1: industry well established in the West and many thousands of
Speaker 1: overland migrants crossing the region every year, what should have
Speaker 1: been canine good times actually ushered in the end game
Speaker 1: for the wolf West. In eighteen seventy two, the Brooklyn
Speaker 1: painter John Gast distilled an important assumption about both Indians
Speaker 1: and the country's wild animals into a famous visual image.
Speaker 1: Gas American Progress painting portrayed a blonde, giant and angelic
Speaker 1: white garb striding across the West, stringing telegraph wires behind her,
Speaker 1: with wagons of settlers in her wake. Disappearing off the
Speaker 1: edges of the canvas were the native people, but also
Speaker 1: herds of buffalo and packs of wolves consigned to the
Speaker 1: margins of the future. Viewers of American Progress seen to
Speaker 1: understand in an America modeled on Europe, not just the
Speaker 1: native people, but all those iconic wild animals had to go.
Speaker 1: Most Americans appeared to assume that in an America making
Speaker 1: itself a clone of the old world, a fate of
Speaker 1: animals like this was inevitable. Buffalo stood first in the
Speaker 1: rank of those incompatible with civilization. Wolves well the plans
Speaker 1: since colonial times had been their total eradication. Eventually, other animals,
Speaker 1: grizzly bears, cougars, jaguars, wild horses, eagles, and, judging by
Speaker 1: the reaction to their extinction, even passenger pigeons joined the
Speaker 1: ranks of species. Civilization would not tolerate their destruction. Gas painting, implied,
Speaker 1: was no one's fault. Simply enough, Ancient America's time was over.
Speaker 1: Incompatibility was a shame, but it seemed to comfort us.
Speaker 1: Distilled from the imported nuts of East India tree, a
Speaker 1: substance called strychnine ushered in this new order. It became
Speaker 1: available in America when a firm in Philadelphia began offering
Speaker 1: cheap packages of strychnine in crystal form in eighteen thirty four.
Speaker 1: Since there were few predators left in the East by then,
Speaker 1: most of the poison went west, sold in bulk in
Speaker 1: every store and trading post. Naturally, there were no restrictions
Speaker 1: of any kind on its use. It was cheap, unregulated,
Speaker 1: and it was lethal chemical warfare. Western travelers used it
Speaker 1: both to collect pelts and just to see its effects.
Speaker 1: In an age inured to carnage, it was a horrifying killer.
Speaker 1: Inside a few minutes, a white tablet gulped down from
Speaker 1: a bated carcass launched a victim into waves of convulsive cramping.
Speaker 1: Poisoned wolves died from asphyxiation, but strychnine wrenched the body
Speaker 1: so violently as to leave a signature death pose, a
Speaker 1: corpse with a sharply arched spine and a tail frazzled
Speaker 1: as if the animal had been electrocuted on the frontier.
Speaker 1: People who did this for a living were called wolfers,
Speaker 1: a Western occupation we've probably deliberately left in the dust
Speaker 1: bin of history so we didn't have to look at
Speaker 1: it too closely. Poisoning animals didn't even require a wolfer
Speaker 1: to be present, and unlike trapping, poisoning didn't call for
Speaker 1: any sort of skill. You just baited a carcass or
Speaker 1: put out chunks of meat laced with poison, and then
Speaker 1: headed a camp to enjoy life while the strychnine did
Speaker 1: his work. Teams of wolfers driving ox dron wagons began
Speaker 1: laying out strychnine in the Yellowstone Country as early as
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty four. Approaching a buffalo or horse carcass that baited,
Speaker 1: wolfers would start finding victims appearing sprayed across the landscape
Speaker 1: as if by some spinning centrifuge a half mile from
Speaker 1: their bait animal. The targets were wolves and coyotes, but
Speaker 1: the poison killed everything interested in a rotting piece of meat. Eagles, vultures, ravens, magpies,
Speaker 1: red foxes, gray foxes, swift foxes, tiny kit foxes, skunks.
Speaker 1: As these animals died, their convulsive vomiting sprayed poison across
Speaker 1: the grass. Poison grass could take out collateral victims like horses.
Speaker 1: When Native people lost ponies this way, they developed a
Speaker 1: special hatred for wolfers. This kind of poisoning preyed on
Speaker 1: a wolf's inclination to scavenge and avoid injury in a hunt,
Speaker 1: and astonishing forty dead wolves per bated carcass was common.
Speaker 1: One party in the Texas Panhandle picked up sixty four
Speaker 1: wolves one morning, barely a mile from their camp. They
Speaker 1: made four thousand dollars in one winter, and can this.
Speaker 1: James Mead once poisoned eighty two wolves in a single
Speaker 1: baiting in the Texas Panhandle. Into the eighteen nineties, Wolfer's
Speaker 1: Jack Abernathy Alan Stagg, and Alec Lewis averaged two hundred
Speaker 1: monsters that was their nickname for gray wolves a year,
Speaker 1: killing two hundred and ninety six one year on a
Speaker 1: single giant ranch the Xit. For more than two decades,
Speaker 1: wolf and coyote pelts traded as money in the West,
Speaker 1: worth a dollar apiece and two dollars if you could
Speaker 1: get the pelts all the way.
Speaker 2: To New York.
Speaker 1: There are no figures for this most disgusting of all
Speaker 1: wild animal economies, and for good reason, it's little remembered
Speaker 1: in the story of America. But there's every likelihood that
Speaker 1: from the eighteen sixties through the eighteen nineties, poisoning wildlife
Speaker 1: for money killed Western animals in numbers that competed with
Speaker 1: the death tolls of Buffalo. For a couple of decades
Speaker 1: after the Civil War, while US Indian policy herded the
Speaker 1: tribes under reservations and Western market hunts produced the most
Speaker 1: devastating slaughter of wildlife and world history. Wolves continued to
Speaker 1: thrive despite strychnine, but with most of their prey animals
Speaker 1: now erased, wolves were forced to turn to domesticated cattle
Speaker 1: and sheep as prey, except those were the property of
Speaker 1: ranchers who stood on eight thousand years of history of
Speaker 1: battling predators, so now as hated symbols of wild America.
Speaker 1: Wolves from the eighteen eighties through the nineteen twenties became
Speaker 1: special targets in the in game wolf War. One stockman
Speaker 1: launched to convert the ancient world that acquired into a
Speaker 1: money making pasture for cow's sheep and the market. From
Speaker 1: the founding of the American colonies through the last decades
Speaker 1: of the eighteen hundreds, bounties paid eight on wolf scalps
Speaker 1: became the basic military strategy against wolves. Western stock associations
Speaker 1: paid bounties in every Western state and territory, and bounties
Speaker 1: on predators became a primary and acceptable act of governments too.
Speaker 1: In Montana, the territorial government sometimes used up two thirds
Speaker 1: of its annual budgets paying bounties on predators. Between eighteen
Speaker 1: eighty three and nineteen twenty eight, Montana's governments paid bounties
Speaker 1: on a staggering one hundred eleven thousand, five hundred and
Speaker 1: forty five wolves and eight hundred eighty six thousand, three
Speaker 1: hundred sixty seven coyotes, subsidizing both ranchers and wolfers. As
Speaker 1: late as eighteen ninety nine, the state paid out bounties
Speaker 1: on a whopping twenty three thousand, five hundred seventy five wolves.
Speaker 1: It didn't stop there or even slow down. The war
Speaker 1: against wolves and coyotes in Montana even produced a state
Speaker 1: law passed in nineteen oh five ordering veterinarians to infect
Speaker 1: any wild canines that came their way with sarcoptic mange,
Speaker 1: then released them to spread the disease among the wild populations.
Speaker 1: As a result, wild canids in Montana and Wyoming still
Speaker 1: suffer from a strikingly high mange infection rate even today.
Speaker 1: With this kind of multi pronged pressure, wolf populations went
Speaker 1: under so dramatically that after bountying more than twenty three
Speaker 1: thousand wolves in eighteen ninety nine, Montana paid for only
Speaker 1: seventeen dead gray wolves in the year nineteen twenty, and
Speaker 1: this ability to kill animals on mass Americans were absolutely unmatched.
Speaker 1: By the twentieth century, ranchers and wolfers were naming the
Speaker 1: last individual wolves still alive in Montana the last This
Speaker 1: one was called Snowdrift. In the Dakotas, the last one
Speaker 1: was the custuerwolf, an animal charge with livestock depredations a
Speaker 1: t rex couldn't have pulled off. At the beginning of
Speaker 1: the century, a Canadian writer named Ernest Thompson Seton, who
Speaker 1: had extensive outdoor experience and also employed scientific methodology in
Speaker 1: his work, tried to take on the huge implications of
Speaker 1: the new Darwinism in the world around him. Setan moved
Speaker 1: to New Mexico and began to write books, books that
Speaker 1: strongly appealed to the new centuries readers. To counter the
Speaker 1: so called nature read in tooth and claw conclusions that
Speaker 1: others had drawn from Darwinian evolution, writers like Seton and
Speaker 1: Jack London looked for examples among wild creatures of traits
Speaker 1: humans admired, individuality, compassion, cooperation, loyalty, and an ability to
Speaker 1: transfer culture learning across generations. One of Setan's most popular
Speaker 1: stories employing this approach was about one of those legendary
Speaker 1: last wolves in New Mexico's case a wolf Setan called Lobo,
Speaker 1: King of Carumpa. Lobo was a male wolf Setan had
Speaker 1: known years before he became a writer, when he was
Speaker 1: himself a trapper and wolf hunter who had finally captured Lobo.
Speaker 1: He had done that by baiting his traps with the
Speaker 1: scent of Lobo's mate, a female wolf the ranchers called Blanca,
Speaker 1: a beautiful animal Setan had trapped and killed while listening
Speaker 1: to Lobo howling mournfully in the distance to no reply.
Speaker 1: As Setan described him, Lolo was an amazingly canny wolf,
Speaker 1: but with one fatal flaw. That flaw was Lobo's fidelity
Speaker 1: to his mate. Setan caught Lobo in traps laced with
Speaker 1: Blockeka scent, and the ranchers then hauled Lobo alive to
Speaker 1: a ranch yard and chained him there as a prize
Speaker 1: to show the community. Within days, Lobo died, looking off
Speaker 1: at the New Mexico planes that had been his and
Speaker 1: Blanca's world. Lobo's and Blanca's story first appeared in Setan's
Speaker 1: book Wild Animals I Have Known, and it was one
Speaker 1: of the stories that gave that famous book its running theme.
Speaker 1: Those in America who celebrated the destruction of the West
Speaker 1: wolves sneered, but Setan's book was pointing towards a different
Speaker 1: kind of future. The theme of wild animals I have known,
Speaker 1: he wrote was simple, we and the beasts are kN.
Speaker 3: So Dan, thinking about wolves. One of the points that
Speaker 3: you raise in this episode is that the perception of
Speaker 3: wolves coming from the old world doesn't match up with
Speaker 3: the reality of wolves in the New world. And it
Speaker 3: got me thinking about when we were working on our
Speaker 3: Long Hunter project and our Mountain Man project. We do
Speaker 3: have instances of guys being bitten by wolves, and it's
Speaker 3: always when they're sleeping around a campfire, and I had
Speaker 3: sort of read that as we're working on it. I'd
Speaker 3: read that as like evidence of wolves being all over
Speaker 3: the place and just a presence on the landscape. And
Speaker 3: then in light of your episode had caused me to
Speaker 3: rethink it. These wolves are sneaking in and you know,
Speaker 3: they're not super aggressive, they're just approaching guys when they're asleep.
Speaker 3: I don't know that there's a question there necessarily, but
Speaker 3: I mean with.
Speaker 2: The Long Hunter instance, it was a rabbit wolf. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and there's there's a rabbit there's.
Speaker 1: A rabbit wolf rabbit mountain man at one of the
Speaker 1: rendezvous too. Yeah, there's a wolf that runs around at
Speaker 1: a rendezvous in the eighteenth things and bites people.
Speaker 3: I guess it strikes me because you read it, you
Speaker 3: write accounts from those periods, and you're like, Wow, wolves
Speaker 3: were everywhere, wolves were biting people. And then when you
Speaker 3: take a step back and you sort of contextualize it
Speaker 3: with how many wolves there were, there are sort of
Speaker 3: these rare, very rare instances that jump out to us.
Speaker 3: But in the grand scheme of things, the wolves are
Speaker 3: pretty much off on their own.
Speaker 2: And yeah, you.
Speaker 4: Can find guy after guy after guy after guy that
Speaker 4: gets tore up by a grizzly bear. Yeah, No, guys
Speaker 4: are getting tore up by wolves, right.
Speaker 2: No, they're not.
Speaker 1: And uh, I mean one of the reasons I wanted
Speaker 1: to include that quote from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. This
Speaker 1: is in William Woods's book that he publishes in sixteen
Speaker 1: thirty two, when he's running through the accounts of all
Speaker 1: these new animals that are in the Americas, he makes
Speaker 1: that statement that I, as far as I can find,
Speaker 1: remains true all through American history, certainly through the West
Speaker 1: and the West wolves. He makes that statement that there
Speaker 1: has not been an instance where a wolf has set
Speaker 1: upon a man or a woman in our colony, and
Speaker 1: he's already said there are wolves around all over the place,
Speaker 1: but there has not been an instance. And the reason
Speaker 1: he said that, I'm pretty certain is because these people
Speaker 1: came out of Western Europe. For one thing, England hadn't
Speaker 1: had wolves since the fourteen hundreds, so there have been
Speaker 1: multiple generations of people who the only thing they know
Speaker 1: about wolves is, you know, these fairy tales and folk
Speaker 1: tales that they've hurt handed down. Is they are expecting
Speaker 1: once they hear that there are wolves in North America,
Speaker 1: that wolves are going to be tearing people limb from limb,
Speaker 1: and suddenly the reality is, wow, there's not been a
Speaker 1: single instance where a wolf has set upon a man
Speaker 1: or a woman in our experience. And that's kind of
Speaker 1: what tracks through the story here, especially in the West.
Speaker 1: What most people in the nineteenth century in the West,
Speaker 1: especially after they had had generations of this kind of
Speaker 1: interaction with wolves, what their reaction to wolves was is
Speaker 1: wolves are cowards. Wolves are not aggressive and are going
Speaker 1: to attack you. They're cowards, and that became the detegration
Speaker 1: that people levied against them. You know, the Native people
Speaker 1: think am as boy wolves are these wonderful animals. They're
Speaker 1: loyal to their families and you know, and they're brave,
Speaker 1: and and the European euro American perspective was because the
Speaker 1: wolves who are not of aggressive there are a bunch
Speaker 1: of cowards and that's that's how they.
Speaker 2: That's how they respond.
Speaker 4: There's a lot of I hesitate to say evidence because
Speaker 4: I don't know that I've seen it in evidentiary form.
Speaker 4: You hear people say that the wolves of Europe, the
Speaker 4: wolves in Romania, wolves in other places, that it's a
Speaker 4: there is a there's a legacy of greater aggression and
Speaker 4: like a higher propensity to attack people with some of
Speaker 4: these Eurasian wolves, more livestock depredation.
Speaker 2: Do you know that? Do you know that to be true?
Speaker 4: Or is that?
Speaker 2: Is that not true?
Speaker 1: I know that that's what's thought to be true. That's
Speaker 1: what the folklore of the wolf is has always been,
Speaker 1: and that folklore was brought to them America. So that's
Speaker 1: one of the you know, and it's still I mean,
Speaker 1: I encountered people, you know, when I was living in
Speaker 1: the Bitterroot Valley. Back a decade ago, I had a
Speaker 1: neighbor who when wolves were recovering in the Sapphire Mountains
Speaker 1: right above us, and I would occasionally see a pack
Speaker 1: run across the road. As I would come home from
Speaker 1: a graduate class at night at ten o'clock, pack of
Speaker 1: wolves would run across the road. I could go outside,
Speaker 1: usually two or three times a year, and I'd hear wolves.
Speaker 1: How I had a neighbor who had grown up in
Speaker 1: California who walked up to the house one day and
Speaker 1: said something like, well, I guess you know that these
Speaker 1: wolves are probably I mean, we're in mortal danger. These
Speaker 1: wolves are close, and these things they're going to tear
Speaker 1: my wife off the front porch and maul her in
Speaker 1: the yard. I can't let my son and his granddaughter
Speaker 1: come over because I know they're going to get my granddaughter.
Speaker 4: And you know, I was trying to tell you they
Speaker 4: haven't got man the tree, haven't got anybody.
Speaker 1: They have, there's no but it did not work. I
Speaker 1: told him that, and I could tell he was completely unconvinced.
Speaker 1: And so these stories, I mean, they go obviously back
Speaker 1: a long way into the old world. I mean, they
Speaker 1: are still current with us where you know. And I
Speaker 1: went to a wolf conference in southern New Mexico and
Speaker 1: Las Crusis one time, about twenty years ago, and there
Speaker 1: was a woman who was representing the livestock industry who
Speaker 1: showed our asseymbol throng of an audience of two hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty people or so, how deadly Mexican wolves were
Speaker 1: and how scary they were to have them on the ground.
Speaker 1: And what she showed us was a photograph of a
Speaker 1: cowboy in full shaps and hat and everything, his boots
Speaker 1: running towards a front porch, running towards the photographer and
Speaker 1: he's really balling the jack and back in the background
Speaker 1: maybe one hundred yards away, so far away. She had
Speaker 1: to draw a circle around it to make sure that
Speaker 1: the audience saw it was a wolf standing in the road.
Speaker 1: And she said, this is an example of how bloodthirsty
Speaker 1: these wolves are.
Speaker 2: Had he not.
Speaker 1: Run for the porch, this wolf was going to pull
Speaker 1: him down. Yeah, And it's a wolf standing curiously in
Speaker 1: the road watching a cowboy in shaps run up the
Speaker 1: up the dirt road.
Speaker 4: There's a great way of looking at the risk. And
Speaker 4: you see it with grizzly bears, And it'd be interesting
Speaker 4: to look at it with contemporary Europe, you know, or
Speaker 4: in your aging countries to.
Speaker 2: Have wolves would be like, what are the odds.
Speaker 4: Than in a given year any individual, Yeah, acts will
Speaker 4: have a violent altercation with a human, you know. And
Speaker 4: then when you look at like the menagerie of North
Speaker 4: American wildlife, it's like grizzlies.
Speaker 2: Are grizzlies are mountain lions? Yeah?
Speaker 4: Are well, Yeah, grizzlies are high and every and everybody
Speaker 4: else is kind of like inconsequential. But I would be
Speaker 4: curious to know, like if the europe if that European
Speaker 4: sense which you see cited all the time when it
Speaker 4: talks about the American the immediate American hatred of wolves
Speaker 4: coming from this big bad wolf in Europe thing to
Speaker 4: just be interesting to look at and be like, was
Speaker 4: it any more was it any more true in Europe
Speaker 4: than here? Or was it just as untrue there as
Speaker 4: it was here? About the human health risk with wolves, Yeah,
Speaker 4: not the inconvenience of livestock, but the health risk I.
Speaker 1: Think, you know. And there's a guy who's who's written
Speaker 1: a recent book which I just blurbed for him on
Speaker 1: Europe's wolves. And what he did was there was a
Speaker 1: wolf in Romania that tracked sort of a you know,
Speaker 1: one of these single colonizing wolves, that tracked three or
Speaker 1: four hundred miles from southern southeastern Europe towards France. And
Speaker 1: this guy, a couple of years later, went out and
Speaker 1: he that exact route that this wolf had taken and
Speaker 1: wrote a book about it. And one of the things
Speaker 1: he said that struck me because I.
Speaker 2: Didn't know this.
Speaker 1: Europe now has more wolves in it than the United
Speaker 1: States does. The United States, accepting Alaska, the lower forty eight,
Speaker 1: Europe has more wolves than the Lower forty eight, and
Speaker 1: Europe is attempting to be as welcoming of wolves as possible. Now, Obviously,
Speaker 1: according to this guy's journey, he was running into people,
Speaker 1: you know, every few days who were outraged, just as
Speaker 1: a lot of Montana ranchers are outraged that there were
Speaker 1: wolves returning to Europe, and so some of those same sensibilities.
Speaker 1: But it's going to require somebody doing a book to
Speaker 1: try to find whether or not evidence actually exists, because
Speaker 1: some of the things I've read about wolf attacks in
Speaker 1: Europe are well okay, So there's always the rabid animal
Speaker 1: that's that could be involved, and there were evidently a
Speaker 1: lot of wolf dog hybrids and those animals, at least
Speaker 1: some people have argued, may have been responsible for some
Speaker 1: of the attacks that have so anyway, it's that kind
Speaker 1: of story. And obviously in the nineteenth century when people
Speaker 1: are coming west. I mean, what I tried to get
Speaker 1: across this episode is that hell wolves have been They
Speaker 1: had been in the West and in America for five
Speaker 1: million years. All of the wildlife, the way trees and
Speaker 1: grass grew was sort of dependent on there being this
Speaker 1: keystone predator at the top of everything. So it's a
Speaker 1: little bit like taking the beavers out or taking the
Speaker 1: sea otters out. When you do that, the ecologies start
Speaker 1: scrambling and changing because you've got in place this animal
Speaker 1: that's been there for millions of years and producing its
Speaker 1: effect the world. And yet you know, we come from
Speaker 1: the old world with this kind of wolf hostility, and
Speaker 1: our task immediately is to try to get rid of
Speaker 1: them is just as fast as we can.
Speaker 3: I think one thing that I've gotten from your work
Speaker 3: in terms of just how I conceptualize and certain animals,
Speaker 3: this relationship between coyotes and wolves and they look alike,
Speaker 3: but there's obvious differences. But this idea that you know,
Speaker 3: wolves go up, coyotes go down, foxes go up, and
Speaker 3: it's sort of this continuous balancing act between these. I
Speaker 3: don't know if you can sort of talk about the
Speaker 3: coyote story because that's obviously an area of expertise, but
Speaker 3: how that relates to the wolf story, because there's some
Speaker 3: interesting parallels, but then obviously those two animals, their histories
Speaker 3: diverge in very clear ways.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I've done obviously the Old Man America episode on
Speaker 1: you know, the Native stories about coyote with a capital
Speaker 1: C as the deity figure, and I'm going to do
Speaker 1: one more episode later in the year that's going to
Speaker 1: be about the sort of the coyote story because the coyote,
Speaker 1: unlike wolves, Europeans had no familiarity with coyotes, and so
Speaker 1: they didn't actually know what to think about them, and
Speaker 1: it took, you know, some time, It took particularly you know,
Speaker 1: Mark Twain in roughing it sort of giving Americas on
Speaker 1: America's an idea of how to think about coyotes, and
Speaker 1: and it was not a favorable and appraisal unfortunately. But
Speaker 1: coyotes and wolves obviously go back a long way. They
Speaker 1: are closely related. They can hybridize, although one of the
Speaker 1: interesting things that's happening these days is that coyotes will
Speaker 1: readily hybridize and the wolves will too, with eastern wolves
Speaker 1: and red wolves, but not gray wolves. And the gray
Speaker 1: wolves that are in the West seem to be sort
Speaker 1: of mortal enemies of coyotes, and we have some explanations
Speaker 1: for that, and I can talk about them a little
Speaker 1: later in the series. But they're closely related, they're related
Speaker 1: enough to hybridize. But I had a biologist at the
Speaker 1: Predator Research Facility in Logan, Utah tell me one time
Speaker 1: that they had deliberately induced a pregnancy and a coyote
Speaker 1: with wolf sperm, and when she had this litter, she
Speaker 1: immediately killed every one of them.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she killed every one of them within a day,
Speaker 1: her own pups.
Speaker 4: Her hatred wolves greater than her love of her own children.
Speaker 1: Yeah, her love of her own pups.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think the end of a book. Yeah, read
Speaker 2: that to my kids at night. Yeah, they love that.
Speaker 2: Not that and she ate them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but you know, I mean one of the stories
Speaker 1: I obviously told in this this particular episode is about
Speaker 1: the Wolfers, which is uh and I you know, have
Speaker 1: to observe that's not of sort of a Western figure
Speaker 1: that has made it into Hollywood movies. But holy cow,
Speaker 1: these guys they killed untold thousands of animals and not
Speaker 1: just wolves because the baits, the strych nine baits they
Speaker 1: were putting out. They were killing everything that came and
Speaker 1: took the baits. So they were killing eagles and ravens
Speaker 1: and hawks and skunks and raccoons and foxes and coyotes
Speaker 1: and you know, and also wolves.
Speaker 4: I'll tell you another interesting bycatch.
Speaker 2: They would get yeah in.
Speaker 4: Life and Death at the Mouth of the Muscleshell, which
Speaker 4: is like a trader's journal.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Uh.
Speaker 4: They it seems like when they get little free time,
Speaker 4: like the guys in this little community which is now
Speaker 4: under the wa waters of Fort Peck Reservoir, they kind
Speaker 4: of like, as they get a minute or they get
Speaker 4: the right amount of drunk or whatever, it's decided that
Speaker 4: they'll go and lace some baits, just like a fall
Speaker 4: like nothing else nothing better else to fall back is
Speaker 4: lay some baits in it. He talks about, I can't
Speaker 4: even remember what tribe it is. They come in pissed
Speaker 4: because they've lost twenty four of their dogs to a bait. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and they want to raise it. They want to raise
Speaker 4: a fuss about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And.
Speaker 1: Of strict nine poisoning because wolves and coyotes would vomit
Speaker 1: the stryct nine onto the grass, and Indian pony herds
Speaker 1: would if they happen to be herded in that spot,
Speaker 1: and aiding that grass horses would suddenly die from being
Speaker 1: killed by strick nine.
Speaker 3: What's the This might be a two technical what's the
Speaker 3: half life or whatever? The appropriate term would be a
Speaker 3: strictionne it seems like one of the like a heavy
Speaker 3: metal almost that is just sort of it's accumulates and yeah,
Speaker 3: like where does it end? The horse eats the grass
Speaker 3: and the horse does then yeah, comes against the horse.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I wish I could answer that question. I don't
Speaker 1: really know, but I do think it remains toxic, you know,
Speaker 1: exposed above ground in a form that another animal can
Speaker 1: get for quite a while. Yeah.
Speaker 4: One last question for you on this. Dire wolves been
Speaker 4: in the news Colossal Bioscience, Colossal Biosciences, where you and
Speaker 4: I are on the conservation advisory board. They've taken they've
Speaker 4: identified some dire wolf genes I believe nineteen, and we're
Speaker 4: able to put them, combine them with a gray wolf,
Speaker 4: and then use surrogate pops to birth some Yeah, and
Speaker 4: it's sparked this huge debate of how you know when
Speaker 4: they when when someone declares it a dire wolves, Like,
Speaker 4: what does it require to say an animal is what
Speaker 4: it is? Does it have to pass the look test?
Speaker 4: Does it have to pass the genetic purity marker?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 4: Like, who gets to say that that's what that is?
Speaker 4: And you and I had talked before about.
Speaker 2: Even if you had, if you knew you had.
Speaker 4: The complete animal, how do you account for the culture?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's the to me, the whole thing. And
Speaker 1: we have talked about it, say, because animals have culture,
Speaker 1: and so particularly for social animals like wolves, I mean,
Speaker 1: they teach their pups what the potential prey is, how
Speaker 1: to function in a landscape. And these are animals that,
Speaker 1: these these dire wolves, if that's what we can call them,
Speaker 1: that are not going to have any culture to rely
Speaker 1: on the culture they're going to be taught basically as
Speaker 1: whatever they're human handlers are exposing them to, you know,
Speaker 1: And the other thing about this. I mean, this is,
Speaker 1: as you and I both know and I've talked about,
Speaker 1: this is a kind of a genetic experiment to see
Speaker 1: if it's possible to de extinct an animal, and canids
Speaker 1: appear to be easier to do this with than anything else,
Speaker 1: and so that's why Colossal ended up doing this wolf
Speaker 1: experiment to begin with. But you can't really say that
Speaker 1: these animals ultimately are dire wolves. They're wolves that are
Speaker 1: going to have some direwolf genetics, and we're going to
Speaker 1: get a chance to see. I mean, one of the
Speaker 1: things obviously that these genetic these spliced in genes have
Speaker 1: done is they've produced animals that are white, and that's
Speaker 1: one of the arguments that dire wolves probably had white coats,
Speaker 1: particularly thick white coats, and these animals have that. I
Speaker 1: think the next testing to be interested in is to
Speaker 1: see exactly how big they get, because our perception, particularly
Speaker 1: from Librea tar pits, where there are just hundreds of
Speaker 1: direwolf skulls available from dire wolves that were caught in
Speaker 1: the tar there is that dire wolves were probably about
Speaker 1: twenty five thirty percent larger than gray wolves, which means
Speaker 1: if these animals get to adulthood, and they do express
Speaker 1: direwolf genetics. I mean they're going to weigh one hundred
Speaker 1: and sixty hundred and sixty five pounds or something. So
Speaker 1: that's going to be I think, an interesting test to see.
Speaker 1: I don't know how it's going to turn out, but
Speaker 1: it's a very fascinating.
Speaker 4: It's it's been just for the debate in the conversation
Speaker 4: that it's inspired about kidding about wildlife and the role
Speaker 4: of wildlife and extinction. My first date with my wife,
Speaker 4: my very first date, we went to Librea tar pit
Speaker 4: it is and they have a display on a wall
Speaker 4: of seventy five wolf skulls, and I have a skull
Speaker 4: shelf in my house that was inspired by the It's
Speaker 4: not lit the same way, but it was inspired inspired
Speaker 4: by that, inspired by that, and I got in trouble
Speaker 4: on my first date because we want you know, they
Speaker 4: play those movies on Circle. Well, I'm sitting there and
Speaker 4: we come in and we watched the end half of
Speaker 4: a movie and I found myself explaining, so what we'll
Speaker 4: do is we'll watch the end half and then it'll
Speaker 4: start over and we'll just watch up to where I started.
Speaker 2: And she's like, oh that this is how that that
Speaker 2: that's how this works. Oh thank you for.
Speaker 4: Thank you for explaining. I was toy lost as how
Speaker 4: we're gonna see the whole movie. Thanks for helping me out.
Speaker 4: I just couldn't visualize how this is gonna work.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, well guys, thanks for all the question man.
Speaker 2: Yeah this is this has been great fun as always.
Speaker 2: Ye all right
Speaker 4: M mmmmm