Speaker 1: Oh hey, everybody. Episode eighty four of T A C.
Speaker 1: I just messed up the intro twice. At first I
Speaker 1: said that this was the Mediator podcast, and then I said,
Speaker 1: oh hey, dude, hey man, I'm getting progressively better and
Speaker 1: worse at this the same time. I feel anyway, this
Speaker 1: episode eighty four, it's a good one. It's about snakes.
Speaker 1: Most of it's about snakes. At least. We had Harry W. Green,
Speaker 1: who is a herpetologist, the first herpetologist ever on the show,
Speaker 1: and he will not be the last. He is an
Speaker 1: interesting gentleman. He's a professor and many other things which
Speaker 1: you'll hear about in the interviews. Stick around to learn
Speaker 1: about snakes and also his book, which is one of
Speaker 1: the better books I've ever read. Hopefully you check that
Speaker 1: out and pick it up. And I didn't. I went
Speaker 1: on a little bit of a rant, which will hear soon,
Speaker 1: a little bit of a rant. So there's a rant
Speaker 1: about drawing the line. And then we had, of course
Speaker 1: another Nozira sharp moment that's pretty damn good. But before
Speaker 1: we get to that, I want to talk to you
Speaker 1: guys about Meat Eater season eight. Meat Eater season eight
Speaker 1: is now on Netflix, you guys know about Netflix. I
Speaker 1: remember when Netflix was just where you had to like
Speaker 1: get a CD out of it. It mailed you a
Speaker 1: CD or DVD is probably what that was. They mail
Speaker 1: your DVD and then you had to mail it backtone
Speaker 1: or whatever. That was not so long ago. But now
Speaker 1: it's a juggernaut. It's the Juggernaut platform that brings you many, many,
Speaker 1: many good content projects. Paramount among them is meat. Each
Speaker 1: season eight, it's an eight episode season includes lots of
Speaker 1: really cool things that are near and dear to my heart.
Speaker 1: Uh Mexico. CU's dear Maryland, seek a deer Maryland. And
Speaker 1: of course this is very near and dear my heart
Speaker 1: because that's my home territory. So I'm glad we went there.
Speaker 1: But there you can go right now to Netflix and
Speaker 1: binge to your heart's desire with Steve Ronella, Ryan Callahan.
Speaker 1: You honest to tell us the whole crew out there
Speaker 1: doing fun stuff and eating. So Netflix Mediator season eight,
Speaker 1: check it out. Proud of the team for doing awesome
Speaker 1: work on this one. So go binge or don't, whatever
Speaker 1: you want to do. It's free country now. If you
Speaker 1: go to first light dot com as we speak, you're
Speaker 1: gonna learn about the Brookstown Sweater. We talked about the
Speaker 1: Brookstown sweater here before. Brooks Down sweater is my favorite,
Speaker 1: probably my favorite piece of cold weather gear from first
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Speaker 1: wears it all the time. She thinks this looks fashionable. Um,
Speaker 1: it's It's only about ten point nine ounces, it's ultra light,
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Speaker 1: It's advanced active installation. I actually wore it on an
Speaker 1: Elk hunt where it was warm in the morning and
Speaker 1: a snowstorm blew in. I wore it in the hike
Speaker 1: in and I wore for sitting in glassing. Uh for elk.
Speaker 1: So I mean it is a it's a durable piece.
Speaker 1: It's a lot of duality. You can wear it pretty
Speaker 1: much anytime you need insulation. So go check out the
Speaker 1: Brookstown sweater first. Like dot com. Okay, here's episode eighty
Speaker 1: four coming at you. Let's go. I guess I grew
Speaker 1: up on an older road, a pedal to the medals.
Speaker 1: I always did what I've told until I found out
Speaker 1: that my brand new closed a game second hand from
Speaker 1: the rich kids next door. And I grew up fast.
Speaker 1: I guess I grew up. I mean, there are a
Speaker 1: thousand things inside of my head I wish I ain't seen,
Speaker 1: and now I just wanted to a real bad dream
Speaker 1: or being and like I'm coming a part of the seams.
Speaker 1: But thank you, Jack Daniel. No, Hey, everybody, welcome to
Speaker 1: episode eighty four. I'm been O'Brien. Say Hi, Phil, Hello Phil.
Speaker 1: You're just mentioning that you're going through a bit of
Speaker 1: a uh, attitude adjustment here recently. Yeah, well, I feel
Speaker 1: like I have to stick up for myself, uh to
Speaker 1: you and also the people, the THHD listeners who are
Speaker 1: write again with frankly just rude names for a mustache
Speaker 1: they haven't even seen yet. They haven't even it's looking better.
Speaker 1: It's looking better, Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's here. He's
Speaker 1: kind of like a Henry Beauregard must The main problem
Speaker 1: is the color. Yes, not it's best for men or whatever. Hair.
Speaker 1: Jael just one of those coman coloring dye. Next thing,
Speaker 1: you know, you're Phil from the TV Doctor. Phil. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm looking more. I'm more of a mustache man
Speaker 1: than Ryan Callahan. Yep, I will define the mustache for
Speaker 1: this company and the generation. The generation. Yeah, that's what
Speaker 1: I strive for. So anyway, a lot of you guys
Speaker 1: have wrote in with like name Phil's mustache and most
Speaker 1: of them meat, and so we're fighting back. I'm on
Speaker 1: Phil side. It's the first time for everything. I guess.
Speaker 1: I'm on Phil side. Stop saying offensive names about his mustache,
Speaker 1: even though a lot of them are pretty funny. Sure,
Speaker 1: I guess anyway, mustache, what's what's a November? Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: coming up soon. So are you gonna keep it for that? No?
Speaker 1: I think November one. It's it's gone. All right, We'll
Speaker 1: get your touching it and then pulling at it. It's
Speaker 1: a problem. We'll get your mustache names in now because
Speaker 1: we're not having this anymore. Make them nice, polite mustache names.
Speaker 1: Get bastards, all right. We got a lot, we got
Speaker 1: some things to address here. But today's guests is Harry W.
Speaker 1: Green Uh, a wonderful man, a professor for a very
Speaker 1: long time, and a herpetologist. Phil, you know what herpetologist
Speaker 1: is vaguely because I've been mixing the podcast, but I
Speaker 1: would not be able to define for you right now,
Speaker 1: let's define herpetologist someone who specialized in the study of
Speaker 1: reptiles and amphibians but slithers around. Herpetologist is into it. Um.
Speaker 1: But Harry, who we had a great conversation. We're gonna
Speaker 1: keep this uh intro segments short because I want to
Speaker 1: get pretty much directly to the conversation with Harry, because
Speaker 1: I think it's one of the best his books, his
Speaker 1: particularly his his book you'll hear about in the interview
Speaker 1: is is one of the best I've ever read. I
Speaker 1: would say, I mean, it's just as great as he
Speaker 1: calls an eccentric meditation on the outdoors. Um, and it's great.
Speaker 1: So you hear about that coming up. But um, we've
Speaker 1: got a couple of things to cover off on from
Speaker 1: previous podcasts and I we're gonna we'll get to it.
Speaker 1: But snakes, fill Are you afraid of snakes? Phil? Uh? No,
Speaker 1: not not particularly unless they're kind of exotic looking and
Speaker 1: move quickly. Do you have any stories about snakes? We
Speaker 1: had any close run ins or do you have? You
Speaker 1: been fairly No, nothing dangerous. No, I've never come across
Speaker 1: a rattlesnake in the wild but I used to cash
Speaker 1: little garter snakes in my backyard, and um, you know,
Speaker 1: they did the whole thing at school. He had a
Speaker 1: like a wildlife assembly and you have to hold the
Speaker 1: boat constrict and I was into that. So no, I
Speaker 1: don't have like a physical horror like horrific reaction. Well
Speaker 1: I don't either. I'm not into them. I don't want
Speaker 1: them to be crawling around wherever I am, but I
Speaker 1: don't hear them at all. Yeah, but it turns out
Speaker 1: pheel As you know that fear snakes is one of
Speaker 1: the most common phobias in all of humanity. I have
Speaker 1: that tracks that makes sense. And you're gonna hear from
Speaker 1: Harry Green why he thinks that's true. Well, a lot
Speaker 1: of studies will we'll back this up, and it's just
Speaker 1: because and again Harry goes into this in some detail,
Speaker 1: but it's because we've been around them for so long. Um,
Speaker 1: they were on the savannahs of Africa when we were
Speaker 1: becoming if you believe in all of this, becoming lower
Speaker 1: hominids and turning into humans that we are today. And
Speaker 1: so there's just a lot of history with snakes. So
Speaker 1: it's interesting to learn about him, say and they're just
Speaker 1: interesting animals. They slither not like many other beings that
Speaker 1: you'll run into, So they're just an interesting, interesting creature.
Speaker 1: I think we're all interested in them. There's some people
Speaker 1: are Annie Razor, who has been on this podcast before
Speaker 1: talking about Game of Thrones, wouldn't even be in the
Speaker 1: podcast room, wouldn't even be in the office if we
Speaker 1: had a snake in here. No, she was. I honestly
Speaker 1: couldn't believe her reaction when we just started talking about snakes.
Speaker 1: She was like, Nope, I'm not I don't want to
Speaker 1: hear the words snake. Stop it. I don't want to
Speaker 1: think about snakes. She was like, And honestly, if you're
Speaker 1: thinking about bringing a snake into this office, you should
Speaker 1: really let people know so they have a chance to
Speaker 1: not be here. And I think she was talking about herself.
Speaker 1: So throughout evolutionary history, we have learned to fear snakes,
Speaker 1: and it has manifested itself in different ways. Annie is
Speaker 1: an extreme example. I couldn't even get her in the
Speaker 1: podcast to talk about snakes. So that's that. So we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk about that with UM with Harry W. Green
Speaker 1: and just a moment. But we got a bunch of emails.
Speaker 1: Thanks for everybody's been writing into th hc ats medator
Speaker 1: dot com with both your not so sharp moments, your names,
Speaker 1: fulfills mustache, and just your general musing is about the show.
Speaker 1: There's been lots and lots and lots of good emails.
Speaker 1: It's hard to keep up. So if I have an
Speaker 1: emailed you're back, I'm sorry, but I will get to it. UM.
Speaker 1: I'm just happy to see everybody with feelings one way
Speaker 1: or the other about the show. UM. I got one
Speaker 1: from Brandon Hill that I wanted to read. Um, that's
Speaker 1: really really interesting. I won't read the whole thing, but
Speaker 1: he basically just says you've mentioned many times about finding
Speaker 1: common ground and striving to not upset each other. I
Speaker 1: think the one thing you have in address is where
Speaker 1: we draw the line. I get it. There's no reason
Speaker 1: to intentionally rub our grip and grin picks and the
Speaker 1: faces of anton hunters and vegans. We shouldn't go out
Speaker 1: of our way to be assholes to those that are
Speaker 1: offended by what we love to do. But what is
Speaker 1: wrong with being proud of your accomplishments and wanting to
Speaker 1: share with your family and friends When do we say
Speaker 1: to our opposition, you know what enough is enough? This
Speaker 1: is what I do, this is my lifestyle. I'm proud
Speaker 1: and I don't give a ship about your hurt feelings.
Speaker 1: You suggested we should always be opening and evaluate and
Speaker 1: compromise our values. I disagree. There has been. There's become
Speaker 1: a point we put our foot down and you'll know more.
Speaker 1: Otherwise we will slowly be bullied into the end of
Speaker 1: that which we hold. So dear, that's pretty well staged,
Speaker 1: pretty well stated. There's kind of things I think that
Speaker 1: goes back to the Grip and Grins conversation. It does
Speaker 1: yesterday last week, I mean, and it goes to last
Speaker 1: week's from your conversation. It goes to the Bearer conversation
Speaker 1: with Barry Gilbert. It goes all the way back to
Speaker 1: the going to uh Berkeley and talking to vegans and
Speaker 1: animal rights activists. There's a couple of things that that
Speaker 1: Brandon says that just aren't I think if you would
Speaker 1: go back and listen to my comments that just I
Speaker 1: think aren't um they don't track with my views. I
Speaker 1: don't there and I've said this many many times. There's
Speaker 1: some things that I will not I will not bend on.
Speaker 1: There are some things I believe to be true, and
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna bend on doing them, talking about them,
Speaker 1: promoting them, whatever they might be. Um, certainly gun rights
Speaker 1: is one of those things. I believe in the Second Amendment.
Speaker 1: But it's not that I wouldn't have a conversation somebody
Speaker 1: that doesn't believe in the Second a moment, and I'm
Speaker 1: not going to tell them within that conversation. Hey, be quiet.
Speaker 1: I don't agree with you. And so I think Brandon's Brandon.
Speaker 1: Thanks for writing in Brandon, and and I appreciate it.
Speaker 1: But I think what you're saying there is just I
Speaker 1: just think it's wrong. I don't agree. And the reason
Speaker 1: I don't agree is within the conversation. I can have
Speaker 1: strongly held beliefs, but if I'm going to approach a
Speaker 1: conversation by saying like enough is enough, I don't want
Speaker 1: to talk to you about this, I don't care what
Speaker 1: you think. Is basically what you're saying about. I don't
Speaker 1: give a shit about your hurt feelings. Just basically I
Speaker 1: don't care what you think. This is not the way
Speaker 1: that I that I go about things. There are some
Speaker 1: things that I'm not gonna move on. When I talk
Speaker 1: to Barry Gilbert, I wouldn't be like, you know what,
Speaker 1: the North American midle of conservation. Yeah, that's fine, it
Speaker 1: might suck, but like I'll address the reality that it's
Speaker 1: not perfect. But I'm not gonna budge on the fact
Speaker 1: that I think it's a prescription for a better wild
Speaker 1: life and better conservation in this country. And so I
Speaker 1: don't mistake if you're out there listening, don't mistake me
Speaker 1: for some kind of push over snowflake. I just don't
Speaker 1: do that, because that's not the case. Um I am.
Speaker 1: The willingness to have a conversation in the modern sense
Speaker 1: does not mean that you're going to fold to every
Speaker 1: push against your ideologist. It doesn't. But it means you're
Speaker 1: open to new ideas. And being open to new ideas
Speaker 1: doesn't mean you have to sacrifice the ones you believe in.
Speaker 1: And so we can do both things at the same time,
Speaker 1: and we should do both things at the same time.
Speaker 1: So that if the question is where do I draw
Speaker 1: the line, I don't have a line. I'll talk to
Speaker 1: any want about anything at any time, and there's no
Speaker 1: line that I have to draw about my beliefs Now,
Speaker 1: like I said, there's certainly beliefs that I hold that
Speaker 1: I think that would be almost impossible for somebody to
Speaker 1: talk me off of, Like hunting is valuable for wild life,
Speaker 1: for human kind and for all of us. It's gonna
Speaker 1: be hard to get me off of that one. But
Speaker 1: I certainly let somebody try. Um. And I'll certainly if
Speaker 1: someone makes a good point, I'll certainly think about it.
Speaker 1: And if I feel the need to adjust my ideologies
Speaker 1: or my beliefs on something, and I will. And so
Speaker 1: in this common the pushback on liberals to say that,
Speaker 1: oh uh, you're a snowflake if you bend to what
Speaker 1: somebody thinks. Yeah. Fine. I think that the outraging machine
Speaker 1: in this country is a bit off the rails. I
Speaker 1: think people are trained that they can get what they
Speaker 1: want through outrage, and we are developing Internet mobs and
Speaker 1: we're not really understanding how they've come together or what
Speaker 1: they can do. I think we're babies when it comes
Speaker 1: to social media in the Internet. Then we're learning. But
Speaker 1: all of that is to say, I don't have a line.
Speaker 1: Where do I draw the line? I really care. There's
Speaker 1: no line, there's no there's no person that could sit
Speaker 1: in this room that I wouldn't talk to. There just isn't. Um,
Speaker 1: There's plenty of people that I can think of that
Speaker 1: I could talk to, and then I know we probably
Speaker 1: wouldn't come to any agreement, but I'd want to talk
Speaker 1: to him anyway, because understanding the other side of an
Speaker 1: issue is as important as your own beliefs, in my opinion,
Speaker 1: So maybe that's maybe that puts me directly in the
Speaker 1: cross airs of people that think, um, they should be
Speaker 1: proud about their beliefs and shout them from the rooftops.
Speaker 1: If I guess, if you listen to this, you know
Speaker 1: that I do too. But that doesn't I don't sacrifice.
Speaker 1: I don't sacrifice anything because of that within a conversation.
Speaker 1: So that's what I believe. What do you think about
Speaker 1: all that, philm That was a bit of a rant.
Speaker 1: If I deserve a ranted, it's been a while ranted
Speaker 1: in a while. Yeah, So I deserve a rant every
Speaker 1: once in a while. It's your show. You deserve deserve
Speaker 1: whatever you want. What do you feel like that you
Speaker 1: feel like you're learning anything from sitting in here and
Speaker 1: all these conversations. Yeah, I mean, I'm entrenched into a
Speaker 1: bunch of stuff that I had never really thought about
Speaker 1: before working here. So it's been that's why I appreciate you,
Speaker 1: because you're just like coming from a fresh perspective and
Speaker 1: a lot of this stuff. Which again that's another point
Speaker 1: I'll make People with fresh perspectives that aren't in your
Speaker 1: aren't in your bubble, they're not in your echo chamber,
Speaker 1: are important. So and people with heartened perspectives are important
Speaker 1: to have in your life. That that don't believe what
Speaker 1: you believe. I have lots of friends and family members
Speaker 1: that we do not believe the same things. We often
Speaker 1: argue about fairly important things. And my grandfather always said,
Speaker 1: don't bring sex, religion, or politics to the dinner table.
Speaker 1: I don't believe in that. I believe we should be
Speaker 1: able to have those constructive conversations about very important subjects
Speaker 1: without getting all spun up about them. Anyway, that's that
Speaker 1: I was gonna give a brief answer to that question,
Speaker 1: but I give a long answer. So anyway, if you're
Speaker 1: listening to this and you and you just feel like
Speaker 1: I need to push back on some of these folks
Speaker 1: more or that take harder stances on subjects here there,
Speaker 1: I mean I'm certainly going to be firm and the
Speaker 1: things I know to be true, but I'm also looking
Speaker 1: to be proven wrong at some level. I'm looking to
Speaker 1: test my ideas and make sure they're strong enough to
Speaker 1: last any battle, to last any debate, to last any argument.
Speaker 1: Because if my ideas aren't good enough to last in
Speaker 1: any conversation, then they're not good enough overall. So that's
Speaker 1: the way I think about it. Hopefully this show reflects
Speaker 1: that Um and Brandon's Brandon's comments weren't challenging to me,
Speaker 1: but that it was a challenging question something I thought
Speaker 1: about after I read it. Um, And so I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna be bullied by anybody out of my beliefs. But
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean I'm gonna push them away if they
Speaker 1: start to bully me. Um. So we'll see. We're going
Speaker 1: to continue still to get some challenging people in this
Speaker 1: room talking about crazy stuff and see where it goes. Um,
Speaker 1: all right, we're gonna move on. I think, Philler, am
Speaker 1: I gonna keep going. I think we should move on.
Speaker 1: You get more to say. I thought you laid it
Speaker 1: all out there. Though I laid it out. Here's another
Speaker 1: message I got from Jesse. He said, I got a
Speaker 1: real dilemma. I think you folks had help me with.
Speaker 1: Here's the deal. I fella at my work died recently,
Speaker 1: and his memorial services on rifle opener for elk. My
Speaker 1: freezer is getting pretty low, and I've got plans to
Speaker 1: be out at first light on opening day to replenish
Speaker 1: my supply of elk meat. I wasn't particularly close with
Speaker 1: the guy, but I did help him move a while
Speaker 1: back and met his family a time or two. Can't
Speaker 1: decide if I'd be an asshole for not going to
Speaker 1: the funeral. I'm a student, so I've really only got
Speaker 1: a few weekends to hunt, and even then my time
Speaker 1: is limited. What do you think? It's really been weighing
Speaker 1: on me, and I'm worried about what others, what others
Speaker 1: around my shop will do if I don't go. Thanks
Speaker 1: for the great podcast. Blah blah blah. This is a Phil. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're asking Dr Phil my opinion first. I'll give mine first.
Speaker 1: I'll let you off fok on that one. Okay, a
Speaker 1: guy died, man, thank you, that's my opinion. He's dead,
Speaker 1: he's the man's got a family. He's got a family. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I would say it would be that'd be a tough
Speaker 1: look for you if you did not go to this memorial.
Speaker 1: I mean, I get it, your hedge and you're like,
Speaker 1: I only knew him a couple of times, but he's dead,
Speaker 1: and he was a person yesterday dead, worked with him move.
Speaker 1: That's close enough, like friends circle wise helping someone move.
Speaker 1: Phil's never helped me move. No, never helped him. I
Speaker 1: wouldn't if you. Yeah, I said, hey, Phil, well help me. No, No,
Speaker 1: but you'd come to my funeral? I bet I think so, yeah,
Speaker 1: and so yeah, man, I hope the funeral prior already
Speaker 1: happened by the time you'll hear this, But I hope
Speaker 1: you went, Jesse, And if you didn't, real guilty right now, Folding.
Speaker 1: It's one of those things where if you if you
Speaker 1: have to ask yourself the question, you already know the answer.
Speaker 1: You just yeah, you just don't want to already know
Speaker 1: the don't want to hear someone else. We've all had
Speaker 1: like a long distant aunt that died and you just don't.
Speaker 1: You go to the funeral, but you don't go for
Speaker 1: the ant. You go for the people that you know
Speaker 1: who knew the aunt. So like just go and be
Speaker 1: happy about it. And if you need to borrow some
Speaker 1: meat from a friend, you'll probably find a friend. And
Speaker 1: if that friend dies, goes his funeral, to go to
Speaker 1: people's funerals, and then during the service you can sneak
Speaker 1: over to his house and take his meat at Yeah,
Speaker 1: he doesn't need anymore. Yeah, feels getting feels going dark, spicy,
Speaker 1: it's getting spicy, it's going full heel on us if
Speaker 1: you know what that like? Bill his character turn anyway,
Speaker 1: go to the funeral, Jesse for for goodness sakes, man,
Speaker 1: I love hunting and I love wild meats. That's all
Speaker 1: I talk about. But um, if if a co worker died,
Speaker 1: anyone here, immediate or I would go to the funeral
Speaker 1: pretty much every time, even if it wasn't somebody that
Speaker 1: I was super close with. So you know, I'll be
Speaker 1: there for you, Phil, the worst happen, the worst happen,
Speaker 1: they'll be there. You probably be standing, you know, on
Speaker 1: the sidelines, thinking about all the hunting you could of course, dude,
Speaker 1: I might be watching I might be watching hunting videos
Speaker 1: on my phone at your funeral, yes, Or I might
Speaker 1: be looking at onyx maps trying to figure out by
Speaker 1: the best, the quicker route in because I don't have
Speaker 1: as much time that that would make it even more special,
Speaker 1: knowing how badly you didn't want to be there but
Speaker 1: you were. Anyway, I might go hunting in the morning,
Speaker 1: because people do. People have funerals in the morning. It's
Speaker 1: usually I'd say around lunch. It's lunch, So I might
Speaker 1: find a spot and I might go hunting in the morning.
Speaker 1: And then if I kill an Elk, I wouldn't come. Wait, no,
Speaker 1: I would still come. You just yelled at the guy.
Speaker 1: If I killed Elk, I would market. I would market
Speaker 1: and it was away point. And then quickly go to
Speaker 1: the funeral and wash the blood. I probably watched the
Speaker 1: blood off. Quickly go to the funeral and then come back. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think how bad you would feel if you went
Speaker 1: out and you didn't get anything and you missed this
Speaker 1: guy's funeral for enough. What if what if you missed
Speaker 1: a giant bull like a hundred of yards and then
Speaker 1: that was the guy looking down at You're saying karma, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I should have went to my funeral. Now you're feeling
Speaker 1: poorly on many multiple levels. Anyway, go to the service.
Speaker 1: Go to the service, please, Lord, go to the service.
Speaker 1: Man's gotta draw a line. Phil. You know what I'm
Speaker 1: saying now, this is where I draw the line. Man's
Speaker 1: gotta draw the line. All right, Well, we're gonna get
Speaker 1: into uh something you you all really love. We got
Speaker 1: a lot of a lot a lot, a lot a
Speaker 1: lot not so sharp moments, Phil, A lot of them, um,
Speaker 1: hundreds of them in fact. So it's been hard for
Speaker 1: me to sift through them. But they've all been very entertaining,
Speaker 1: and we um we have a bit of an issue
Speaker 1: to discuss around last week's not so sharp moment presented
Speaker 1: by work sharp. There's a song. Are you aware of this, Phil?
Speaker 1: A song by fella named cord Lund called My Truck
Speaker 1: Got Stuck. Nope, I was not aware. It is basically,
Speaker 1: if you listen to it. Several people sent this to me.
Speaker 1: It is if you listen to it, it is basically
Speaker 1: the story that we read last week. So what are
Speaker 1: you implying here? I'm not implying anything. Many people implied
Speaker 1: it to me that we got duped. Oh okay, well
Speaker 1: here's see. I would I would tend to kind of
Speaker 1: be like my my, my eyebrows would be raised. But
Speaker 1: I did go to Elliott's Instagram, and I went all
Speaker 1: the way back and he did. I mean, he didn't
Speaker 1: post any photographic evidence of the trucks, but there is
Speaker 1: evidence of this, like if this event actually happening, um
Speaker 1: on his Instagram. He talked about it before, like months
Speaker 1: before he ever rode into th HC. So I don't
Speaker 1: think I don't I don't think he would make up
Speaker 1: the story. I trust Elliott. I'm not. I defended Elliott
Speaker 1: and all the correspondent stuff. Okay, Good said, Elliott is
Speaker 1: a stand up in divid here's the song. It's a
Speaker 1: nice tune. I like it so far. Brown Prairie that
Speaker 1: had been for so long was very uney, very muny.
Speaker 1: Maybe it just inspired him in his pros. Sure, yes, um, anyway,
Speaker 1: we're on to you Elliott. Yeah. Well he's in good company.
Speaker 1: Then he's not alone. Other people have had not so
Speaker 1: sharp moments. Yeah, that's true. No, I think I think
Speaker 1: it's just a common thing that happens to you in Canada.
Speaker 1: Did trucks get stuck? All the trucks get stuck in Canada? Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you if you were to fly over in a
Speaker 1: helicopter and airplane, it's just a graveyard of trucks. Trucks everywhere, everywhere,
Speaker 1: there's ones. There's one front endloader just going around endlessly.
Speaker 1: The same guy, same thing, doing it for hundreds of years.
Speaker 1: So anyway, I'm on the side of Elliot here. I
Speaker 1: don't think he embellished that at all. I think it
Speaker 1: was completely true because he stopped in the middle of
Speaker 1: the story to say it's true. It's very true. But
Speaker 1: I know this sounds crazy, but it's true. But it's true.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, hit the jingle fill. We're up for
Speaker 1: the next not so sharp moment. Work sharp, not so
Speaker 1: sharp moment, so you don't have Okay, this one some
Speaker 1: Cody Gardner says, a long time THHD listener cool appreciated Cody.
Speaker 1: He's got a not so sharp moment. We will begin.
Speaker 1: When I was a child, I saw a movie where
Speaker 1: a kid owned a raccoon as a pet. M See
Speaker 1: where this one's going, PHILM this Poconhontas. I don't know.
Speaker 1: He doesn't mention the movie. Okay, I can't think of
Speaker 1: any other movie that's a good that's a good pool,
Speaker 1: nice pool. I don't even think of any of those
Speaker 1: types of movies. This inspired a dream of owning my
Speaker 1: own raccoon. How do you say raccoon? You say raccoon
Speaker 1: or raccoon. I say raccoon. Hit me too, I was
Speaker 1: trying to sauce it up there, and I said raccoon, raccoon.
Speaker 1: One day I asked a neighboring farmer for permission to
Speaker 1: go snag car up in an irrigation pond. I received
Speaker 1: permission to fish, but it came with a warning that
Speaker 1: at said pond there was a defensive raccoon that may
Speaker 1: have babies, and a stack of pipe next to the pond.
Speaker 1: This I like. I like this already, and it's like
Speaker 1: a dragon tower. This this was my chance to fulfill
Speaker 1: my dream. I proceeded to investigate the suspect pipe. To
Speaker 1: my delight, saw staring back from one of the pipes
Speaker 1: a small set of eyes. I reeled my hook into
Speaker 1: the end of the pipe and thrust my pole Jesus
Speaker 1: and I gave it a twirl, and I and eagerly
Speaker 1: pulled my new best friend's tail first to the end
Speaker 1: of the pipe. At this moment, I was given the
Speaker 1: opportunity to make a better decision, but failed in the
Speaker 1: most epic fashion. The tail didn't look like I was expecting,
Speaker 1: so I decided to straddle the pipe, grab the tail
Speaker 1: with both hands, and lean over for closer inspection. The
Speaker 1: last thing I remember, as I focused into the darkness,
Speaker 1: straining my eyes and mouth a gape is the is
Speaker 1: the sight that wrenched dirty little cheerio puckered and eyes
Speaker 1: that were poised at fire. What happened next still inspires nightmares.
Speaker 1: I was hit with a direct shot in the open mouth,
Speaker 1: up the nose, and in both eyes with the most
Speaker 1: vile substance in all of nature, skunk spray. See there's
Speaker 1: a twist. Even that's good stuff. I gased in shock,
Speaker 1: filling both lungs to capacity with a half atomized, blasting
Speaker 1: steam of pure liquid terror, which sent me immediately wretching
Speaker 1: to the ground, writhing in pain and feeling as though
Speaker 1: I had been galls in both eyes with a glowing
Speaker 1: red fire poker. I could not see at all, and
Speaker 1: when was unable to open my eyes and take a
Speaker 1: full breath, profuse vomiting quickly overtook me, and I truly
Speaker 1: feared for my life as I lay flailing in a
Speaker 1: mate of goat heads, wondering as a terrified child with
Speaker 1: little life experience, which failed attempt at breathing would be
Speaker 1: my last. A friend I had taken to fish with
Speaker 1: me grabbed me by my ankle and drugged me. Kicking
Speaker 1: and screaming between heaves through the mess of gold heads,
Speaker 1: my own body explosions went into the pond. He then
Speaker 1: proceeded what he referred to as help, but I would
Speaker 1: call it more like waterboarding. At this point, I was
Speaker 1: consistently sucking pond water with every plunge, and spewing my
Speaker 1: insides out every time I was jerked back to the
Speaker 1: surface by the fistful of hair he so persistently held.
Speaker 1: He probably would have preferred a dragon. I was again
Speaker 1: in legitimate fear of the end. I made it home eventually,
Speaker 1: and in a fitting end of the story. As I
Speaker 1: entered my home, still shaken by the near death experience,
Speaker 1: the first words of a compassion I heard from my
Speaker 1: father was a stern command to get out. I lived
Speaker 1: outside for a week until theycame fit to be in
Speaker 1: the presence of others. But the shame, embarrassment, chilling memory
Speaker 1: of this story still linger to this day. Yes, that
Speaker 1: was that was a good one. Again, like the jingle
Speaker 1: Phil not so sharp poem. So you don't have thanks
Speaker 1: work sharp We're gonna Cody, We're gonna send you. We
Speaker 1: should send you like a couple of cans of tomato
Speaker 1: sauce or something. Yeah, can of a breeze for breeze,
Speaker 1: but we're going to send you a work sharp field
Speaker 1: sharpener instead. Hopefully that makes it this, this gruesome childhood
Speaker 1: memory all the better. Thanks for writing in, everybody. Continue
Speaker 1: to write in at th HC at the media dot com.
Speaker 1: Try to top Cody story. Hopefully there's not a song
Speaker 1: about skunk spray somewhere that I don't know about. I'm
Speaker 1: assuming there isn't. We're watching you, Cody, but we're watching
Speaker 1: you people. Plagiarism is not good. You got a drawline
Speaker 1: somewhere now. Mr Harry W. Green, color State University, enjoy
Speaker 1: I guess I grew up on all the road. Harry,
Speaker 1: how's it going. Nice to meet you too, Thanks for
Speaker 1: having me here at I'm getting some days avou going
Speaker 1: back to college. A little late to our meeting, so
Speaker 1: I felt like I was late to class across campus
Speaker 1: I did. Yeah, I didn't know where I was. Much
Speaker 1: like college. I was lost, and then I had to
Speaker 1: find the building, So it really felt like I was
Speaker 1: back back to my collegian days. Um. So we're here
Speaker 1: at Colorado State University, and um, I always like to
Speaker 1: have guests like describe their surroundings, but you know, we're
Speaker 1: in your office. Um, but kind of just described how
Speaker 1: you came to be at Colorado State because it's a
Speaker 1: that's a long story, but the shorter version after your retirement. Right.
Speaker 1: So I've been retired about two and a half years.
Speaker 1: I'm married to another biologist. She mainly studies frogs and
Speaker 1: the fungi they're killing frogs. I mainly study snakes. She's
Speaker 1: not retired yet and she has some close collaborators here
Speaker 1: at Colorado State. So when she got our sabbatical leave,
Speaker 1: that's where we decided to come. Yeah, so you were
Speaker 1: previously we were talking to your previously uh, East coast
Speaker 1: dweller as I was and new to the West. Yeah,
Speaker 1: although I grew up mostly in Texas and then I
Speaker 1: worked in Berkeley for twenty years, So I really think
Speaker 1: of myself as a Westerner, and uh, I think of
Speaker 1: Texas as my home. Really, you just have to have
Speaker 1: a good job, and she has a good job in
Speaker 1: upstate New York. So, so you're telling me about an
Speaker 1: elk hunt you got coming up to. Yeah, we're being guided.
Speaker 1: We're gonna be taken up into the high country in
Speaker 1: northwestern Colorado this Friday for about we don't know, probably
Speaker 1: five to seven days. That's beautiful. Yeah, friends, family, your
Speaker 1: wife's coming along. You told me she's as much a
Speaker 1: hunter as I am. So yeah, that's awesome. Um, I
Speaker 1: guess we should should let people know. It struck me
Speaker 1: that I hadn't heard I hadn't often heard the term
Speaker 1: her patologist before reading some of your books and looking
Speaker 1: at some of your works. So can you explain explain
Speaker 1: what her patologist is her patologists as a person who
Speaker 1: studies amphibians and reptiles. That's that's the shortest possible answer.
Speaker 1: So there are lots of things about the biology of
Speaker 1: amphippies and reptiles. One might study how they eat, how
Speaker 1: they how they reproduce, where they're found, whether the threats
Speaker 1: to their persisted and sin in human dominated landscapes. Those
Speaker 1: are all parts of herpetology, and most herpetologists also have
Speaker 1: some more general specially so like I'm an ecologist and
Speaker 1: revolutionary biologist, I mostly study behavior. Got and you've done
Speaker 1: some interesting studies of of reptile behavior, specifically snakes that
Speaker 1: I want to talk about. But I was reading your
Speaker 1: book Tracks and Shadows Field Biology is art and it
Speaker 1: is Uh, it's striking, thank you it is. It's beautifully written. It. Um.
Speaker 1: I will say I'm like three chords of the way
Speaker 1: through it, but from the very first chapter I was
Speaker 1: thank you so much. Yes, you goat. I mean, I
Speaker 1: feel like when you're reading something like that. I read
Speaker 1: a lot of like how to Loopold and some of
Speaker 1: your what you called eccentric meditations on the kind of
Speaker 1: the natural world reminded me of of Liopold or somebody
Speaker 1: kind of with that kind of profundity, with with your experience. Um,
Speaker 1: and so we should touch on that. But you start
Speaker 1: starting that book and the opening paragraphs talking about when
Speaker 1: you first became interested in the natural world as a
Speaker 1: kid wanted like a ranch in Texas, And there's some
Speaker 1: lines in there you talk about kind of being just
Speaker 1: intrigued and asking questions and give people an idea of
Speaker 1: that time in your life, like when you're asking why
Speaker 1: does that where are the ears on that turtle? Where?
Speaker 1: Those types of things. Yeah, well it's actually a farm.
Speaker 1: My mom grew up in uh fairly extreme poverty in
Speaker 1: East Texas, outside a tiny town about two hours drive
Speaker 1: east of Dallas. Her father was a World War One veteran.
Speaker 1: They had six acres that that Lola, his new teenage bride,
Speaker 1: had been given by her parents, and they had a
Speaker 1: They had a plow horse, a jersey cow for milk,
Speaker 1: a flock of chickens. They raised one pig a year.
Speaker 1: There's no no electricity, no running water, raise one pig
Speaker 1: a year, which you could only butcher in the winter
Speaker 1: because there was no refrigeration, so they had to wait
Speaker 1: for a really cold day. And and my little brother
Speaker 1: and I by then, my mom had had moved off
Speaker 1: married my dad, who was an Air Force officer, so
Speaker 1: we traveled a lot, but we always came back to
Speaker 1: grandpa's farm whenever we could. And so my little brother
Speaker 1: and I, as kids, didn't didn't didn't detect the poverty
Speaker 1: aspects of it, you know. We we just detected that
Speaker 1: they lived close to the earth, and we watched what
Speaker 1: that meant. We watched. We knew where butter came from
Speaker 1: because my grandmother sat in the kitchen with a churn
Speaker 1: and a bag of of milk a cream, you know,
Speaker 1: banging that poll up and down in that little ceramic churn,
Speaker 1: making butter. And we we knew that poultry died for
Speaker 1: us to eat them for dinner, because we watched my
Speaker 1: grandmother butcher the chickens. And one year we watched him
Speaker 1: butcher a pig. And we knew where milk came from
Speaker 1: because Grandpa tried to teach us how to milk the cow.
Speaker 1: So we I grew up with that, And from my
Speaker 1: earliest memories, I was always curious, you know. And and
Speaker 1: I mentioned in the book, you know, once finding a
Speaker 1: box turtle and asking my mom where it's ears, you know, uh,
Speaker 1: looking at a pig being butchered, and already knowing what
Speaker 1: an intestine was, and seeing that's an intestine, you know.
Speaker 1: So so I grew up with interest in natural history
Speaker 1: and in kinds of animals. My my first taxonomic works
Speaker 1: were about, you know, how to tell jerseys from Holstein's,
Speaker 1: from from angus and so forth. You know. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: it just feels when I was reading that, it is
Speaker 1: it feels like there's certain kinds of upbrings that foster
Speaker 1: staff feeling right, that fostered that closeness, like you're saying,
Speaker 1: to the closest to the dirt, to the natural world. Uh,
Speaker 1: you'd know, I would have. I would guess from reading
Speaker 1: your book that that's kind of what led you down
Speaker 1: the path that you're on, that you've been on for
Speaker 1: the last five six decades. Is there any Do you
Speaker 1: have any other moments or stories you can tell people
Speaker 1: that kind of illustrate how you became to be so,
Speaker 1: I mean, you spent your life traveling the world looking
Speaker 1: for crazy reptiles and predators and things like that. You
Speaker 1: have amazing stories of of pulling pythons by the tail
Speaker 1: and jaguars and co streak and things like that. Then
Speaker 1: that I found interesting. All of that came from somewhere. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And and to some extent I don't even know the answer.
Speaker 1: I mean, it was a sort of love at first
Speaker 1: sight thing. My parents weren't what would be called naturalists today.
Speaker 1: In fact, at this point in my life, I'm really
Speaker 1: reflecting back on the fact that my mother wanted to
Speaker 1: escape that poverty which I idolized as a little boy.
Speaker 1: I once asked my mother, Mom, why didn't you marry
Speaker 1: somebody like Grandpa so we could live on a farm.
Speaker 1: And you know, my mother, I only late in her
Speaker 1: life sort of realized how desperately she worked to get
Speaker 1: out of that scene. So here, here, I was idolizing
Speaker 1: something that you know, it wasn't idolizeable to her, but
Speaker 1: it it did put me around animals that it got
Speaker 1: me to watching animals, and I loved it from the start.
Speaker 1: And I'll say this from my parents. Their reaction was
Speaker 1: to buy me books. So I had my first reptile
Speaker 1: book when I was seven years old, and so there
Speaker 1: it was. You know, what I didn't have was any
Speaker 1: any inkling. There was a career until I was thirteen
Speaker 1: years old. My father was stationed for one year near Norman, Oklahoma,
Speaker 1: and he was taking classes at the University of Oklahoma.
Speaker 1: He came home one night he said, son, I met
Speaker 1: this I met this professor of zoology and he studies
Speaker 1: lizards and he wants to talk to you. So the
Speaker 1: next day I wrote my little three speed at that time,
Speaker 1: bicycle Down. I met this guy, Charles Carpenter, and I
Speaker 1: came home that night and I said, boy, I'm going
Speaker 1: to be a university professor. They get to keep lizards.
Speaker 1: Because because when I walked in his office. You know,
Speaker 1: the thing that impressed me was he had these live lizard.
Speaker 1: He had a live possum living in a cage gender
Speaker 1: his desk, and I thought, what could be better than
Speaker 1: living the tream? You got your Yeah, that's right, and
Speaker 1: he got paid, you know, And so that that was
Speaker 1: what showed me there was a career path for me,
Speaker 1: and that there's other transformative part in your life. We'll
Speaker 1: hustle through this so we can get to all, like
Speaker 1: we got a lot to cover. Um another point in
Speaker 1: life where you talk about being an ambulance driver and
Speaker 1: and being like an assistant mortician, all of these. I
Speaker 1: will say that all of these reflections that you make
Speaker 1: in your book kind of all lead to somewhere that
Speaker 1: kind of the year hypothesis about the natural world and
Speaker 1: conservation things like that. So I think, just so folks listening,
Speaker 1: but we get there. I'm kind of excited to get there.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna work through this. But you talk about
Speaker 1: how seeing you know, crying infants, like how seeing people
Speaker 1: die changed you at that early age, like it impacts
Speaker 1: you still today. You kind of describe that time in
Speaker 1: your life for folks, Yeah, it happened accidentally. I was
Speaker 1: such a nerd in high school. I published three signs
Speaker 1: papers before I graduated from high school, but I didn't
Speaker 1: hadn't had a date. And then I went off to
Speaker 1: college and I was like, whoa, there's a whole new
Speaker 1: world out here, you know, And so I that's why
Speaker 1: at the end of my junior year in college I
Speaker 1: had accumulatude one point eight nine g p A. That's
Speaker 1: a D plus average for three years of college. Because
Speaker 1: I was having a really good time and my father
Speaker 1: wasn't giving me a big enough allowance to have as
Speaker 1: good a time as I wanted to have. So I
Speaker 1: found out there was this job at the Locals tiny
Speaker 1: town funeral home and it paid sixty dollars a month,
Speaker 1: plus you got your room free. So I'd had a
Speaker 1: boy scout first aid class. I went down. Guy asked
Speaker 1: me if I had if I had a black tie
Speaker 1: in a white shirt, and I said yeah, and he goes,
Speaker 1: be back here at one o'clock. You're hired. And the
Speaker 1: next thing I knew, I was loading a body off
Speaker 1: out of a hospital bid onto onto a gurney. And
Speaker 1: for the long story short, for the next three years
Speaker 1: or so, first in this tiny Texas town and then
Speaker 1: in Fort Worth for a big ambulance company. I was
Speaker 1: an ambulance driver and ambulance met it before they were
Speaker 1: called E M T s. And this resulted in many, many,
Speaker 1: many encounters with violence and with illness, with tragic deaths, uh,
Speaker 1: all of which I sort of almost always took in stride,
Speaker 1: because I was brought up to just take things in stride.
Speaker 1: You know. There were there were a couple of events,
Speaker 1: and it's that that got me, but but mostly I
Speaker 1: just took it and stride. And when I look back
Speaker 1: on it now decades later, I think two things that
Speaker 1: did for me was impressed me with how how precious
Speaker 1: life is and how permanent death is. And the other
Speaker 1: thing was that this is in the late sixties. We
Speaker 1: we couldn't do much in the ambulance. I was later
Speaker 1: in army medic, and I could do a lot more
Speaker 1: things as a trained army medic that I could do
Speaker 1: as a civilian ambulance driver. So I'm afraid we probably
Speaker 1: made mistakes. Sometimes at the very least, we probably failed
Speaker 1: to do things that might have saved a few people.
Speaker 1: And that's haunting. But as a conservation by all just today.
Speaker 1: I often think about that because I think the dilemma
Speaker 1: facing conservation biologists and people in general in terms of
Speaker 1: saving some some section of biodiversity, it's kind of like
Speaker 1: that we don't know everything we'd like to know, and
Speaker 1: so the easy way out would be to take no
Speaker 1: risks because then you won't get criticized. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think our our our descendants may criticize us, why did
Speaker 1: why did you let elephants go extinct on a global
Speaker 1: basis on your watch? So we might have great grandchildren
Speaker 1: who will look back and wonder why that. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: all wonder why you in terms of because we're both
Speaker 1: conservationists at some level. I know we are, so they
Speaker 1: might look back then, but right now not taking risk
Speaker 1: because it's sort of the easy way out. Your your
Speaker 1: peers won't jump on you because you proposed a kind
Speaker 1: of a crazy thing like place to scene rewilding in
Speaker 1: the possibility of putting surrogate mammoths back in North America,
Speaker 1: you know, And I often think that that that. I
Speaker 1: think that the lemma for conservationist is sort of like
Speaker 1: the dilemma for an ambulance medic is you know you
Speaker 1: don't have you're not in in the r You don't
Speaker 1: have everything you wish you had. You don't know how
Speaker 1: to do certain procedures, you don't actually know what's going on.
Speaker 1: You know. I once picked up a guy and the
Speaker 1: only wound was a blood us caliber hole in his chest,
Speaker 1: who was sitting on accouch talking to me while his
Speaker 1: wife sat next to him. And he said, well, and
Speaker 1: the cops were interviewing him, and he said, well, the
Speaker 1: wife and I here were arguing and she accidentally shot me.
Speaker 1: And so I put him on the gurney and I
Speaker 1: emphasized there's no blood, it's a twenty two caliber slightly
Speaker 1: bluish hole, is just blue skin. And the guy dies
Speaker 1: as we unload him at the hospital. So there might
Speaker 1: have been things that somebody with more advanced equipment training
Speaker 1: could have done. I didn't have that, you know, And
Speaker 1: I think conservation bio is kind of like that, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: when I read that, it struck me like, man, you know,
Speaker 1: we're all twenty year old aimulist drivers. We are, you
Speaker 1: are and so, and you have all these different views
Speaker 1: about that that Ultimately we were talking earlier about values.
Speaker 1: You know, uh, what if it turns out that in
Speaker 1: order to save the Channel Island gray fox, which is
Speaker 1: really cool and it's just an incredible animal. You know. Well,
Speaker 1: it turns out in vacy bald eagles were we're eating
Speaker 1: the foxes. Why were they there? Because they were subsidized
Speaker 1: by the feral pigs on the island, you know. So
Speaker 1: there's a very complex ecological story. And if your values
Speaker 1: are such that you think that that little uniquely evolved
Speaker 1: dwarf Tamish Island gray fox that we're saving, you got
Speaker 1: to get rid of the eagles and the pigs. And
Speaker 1: how do you choose right? And with what? With what
Speaker 1: tools can you make that choice right? And it was
Speaker 1: very acrimonious. And then what if you screw up? Boy,
Speaker 1: if you screw up, you're gonna be on the nightly news.
Speaker 1: You'll get a lot of money morning quarterbacking on on. So, Yeah,
Speaker 1: for every celebration, like for every subbing, should we save
Speaker 1: with the gray fox? Look at all the foxes? What
Speaker 1: like what dirty business did you have to do to
Speaker 1: get there? Yeah, something like that. So I would say,
Speaker 1: in a way when I look back on those on
Speaker 1: that period of my life which is now decades ago,
Speaker 1: it's the grittiness, the uncertainty, the need to in my view,
Speaker 1: go ahead and act anyway, do the best you can,
Speaker 1: say what you can say, say what you can say,
Speaker 1: do the best you can what you got. I hope
Speaker 1: that you don't suffer too much for mistakes. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: I found it in reading your writing that that that's
Speaker 1: what struck me, is like that at some point in
Speaker 1: my life, I live long enough and I've done enough,
Speaker 1: I'll be able to meditate on the natural world in
Speaker 1: the way that you have, in the way that it's
Speaker 1: been informed by all the moments in your life, and
Speaker 1: in this case, moments that didn't really have much to
Speaker 1: do with the natural world. They didn't seem to anyway,
Speaker 1: they didn't seem to, right, So like all this stuff
Speaker 1: being intertwined is is interesting me. You You had a
Speaker 1: quote in the beginning of your book to um, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna give people out of beginning of the book stuff,
Speaker 1: so I'll have to go and get it and read it. Um,
Speaker 1: A journalist Bayard Taylor. Yeah, this is is a real
Speaker 1: good one. He liked nature to a princess fallen into
Speaker 1: the hands of robbers who cut off her fingers for
Speaker 1: the sake of the jewels. She wears. Isn't that incredible?
Speaker 1: I'm like, the that's incredible, incredible quote. It is, isn't it?
Speaker 1: And I heard that, uh at a dinner for University
Speaker 1: California Press authors. So my my first book was about
Speaker 1: snakes and it was published by them. And I was
Speaker 1: at a dinner for authors and this famous historian of
Speaker 1: California history was given the banquet talk and he read
Speaker 1: that quote and it just electrified me. I mean, I
Speaker 1: was like a pencil the napkin, you know, and I
Speaker 1: wrote it down then later burrowed into I actually found
Speaker 1: copies of Buyer Taylor's books to buy, and I because
Speaker 1: I wanted to read it in the original, you know,
Speaker 1: I think that's incredible, incredible, It's incredible. And when he
Speaker 1: first read it, it it strikes you as kind of like
Speaker 1: an environmentalist metaphor, but it's it's I think it's deeper
Speaker 1: than that. I do too, and and that's that's why
Speaker 1: I used it early in my book, because there is
Speaker 1: a threat of violence that runs through my own life,
Speaker 1: and I think we I think it inevitably runs through life,
Speaker 1: and I think modern humans, especially in some ultras, go
Speaker 1: to great links to deny that, to hide from it.
Speaker 1: That's one response to it. I I'm not putting that down.
Speaker 1: I mean, I've I've seen some violence i'd like to
Speaker 1: hide from. Yeah, but I'd like to have not seen.
Speaker 1: So I sort of get that. But in the end,
Speaker 1: I think it may not service well in terms of conservation.
Speaker 1: I would agree. And I think we've in the moderns
Speaker 1: and the more modern like social media sense they have
Speaker 1: there's a there's a this is a weird thing to
Speaker 1: bring in a conversation, but there's a page on Instagram
Speaker 1: called Nature's Metal, and Nature's Metal is just some of
Speaker 1: the craziest, most carnal things you'd ever predator, you know, predators,
Speaker 1: ripping faces off, zebras. It's just like it's an expression
Speaker 1: that nature is crazy and scary and brutal and death
Speaker 1: defines it. And that's just just what it is. And
Speaker 1: I think that is like a spasmatic, you know, response
Speaker 1: to people whitewashing nature and then you know the like
Speaker 1: anthromomorphizing animals and like, so we've had this that thing
Speaker 1: is being recognized within our culture, and we're pushing back
Speaker 1: on it in certain ways, trying to make sure people
Speaker 1: are aware that in't you know, in Africa. Photos fars
Speaker 1: are great, but you're not getting And I live right
Speaker 1: by Yellowster National Park. That's a wonderful place, but it
Speaker 1: is not nature and like in the way that that
Speaker 1: you really need to know it. Yes. And so when
Speaker 1: I much later in life became a late onset deer hunter,
Speaker 1: one of the and honestly, uh, should I go ahead
Speaker 1: and say something about this or did you want to
Speaker 1: know what you want? When when my friend David offered
Speaker 1: me the opportunity to teach to teach me to deer hunt. Uh,
Speaker 1: And I had an old model ninety four Winchester which
Speaker 1: my students at Berkeley had given me as a present.
Speaker 1: I'm sure I'm the only Berkeley professor ever to get
Speaker 1: given an old Winchester. But they knew at a certain
Speaker 1: nostalgia from my Texas youth, and they actually knew that
Speaker 1: I specifically wanted a pre sixty four model money for
Speaker 1: Winchester BEAUTIFU beautiful rifle. And so I got this card
Speaker 1: one day in my mailbox and it said, uh, happy sabbatical. Uh,
Speaker 1: this is good for one pre sixty four model ninety four.
Speaker 1: You find it and we'll pay for it. And so
Speaker 1: I walked into a Seattle gun shop and and said,
Speaker 1: I'm looking for an old model linety four. And the
Speaker 1: guy goes, there's a whole rack up and pick out
Speaker 1: which one you like this? So I went through him,
Speaker 1: you know, sticking my thumb to the receiver and trying
Speaker 1: to get enough light to see the the riflings, and
Speaker 1: and picked out the one I liked best. It turned
Speaker 1: out from the serial numbers made nineteen fifty, so I
Speaker 1: had this old Winchester. I've been wanting to try deer
Speaker 1: hunting for a long time, but he didn't want to
Speaker 1: be a bozo about it. I knew that, and also, ironically,
Speaker 1: because my grandpa taught me firearm safety and marksmanship, I
Speaker 1: was a boy scout and I was a soldier, had
Speaker 1: lots of experience, and I had a lot of experience
Speaker 1: with gunshot wounds too. I knew a lot about firearms relatively,
Speaker 1: but I'd never had a gun safety course, and I
Speaker 1: knew that you all, I thought that you had to
Speaker 1: take one to get a hunting license, so I kept
Speaker 1: putting it off year after year. Plus I didn't have
Speaker 1: a mentor, and I felt we needed mentor. So my
Speaker 1: friend David this U t Austin professor David Hillis who
Speaker 1: who ranches and hunts. He calls me one September two
Speaker 1: thousand nine. He goes, green, you've run out of excuses.
Speaker 1: So what are you talking about, David? And he said,
Speaker 1: turns out in Texas if you were born in ninety seven,
Speaker 1: your grandfather, did you know? And I thought, God, that's weird.
Speaker 1: You know, that's kind of crazy. But okay, and he says, yeah,
Speaker 1: I get yourself a Karen case and come on down
Speaker 1: and I'll I'll teach it hunt. So I went down there,
Speaker 1: and I really didn't know how i'd react. I considered
Speaker 1: the possibility that I would. I would kill one deer
Speaker 1: and be disgusted and sell my old rifle. How old
Speaker 1: are you sixty four year old adult hunter? Will you? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that I had just turned sixty four in September, and
Speaker 1: this was in December. And so I go out kill
Speaker 1: my first dear, a few days later kill a second
Speaker 1: dear with a borrowed scoped flatter shooting rifle, And in fact,
Speaker 1: I end up feeling like it's maybe the most respectful
Speaker 1: thing I've ever done as a nature lover is to
Speaker 1: own up to my omnivory and to participate like that.
Speaker 1: So that's that's what happened. That's it's worth. It's worth
Speaker 1: thinking about where you were in your life. You're a
Speaker 1: tenured you know, academic who and I don't want to
Speaker 1: generalize academics, but I've talked to a lot of them,
Speaker 1: the ones that work at Berkeley specifically, and I'm headed
Speaker 1: to Cornell next month. Um, being a hunter is not
Speaker 1: probably how how will say, it's not like the prevailing
Speaker 1: thing to be. Um, it just doesn't see that way
Speaker 1: to me. I'm sure there's there's pockets of all kinds
Speaker 1: of things, but it's just not not a thing to
Speaker 1: be your herpetologists. You travel the world, you've done all
Speaker 1: these things which will well she'll talk about, and you like,
Speaker 1: you've seen more of the natural world than than most
Speaker 1: people of people, and you've like and you've found profundity
Speaker 1: in killing a deer in Texas Like out to me,
Speaker 1: is that's amazing, you know, at the at the age
Speaker 1: of sixty four, and you think that that adds some
Speaker 1: value to like hunting story because it because it's done
Speaker 1: that for you. You can talk about that a little bit,
Speaker 1: like what it because it's been you know, a decade
Speaker 1: or so then since you've been a hunter, right right,
Speaker 1: and so um, maybe I'll add a little thing about
Speaker 1: my wife at this point, because she's also an academic.
Speaker 1: So and it's true, there's there are certain stereotypes of academics,
Speaker 1: you know, and uh, and they're widely used by by
Speaker 1: diverse people. Ken Brower, who's a very well known nature writer,
Speaker 1: he's David Brower's son. Uh. He makes fun of people
Speaker 1: who criticize classic notions of wilderness by calling them pale
Speaker 1: men and tweets. Okay, well, well, I'm writing a book
Speaker 1: now that directly confronts John Muir and Ed Abbey and
Speaker 1: sort of that nation of wilderness because i think it's
Speaker 1: got a serious problem and I'm trying to address that
Speaker 1: in this book. I've were worn tweet in my life,
Speaker 1: you know. And I have a picture in the in
Speaker 1: the manuscript the book of me with a backpack in
Speaker 1: pre Canyon, Utah, in the slick rap country, and I say,
Speaker 1: pale skin true, no tweets in sight, you know. So uh,
Speaker 1: I know where the stereotype of academics comes comes from,
Speaker 1: because there, in fact, are a lot of academics who
Speaker 1: seem we could say, a little detached from other aspects
Speaker 1: of life. As many people do it, but probably not
Speaker 1: as many as most non academics think. Like there are
Speaker 1: a number of people in my department that hunt, and
Speaker 1: there are other people in my department who, although they
Speaker 1: don't hunt themselves, are totally fine with it and even
Speaker 1: allow those of us to do on their land and
Speaker 1: things like that. Yeah, and I'm aware of the prevailing like, oh,
Speaker 1: the new modern live when I when I walk on
Speaker 1: college campuses, I'm a little looking around, like for gender
Speaker 1: pronoun signs and ship what's going on? I have that feeling.
Speaker 1: I know that's not all of it, and I think
Speaker 1: it's it's that's a good perspective for you too, and
Speaker 1: it's probably not fair. It's not fair at all, you know,
Speaker 1: as would be various other stereotypes in various other cultural
Speaker 1: context but we we all have we all have those.
Speaker 1: Just like to address that when I when I was
Speaker 1: reading some of the stuff that that you had said
Speaker 1: an NPR and Arkle and NPR just kind of going
Speaker 1: back and forth with a professor friend of yours. That is,
Speaker 1: I don't know IFULL say anti hunting, but some animal
Speaker 1: rights thoughts. Um, it struck me as like your place
Speaker 1: in life, how you got to where you are and
Speaker 1: where you are is quite the story, especially as a hunter. Um,
Speaker 1: your first experiences with you know, when you walk up
Speaker 1: on a dead deer. You've seen dead things in the wild.
Speaker 1: You've seen wild things, lots of dead things. Um, what
Speaker 1: was what was that like? Uh? You know the craziest thing. Uh,
Speaker 1: I don't want to hear the things that are not
Speaker 1: really relevant. But I have no religious podcasts, aren't no
Speaker 1: religious beliefs and anymore. And so I walk up to
Speaker 1: this dough that I've just shot with my old model
Speaker 1: ninety four wind sister. Uh. And she it's almost dusk.
Speaker 1: I've shot. She she bounds out of sight left. She's
Speaker 1: seventy five yards away or so. And I know I've
Speaker 1: hit her, you know. And I know I'm supposed to
Speaker 1: wait thirty or forty five minutes to make sure she
Speaker 1: doesn't jump up if she's down, But it's getting dark
Speaker 1: and I and so I do get up, all right,
Speaker 1: I lever in another round, put on half cock safety
Speaker 1: and walk looking for and I walked fifty yards in
Speaker 1: there she is down and she's she's got her head
Speaker 1: up as if she'd been sleeping or taking a nap.
Speaker 1: And literally, and of course, as you know, this is
Speaker 1: probably less than forty five seconds after I mean, in
Speaker 1: in five seconds, a deer goes a long way, you know,
Speaker 1: so this is not like this deer has been running
Speaker 1: for a long time. And so as I walk up
Speaker 1: to her, she fades and draws back down and I
Speaker 1: go over and touch a leg and she's dead. You know.
Speaker 1: I've actually made a good bread basket shot. And three
Speaker 1: words popped into my head and I opened I don't
Speaker 1: screw this up and forget them. But one of them
Speaker 1: was sacred and like where did that come from? Gratitude
Speaker 1: was another one, and I can't remember the third and man,
Speaker 1: But to me, the most interesting is one is that
Speaker 1: I came up with the words sacred and they just
Speaker 1: it just popped into my mind. You know. It's a
Speaker 1: transformative experience for me. I felt, I felt extremely affected
Speaker 1: by the fact that I just killed this animal. And
Speaker 1: of course then we feel dressed at you know. And
Speaker 1: and later it went back to the freezer in New
Speaker 1: York and my family and people we invited for dinner
Speaker 1: eight that eight that deer and I I've always I
Speaker 1: had already been on that That was the first time
Speaker 1: I was on that ranch. I've been on that ranch many, many,
Speaker 1: many times since then. And I always think about the
Speaker 1: fact that when I eat meat from the Texas Hill Country,
Speaker 1: which is my favorite place on Earth, I'm more of
Speaker 1: a participant and less of a spectator in my favorite
Speaker 1: place on Earth. Yeah, I think, Um, what is interesting
Speaker 1: to me lately is the transformation. How satisfying the transformation
Speaker 1: from a dead animal to like, say, a steak is
Speaker 1: for me. I recently got people that listen to the
Speaker 1: podcast will know because I keep talking about it, but
Speaker 1: I really like it. I got a slicer like a
Speaker 1: meat commercial, like a Deli meat slicer, and we were
Speaker 1: talking about the other day, like, why is it satisfy?
Speaker 1: Why is it so satisfying to me to see this
Speaker 1: meat coming off the slicer ready to be made into
Speaker 1: lunch meat. That's an elk that I had killed. Why
Speaker 1: is that so satisfying? And somebody said, a friend of
Speaker 1: mine said, um, because you're trans just another transformation. It's
Speaker 1: like another thing that you've done to take the part
Speaker 1: of that process, to transform this living thing into something
Speaker 1: that is so useful to you, and that's why it's
Speaker 1: so satisfacing, and that's why probably right, absolutely, And so
Speaker 1: the first time you go through that Transformers process and
Speaker 1: take it home and have a meal with your family
Speaker 1: back in New York, I'm sure was a was a
Speaker 1: big deal. Well, and not like that. I paid more
Speaker 1: attention to all my food now than I used to,
Speaker 1: even and including vegetables. I mean, I'm I'm much more
Speaker 1: once I started deer hunting, I became much more interested
Speaker 1: in eating locally, Like even since I moved before Colins,
Speaker 1: I've been picking raspberries here and then I buy peaches
Speaker 1: that the peaches here unbelievable, like most delicious peaches I've
Speaker 1: ever eaten in my life. I've been buying at the
Speaker 1: farmer's market here and for Colins every Saturday. And I'm
Speaker 1: I get a huge sense of satisfaction, pleasure, and some
Speaker 1: kind of spiritual uh whatever out of knowing that these
Speaker 1: weren't you know, uh, packaged covered in nitrates all sorts
Speaker 1: of stuff. They weren't shipped from Chile. They're there from here,
Speaker 1: And I get a lot of pleasure in that, and
Speaker 1: and looking at my food that way, and looking at
Speaker 1: me eating changed once I became a deer hunter. That's
Speaker 1: that's what happened to me when I really took on
Speaker 1: honting is like a part of my lifestyle. Then you
Speaker 1: start thinking like why am I Why don't have a
Speaker 1: garden because gardens a very similar activity. It is, so
Speaker 1: why am I doing this? But not that gardening is
Speaker 1: way easier. Well, I'm actually starting to think about gardening
Speaker 1: and I've never had any inclination in that direction before. Well,
Speaker 1: I get back to kind of your teachings and your
Speaker 1: time in the field as a herpetologist. But I read
Speaker 1: a thing one of your students at Cornell wants described
Speaker 1: you as the mythical her herpetological green giant. Oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: you remember that. No, I don't remember that. Somebody wrote
Speaker 1: that about you? Was that right? I don't know what
Speaker 1: that was about. When you were tired they had to
Speaker 1: think called green Fest told me about that you're tired
Speaker 1: from Cornell and they just threw a party. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: one of my former PhD students, man named Jonathan Lassos,
Speaker 1: who who at that time was a Harvard professor. There's
Speaker 1: there's something you could stereotype and probably not the entirely
Speaker 1: fitting a man in an ascot. Yeah. Yeah, so. Uh
Speaker 1: but Jonathan who's also one of my dearest friends, he
Speaker 1: and my wife basically organized a party for me and
Speaker 1: they invited about a dozen people to speak and uh
Speaker 1: So it started Friday night with a party at my
Speaker 1: house where we served wild boar in Venison, and then
Speaker 1: all day Saturday there were there were talks out at
Speaker 1: the Laboratory of Ornithology, which is an institution on our
Speaker 1: campus on Southern Town. And so we invited a dozen
Speaker 1: people that range from um, my boss at Berkeley who
Speaker 1: was older than I am, too, a woman I first
Speaker 1: met when as a high school students she took my
Speaker 1: biology class and she's now a professor at Michigan State.
Speaker 1: So we had all the way from youth to almost elderly.
Speaker 1: We had men and women. They gave talks about what
Speaker 1: they do sort of to celebrate my retirement. It was
Speaker 1: it was extremely touching and I'm afraid I was in
Speaker 1: a bed of a days the whole time. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: I guess in the herpetology world, which I'm not familiar with, like,
Speaker 1: you had a big impact in your life. I mean,
Speaker 1: you've written hundreds of papers um, how many field studies
Speaker 1: and books and things like that. Can you just give
Speaker 1: people an idea of the breath of your work with
Speaker 1: I think snakes is probably the thing most people be
Speaker 1: interested in that you did a lot of work with them,
Speaker 1: Like I've mostly worked on snakes. So I got a
Speaker 1: master's and a PhD. And for those graduate degrees you
Speaker 1: have to do a piece of research. You have to
Speaker 1: write a master's thesis for master three, and you have
Speaker 1: to write a doctoral dissertation. And the topics of both
Speaker 1: of my graduate degrees had to do with snake biology,
Speaker 1: and so I have especially interested in what and how
Speaker 1: snakes eat. So for example, I've I've looked in the
Speaker 1: stomachs of thousands of maybe even in tents of certainly
Speaker 1: many thousand museum specimens to see what their last meal was,
Speaker 1: if there is one. So snakes don't snakes into eat
Speaker 1: big meals and therefore not so frequently. So just just
Speaker 1: by chance, if people go out and preserve a bunch
Speaker 1: of snakes and put the museum, only a relatively small
Speaker 1: fraction will wet food in their stomach because they don't
Speaker 1: eat so so on an average I probably get about
Speaker 1: a ten percent return but I have looked at literally
Speaker 1: thousands of specimens all over the world in the world's
Speaker 1: great museums. I get the curative permission to make a
Speaker 1: little slip and then I look in the stomach. It's
Speaker 1: like Christmas, I never know what I'm gonna find you,
Speaker 1: what did you find with crazy? Like? Like, uh, um,
Speaker 1: the largest meals that any snakes in the world eat
Speaker 1: away upwards of a hundred forty two d of their
Speaker 1: own mass. So you look like kind of a und guy.
Speaker 1: So imagine you eating a two ur and seventy pound
Speaker 1: cheeseburger with no utensils and no arms. You literally walk
Speaker 1: your head around a two and seventy found cheeseburger and
Speaker 1: then crawl off with it. That's that's what That's what
Speaker 1: vipers can do. And so I've I've spent and then
Speaker 1: sort of the second thing that I did and started
Speaker 1: doing was I wanted to watchnkes in the wild. I
Speaker 1: wanted to I wanted to see what they do. What's
Speaker 1: the craziest thing you found in a steaks gut? For? Like,
Speaker 1: the craziest thing ever? WHOA, I've seen a lot of
Speaker 1: crazy things, like five crazy things. This is interesting? Uh, Well,
Speaker 1: in an aquatic coral snake, which is a venomous cobra
Speaker 1: reality that lives in South America. I found five eels
Speaker 1: and they there were five of them there, and and
Speaker 1: one of them was only a tail left. It was
Speaker 1: the one that had been eating the longest ago, so
Speaker 1: it was the one most digested. And then as you
Speaker 1: went anteriorly in the gut, these items had been eaten
Speaker 1: more and more recently. And though it's recent one, it
Speaker 1: was a completely intact deal that's probably been eating just
Speaker 1: minutes before some biologists killed the squirrel snake and put
Speaker 1: it in the museum. That's pretty cool, right, that's um.
Speaker 1: Another one that was very insightful was I found a
Speaker 1: Pacific rattlesnake from California that had eating a ground squirrel.
Speaker 1: And the really interesting thing about vipers they have these
Speaker 1: long folding fangs and they have this tissue destructive cocktail
Speaker 1: venom that are made on a gland on each side
Speaker 1: of their head, you know. And basically, when a rattlesnake
Speaker 1: or any viper wants to kill a prey at him
Speaker 1: like a rabbit or a squirrel, it waits an ambush,
Speaker 1: it launches itself, it stabs these two hypodermic needles into
Speaker 1: the prey simultaneously compresses these two glands. It's essentially like
Speaker 1: it has a pair of hypodermic needles and the barrels
Speaker 1: filled with digestive and immobilizing cocktail. And so the rattlesnake
Speaker 1: goes like that, squirts in and releases almost instantly in
Speaker 1: a fraction of a second, minimizing the chance the rabbit
Speaker 1: of the squirrel might hurt it, and the rabbit of
Speaker 1: squirrel goes bounding off. One time, I one time we
Speaker 1: watched a rattlesnake bite a rabbit and the rabbit hopped
Speaker 1: ninety yards before it fell over. It took the rattlesnake
Speaker 1: almost three hours to find the rabbit, and it tracked
Speaker 1: the exact path of the rabbit. Turns out, rattlesnakes are
Speaker 1: putting a tracker molecule in their prey with the venom,
Speaker 1: and so it followed like the rabbit wind. It's it's
Speaker 1: smell or sense with its tongue, which is an older
Speaker 1: an odor carrier. There's a special organ in the roof
Speaker 1: of the mouth where the where the actual sensing happens,
Speaker 1: and the tongue carries in these odor molecules. So rattlesnake
Speaker 1: strikes the rabbit. The rabbit goes bounding off on this
Speaker 1: very irregular path over a rocky slope, and the rattlesnake
Speaker 1: takes this. The rattlesnake only about this big. It takes
Speaker 1: three hours, and I held my hands up. It takes
Speaker 1: it almost three hours, and it follows the precise security
Speaker 1: path of this rabbit. But the time it finds the rabbit,
Speaker 1: the rabbit is not only dead, but it's being digested
Speaker 1: from the inside out because the rabbit with its dying heartbeats,
Speaker 1: it's like it's like if you injected meat with a
Speaker 1: tender riser. It's in like actually some recipes you do
Speaker 1: inject meat with butter or whatever. Well, the rattlesnake has
Speaker 1: just injected two glands fulls of this the jestive enzyme
Speaker 1: cocktail and the rabbit, And as the rabbit bounds off dying,
Speaker 1: its own heartbeats are circulating these digestive enzymes throughout its tissue.
Speaker 1: So when the rattlesnake finally gets there and starts to
Speaker 1: walk its head over this meal that's maybe fifty of
Speaker 1: its mass, the rabbit is already digestion is already well underway.
Speaker 1: It's an incredible thing. How's that? I don't know what
Speaker 1: kind of species keep going? I read that, Um, I
Speaker 1: guess we should. I just asked, like the obvious question,
Speaker 1: what's the most frightening encounter you've had with a snake?
Speaker 1: With a snake? Uh? That's actually pretty easy, because I've
Speaker 1: almost never frightened of snakes. So I'm I'm long ago
Speaker 1: got over sort of macho showing off. In fact, um,
Speaker 1: I've actually calculated how risky is it to manhandle a
Speaker 1: vnom a snake? Pick it up, show off the fangs
Speaker 1: to the nearest uh fellow teenager, preferably a girl, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean that's that's sort of the old macho approach
Speaker 1: to venomous snakes, as you you man all of all that.
Speaker 1: When we now know that that's a stupid risk, it's
Speaker 1: not necessary, it's really hard on the snakes. We don't
Speaker 1: do it anymore. And I got over that, and so
Speaker 1: I've I've generally had a sort of risk adversitive, respectful
Speaker 1: approach to studying venomous snakes my whole life. But when
Speaker 1: I first started working in Costa Rica in about all
Speaker 1: of my venomous snake experience was with with pit vipers,
Speaker 1: mostly rattlesnakes in the US, which are in fact pretty
Speaker 1: easy to deal with. I mean, we could have a
Speaker 1: big rattlesnake in this room where we're sitting vid a
Speaker 1: snake hook. We could just keep talking. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: just it's just not that hard if you're respectful in
Speaker 1: what you're doing to work with us pitt vipers. So
Speaker 1: I get to Costa Rica and there's this really big snake.
Speaker 1: There's two of them, actually, but one of them, one
Speaker 1: of them, the more common it's called was used to
Speaker 1: be called a fertilence. Costa Ricans called them tertio pelo,
Speaker 1: which means velvet in Spanish. It's a massive snake. The
Speaker 1: big females are like six and a half to seven
Speaker 1: ft long. The head is the exaggerating to say it
Speaker 1: was as big as my hand, but it's a big head,
Speaker 1: really long. Aang's very toxic venom. It's the most dangerous
Speaker 1: snake in terms of killing people in Costa Rica by far.
Speaker 1: And I had no fuel experience with him, and so
Speaker 1: I really wanted to catch one, and I was I
Speaker 1: was at some part of this preserve where I was working,
Speaker 1: and somebody came and said, Harry, they've spotted a big
Speaker 1: fertile lance and in this little swamp below the bat tree,
Speaker 1: this place I knew, so so with my my assistant time,
Speaker 1: I literally jogged about a kilometer about a half mile
Speaker 1: over there, and I couldn't find it. So then I
Speaker 1: walked back to where i'd been in just a few
Speaker 1: minutes later they kind and they go, we spotted it.
Speaker 1: So we jogged another jogged this kilometer again and I
Speaker 1: sort of stumbled down this long slope and there's a
Speaker 1: big fertile lance and it's it's it's lying on the
Speaker 1: surface of this of this mud. And so I'm a
Speaker 1: little out of you know, I'm I wasn't thinking clearly,
Speaker 1: and so I have my big snake hook and I
Speaker 1: just slog into the mud and the snake draws back
Speaker 1: into a striking pose right at my feet, almost when
Speaker 1: I barely touched with the hook, and I'm and I'm
Speaker 1: thinking that I'm going well, actually, so what I thought
Speaker 1: was that I would go out like as if as
Speaker 1: a rattlesnake, and I would lift it on my snake
Speaker 1: hook over on the dry land and then I would
Speaker 1: bag it and I'd find some way to get it.
Speaker 1: So I slog out of the mud. It's it's crawling
Speaker 1: away from me. I touched it with my snake hook,
Speaker 1: and it whips around right at my feet and it's
Speaker 1: is facing up at me like like it's ready to strike,
Speaker 1: and and I was completely taken aback, and I the
Speaker 1: first thing I noticed was that I couldn't move. My
Speaker 1: my legs were stuck. I had gotten in just over
Speaker 1: my knees and I couldn't move. And the second thing
Speaker 1: I actually remember thinking, I wish I had a pistol,
Speaker 1: but I didn't, and so I raised my snake hook
Speaker 1: over my head and I thought, if if it's strikes,
Speaker 1: I'm going to try to I'm going to try to
Speaker 1: disable it with a blow. And instead it just turned
Speaker 1: around and took off into this one. The chances you
Speaker 1: could have disabled it, I don't know. I don't know.
Speaker 1: Fortunately we didn't have to. We didn't have to answer
Speaker 1: that because it just went away, which is what even
Speaker 1: really dangerous snakes almost always want to do. And I
Speaker 1: was I was so mired that somebody had to get
Speaker 1: a tree branch to get me out and Uh, that's
Speaker 1: the most uneasy I've been in in my life. I'm
Speaker 1: uneasy just listening to and that that happened a long
Speaker 1: time ago, and I've never done anything that's stupid Again,
Speaker 1: would have been a mis snakes, Is there how much
Speaker 1: of you thought about and read about just kind of
Speaker 1: our our relationship to stakes, the way we see them,
Speaker 1: kind of like their place in our culture throughout history
Speaker 1: a lot. It's a big theme in my current writing
Speaker 1: and research, And so how would you boil that down
Speaker 1: for folks, Like, what's the best way to think about
Speaker 1: how um humans approached snakes and and kind of the
Speaker 1: way that they are in our psyche? Because when I
Speaker 1: pictured that snake curled up and ready to strike you,
Speaker 1: it's demonic in my mind. Yeah. So, when I was
Speaker 1: writing my first book, which was about snakes as a
Speaker 1: review doing all this natural history literature, you know, I
Speaker 1: basically wanted to read everything I could find about all
Speaker 1: the snakes in the world in terms of what they do.
Speaker 1: And so I was just winnowing all this natural history
Speaker 1: literature over the last hundred and fifty years or so
Speaker 1: about snakes, and I encountered something I didn't expect, which
Speaker 1: was that every major group of primates, which is to say, lemurs,
Speaker 1: tar Sear's New World monkeys, Old World monkeys, and apes,
Speaker 1: including us, every major group of primates, I found observations
Speaker 1: of them both killing and being killed by snakes. And
Speaker 1: what what I thought was so fascinating was it it
Speaker 1: wasn't just the one. So if it was just that
Speaker 1: snakes are really dangerous to us, well fine, you know,
Speaker 1: so are cape buffalo. Yeah yeah, so fine, you know,
Speaker 1: I get spiders, you know. But it turned out it's
Speaker 1: not just that, it's that also not only humans, but
Speaker 1: other primates. They're attracted to snakes. They mobbed them, sometimes
Speaker 1: they pick up sticks and kill them, they throw stuff
Speaker 1: at them, sometimes they eat them. So it turns out
Speaker 1: capuchin monkeys in Brazil basically distinguished two kinds of snakes.
Speaker 1: One kind of snake is vipers, coral snakes and the
Speaker 1: mimics that look like them, and boas and all the
Speaker 1: other snakes several dozen species that a herpetologist would say
Speaker 1: are many different kinds, there's just one kind. They're the
Speaker 1: kind that's not a boa of viper or that's not dangerous,
Speaker 1: that's right. And so these Capuchian monkeys they find type.
Speaker 1: The first type, they make a big commotion, they throw stuff,
Speaker 1: they get sticks, they even kind of take sticks and
Speaker 1: jab them at the viper and the crevice. The other
Speaker 1: kind is grab and eat and throw the carcass down
Speaker 1: half eat. So even a non human primate like a
Speaker 1: capuchin that so so there and you when you get
Speaker 1: the people, it's all the place you have. Sure you
Speaker 1: have people that hate snakes, but then you have the
Speaker 1: whole cultures that deify them. You know, they're people. You
Speaker 1: don't kill cobras in India. You know people in the
Speaker 1: Eastern US who handle rattlesnakes as part of their scriptural
Speaker 1: and turn reportation of the Bible. You know. So there's
Speaker 1: there's this what I find fascinating ambivalence. And I think
Speaker 1: the reason is that, on the one hand, if you
Speaker 1: don't see the snake that either wants to eat you
Speaker 1: or is scared of you, you can get hurt really badly,
Speaker 1: really quickly. Your whole life can change and maybe end
Speaker 1: in a matter of seconds. On the other hand, a
Speaker 1: snake is about the easiest vertebrate animal to disable on Earth.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's basically one long vertebral column, a good
Speaker 1: hard blow any place along that column. You've you've got
Speaker 1: a disabled snake, and you can eat it. It's a
Speaker 1: fine chocolate protein. So I think that that's at the
Speaker 1: heart of it, that it goes way back. So I
Speaker 1: I give talks on this, this this general topic, and
Speaker 1: I call it the seventy five million year old Deadly
Speaker 1: Dialogue because snakes are about a hundred million years old
Speaker 1: and primates are about seventy five million years old. So
Speaker 1: every since primates have been on Earth, we've only been
Speaker 1: around almost apiens actually only a few hundred thousand years.
Speaker 1: So we have this long history and it's a it's
Speaker 1: a heritage, you know, and it's it's a fraught one.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's fraught with both the possibility of an
Speaker 1: easy meal, it's fraught with a certain fascination. I mean,
Speaker 1: what the heck, no legs, two penises. I mean, that's ah,
Speaker 1: there you go. Well, there used to be one that
Speaker 1: said snakes have something extra big picture of a snake penis,
Speaker 1: but uh so there you know, it's a very fraught relationship.
Speaker 1: And uh many people think that we are innately afraid
Speaker 1: of snakes. I think that's probably not true. I think
Speaker 1: it's pretty clear we we we have built in mechanisms
Speaker 1: that make it easier to recognize snakes than other things.
Speaker 1: But I think the fear part probably gets connected within
Speaker 1: an individual based on experience, teach, so forth. I think
Speaker 1: those connections are made right the Serpent. Like most cartoons,
Speaker 1: my son watches a thing called the Gruffalo and the
Speaker 1: snake comes out. He goes, Oh, a snake. He doesn't know.
Speaker 1: He he grew up in UH for his first two
Speaker 1: years in Texas and then moved to Montany. He's never
Speaker 1: seen a snake. I've never had an instance to talk
Speaker 1: to him about a snake. Yet when he sees one
Speaker 1: on a show that is kind of a it's not
Speaker 1: a bad or good snakes. Snakes just a character in
Speaker 1: the little thing he's watching. He's he's fascinated. He and
Speaker 1: when when a fox walks out, he doesn't go look
Speaker 1: a fox. But when a snake comes out, I don't know.
Speaker 1: Like I said, I don't know if it's just the
Speaker 1: nature of what it is or how it looks or
Speaker 1: how it moves, and it's the unique characteristics. There are
Speaker 1: definitely features that define snakiness and UH. One study, for example,
Speaker 1: involved this has been done with both children and with
Speaker 1: macaques kind of monkey. Um, you show him a screen
Speaker 1: that has like nine different images and they images vary
Speaker 1: from flowers to mushrooms, to spiders to snakes, a bunch
Speaker 1: of stuff. And then, uh, you set this up so
Speaker 1: that the subject as they're called, is rewarded for picking
Speaker 1: out something they're shown. So they're shown something and said,
Speaker 1: until pick this out. What turns out if you give
Speaker 1: a child or a macaque a second or more, they
Speaker 1: can pick pick out with equal facility a spider, a mushroom,
Speaker 1: or snake. If you cut it down to about six
Speaker 1: hundred milliseconds, it's just over half a second. They can
Speaker 1: still pick out spiders and snakes. If you cut it
Speaker 1: down to three hundred milliseconds, so only about a quarter
Speaker 1: of a second, they can only pick out snakes, which
Speaker 1: is just consistent with lots of other studies that suggest
Speaker 1: we have some sort of recognition mechanisms at the level
Speaker 1: of brains, like, yeah, that's right, that's right. And many
Speaker 1: of us who worked in the field, and this has
Speaker 1: happened to me. I once was working coaster RecA. The
Speaker 1: other big viper there is called a bushmaster. It's even bigger.
Speaker 1: It's it's doesn't cause nearly as many accidents, but it's
Speaker 1: a massive it's the biggest viper in the world. And
Speaker 1: I had a radio transmitter in one we surgically implanted,
Speaker 1: and so I was looking for that that snake. It
Speaker 1: was a smallish one, like four or five ft long.
Speaker 1: Had two other experienced herpetologists with me, and it was
Speaker 1: in the middle of the day. Well you know, you
Speaker 1: can see, and all of a sudden, I knew there
Speaker 1: was a huge bush master that I just bumped my
Speaker 1: right foot against. And I knew it at some preconscious
Speaker 1: level because I I screamed an expletive and had to
Speaker 1: shove this even bigger guy to my left out of
Speaker 1: the way, because I knew that I just woke up
Speaker 1: this like seven seven a half foot bushmaster on my
Speaker 1: right foot, and it was drawing back. I don't think
Speaker 1: it was drawing back to strike. I think it was
Speaker 1: I had literally woken it up. We're both drawing back.
Speaker 1: We were making equally appropriate responses, you know, But I
Speaker 1: know that recognition and that action skipped all sorts of
Speaker 1: conscious functions. Do you feel like we've had other Violetis
Speaker 1: on that spend a lot of time around a certain species,
Speaker 1: you whether it's a grizzly bear or something else, and
Speaker 1: they always seem to have different feelings for the thing
Speaker 1: that they've studied. Where where do you land with snakes?
Speaker 1: You have an affection for them? Yeah, yeah, I you
Speaker 1: know snakes that A thing that's tough about snakes is
Speaker 1: that you can't read them very well. So they don't
Speaker 1: have eyelids, they don't have lips like mammals, do you know.
Speaker 1: So I love I especially love dogs. I have two labs,
Speaker 1: you know, and and I you know, I talked to
Speaker 1: them all the time. I love them dearly. I'm totally
Speaker 1: distraught if anything's wrong with either one, you know. And
Speaker 1: it's it's a little harder to get that way about
Speaker 1: snakes because you don't get as much affect. You don't
Speaker 1: you don't feel that. And I think a lot of us,
Speaker 1: including me, I used to think there wasn't much in there.
Speaker 1: And just in the last ten years or so, twenty years,
Speaker 1: but last time especially, we've discovered parental care. We've discovered
Speaker 1: what's called aloe parenting. That's when one mom takes care
Speaker 1: of somebody else's babies, so it turns out rattlesnakes have
Speaker 1: aloe parenting. We've discovered uh snakes modifying their ambush environment
Speaker 1: to solve a problem that may not actually occur for
Speaker 1: several days. So here here's an example that this is.
Speaker 1: This is maybe the coolest thing I've ever seen in
Speaker 1: the field. I was watching a big blacktail rattlesnake in
Speaker 1: the Chericogo Mountains of Arizona. It was actually male number forty,
Speaker 1: and he's in the one I wrote down radio collared
Speaker 1: fifty black tail ratle snakes in Arizona. Well, they're not
Speaker 1: collared because you can't put a collar on snake, but
Speaker 1: implants implant. Yeah, And we so that's how we discovered
Speaker 1: parental care and them and stuff, because we were watching
Speaker 1: these moms, these pregnant moms, and we thought they were
Speaker 1: just going to give birth and their babies to leave,
Speaker 1: because that's what we all knew happened. And they gave
Speaker 1: birth and they didn't they didn't leave. They stayed with
Speaker 1: their babies and all this cool stuff happened, you know.
Speaker 1: And then it turns out ten days after birth, the
Speaker 1: baby said there's getting the first time that the whole
Speaker 1: thing ends. Then, so we document all that, but the
Speaker 1: slowly mind blowing this thing. As we were watching this
Speaker 1: big male and he was cruising through a little shady,
Speaker 1: cobbled dry stream bed, and all of a sudden, he
Speaker 1: stops abruptly and he starts tongue flicking meticulously about two
Speaker 1: square yards of leaf litter, which I later found had
Speaker 1: a chipmunk trail going right through it. I found the runway,
Speaker 1: but we didn't know that first. So he tonue flicks
Speaker 1: for thirteen minutes. I've got my stop watch running, I'm
Speaker 1: watching with binoculars, my collaborator, the Tusun physicians watching, and
Speaker 1: then he after thirteen minutes, he he coils into the
Speaker 1: stereotyped ambush posture that a viper uses when it's gonna
Speaker 1: sit and wait for something to come by. And they
Speaker 1: may wait, incidentally, for days or even weeks for that
Speaker 1: animal to come by. So he gets already. And that
Speaker 1: was cool to watch, but we knew that's what they did.
Speaker 1: What happened next, though, was there was a dead fern,
Speaker 1: a brown dried fern, about eight inches right in front
Speaker 1: of his face, who was right in his prospective strike path.
Speaker 1: It would beat as if you got set up. I
Speaker 1: was just to ambush a deer, and then there's there's
Speaker 1: all these saplings in the way this snake is cut exactly,
Speaker 1: you know, and that's what he did. So we're watching,
Speaker 1: you know, and all of a sudden he reaches out
Speaker 1: with this very stereotype posture. It looks sort of like
Speaker 1: a shepherd's crook, and it's what Mayo rattlesnakes used to
Speaker 1: fight with other rattlesnakes. So if you look up on YouTube,
Speaker 1: just look for rattlesnakes fighting, you'll see what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1: They rise up in the air and they push each
Speaker 1: other down, and they use the stereotype little cook in
Speaker 1: their neck for the pushing down parts, like arm wrestling.
Speaker 1: But this guy did it, and he pushed the fern
Speaker 1: out of the way. He bent the fern down and
Speaker 1: then went back into his ambush posture. And I was like, no,
Speaker 1: what he's gonna believe me because I didn't have a
Speaker 1: video camera. And I turned to Dave and I said,
Speaker 1: what you just see? And he said, wow, he built
Speaker 1: he bent that fern down. I go, yeah, and then
Speaker 1: I'm writing my notes, you know. A few years later,
Speaker 1: a former post doc mind ruling Clark as a professor
Speaker 1: at San Diego State. Now he started using remote videography
Speaker 1: to study rattlesnake behavior, and he got video of multiple
Speaker 1: rattlesnakes making these ambush tunnels through brush in California. And
Speaker 1: so they're trying to ambush California ground squirrels, and they'll
Speaker 1: stick their body out and kind of beat, beat in
Speaker 1: all directions and sort of form this little hollow in
Speaker 1: the brush where they're gonna strike squirrel. They're hunting. They're
Speaker 1: hunting in there, and as you say, it's a perfect analogy,
Speaker 1: they're perfect. Who would I believed it? I mean, if
Speaker 1: I told you panda did that, you might think it's true.
Speaker 1: And if I told you I'm a cat or a chimpanzee,
Speaker 1: did it. Sure? But this is a rattlesnake. It does
Speaker 1: not have a big brain, and it's and it's doing
Speaker 1: all this cool stuff. Do you feel like one thing
Speaker 1: that strikes me about like the your proximity of these
Speaker 1: at these creatures, and like knowing them so much, what
Speaker 1: do you what do you think about their place in
Speaker 1: the natural world? What did you I'm sure you've thought
Speaker 1: about that at length I have, And what about their
Speaker 1: place in our world? That that would be the second
Speaker 1: question we could ask. I mean, it's pretty clear, uh,
Speaker 1: they are predators, you know. And so actually their predators
Speaker 1: sort of out of proportion to their body size because
Speaker 1: they can eat things so big. So, for example, I
Speaker 1: mentioned bushmasters in Costa Rica. The bushmaster might weigh four
Speaker 1: to ten pounds. It eats the same prey that a
Speaker 1: thirty five pound oscilotte eats. Okay, so a western diamondback rattlesnake,
Speaker 1: a big western back rattlesnake, might weigh four or five
Speaker 1: or really big one, maybe ten pounds. It's eating the
Speaker 1: same thing that a bobcat our coyote eats that outweighs
Speaker 1: it by a factor of like four or something. That's
Speaker 1: because there's a snake, you know. And so they are
Speaker 1: at the same level in a food pyramid or a
Speaker 1: food web as a mammal that weighs several times what
Speaker 1: they do, so they play important roles like that. We're
Speaker 1: actually still kind of finding out what they do. And
Speaker 1: the coolest thing lately is it turns out their seed dispersers,
Speaker 1: so you know, uh, plants, when they make seeds and
Speaker 1: fruit and all that, we might think they make it
Speaker 1: so we can have tasty breakfast. But the plant is
Speaker 1: really dispersing its offspring when it makes fruit, you know,
Speaker 1: it hopes, it hopes that something will eat the fruit,
Speaker 1: pass it through its gut, and the seeds will go through,
Speaker 1: get pooped out, and go somewhere else. That's how it
Speaker 1: that's how that's that's how it disperses. That's how it says.
Speaker 1: It's kids off to college. It was a term that
Speaker 1: somebody used recently, ecosystems services absolutely, and I was like that,
Speaker 1: like click something in my head, like yeah, man, yeah,
Speaker 1: all of these things are doing a service to the
Speaker 1: that's right. So it turns out we discovered accidentally one
Speaker 1: of my former students when we were looking at the
Speaker 1: museum guts. Uh, they're all these black things, these little
Speaker 1: black dots in the gut of these desert rattlesnakes. What
Speaker 1: we're really looking at, we think is fur and teeth
Speaker 1: and digested mammal. And he showed it to me through
Speaker 1: a microscope and I went, I don't know, maybe their
Speaker 1: seeds whatever didn't didn't hit me. And then he calls
Speaker 1: me back in and he he shows me out of
Speaker 1: the holding. So this is the end of the gut,
Speaker 1: and I don't know how just I'm going to describe
Speaker 1: it to you, but what word. It looked like this.
Speaker 1: There was a little little seedling coming of it. So
Speaker 1: we found germinated seeds in the colons of these rattlesnakes.
Speaker 1: These rattlesnakes are eating kangaroo rats, which have pouches. So
Speaker 1: the kangaroo rat goes around picking up all these seeds,
Speaker 1: stuffing its pouch like a hamster goes into its burrow,
Speaker 1: takes all it out and has a little cache. You know,
Speaker 1: the plant is hoping that some fraction of those seeds
Speaker 1: won't ever actually get eaten and will germinate in this nice, cool,
Speaker 1: dark moist place. That's the plant's bet. You know, Well,
Speaker 1: if that plant, if the seeds from that plant end
Speaker 1: up in the pouch of a kangaroo rat that gets
Speaker 1: eaten by a sidewinder, which is not a very big rattlesnake,
Speaker 1: that plant just hit the dispersal jackpot because the sidewinder
Speaker 1: rattlesnake has a home range radius of like five to
Speaker 1: ten times what the kangaroo rat is just rolling around
Speaker 1: the ground dropping seat. That's right, that's right. So there's
Speaker 1: another ecosystem service for you. I love that term. I
Speaker 1: don't know why it struck me, like, yes, because we're
Speaker 1: thinking about biodiversity, that's thinking about what you know, we're
Speaker 1: we're not very serviceable creatures when it comes to a
Speaker 1: lot of things that we do. But when you start
Speaker 1: thinking about the game that we pursue and the way
Speaker 1: we think about elk and stuff like that, there every
Speaker 1: animal you see as a service, that service to the
Speaker 1: elk and vice versa. And so that second question which
Speaker 1: you inspired me to bring up, though, we could also
Speaker 1: talk about, well, what what would be the place of
Speaker 1: rattlesnakes in our lives? You know? And of course one
Speaker 1: response was their their potential death threat, so we should
Speaker 1: get rid of them whenever possible. In fact, uh, we
Speaker 1: now know why you die from rattlesnake bite. We know
Speaker 1: how to know how to prevent it. Snake bite is
Speaker 1: a very low public health problem in this country. It's
Speaker 1: a huge public health problem in some countries, but that's
Speaker 1: because of lack of adequate medical carecter. So once you
Speaker 1: you know, when I try to teach people to appreciate rattlesnakes,
Speaker 1: I always start out by admitting the danger and being
Speaker 1: very candid about it. So I think that's the way
Speaker 1: to go. I think that's the way to go with
Speaker 1: the elephants, with bison and anything that could hurt you,
Speaker 1: is to start out by being honest about not trying
Speaker 1: to hide from it, and then you talk about how
Speaker 1: you can ameliorate those dangers, and then you can enjoy
Speaker 1: this incredible stuff. Like I can see the look on
Speaker 1: your face when I'm telling you about the rabbit going
Speaker 1: one yards and then then then she finds it and
Speaker 1: eats it, and she just got one third of her
Speaker 1: annual grocery bill in one predation event. How can you
Speaker 1: not marvel at that? I just like, how can you
Speaker 1: not think your world is richer? I took the wrong
Speaker 1: damn job. Should have been a herpetize something I told
Speaker 1: my wife, like a couple of weeks can shake it. Well,
Speaker 1: what what? What do you think about the future? So
Speaker 1: I want to go back to the wild left biologists?
Speaker 1: You know why? It's because there's so much understanding that
Speaker 1: you miss or well, I guess I put it the
Speaker 1: other way. There's so much out there that you could know,
Speaker 1: You know so much of the intricacy of the natural
Speaker 1: world that you could know, and it informs everything that
Speaker 1: you do, everything that you do. And that's why I
Speaker 1: like Tracks and Shadows so much, because it was like
Speaker 1: kind of a transcendental meditation of all the thing is
Speaker 1: kind of in a gumbo, like all the experiences connect
Speaker 1: to each other, and you can live a more enlightened
Speaker 1: life if you understand a snake and what it does
Speaker 1: for ecosystem and how it germinates a seed and how
Speaker 1: that seed comes from a mouse, and how that mouse
Speaker 1: ate seed and how that plant hops to do those things,
Speaker 1: and those understandings are seminal to our lot, like there
Speaker 1: they are what we are. Um. Yeah, And I think
Speaker 1: when you become a more candid, blatant participant, I mean
Speaker 1: I think a lot of especially you know, first world
Speaker 1: modern humanity, is we've we've ironically distanced ourselves from nature.
Speaker 1: I'd say ironic because I think some of the real
Speaker 1: champions of environmentalism, on the one hand, bemoan that we're
Speaker 1: dis junct from nature. And then there then they don't.
Speaker 1: They're there whole kinds of activities they don't want to
Speaker 1: participate in, which are actually being part of nature instead
Speaker 1: of being it indirectly, you know, they're their environmentalism at
Speaker 1: some level, kind of hatchment. That's right. I believe that's true.
Speaker 1: They become somewhat more spectators than participants. And so as
Speaker 1: you can tell if from reading my book. And there's
Speaker 1: a reason why it's the next last chapter because and
Speaker 1: it's called Born Again Predator and so here here I
Speaker 1: spent my whole life studying predators and thinking about what
Speaker 1: that entails, ecologically, psychologically, all these things. And then I
Speaker 1: then I get to go there. And I tried to
Speaker 1: tell the reader what it was like to have had
Speaker 1: the life I've had and then to go there, And
Speaker 1: I hope I succeeded in en showing that it was.
Speaker 1: It was really transformative to me. It really, Uh it was.
Speaker 1: It was. It was a life enhancing experience and has
Speaker 1: been ever since. Yeah, I've read as many accounts as
Speaker 1: I give my hands on that's similar to yours, kind
Speaker 1: of of what the natural world gives and what you
Speaker 1: give it and kind of a life lived like that.
Speaker 1: And I think this was one of the best I've
Speaker 1: ever read. And you had I wrote something down. I
Speaker 1: wanted to make sure miss that you wrote that our
Speaker 1: psyches are linked to predators. With wildness like or like
Speaker 1: the way that we are, like the reason we think
Speaker 1: about even charismatic megafaunal or the opposite. You know, we
Speaker 1: think about them in different ways. You know, they're they're
Speaker 1: connected to us in different ways. Some people I think
Speaker 1: that manifests itself in like a sympathy. We're talking before
Speaker 1: you hit record about sympathy, right, they have a sympathy
Speaker 1: for bears or a sympathy for UH predators and other people.
Speaker 1: There's like an understanding that leads to empathy that allows
Speaker 1: you to kind of understand their place a little bit better.
Speaker 1: And some people, I just I would imagine use their
Speaker 1: disconnect via fear. You know. So there's lots of ways
Speaker 1: you can do. You can link to a predator, but
Speaker 1: talk about that for you, like what what that means
Speaker 1: to be linked to a predator with with a psyche? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and to the prey to I mean, we we are
Speaker 1: potential prey and we used to be. We're not so
Speaker 1: much in the United States anymore, al though in some
Speaker 1: places you might still be. Yeah. And so you know,
Speaker 1: I told you I'm interested in the book I'm writing now.
Speaker 1: I'm interested in especially in this world world word wild
Speaker 1: because in the US, and I think it really is
Speaker 1: fair to say it's a it's an especially North American
Speaker 1: environmentalist twentieth century perspective. We've and twenty one now, we
Speaker 1: we tended to define wildness in terms of whether or
Speaker 1: not people are sort of functionally part of it all.
Speaker 1: We've defined them out of it. And you know, the
Speaker 1: first thing you can say is, well, how about words
Speaker 1: like Shoshone and Comanche and things like that. Um. But
Speaker 1: another thing is that, uh, like we were talking about earlier,
Speaker 1: there's this irony of wanting bemoaning that we're not part
Speaker 1: of nature, that we're dis junct. In fact, the masthead
Speaker 1: for Friends of the Earth back when I, as a
Speaker 1: Berkeley professor said not man apart, which is a line
Speaker 1: from a Robertson Jeffer's point, not man apart bemoaning being
Speaker 1: apart from nature. And yet we've done all this stuff
Speaker 1: that keeps us, I think, makes us ever more distant
Speaker 1: from the fact that we are inevitably, ultimately functioning parts
Speaker 1: of ecosystems. You know, food goes in, food goes out.
Speaker 1: If there's a lot of it, we're gonna eat. If
Speaker 1: there's a lot of us, we're gonna be eating a
Speaker 1: lot of things of one sort or another, and a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff is gonna come out, and we're gonna
Speaker 1: have to deal with both of that. And we've we've
Speaker 1: done these things, especially as modern first world people, to
Speaker 1: almost like hide from that. And so I'm I'm all
Speaker 1: for getting people back out in nature. I don't make
Speaker 1: fun of vegans. I don't. I don't make fun of
Speaker 1: other people's life choices, especially about ethical issues, you know.
Speaker 1: But and so I think there's ways that they can
Speaker 1: do it too. I mean they can, they can farm,
Speaker 1: they can they can admit that if you if you
Speaker 1: clear a place to make a soy feel or an
Speaker 1: almond orchard, there'll be almost no biodiversity left, and those
Speaker 1: animals will not go somewhere else. We'd all like to
Speaker 1: hope that they go somewhere else. They mostly don't make
Speaker 1: that point in your book as well as say like
Speaker 1: we think that that all these organisms when if we,
Speaker 1: you know, we're a bit of a virus or a bacteria,
Speaker 1: we move into a place and we clear it off
Speaker 1: and we kind of remove its natural way. Like there's
Speaker 1: almost there's no in our country, no undisturbed dirt that
Speaker 1: I can think of even in wilderness there these are
Speaker 1: these are yeah to some extent. And so you know,
Speaker 1: we we define native as some length of time that
Speaker 1: we've we've prescribed. Oh that's native. Is this many years?
Speaker 1: Well that's that's just a thing that we've said. And
Speaker 1: so at some point I wonder how do we how
Speaker 1: we put all that stuff together? You know, how how
Speaker 1: we get to a point where we really understand what
Speaker 1: we are within nature? And whether it's I often look
Speaker 1: at somebody smarter than me. I once read it like
Speaker 1: if you're flying in a plane, say you're over Yellowstone
Speaker 1: National Park, they'll be the splendor. And I fly over
Speaker 1: these areas a lot. There's it's like it seems pristine
Speaker 1: and untouched. And as you move towards Los Angeles, it
Speaker 1: seems as if the earth has gotten some sort of sickness.
Speaker 1: And as you move towards Los Angeles, the sickness gets
Speaker 1: increasingly evident. And as you get to Los Angeles, it
Speaker 1: looks like some bacteria has grown in an area and
Speaker 1: it looks very unhealthy. If you are if you were
Speaker 1: to like if an alien came down, And so for me,
Speaker 1: I think that's true, but that doesn't there's echoes environmentalism
Speaker 1: in that thought. But for me, I feel like, yes,
Speaker 1: I we are that. But how do I make sure
Speaker 1: I understand my peace and that greater giant organism That
Speaker 1: gets just getting a little deep. But how do I
Speaker 1: understand my peace of that greater giant organism than I am?
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't hate myself for being a part
Speaker 1: of it. How do I be a better part of it?
Speaker 1: And what does it all mean? And I think the
Speaker 1: environmentalist might say, like, I hate humans for being what
Speaker 1: they are, and I'm sure you don't intend to, and
Speaker 1: I certainly I want to say that. I'm I don't
Speaker 1: mean to stereotype all environmentalists is one thing, and I
Speaker 1: get all that, but I think there is a brand
Speaker 1: of a segment of environmentalism, And especially in the US,
Speaker 1: I don't think you would see it nearly as much
Speaker 1: in Latin America if you were talking to conservation, conservation
Speaker 1: by all just the nature lovers there, I don't think
Speaker 1: you'd see as much in Europe. It's it's a sort
Speaker 1: of a privileged notion of you know, that's that's if
Speaker 1: we could it all be like that, and we would
Speaker 1: only take pictures and leave only footprints, and I've kind
Speaker 1: of think that that's that's that's not the way forward.
Speaker 1: So I think we all start with realizing that we
Speaker 1: can't escape our presence and and all this sort of like, uh,
Speaker 1: it's sort of like anthropophobic or something, you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's a and I find I just can't embrace that.
Speaker 1: I mean, I am a person. I had a mother
Speaker 1: and father I have I'm married to somebody, I have
Speaker 1: a brother, I have a niece I love. I mean,
Speaker 1: you say you want to get rid of five out
Speaker 1: of the seven billion people on Earth right now, Well,
Speaker 1: which five billion would you pick? You know you're going
Speaker 1: to be the privilege one that gets to say so
Speaker 1: I I just it's not that I don't understand feeling
Speaker 1: like that. I just don't think it gets us very far.
Speaker 1: And so I want to push us starting by admitting
Speaker 1: that we're all part of nature. We never were apart
Speaker 1: from it. We still eat, we still poop, we still
Speaker 1: you know, we're all part of it. And now what
Speaker 1: can we do to preserve as much of the rest
Speaker 1: of this biological heritage that four billion years of evolution
Speaker 1: have left us with? You know that we can all
Speaker 1: how can we make it so that your grandkids might
Speaker 1: at least have the option of deciding whether they're excited
Speaker 1: about seeing a rattlesnake or an elephant. Wouldn't it wouldn't
Speaker 1: just just twelve thousand years ago, there were five or
Speaker 1: six kinds of elephant relatives in the United States. They're
Speaker 1: just that's less than twice the age of a bristle
Speaker 1: colmb pine tree. So forget about the end of the
Speaker 1: place to seem being ancient, it was only twelve thousand
Speaker 1: years ago. The last mammoth on Earth was about thirty
Speaker 1: years ago, about the time Babylon was being sacked. So
Speaker 1: we used to have a much more diverse world. It's
Speaker 1: we're simplifying it at a horrifically fast pace. Wouldn't it
Speaker 1: be terrible if there are no elephants lefted? How would
Speaker 1: you like to have to tell your grandkids, Wow, we
Speaker 1: used to have the thing called elephants. No ship, we
Speaker 1: really did. They had this, They had a trunk. They
Speaker 1: weren't just in pictures. We had them, but we don't anymore.
Speaker 1: You wouldn't it be that's the I think that's the
Speaker 1: worst outcome. What a stain the worst outcome And and
Speaker 1: I think of you know, people that don't agree with hunting,
Speaker 1: like I think that hunting might lead to less elephants,
Speaker 1: if done right, it's a prescription for more. It might be,
Speaker 1: it might be I think that. I think the elephant
Speaker 1: thing in particular is very complex. But the fact is
Speaker 1: every elephant will die too, just like I was talking
Speaker 1: about that earlier with there you know, every bird will die.
Speaker 1: I think I didn't quite finish my thought about the birds.
Speaker 1: But here's these three billion birds killed by cats. All
Speaker 1: those birds are gonna die anyway. So the issue is when,
Speaker 1: how frequently, and what will be the consequence of the
Speaker 1: particular way that they die, And that's that's what we
Speaker 1: want to know. If if cats are killing birds at
Speaker 1: a rate that is causing birds to plummet in terms
Speaker 1: of sustainable population, that's a really big deal. If cats
Speaker 1: are a source of mortality of birds, but bird populations
Speaker 1: were remaining constant, that would be a very different picture.
Speaker 1: And so I don't feel like I'm in a point
Speaker 1: to position to prescribe what we should do for most
Speaker 1: of these problems. But I think starting by admitting that
Speaker 1: we are inevitably part of nature is really important and
Speaker 1: I think getting out and participating, fishing, gardening, farming, hunting,
Speaker 1: those are those are ways of of really owning up
Speaker 1: to the fact that we are indeed participants. Yes, I
Speaker 1: read another paper that you were called Rewilding our Lives.
Speaker 1: It's great, and you said there's a couple of questions
Speaker 1: you ask, But the most point in one, I think
Speaker 1: is how wild a world do we want as opposed
Speaker 1: to how wild a world we will tolerate. I think
Speaker 1: that's an interesting juxtaposition, because we all in our minds
Speaker 1: want this Yellowstone National Park wild world that's both accessible
Speaker 1: to us but also wild. Does it really those two
Speaker 1: things will come at odds they could, they will adeptably,
Speaker 1: and so I think we've got to negotiate a whole
Speaker 1: set of relationships, you know. And I sort of imagined
Speaker 1: that that that conceptually it would be almost like concentric
Speaker 1: circles outward from pure wildness. But I would say that
Speaker 1: even pure wildness on both places, most places on Earth
Speaker 1: have a place for human presence, and the issue is
Speaker 1: how much presence, what are we doing there and so forth.
Speaker 1: So I think the only places that were ever wild
Speaker 1: in the sense of take only pictures and leave only footprints,
Speaker 1: where the pollar, the polls, even the Inner Sahara has
Speaker 1: had people that work there, you know. So I I
Speaker 1: really am interested in exploring the difference between this kind
Speaker 1: of pure wilderness notion in which people don't really have
Speaker 1: any place at all. That's the key thing at all.
Speaker 1: Nobody denies that if you put tens of thousands of
Speaker 1: people living in Yellowstone will lose a lot. I'm not
Speaker 1: arguing for that, but I am arguing that that, Um,
Speaker 1: people have always been parts of all this. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: levels to it, right. So somebody described Yellows to me
Speaker 1: like an ambassador for the natural world. There's people who
Speaker 1: would never have the wherewithal to understand what you understand
Speaker 1: from your your years of work. Um, you just don't
Speaker 1: have the interest in it. Different people have different interests.
Speaker 1: Some people have more urban interests and that's what they
Speaker 1: do their cultural society. They like to be around these
Speaker 1: buzzing hives of energy, human energy. They don't they don't
Speaker 1: long for things that that you and I probably long for,
Speaker 1: which is being alone or being with a few people
Speaker 1: out in the middle of nowhere. So like Yellowstone becomes
Speaker 1: an ambassador for those those folks. They can go and
Speaker 1: see it, and that's just a level of kind of
Speaker 1: the natural world. It's kind of like the top level
Speaker 1: that you can see, but there's so many deeper things
Speaker 1: that you can get into. And for somebody like me,
Speaker 1: I just over the last couple of years, I've realized
Speaker 1: that I can't really operate without deeper levels of understanding.
Speaker 1: And that's just me. That's not everybody, but my I'm
Speaker 1: not happy without that, you know if I and hunting
Speaker 1: is just a good way for me to find a
Speaker 1: deeper level of understand absolutely, But for herpetology is another way.
Speaker 1: And you've you've had some crazy some crazy uh that
Speaker 1: you had a jaguar story too, didn't you. From being
Speaker 1: in Costa Rica, I've been around jaguar's a fair amount.
Speaker 1: I've only actually seen one once and it was just
Speaker 1: just fleeting. My crossed the trail in front of us
Speaker 1: at night and we it's squinted at us through it
Speaker 1: in our flashlight and then it disappeared. You know, many times,
Speaker 1: especially in their early in the eighties where I worked,
Speaker 1: it was not uncommon to find their droppings and sometimes
Speaker 1: really fresh. I mean you you almost imagined you could
Speaker 1: see steam coming up you know. And jaguar droppings are big.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's we're talking big, you know. And often
Speaker 1: you can see that this one is all peckory for
Speaker 1: or this one's got a sloth claw and it or
Speaker 1: something like that and so, and they're in their tracks.
Speaker 1: Jaguar tracks are really splay. I'm like puma track. So
Speaker 1: puma tracks tend to be more parallel sided. And a
Speaker 1: big puma might have a footprint like something like that,
Speaker 1: you know, for it, And a big jaguar track because
Speaker 1: they tend to occur and moisture habitats and walk on
Speaker 1: their toes. Their toes are kind of splayed. So a
Speaker 1: big jaguar track is it. I mean, I can only
Speaker 1: imagine a tiger track. I've never seen. I've never been
Speaker 1: around tigers. I wish, But yeah, do you do you
Speaker 1: think of you know, I think I keep going back
Speaker 1: to tracks and shadows because it it just was. It
Speaker 1: struck me in a lot of ways. Um, it took
Speaker 1: you a long time to get there, right, that you
Speaker 1: had to take a lot of When I was reading
Speaker 1: and I was thinking of the concept of you had
Speaker 1: to you had to spend a lot of time and
Speaker 1: like micro moments like a lot of studying, you know,
Speaker 1: SCAT and these things you're talking about that like really
Speaker 1: on the ground moments, and there was like there must
Speaker 1: have been a time in your life where you were
Speaker 1: able to take it to a macro level and start
Speaker 1: started to think about it. You're overall understanding of the
Speaker 1: things you've learned from those micro instances. Can you give
Speaker 1: people a like, was there a moment where you start
Speaker 1: to think, Man, I gotta write this book. I gotta
Speaker 1: meditate on everything I've learned, everything I've done, because I think,
Speaker 1: to me, at least that's an interesting inspection. Well, by coincidence,
Speaker 1: it involves Montana the answer. So, um, it's the early eighties. Uh,
Speaker 1: I'm a I'm an assistant professor coming up for ten
Speaker 1: year pretty soon at Berkeley. I'm writing signed papers because
Speaker 1: that's the pint of the realm, that's what that's the
Speaker 1: last stage of doing scientific scholarship is to publish a
Speaker 1: peer reviewed paper. So that's what I'm doing, and that's
Speaker 1: that's my job to do that. But I am in
Speaker 1: my early thirties. I'm out of the army. I'm so
Speaker 1: glad I didn't have to go to Vietnam at the
Speaker 1: last minute. You know, I'm I already had the amblean stuff.
Speaker 1: I've been divorced twice, and all these things are swirling around,
Speaker 1: you know, and I'm thinking, God, I want to write
Speaker 1: something else, you know, I want to write about what
Speaker 1: this other stuff means. And a friend gives me a
Speaker 1: book called A River Runs Through It by Norman McClay. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I it's just a little book, you know, it's
Speaker 1: actually three stories, but it's the title novella. I think
Speaker 1: that that blew my mind. I just I read it
Speaker 1: in one sitting, and I I saw the possibility of
Speaker 1: non uh, because I had thought, well, you know, if
Speaker 1: you want to write about these life and death things,
Speaker 1: you gotta write fiction. And I know Hemingway or I
Speaker 1: don't know Jim har I didn't know about Jim Harrison
Speaker 1: yet at that point, and so I had this misconception
Speaker 1: that I would never do that because I don't know
Speaker 1: how to write, and I couldn't see myself writing fiction.
Speaker 1: And then I read A River Runs Through It, which
Speaker 1: is only scarcely fiction, it's you know, and I saw
Speaker 1: what he could. There's a single paragraph in which, in
Speaker 1: the middle of a paragraph, his brother abruptly gets killed
Speaker 1: in an alley, and I thought to myself, that's how
Speaker 1: it really is. That's that's how when you get the
Speaker 1: phone call from your mom and you think she's calling
Speaker 1: to tell you to invite you for dinner, and it
Speaker 1: turns out Marsha has been murdered, her first lover has
Speaker 1: been murdered. That's what that's what that's what literature can do.
Speaker 1: I saw that McLean did that in that paragraph, you know,
Speaker 1: just going along. It's a Presbyterian father. I went, I
Speaker 1: went fly fishing, and my brother was killed in an alley.
Speaker 1: You know, Jesus, you know this is this is something.
Speaker 1: So Norman McClain by then was an elderly retired English
Speaker 1: professor at the University of Chicago, and you probably know
Speaker 1: all this. Many publishers turned down that book, and Chicago
Speaker 1: published it as the first worst work of fiction, the
Speaker 1: University of Chicago Press, and every published and at first
Speaker 1: it started out slow, and then eventually, you know, gazillions
Speaker 1: and all these languages and stuff. So I knew the
Speaker 1: editor at Chicago at that time, and I this is
Speaker 1: before so we're talking snail mail, and I write her
Speaker 1: and I go, oh my god, Susan, I just read
Speaker 1: the most incredible book from your press. The River runs
Speaker 1: through it. And I went on for like three paragraphs
Speaker 1: about why this book just captured me, and she writes
Speaker 1: me back. A couple weeks later, I get back from
Speaker 1: her and she goes, well, Norman comes in to get
Speaker 1: his royalty check from time to time, and I showed
Speaker 1: him your letter and he says, this guy can write.
Speaker 1: He should write a book. And so she says, Norman
Speaker 1: thinks she should write a book. So then I I've
Speaker 1: got an address, and I wrote to Norman McLain. I said,
Speaker 1: Dr McLaine, I'm I'm coming to Chicago to do some
Speaker 1: snake work at the Field Museum, but I'd like to
Speaker 1: take you out to dinner. And he writes me back.
Speaker 1: He says, I'll take you to dinner to the Faculty Club.
Speaker 1: So I get on a plane, I fly to Chicago.
Speaker 1: I do my work in the Field Museum looking at
Speaker 1: the stomach contents, and I have dinner with Norman McClean.
Speaker 1: He's like eighty years old. And the first thing he
Speaker 1: tells me that surprised me is that he's written another book.
Speaker 1: And I go, oh, really, what's it about? And he
Speaker 1: says it's called young Men in Fire and I go, oh, wow,
Speaker 1: what's that about. Oh, it's about this tragic fire, you know.
Speaker 1: And he says, but I've got about another year's worth
Speaker 1: of work to do on it. And that was that
Speaker 1: took me back, because I thought that great writers had
Speaker 1: just spilled from their pen, you know, and here he's
Speaker 1: telling me he's finished the manuscript, but he's got another
Speaker 1: year of work to do on it. So and then
Speaker 1: I thought, well, you know, I'm gonna have dinner and
Speaker 1: I'm gonna tell him about going into burning buildings and
Speaker 1: saving people and all this stuff, you know, being an
Speaker 1: amulist driver. And he he didn't seem very interested in it.
Speaker 1: And several times during the dinner he said, why don't
Speaker 1: you write up? He said, why do you want to
Speaker 1: work with those goddamn rattlesnakes? Why don't you go right
Speaker 1: about that? He was very he was very uh, he
Speaker 1: sort of veered between erudite professor and vulgar cowboy. And
Speaker 1: he says, why do you why do you want to
Speaker 1: work those goddamn rattlesnakes? You should go write about that.
Speaker 1: And on the plane back to California, I thought, you know,
Speaker 1: he's right, I'm not ready to write about that. I
Speaker 1: don't think I don't know myself remotely well enough to
Speaker 1: write about this life and death stuff. But I'm gonna
Speaker 1: write a book about snakes that tries to go modestly
Speaker 1: in that direction. So my Snake Book starts out with
Speaker 1: my dinner with Norman McClain. So in the in the prologue,
Speaker 1: Norman McClaine poses the question to me, why snakes? And
Speaker 1: then I wrote the chapters to my Snake Book. So
Speaker 1: there were little essays at the start of each chapter
Speaker 1: that we're about the topic, but more personal. And these
Speaker 1: essays run through the book, and they ended an epilogue
Speaker 1: which gave my best answer in to the question why snakes.
Speaker 1: When I finished the Snake Book, by then it was
Speaker 1: fifteen years later and I was ready to start thinking
Speaker 1: about that one. So that's how it happened. Sorry, I
Speaker 1: was such a long story, but I think they had
Speaker 1: to admit that it was the deadliness of it was
Speaker 1: the violence, and it was it was me commsily, inarticulately,
Speaker 1: never quite conclusively, grappling with having a kid die in
Speaker 1: my arms and trying to save people with gunshot ones
Speaker 1: their chest and stuff, you know, and and you know,
Speaker 1: when you go out and you watch a rattlesnakes strike
Speaker 1: a rabbit, you can kind of you can kind of
Speaker 1: at least shed all that human stuff and you can
Speaker 1: confront what is surely nake. It's surely violence. It is
Speaker 1: it's a violent act that you it doesn't have all
Speaker 1: that other baggage. And so you can just sit there
Speaker 1: and and think about that. You know, life, life, death,
Speaker 1: one life left, you know, all the stuff. So that
Speaker 1: was the It's a little more complicated, but that was
Speaker 1: the answer to the Snake book. Catharsis of something absolutely
Speaker 1: absolutely and both books were cathartic. I mean, there was
Speaker 1: no doubt that writing Snakes, even though I was only
Speaker 1: sort of tangentially dealing with these things. And in the
Speaker 1: epilogue of Snakes, I talked only a little bit, only
Speaker 1: as much as I needed to and as unsentimentally as
Speaker 1: I could about some of the experiences I had as
Speaker 1: a young man. And then yeah, and then I was
Speaker 1: ready to like take take a deep breath and go okay.
Speaker 1: And actually, one more thing is that back when I decided,
Speaker 1: when I met Norman McLain and decided I wasn't ready
Speaker 1: to write it. I did. I was worried I would
Speaker 1: forget stuff. And so right after we word processing came along,
Speaker 1: and you know, keyboards, I wrote a stream of conscious
Speaker 1: this memoir one summer. I just tried to remember dialogue
Speaker 1: and smells and sounds and the relatively little emotion that
Speaker 1: I did feel that I was aware of, and I
Speaker 1: wrote it all down, just without worrying at all about
Speaker 1: the quality of the pros, and I put it in
Speaker 1: a spiral notebook and stuck in a file cant and
Speaker 1: like literally ten fifteen years later, when I started trying
Speaker 1: to write tracks and shadows, I pulled that out and
Speaker 1: I had things in there that I I fear I
Speaker 1: would not have remembered fifteen years later. It's like a
Speaker 1: strange time machine to pull that out, and I think, now,
Speaker 1: I'm you know, gosh, if you traveled ten years back
Speaker 1: in time and interviewed yourself, you're like, wow, Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: an interesting idiot there, Like, well, I wonder what he's
Speaker 1: going to get into. Yeah, well, maybe you're going to
Speaker 1: write a book. I hope someday. Have you thought about that?
Speaker 1: I have, and I thought about it in much the
Speaker 1: way that you have thought about it, and kind of like,
Speaker 1: at what stage in your life are you ready to
Speaker 1: reflect and introspect and what at what points in your
Speaker 1: for you ready to just like study and and sift
Speaker 1: and look through things and learn things. And that's why
Speaker 1: when I was reading your book, that's what I was
Speaker 1: thinking of. I'm like, here's a person who's done all
Speaker 1: these things and is spilling them out, but in such
Speaker 1: a way that leads to this conclusion, which is informed
Speaker 1: by all these experiences. You know, and if you were
Speaker 1: if you would have wrote that book when you were thirty,
Speaker 1: it wouldn't have been as good as it is. And
Speaker 1: and so I think about that as a writer, you know,
Speaker 1: and writing is so damn painful. It's the worst. I
Speaker 1: talked to writers on this podcast all the times. It's
Speaker 1: like it's it's like, what's writing like for you? I'm like, well,
Speaker 1: what's the worst thing? Ever? It's really wonderful too, though,
Speaker 1: Oh it's I mean like pain and and and pain
Speaker 1: is wonderful in lots of ways, especially when it's like
Speaker 1: some artistic pain. It's almost like writing is the pain,
Speaker 1: and writing is what makes it good. Um, So I
Speaker 1: think about that and I'll write a book one day
Speaker 1: that that maybe meditates on all the things and and
Speaker 1: try and try to do that. But I I'm not there,
Speaker 1: just quite yet. I don't want to rush it. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I hope you make it the end of Tracks and Shadows,
Speaker 1: I will. I got one two chapters. In fact, I
Speaker 1: read the last chapter the Cowboy. I do well, go
Speaker 1: pick up Tracks and Shadows. That's just the one that
Speaker 1: I liked the most. But there's a lot of other
Speaker 1: books by Mr Harry Green here that you should go
Speaker 1: pick up and and then learn about his life. It's
Speaker 1: a pretty badass. Thanks. All right, Thanks Harry. Great talking
Speaker 1: to you too. Yeah, I hope we hope we go
Speaker 1: for a hike someday we're gonna go, Yeah, with an
Speaker 1: elk at the end. We should do that, well, hopefully
Speaker 1: and elk maybe. Or if I was gonna encounter Rattlesnake,
Speaker 1: I'd be I'd be comfortable with you there. But what
Speaker 1: do I do now? As I'll tell you, I have
Speaker 1: one rattlesnake story because I lived in Texas and hunted
Speaker 1: in Texas, UH for four years. I was hunting access
Speaker 1: to her in the hill country. A couple of years ago,
Speaker 1: and I was sitting there was it was during, it
Speaker 1: was during, well they don't have a rut but there
Speaker 1: was some rutting access here around me, and there was
Speaker 1: just roaring access there a hundred yards. I got my
Speaker 1: bow and I'm like I kept working in on him,
Speaker 1: and he'd be chasing the dough and working on me
Speaker 1: chasing the dough. I'm like, man, I'm just gonna sit down.
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna calm down, sit down, Maybe he'll come
Speaker 1: walking by. So I sat down just up against this
Speaker 1: old scrub boak tree and put my feet out. I
Speaker 1: had snake boots on up to my knees. I sat
Speaker 1: there and uh, about five minutes go by and this box,
Speaker 1: you know, I could see him two hundred yards away,
Speaker 1: just running in his thick mesquite and I could see him,
Speaker 1: and I was like, well, I'm just not gonna I'm
Speaker 1: just gonna hope that he comes over here. And just
Speaker 1: about that time, I I felt something kind of like
Speaker 1: touching my hip and I just reached down to like
Speaker 1: brush my jacket away, and I looked back down and
Speaker 1: there was like a six ft rattlesnake that had that
Speaker 1: had breached my knee and was crawling over my boot.
Speaker 1: His rattle was about at my and my first all was,
Speaker 1: oh cool, a snake. And then slowly as he was
Speaker 1: like making his way down my boot and up over
Speaker 1: the foot and down, and then I quickly switched my mind,
Speaker 1: hold ship, Oh my god, what do I do? And
Speaker 1: I and I just sat there long enough to let
Speaker 1: him kind of get over my boot. And I ran
Speaker 1: like a little girl for like three yards and I
Speaker 1: turned back and he didn't even he just kept on going.
Speaker 1: He turned and looked at me kind of like in
Speaker 1: an annoyed fashion, and I wish he would have just
Speaker 1: chilled out, but he didn't try to. He didn't coil
Speaker 1: to strike or anything. Just you have to remember one month.
Speaker 1: This one, I want to say it was in June,
Speaker 1: so that that quite possibly they tend to mate a
Speaker 1: little later than that. But they also have some spring
Speaker 1: mating in western dinadbacks that that quite possibly, based on size,
Speaker 1: it was almost certainly a male, and when they're they
Speaker 1: can distinguish. I don't actually know where they can even
Speaker 1: perceive that where a nonreceptive female has been so rattlesnakes
Speaker 1: generally don't breed every year of the females, it takes
Speaker 1: them more than one year to building up fat to
Speaker 1: make a litter, so only at most every other year,
Speaker 1: sometimes only every three or four years. A female is
Speaker 1: receptive to breed that summer to produce a litter the
Speaker 1: next summer. So that's their that's their social system. And
Speaker 1: so because females, if you imagine that there the sex
Speaker 1: ratio is equal in any one summer, there's a lot
Speaker 1: more males looking for females and there are receptive females, right,
Speaker 1: And so when males are on the trail, females they
Speaker 1: stop eating. They just sound familiar, so they're just like
Speaker 1: they're just going run, and so they try they crawl
Speaker 1: these long, fairly straight routes. It turns out, if you're
Speaker 1: looking for a trail and you don't know where it is,
Speaker 1: a straight line is like that is like the right
Speaker 1: search strategy. You just cut a direction that's right. And
Speaker 1: so that's what they do. And so I've watched them
Speaker 1: many times. A male rattlesnake during the breeding season is
Speaker 1: just like crawling about a about a body length a minute, flicking, flicking, clicking, flicking,
Speaker 1: flicking enough act. Really a few times seen one when
Speaker 1: he encountered a trail, because then everything changes. He starts
Speaker 1: crawling in this very circuitous much slower, and if you
Speaker 1: keep with him, you'll find him. He'll locate a female.
Speaker 1: You know, so this I wouldn't be surprised if that guy,
Speaker 1: he couldn't have cared less about you. You didn't smell
Speaker 1: like a rabbit or a squirrel, you didn't act threatening,
Speaker 1: and you weren't a receptive female. So you were just
Speaker 1: there were just one more like nose rock or log
Speaker 1: or what? Do you feel that when there's a snake
Speaker 1: on top of you crawling right, there's a little bit
Speaker 1: of a helpless this feeling, But then you realize, like
Speaker 1: he's got all the power really in this situation. But
Speaker 1: you know what if he had if you had been
Speaker 1: like say, just a few feet away, and you'd tossed
Speaker 1: a stick or something, and he snapped into that big
Speaker 1: exaggerated strike coil and started buzzing like crazy, the big long,
Speaker 1: slow tongue flick when they as long as you, as
Speaker 1: long as you were, like, let's say, if you really
Speaker 1: want to be super careful ten feet away, nothing's gonna
Speaker 1: happen the ral snake you've seen unless you're standing on
Speaker 1: it when you see it, are putting your hand on
Speaker 1: it when you see it. It's pretty much not dangerous
Speaker 1: to you anymore. It's it's the one you haven't seen
Speaker 1: that that could hurt you, or the one you interfere with.
Speaker 1: A huge fraction of snake bites in the US, not
Speaker 1: in Senegal or India, but but in the US, a
Speaker 1: huge fraction of snake bites are people purposely messing with
Speaker 1: a snake? You think snakes to have an opinion of us?
Speaker 1: I think they. I think they just want to avoid us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't think they much like anything else. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: no predatory I wonder how I was thinking. I wonder
Speaker 1: if the snake has an opinion of what's going on,
Speaker 1: because he looked I remember looking at it, like look
Speaker 1: pretty annoyed the situation, Like, well, I'm going probably, like
Speaker 1: you said, I'm going to find receptive female and anything
Speaker 1: isn't that is annoying to me. Yeah. We had, uh
Speaker 1: you know what you read. We had fifty snakes with
Speaker 1: radios in them, and the one we had the most
Speaker 1: experience with it was a female. She was a young,
Speaker 1: an adult female. When we first put a radio in her,
Speaker 1: and we watched her for twelve years. So twelve years
Speaker 1: later she was a very senior female and we had
Speaker 1: I think it was five and sixty nine encounters with her.
Speaker 1: I wasn't in on all of them, but me and
Speaker 1: my collaborator and UM, I think during that twelve years
Speaker 1: we had to catch her three or four more times
Speaker 1: to change her batteries basically, but our our whole handling
Speaker 1: protocol was super gentle. So I don't think I ever
Speaker 1: heard that snake rattle during all the times we captured her,
Speaker 1: anesthetized or put her radio and released her and so.
Speaker 1: And the significance of that is that, uh, one time
Speaker 1: I was looking for and I was by myself, and
Speaker 1: I had the radio antenna and I had her signal,
Speaker 1: and it was getting louder and louder, so I knew
Speaker 1: as closer and closer, and I was looking ahead, looking ahead,
Speaker 1: and I'd start walking from different directions and I'd always
Speaker 1: get the same vector to the last signals pointing at
Speaker 1: this juniper tree, and I was looking at my binoculars
Speaker 1: under it, and I couldn't see her. And I find
Speaker 1: a side as improbably is. It seemed to me that
Speaker 1: she was somehow buried under the duff, under the litter,
Speaker 1: under the tree. So I took the antenna off and
Speaker 1: was going to use the cable as a really short
Speaker 1: distance detector. And I crawled all the way around the
Speaker 1: juniper tween in my hands and knees, poking the cable
Speaker 1: at the ground and nothing. I can't find a goddamn snake.
Speaker 1: So I I finally sit up right against the trunk.
Speaker 1: It was sort of a big tree with drooping limbs,
Speaker 1: and I sit up with my head kind of among
Speaker 1: the limbs, and I literally started daydreaming about a book
Speaker 1: called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, because it
Speaker 1: made me think about something called a gumption trap, where
Speaker 1: you're you're not you're not making head away because you're
Speaker 1: making a false assumption about what you're doing. So I
Speaker 1: was saying and thinking, what what is my false assumption?
Speaker 1: And I had this weird sensation. I tilted my head
Speaker 1: slightly to the left and female one was sitting on
Speaker 1: a limb right next to my face. Her head was
Speaker 1: literally three or four or five inches from my face,
Speaker 1: and she didn't so much as flick her tongue, she
Speaker 1: didn't rattle, she didn't flick her tongue, she didn't bite me,
Speaker 1: she didn't do anything, And of course I I just
Speaker 1: very slowly moved away. And when I walked away, she
Speaker 1: was still sitting there with that movie. So I think
Speaker 1: it's possible. I don't want to like overly anthropomorphize the situation,
Speaker 1: but I think it's certainly reasonable to think that I
Speaker 1: never taught her to be afraid of me. I'm not
Speaker 1: saying we were pals. I'm not saying she recognized me,
Speaker 1: But I think it's it's I never taught her to
Speaker 1: be afraid of me. And I think if every time
Speaker 1: I had encountered that snake, I had pinned her down
Speaker 1: and picked her up by the head and showed her
Speaker 1: fangs off to somebody and kind of roughed her up,
Speaker 1: I think she would have been a much more defensive
Speaker 1: snake in the presence of whatever ME meant to her.
Speaker 1: And I think I could have ended up getting bitten
Speaker 1: out of the face, which would have been Would you
Speaker 1: think they have this this predatory of the molecule you
Speaker 1: mentioned when they're so they got a tracker molecule, they're
Speaker 1: using that kind of sophisticated biological markers they got to
Speaker 1: know you. They gotta understand like different, you know, things
Speaker 1: in their environment that that are similar and repetitive. They
Speaker 1: got to know that. Absolutely. It only makes sense. It
Speaker 1: makes sense, it would be it would be unparsimonious to
Speaker 1: think otherwise. Wo, we don't want to be that. No,
Speaker 1: we don't want to do that. We don't. Well, thank you, Harry,
Speaker 1: appreciate everything. And and uh, let's go mess around some
Speaker 1: snakes together, pleasure and learn something. I'll get I'll get
Speaker 1: up to Montana sometimes. It's one of the few states
Speaker 1: I've never been in, so it's just just wonderful. Get
Speaker 1: up there. You're not too far away. Come see us,
Speaker 1: all right, Harry, I guess that's it. That's all thanks
Speaker 1: to Harry Green. H great interview man, one of my favorites. Uh,
Speaker 1: I think you know, unlike other recent interviews, I connected
Speaker 1: with Harry and a lot of things. I really appreciate
Speaker 1: his views on the outdoors. I really appreciate his experience
Speaker 1: with snakes and some of the things he taught me there.
Speaker 1: But just a good dude that I'd want to hang
Speaker 1: out with as much as possible. So if we can
Speaker 1: have them on again, there's there's a whole life's worth
Speaker 1: of experiences we have yet to down earth with Harry,
Speaker 1: so hopefully we can do that at some point soon.
Speaker 1: But thank you to him, thank you to his wife
Speaker 1: for letting me bor him for a while in color
Speaker 1: State University for let me get lost in their campus
Speaker 1: uh while I was there. And then also thanks to
Speaker 1: Cody Gardner for writing in with your not a sharp moment.
Speaker 1: Thanks to everyone that has been filling THHD at the
Speaker 1: Metator dot com with a bunch of stuff. Before we go,
Speaker 1: you should definitely continue to watch the Back forty. You
Speaker 1: go to the Mediator YouTube channel the Meteor dot com
Speaker 1: you can watch the Back forty with Mark Kenyon. Mark
Speaker 1: Kenyon we bought a property sixty four acres in Michigan
Speaker 1: and Mark Kenyon is working right now as we speak
Speaker 1: to try to kill a deer on it and also
Speaker 1: manage it for biodiversity. So it's a fun show. I've
Speaker 1: been working hard with Mark on it, so I appreciate
Speaker 1: if you guys went over there and watch that at
Speaker 1: the Mediator YouTube channel or the Metior dot com. I
Speaker 1: really would. And also another piece of content I work
Speaker 1: on every week that I really think is great is
Speaker 1: Remy warrants Cutting the Distance, Cutting the Distances, the podcast
Speaker 1: that will make you better pretty much any hunting tactic,
Speaker 1: mostly Western hunting tactics with Remy. Remy does a great
Speaker 1: job storytelling, he's a great job of giving tips and tactics,
Speaker 1: melding that altogether, and a beautiful gumbo of hunting advice.
Speaker 1: So go anywhere you can download podcasts or the meet
Speaker 1: dot com check out Cutting the Distance. Those are my two.
Speaker 1: If you want to know what I'm working on every week,
Speaker 1: it's THC and those two things. That's what it's spent
Speaker 1: most of my time doing. So um proud of those
Speaker 1: those contact projects, proud of the proud of Remy and
Speaker 1: Mark and all the hard work of everybody here to
Speaker 1: meet either team. So we're gonna see you next week
Speaker 1: in our next Whiskey and Ethics on Baiting. Soe then,
Speaker 1: because I ain't go a week without doing run, oh
Speaker 1: without run, drinking out and run a wrong drinking in Heaven,
Speaker 1: don't sit in at the bostould start the row root
Speaker 1: I'm feeling lagging. Hold on out barros shoes all down
Speaker 1: the one