Welcome to episode three of Get Out Alive, a podcast where me, your
host Ashley, and my best pal Nick tell you an animal tech story every
Wednesday. But before we get into it, Nick, you have some Patreon
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So today's a very special episode. Hell yea, it is so Nick.
You and I have been friends since high school. Yeah, and we have
talked almost every day since high school. Yeah, basically, Yeah, if
you had to guess, what do you think my favorite animal is? Oh
that's after a while dog. Oh yeah, that's a good one. Yeah,
okay, all right, I mean, yeah, I guess I have
an African wild dog tattooed on my body. But the animal that made me
want to become like a biologist was the gray wolf. They are amazing.
I was able to see it and when I went to Yellowstone, unbelievable experience.
Yeah, I'm finally going in September. It is going to be the
trip of a lifetime. It's all I've ever wanted to see since I was
a child. So wolves are really what got me interested in being a wildlife
biologist. And it was so cool to talk to you our guest today and
hear about his experience, and it gave me a whole new respect for them.
So, Nick, who are we talking to today? We are talking
to Oliver Starr, a man who not only works with wolves on a daily
basis, but was actually attacked by one and almost died. Almost died,
but yet a bad ass gro for helping out. Yeah. Once again whole
new respect for wolf. So thanks for tuning in and we hope you enjoy
our interview with Oliver. I was studying wildlife biology at See You at the
time, and one of my professors is a guy by the name of Mark
Beckoff, who's a world famous carnivore expert specializing in coyotes and other carnivores.
And Colorado Parks and Wildlife reached out to him and said, Hey, we've
got this wolf that's been seized from this project that was trying to do an
introduction without the right permits, and we need a place to park h And
Mark said, I've got this crazy student. And they literally, Colorado Parks
and Wildlife literally met me in North Boulder Park there and Boulder with one of
their green trucks with a metal box in the back, and I backed my
pickup up to theirs and they slid it across and said good luck kid.
Wow, And I got Jake. So you said that you have wolf dogs.
So did you have them as pets or were you the kind of person
where like people had them as pets they were too overwhelming for them and then
they dumped them on you. So my very first wolf dog was an animal
that had been running at large near my home in Boulder. I lived up
above Boulder in a place called Boulder Heights at about seventy five hundred feet above
town. It's kind of a rural urban you know, there's roads there,
but you need four wheel drive in the winter. My mom would always panic.
She called me, what do you live on Cliffhanger Road? So,
yeah, I had some land up there, and she was roaming around up
there and AC got her and I had seen her, and I called AC
and they said, well, we're not going to adopt her to any normal
person, but you're apparently not a normal person, so you can have her.
And that was my first kind of a mid content well actually I had
a very low content maladue wolfdog mixed before that. But I got her,
And so several of the animals that I started with animals that I rescued from
either at large or humane And then after a Galfian on a story with Jake,
and then I ended up with a pop out of Jake later that was
a pure also a pure wolf. Well, I mean, it's a pretty
good place to start Wayne to tell us about the Sword of Jake, and
you know how the whole day went. So I'd had Jake for some time
and I really made remarkable progress. In fact, it's because I made such
good progress that I made the mistake that I made. So by the time
the incident occurred, I could take Jake in the car, I could take
him on walks. You know, he was very social to me, and
he'd never indicated to me in any way that he was potentially dangerous. He
was not neutered. I had him with a spade female high content wolf dog
that I'd had from the day she was born. I owned her mother as
well, and so he was in a habitat just with her, and they
were kind of a bonded pair, even though he couldn't breed her. And
on this particular day we were doing I had a girlfriend at the time named
Leah, who was a rodeo. She was a roper and grew up on
a farm and was also a pro mountain biker at the time, and so
we would hike way up into the mountains to do photo shoots. She was
a good photographer and so we were like selling photos of the animals to magazines
or whatever. So we'd hiked up into the back country to do this photo
shoot, and we had been taking it was very cold. It was probably
between ten and twenty below. So we were wearing a ton of clothes,
I mean, and that's important because if I had not been wearing so many
layers, I would have been even more seriously hurt. So I was wearing
on the day, like a thermal shirt, a flannel shirt, a wool
sweater, and one of those car hard shirple line denim jackets, big heavy
leather gloves, just the normal stuff for being out in that kind of weather
all day. So we'd had this photo shoot, I'd had both animals off
leads. He was that socialized to me that I could let him off a
leash and get him back on one. And sun was starting to set,
and so we were going to get off the mountain. It was like a
probably a twenty minute hike down to a road where we were parked, and
I had Jake on his leash and Jessa, his bonded female, was darting
all around and having a real good time playing keep away, and I was
trying to get her and she would just run past and she thought it was
really funny, and I was getting frustrated because the sun was going down and
I was kind of afraid she was going to because she was being unruly run
down to this little mountain highway and get run over. I mean, it's
not like there was a ton of traffic, but I'm just overly paranoid about
that stuff. And so when she raced by me this one particular time,
I just pounced on her. I just grabbed her by the scruff to get
a hold of her, and she kind of squeaked. And because I'd been
so focused on her, I wasn't really paying attention to Jake, who I
had on a leash and I was holding I was holding his leash with my
left hand, and I grabbed Jessa with my right hand. And he had
become agitated and thought that I was attacking his bonded pair mate, and so
he attacked my arm that I had grabbed Jesso with. It was just a
bone crunching attack. I mean, just he had decided at that point that
I was no longer his buddy. The animal clearly felt like he had crossed
a bridge, and the attack was unrelenting, and so he grabbed a hold
of my right arm and immediately broke it. I mean, it just felt
like my head exploded. It was so fast and so surprising, and the
way he grabbed it. Then he started to sort of you know, they'll
shake something real hard to get a better purchase and also to inflict more damage.
And so he started shaking my arm and dragging me around by my arm,
and so I took my other arm and I reached kind of around his
head and stuck my fist with the glove on in his mouth. So my
arm was still in his mouth, and now my fist was in the front
of his mouth, and he just bit down harder, which broke all my
fingers my already broken arm. I mean, you just can't imagine that.
I mean, he had completely compressed my arm to the point where he could
break my fingers in the front of his mouth with my arm in the back
of his mouth. Wow. And I still kind of was retaining my grip
around his head, and I sort of wrestled him to the ground, and
so we were both rolling around on the ground and he was just continuing to
try to twist his head and get loose for me and biting on me.
And I know this sounds crazy, but it was this really interesting moment because
my consciousness was in like three places at the same time. Like there was
part of me that was watching this from a third person perspective, like completely
out of my body, just like a drone surveying the scene. And then
there was a part of me that was fighting for my life. And then
there was this part of me that was like this cool scientist kind of talking
in the back of my head saying, Wow, he's really a lot stronger
than you expected. Had just sort of given me this narrative, and I
could hear Lis screaming, what do I do? What do I do?
I don't know who advised me, Which of the three split consciousness has advised
me to scream out grab his nuts? I don't even know where that came
from because it's just such an atypical thing, but she did. She was
an amazingly quick, agile, brilliant athlete, and she grabbed his nuts really
hard and he let go of me, and I was able to like jump
backwards to my feet to get some distance. And I say this without reservation.
If it had been any other human being than Leah, who I used
to call Frankie because her nickname was a conjunction of feisty and cranky. If
Frankie had not been there, I would have been dead because she had the
only instinct. The only kind of person that would have this instinct is a
ranch hand. She grabbed his loose line, and that saved my life because
I jumped back. He jumped to his feet and immediate lunged from my face
and throat. And only because she had the leash, he came up short
and he got my left bicep again. Remember I'm wearing a ridiculous clothing,
and just the very front of his teeth tagged my bicep, kind of in
a glancing blow, but just that glancing blow severed my bicep. Wow.
She retained control of him, and luckily for us, he was only interested
in aggression towards me, not to her, so she was able to tie
him. You know, it's called a dally, like you wrap a line
around something really fast, and she dallied him up to a tree and you
know, started in with them. I need to get a gun. I'm
gonna shoot Jake. And I didn't even know how badly hurt I was at
the time, but I knew I was seriously hurt. Because of the temperature,
and now the distance to the road and the nature of my injuries,
I didn't really have time to argue with her. So I just said,
no, you're not You're gonna get Jessa and give me ten minutes and you'll
either find me in the trail or in the truck at the bottom of the
trail. I didn't give her any time to argue with me. I just
started stumbling. You know, I had both my arms, kind of my
really injured right arm. I was holding to my chest with my left arm,
my left forearm because my left hand had been destroyed, and I just
stumbled down in the dark, and you know, I'd fall and I'd somehow
get back to my feet, and I was just kind of in this autonomous
mode of getting to the car. And I did, but then, of
course I was too injured to unlock the damn thing because I come with my
hands, and so then I had to wait, and she had to manage
two animals and get them in the back before I could get near the truck,
because when he saw me, he started bristling again, so she loaded
him in the back. We had a camper shell. She led him in
the back of the truck and got me in the truck, and she wanted
to take me to the hospital, but I needed her to get the animals
out of the truck, and so we went back to our place and unloaded
the animals. So by the time that I got to the emergency room,
I think it was probably an hour and a half to two hours something after
the actual injury, and you're just sitting there bleeding out in the The fascinating
thing was there was no blood. The injuries were all crush injuries. There
was a lot of internal bleeding, of course, but there was no I
mean there was, I say no, but very very minor, I mean
incredibly minor tears in the skin, mostly just from the friction of the clothing.
They cut everything off me at the hospital and they looked at my forearm
and they just said, where do you want us to amputate? Wow,
my forearm looked like a bag of blood. It was just so it was
like four times the size of a normal forearm, and it was just red
from the inside because there had been so much damage to He had torn all
the muscle sheaths and severed the tendants, and they said we on an X
ray they could no longer tell where the ulna and the radius that the bones
had been so twisted around and shattered that they didn't know which pieces belong to
which bone. Wow geez. They wanted to amputate my arm at the elbow.
I wasn't really interested in them doing that. And because I'd been an
athlete. I was an athlete at the time, I knew if Steedman Hawkins
and veiled because that's where everybody went to get their knees fixed. And so
I called Stedman Hawkins and they said, well, if you can get up
here by the morning, we'll take a look and see if there's anything we
can do for you. And I didn't even have insurance. I mean I
was two years old and uninsure, you know, just a typical young person.
So then I got up to Steedman Hawkins. I slept with my arm
packed in ice because they were they told me what to do, because they
were afraid that I get all kinds of compression damage from all the pressure and
the bleeding and everything. So we got up there and I was waiting there
and they arrived in the morning and they they were when I told them what
happened. I didn't. I was afraid if I told the er and Boulder
what had occurred, that the animal would be seized or euthanized and involved.
Yeah, even with the severity of the injuries, I knew it was my
fault. I did not blame him at all. It was totally me.
I made a mistake. I was over confident, and I wasn't going to
let him pay the price for my mistake. And so Boulder I told him
I had an injury with a snow blower. They didn't believe me, but
they weren't going to get anything else. And I told Stedman Hawkins, and
they were really you know, they'd never seen such injuries, and so they
were willing to do everything pro bono, which was a miracle because I'm sure
one hundred thousand dollars or more of work. And they said, well,
we can't promise you're going to keep your hand or your arm or you're going
to regain function, but we're going to give it our best shot. And
they did. They opened me up, and they used one of those halos
and put my arm back together with a whole bunch of pins and an external
halo and they put pins in my fingers to fix my broken hand, and
I was amazingly lucky. I've always been pretty resilient with respect to healing,
so I have full use of everything. There's still obvious bulges in my forearm
where the muscle sheaves are open, and I have some like chronic discomfort when
the weather changes or whatever. But I didn't. Yeah, I regained full
function my hand that got broken, same kind of deal. It hurts little
bit when the weather changes, but it's fine. And actually the worst of
the injuries was the severed bicep because it was about an eighty percent tear of
the bicep all the way through and basically the tendon was holding the bicep to
the shoulder still and so I have a big divot in the bicep and it
the arm is definitely a little weaker than my other arm. I worked real
hard to recover the strength, but it's probably ten percent weaker than my right
arm. Wow. And I mean, how long was the attack because it
seems like the amount of damage you have the attack would have gone on for
minutes, but it's yeah, it seemed like it went on forever, and
it also seemed like it happened in an instant. I think it was somewhere
between forty five and ninety seconds of rolling, you know, contact and then
rolling on the ground. I think most of the damage to the forearm occurred
in the first the first shot. He wasn't messing around and he bit me,
probably as hard as he could. And you know, they estimated it's
really hard to get reliable estimates. They say that a German shepherd, a
full grown German shepherd who's really motivated a bite can generate around seven hundred and
fifty pounds per square inch, and they believe that wolves generate around twelve hundred
to fifteen hundred PSI. But we really don't know because it's hard to get
them to do what you want. But it was, you know, just
a complete crush injury the width of his jaws, and then the twisting around
and the biting and everything else, probably you know, did the rest of
the damage. Wow, it's actually impressive about animal in a certain way.
You know. I get a lot of comments because I wrote it. I
wrote this up on Korra, and I get a lot of comments about if
you had stuck your finger in his eye, or it wasn't your animal you
would People just they just can't conceive of how strong and how fast he was,
how quick it happened. I mean, I wasn't thinking about not hurting
Jake. I was thinking about saving my life. I mean, it was
just a life or death. There was no conscious anything other than I want
to live. And if I don't somehow get away that you had, you
know, the awareness to tell lead a ground by the balls is amazing its
own, right. Yeah. I don't know where that, Like I said,
I don't know what angels were on my shoulder that put that message in
my ear because I don't know. I mean I honestly I can remember it
like it was yesterday, and I don't know how that came out of me,
but it's what I said. Amazing. Yeah, And like I said
again, I'd be dead if it wasn't for having the right person at the
right time. I mean, one of the questions that we had was if
you had been alone, what would you have done differently? But I guess
nothing. It seems if I had been alone, I would have died.
Wow. If I had been alone, I would have died. I mean,
so I wouldn't have been alone only because I would never work two animals
by myself off leash. And of course I wouldn't have been able to take
the pictures then, because I was handling the animals and doing the things that
would que them and she was the one taking pictures. But yeah, I
mean that if Jake had attacked me in the habitat and I was by myself,
he would have killed me. There was no way I would have defeated
him. He was too much faster, too much stronger, and I wouldn't
have been able to get away. I mean, especially after he'd damaged one
hand and broken the other, I wouldn't have been able to open the gate
to escape. So true, Yeah, so I was really fortunate that I
had the right person at the right time. Seriously, so after you get
Jake, what do you do with him? Like, do you have to
rebuild a relationship or what happens? Oh? It was so after that there
was no way that I could interact to him safely. I mean especially right
after, because I was so seriously injured that the vulnerabilities that I had would
it would have made me an easy target. I did go in the habitat
a few times to kind of see what happened, and he immediately started bristling
and getting ready to challenge me, and I didn't want to end up in
another altercation or hit him with a pipe or something, and so I realized
that this was an animal that could not safely be managed under normal circumstances.
And I was pretty lucky and that I knew a guy who had a facility
that still exists, but it's kind of he's passed away since then, and
it's a sort of a different incarnation. But it was called Prairie Wind Animal
Refuge, and he had like bears and lions and tigers, and so he
had the ability to accommodate an animal that could have been handled by people.
So Jake ended up going there for a while with j I put Jessa with
him just to make the transition easy, and then we took Jessa back and
he was paired with a female wolf named Indigo, who was spectacular, and
she and Jake ultimately bred, and I ended up getting a puppy from Jake
and Indigo that I named Tahoe, who was a remarkable successful animal. I
bottle fed him and I was dad, and he'd never showed any indication that
he would be dangerous to me, and he never was. He was terrific.
Oh, full circle, full circle. Yeah. I got two animals
out of them. I made a match pair, one from Jake and Indigo
and another female from another paria named Phantom in Montana. Wow. So how
do you think the attack affected your life personally, even away from the wolves,
just you and your everyday life. Well, you know, I had
a recovery period. Of course that was interesting and challenging since my income was
as an athlete and I truncated that for some time, so it was kind
of lean times. But I mean, other than that, I think it
just it really enhanced my respect for these animals and my appreciation for the different
it's between wolves and dogs. They look so similar and they're so closely related,
but they're just not the same. I learned that in a very intense
and personal way, and I mean I wouldn't trade it. It was a
bad experience, for sure, but it also brought me to a different level
and understanding what stewardship of these animals really looks like and what you need to
be focused on when you're working with these animals. Yeah. You know,
when I first was talking to Nick about starting this podcast. We're making a
list of different animals we wanted to cover, and I was like, oh,
let's put down wolves. In my head, I was like, I
could take a wolf like if they don't scare me in the slightest And then
I read your story and I was like, man, maybe I'm vastly underestimating
them. Yeah, maybe a little bit. Everybody. Everybody underestimates wolves.
And I mean, on my core answer, I have hundreds of comments of
people who for whatever reason, think that they know better, and they share
stories of people who've killed, you know, like old women who've killed wolves
with an axe or whatever. But almost without exception, those are European wolves,
which are somewhat smaller and just particularly in a scenario where an animal takes
you by surprise that's as powerful as a wolf and also has the capability to
move so quickly. I just my experience now and my handling experience now.
I've had to deal with aggressive animals where I've had to get control of them
on a number of occasions, and I do that very differently. But I
know full well that if I make a single mistake in an emergency situation,
I'm going to be badly, badly hurt. Gotcha, If I'm someone that's
just out hiking, say in Yellowstone or something, and I come upon a
pack of wolves or a single wolf that's aggressive towards me, what are things
that you can do to prevent an attack from happening, if anything. First
of all, this would never have happened with a wild wolf, only because
wild wolves are terrified. If people, we are death to wild wolves.
I mean, so I like people to understand that the chances of you being
attacked by a wolf. I mean, I would, you know, not
so concerned at all about about wolves. I worry much more about bears.
If it weren't for grizzlies, I wouldn't be afraid to sleep in wearing a
meat suit in Yellowstone. A wolf isn't going to attack me. A grizzly
will eat me for lunch, of course. But wolves are just tremendously timid
animals, like the animal in the photo that I shared with you, Icknick.
When he's out of habitat and he just catches the scent of an unfamiliar
person somewhere in proximity, he wants no part of it. He'll drag me
off the trail, he'll take me off my feet in his terrified efforts to
get away from dangerous, unfamiliar human. And he has never had a bad
second with a human being. Every moment of his life with humans has been
positive, but deep within his DNA. And I believe that Lamark is correct
that there are certain behavioral characteristics that get shaped to the point where they're inherited.
The timidity of wolves from persecuted populations runs deep, and so you just
see that. What you'll see is that in the very few instances in North
America and modern history where they have reliable reports of wolves interacting negatively with humans,
there's almost always some kind of proximate cause, like the wolves were habituated
because they'd been fed by people, or the wolf is unwell in some way
and is desperate and is you know, exploring a food source, not really
intending to attack an unfamiliar human. There's really two deaths in North America in
like the last hundred years that they attribute to wolves. Both of them are
unusual circumstances. One of them was a guy named Kent Joel Carnegie, who
was pretty clearly killed by wolves. But wolves had been accustomed to humans because
they'd been feeding at a dump site and they'd been around to near people,
and we don't really know what happened because they just found his remains. And
the other one was a woman named Candace who was killed at Lake Chignik,
Alaska. There's some doubtst whether wolves really killed her. A friend of mine
named Paul Piquette was the only wolf biologists who investigated the incident felt like she
was killed by bears and then her he remains were fed on by wolves.
But in any case, that was kind of an interesting Karmen twist of fate
because she'd been learning how to trap, and she was planning on going wolf
trapping with some people in the following days. And she was a diminutive woman.
She was like four foot nine, she's quite small, and she had
gone jogging around the lake wearing headphones at dusk, and so she had taken
every conceivable means of being properly prepared in the woods and eliminated them and just
put herself on the menu. And so whatever happened to her, I attribute
that to her own bad luck and lack of forethought. When you're in Alaska,
you don't do stuff like that, but you know there's I mean,
wolves see people all day in Yellowstone, and then the interactions are quite unusual
that where anybody would feel threatened. And since that day, I've never once
felt threatened by you know, even the animals that I work with every day,
or which are You're by far more likely to be attacked by a captive
wolf than you are by a wild animal. I mean, if this animal
had been Jak, been a free running wolf, he would have been anywhere
near me, matchab. So that kind of leads into our next question.
You know, we've seen these wolf sanctuaries around that people can go to and
interact with wolves. Do you feel that those are safe? Do you think
that's a safe business for people to be in. And so I have mixed
feelings about it, and not because I feel like it's unsafe, but more
because I sometimes feel like and it's a difficult conversation in some respects because I
believe that ambassador wolves play a critical role in building tolerance. It's why I
have these animals. I think most people have these animals for wrong reasons,
which is more ego and to say I've got a wolf. All my animals
are educational. We spend and we never charge for any of this. We'll
bring photographers here. We help fund charity events for NGOs that work with wildlife.
I'll volunteer to do exhibits and fundraising or either from zoom in the habitat,
or sometimes I'll even bring a wolf. We do talks at national parks
in the summer so people can learn about wolves, and I think that having
that chance to see a wolf up close and even to touch a wolf can
be transformative to people and make them from somebody who is maybe mildly curious into
somebody who will advocate hard. And these species really needs hard advocacy to be
able to recover, especially with the turning of the tide with the Trump administration
allowing for a nationwide delisting, and there's been a wholesale wolf slaughter since that
happened, and it's only prime to get worse unless the Biden administration will reverse
that decision and relist wolves under the Endangered Species Act. So I think that
wolves need all the positive PR they can get, and positive PR can come
from those first person interactions. The only objection to it that I have is
not related to risk, because I think that most at least when we're talking
about like AZYA accredited top tier facilities with professional handlers. Those are places like
Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary, Mission Wolf, the California Wolf Center. There's there
are relatively few that are really skilled and been fully equipped to work these animals
correctly and in those circumstances. I think that they do great. My only
objection to that is that it sometimes gives the wrong idea and then people decide
they want a pet wolf. Yeah, and that's the scenario that I try
to avoid it. Of course, there's a delicate dance there because people say,
well, you do it, and yes, I do, and so
I don't say no, you can have a wolf. I say, come
see me, come see how I live to do this in a way that
is appropriate. And when people take you up on that, a lot of
times they're like, Okay, I don't want that because it's a you know,
I say, dogs are pets having wolves as a lifestyle and it's not
a lifestyle. Most people like, yeah, you know, it's funny you
talk about the delisting of wolves too. I mean, there's such a controversial
species. If not, I mean maybe besides coyotes, like the most controversial
species in America, in my opinion, when it comes to predators especially,
are there any other misconceptions about wolves that you can think of that you want
to talk about, Like, I know here in New Hampshire people constantly say,
oh, well, coyotes are always killing our deer, which is just
inherently not true. Is there anything like that, like, oh, wolves
are always killing my cattle and it's just not true or something like that.
All, yeah, all of the above. I mean, so, yeah,
let's tackle a couple of them here. Yeah. So almost every bit
of the wolf myth is untrue. Wolves are tremendously timid. They don't kill
for fun. Killing big animals is a dangerous business. They're not one and
done hunters. They have to work very hard. Est of its are that
are about only one and seven serious attempts at taking down prey are successful.
Lots of wolves get injured in the pursuit of their food sources, because,
I mean, a typical elk outweighs a wolf by hundreds of pounds. Wolves
like the Icnic that come from Alberta that specialize in bison or dealing with animals
that are some cases twenty times their size by weight. Yeah, so the
way they kill is definitely not for the faint of heart. It's not one
and done like a big cat that can jump on the back and grab an
animal and suffocate it right away. It's a typically, especially the larger prey.
It's a slow, painful death. But that's how they do what they
do. Wolves are opportunistic hunters. They're focused on the easy options on their
menu. As I said, they don't kill for sport. When wolves kill
a bunch of animals at one time, it's a behavior called surplus killing,
and it's because those animals are vulnerable. It's not because it's fun. It's
because it's like going to Costco and discovering that filats are a dollar ninety nine
a pounds, So you fill your whole cart and you're not going to throw
those away in the parking lot. You're going to pack them in the freezer
in need them later. Wolves are the same. Wolves don't represent a threat
to people. Their impact on livestock is minuscule in spite of what ranchers say,
and my family was one of the largest beef producers in Colorado history.
I don't consider most of these ranchers that whine and cry about wolves to even
be ranchers. They're hobbyists with the herd. I mean to put it in
perspective. We had fifty four thousand head at the typical peak operation, and
these guys have a couple hundred head. Maybe they're grazing these animals on public
lands where wolf, wolves and wild things belong and not cattle. And even
so, even though they're just turning their cattle loose on public lands and for
the most part just neglecting them for an entire summer and rounding them up in
the fall, wolves kill a very small number of those animals, and in
many cases kills attributed to wolves, we're actually the animals dying from something else
and wolves feeding on the carcass. And then the rancher screams wolf and tries
to get compensated for the loss, because there in many states there's compensation programs
that will pay a rancher for their losses. Yep. But of course they
have, you know, one hundred stories about how bad wolves are, and
they want the woods cleansed of anything that represents even the most minuscule threat to
their herds. They'd probably prefer that there's not elk or deer in those woods.
Either, so there's more forage for their cattle, which I think is
an atrocity. I don't think that cattle belong on public lands. I didn't
even know that was an issue that cattle were on public lands to begin with.
It's a massive issue. A cowcaf pair costs a dollar thirty five per
month to graze on our land, which doesn't even cover the cost to rehabilitate
the land. Because cattle are a truly invasive species that result in huge damage
to water courses. They foul water courses, they trample down grasses, They're
tremendously damaging to the environment. You can see here in Tahoe where I live,
there are some decommissioned allotments that have now been vacated for two decades,
and you can still see the damage the cattle did to these high mountain meadows.
And so they really don't belong. The public doesn't realize that we're paying
for private business to use our public lands for private industry. The irony is
that these guys, these ranchers, claim they're feeding America, but the percentage
of cattle that's actually graysed like that is minuscule in comparison to the feed yards
where most of our beef comes from. So it's an industry that really should
go away. And I know ranchers aren't going to like hearing me say that.
And when I go to federal hearings, the ranchers hate me more than
anybody because they can't discredit me by calling me the snow because I'll just say,
oh, really, we had more We had more cattle in a calving
barn than you have in your entire herd. Go away. You know.
I feel like in New Hampshire we have the same but slightly different struggle,
where so many people have backyard chickens that they just let free range and then
call me and say, well a bear or a fox ate my free ranging
chicken, can I kill it? And it's like you can't protect your cattle
that you just let loose into the woods, and no one's responsible for that
death but you. It's the only industry I know where you can exhibit wilful
neglect and still get compensated for it and have the government fly helicopters to shoot
wolves when they take out your livestock. Yeah, were there any other misconceptions
about wolves you could think of? I mean, we covered cattle. There's
one that always there's so many, but there's one that always gets me,
which is lone wolf. Oh yeah, it's just such an unfortunate phrase because
the irony is that when a wolf is alone, it's at its most vulnerable,
it's at its least likely to be doing anything wrong. Because when wolves
are lone wolves, it's what's called a disperser, and that's an animal that's
set out from its natal group. You know, wolf packs are just families.
There isn't any bunch of wolves that got together and decided, okay,
we're going marauding. Now. That happens with feral dogs. It does not
happen with wolves. Packs are family groups. Those animals are all related.
It's mom and dad and maybe some brothers or sisters of mom and dad,
and then offspring of one or more generations. Because wolves take a long time
to get mature, some of them never disperse, and when they do,
it's the most risky and dangerous time in their lives. Because they're now they're
forced to contend with feeding themselves and they can't kill the same stuff they normally
would as easily, so they're forced to, you know, look for carrion
or kill small game, and they have to contend with being in the territory
potentially of other wolves which might find them to be a trespasser and subject them
to aggression. And all they're trying to do is find the place where they
can find a girlfriend and set up a family. And so when we see
all the lone wolf sniper, it just makes my head explode because it's such
an unfortunate and loaded term that is so biologically inaccurate. And then, of
course, as I mentioned, you know that wolf pack that I don't even
use the term wolf pack. You'll see I always use family group because I
want people to understand that even a named pack is still just a family.
In wolf packs, it's not like they're fighting for status and the top dog
gets to breed. It's mom and dad. Like, you don't fight your
dad for breeding rights with mom. Yeah, and neither do wolves. That's
not how it works. If there's any kind of of a dominant hierarchy,
it's more just ritualized behaviors, and it's parents disciplining the young and saying you
have bad manners, shape up, And a lot of what we see is
display. It's not aggression, And so I would say that those are the
two big ones. There is no alpha wolf, it's mom and dad,
and that there is no lone you know, marauding lone wolf if it's a
disperser looking for love. Have you ever seen that picture that was going around
Facebook, if you even have one, where it was a big wolf pack
and there was a few hanging out in the back and somebody wrote the description,
Yeah, the description of the old ones go in the front and the
blood. Yeah, that's there's a great actually a great analysis of that on
Snopes, Believe it or not, but yeah, that's completely bumped. Yeah,
there have been some incredibly large wolf family groups where particularly at the earliest
years of Yellowstone's reintroduction, where there was such plentiful populations of prey that had
been so weakened because they hadn't had proper controls from predators. When food is
abundant, wolves will reproduce more successfully. And now we know that when there's
enough abundance of prey that a very large family group can feed everybody, that
they'll stay together. And so they had a pack I think the largest was
maybe thirty seven animals, and that might have been the druids, and that
was a very unusual circumstance because there were multi breeding pairs, wow, and
so they were very efficient. But this whole idea that the old ones going
front, that just, yeah, that's exactly what I kind of organization.
There's definitely altruism among wolves. I mean, for sure, you know,
when a female is got pups in a den and isn't really well positioned to
go hunting because she'd be leaving pups behind, they provision her with food.
I think there's plenty of evidence that an injured wolf will sometimes be provisioned by
family members to the point where they can make a recovery if they can.
And nobody starves to death in a wolf family group if there's enough food.
It's not like one Bogart's all the food and everybody else has to fight for
scraps. It doesn't work like that. It's just been so great to talk
to you, because whenever I go to a dog trainer, that's what they
spew to me, like, oh, well, you know it's all about
dominance, which I just inherently know is not true. It drives me insane.
Funny story, and you might want to clip this part for when you
publish as I don't want to get you in trouble. But Caesar Milan came
to a friend of mine's facility and tried to be dominant almost ended up dead.
I believe it. I make no secret of the fact that I think
Caesar Milan is a joke who is a serial animal abuser and is not a
dog trainer. Dog trainers work under positive reinforcement only. That's exactly how I
work with my animals. When I say work with my animals, you know,
they're my teammates. They're not my inmates. If they don't want to
do something, they're not doing it. It's as simple as that. I
thought. The only thing that I will ever make an animal do they don't
want to do is get in a vehicle when we're done with something that we
need to go. Sometimes I have to give a little shove. But aside
from that, there's no you know, there's no forcing these animals. And
I don't force my dogs either. Everybody works with me and we're a team.
So you also have dogs on top of the wolves. So I have
a malamute, I would a giant Willie malamut named Bixby, who I credit
with a lot of my success. I would say that almost everybody that's experienced
to doing this, who's working with these animals and exhibiting these animals professionally invariably.
And I think if you look at like the Wolf Conservation Center in New
York, almost all of us use they call them nanny dogs. I think
that's a little bit demeaning, particularly when the mal meat is a giant,
intact male. So I call them mentor dogs. And I love workings.
I love malod meats. Anyway, They're my favorite breed of domestic dog.
They're just so wolf like without without any of the negatives. They have all
the positives the wolves out the negatives. They're a great translator. They speak
wolf incredibly well because they're very primitive dogs, and they also speak human perfectly.
And so they're my internally, you know, my intercessor, my interpreter
between me and my animals, and especially when out in public, they look
to him to see how he's interpreting a situation and take cues from his behavior.
So if you've got a great, steady, well adjusted, calm mentor
dog, it makes a huge difference. And also people ask what's the difference
in a wolf and a dog? And so bringing out a giant malomi,
which is a really wolfy dog, and then bring it out a wolf.
People can still see there's all these differences, and I think that's great for
educating, especially young people. Well. Also, what a great tool to
say instead of saying to me that you want a pet wolf, here is
a domesticated option, a malamute. And I do that all the time and
pray that people make that choice and don't. If they go out and they
get themselves some wolf dog of any content, appreciable content, the chances are
they're going to be calling me or somebody like me in a year when they
realize that they don't want this life. They don't want the restrictions. I
mean, I give you some examples. Now, very few people do what
I do. People that do it at the level I do it are mostly
facilities that have full staffs. It's not a man and his wife. But
I don't like that some of the restrictions associated with that. For example,
my home is in the center of my habitat, so my animals are in
and out of my house. They live, I live with them. I
don't like that separation of habitat is here, houses here, they or other.
We are family, and family lives together. But my wife and I
have been married twenty years. We've never been on an airplane together because one
of us is always on the ground. Wow. When we travel, if
we're going to go on a vacation, it's you know, when we just
had Bixby and a que toc our arctic animal, we go and travel and
stay at Motel six. But with a third animal, that's just too much.
And so our travel is now restricted to you know, backcountry backpacking or
distributed camping where we can go way far away. That's a vacation. Wow.
Damn. Yeah, there's no kennel right when you roll up and say
all right here take it Nick and Aku, good luck guys. Is there
any way people can get involved? Where can people find you? Give us
everything? So I'm pretty easy. I mean, all you got to do
if you want to find me is type in the wolf guy, and I
think Oliver is the first thing that comes up. And even though you got
the right guy, and as far as what can people do right now is
a critical time for wolves. The Biden administration is Joe Biden actually just mentioned
that his grandkids are quite upset about what's happening, and he's looking into what
they can do to reverse this delisting. As far as involvement, I would
urge the Biden administration to restore protections. I would sign any any petitions.
It's better if you make your own comment rather than just hitting here's my name,
send personal comments, especially changing the subject line in an email really helps,
and just staying informed about it. If you're curious about what it's like
to have these animals, before you go out and get yourself a wolf dog,
I really recommend you spend some time visiting a sanctuary and ce a what
kind of care these animals really require and be the consequences of failure which are
high and negative for the animals, in particular because they never recover from losing
their natal family. They're never the same. Wolves are family creatures, and
if you kick them out of your family, their behavior changes for sure.
I highly recommend if you want to support any facilities. My two favorite,
and I known the people that founded them and run these things for decades.
Mission Wolf, which is run by a fellow named Kent Weber that's in Colorado,
and Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary, which is in Candy Kitchen, New Mexico
and the Zuni Pueblo. They both allow people to interact with animals and they
have amazing facilities and top tier care. And then there's organizations that are not
so they don't allow, for example, contact with the animals or anything.
But the International Wolf Center is remarkable. That's an ely Minnesota, beautiful facility.
Also run by friend of mine. The Wolf Conservation Center in New York
is a fantastic, remarkable place. Wolf Park in Indiana also amazing, and
they do these exhibits where they allow they have bison also and they allow the
wolves to test the bison. And so if you can find a day when
they're doing that and get to see how they won't kill these bison. They're
far too robust. But it's fascinating to watch how the wolves sort of faint
and try to get them to move and figure out, you know, are
there any vulnerabilities, and of course they realize no, these animals are in
vulnerable, so we're not going to go buy them. But it's fascinating and
those people are amazing as well. These are all top tier, you know,
AZA accredited, and I will tell you that my facility meets and exceeds
every standard for AZA credation even though it's a private property. Thank you so
much, Oliver. So it's my pleasure. I'm excited for you guys.
I hope you have great success. All right, Episode three, Nick,
how did you feel about our interview with Oliver? Oh? It was amazing.
So we're according to this a couple weeks after the interview. That was
our first interview experience, and it was awesome. We came out of that
like jittery, yeah, like so pumped. Oh yeah, I mean it
was amazing to talk to Oliver and he was great. Afterwards. He actually
put us on FaceTime and showed us around the enclosure for the wolves he has,
which was just awesome. We got to meet the wolves, got to
see him. He is a real great dude. He does the right things
with his animals. He's not one of these guys like Joe exotic who's just
trying to show off his animals. Like he is and a biologist and a
biologist. Yeah, I mean, he is just great. So it was
really interesting just to him talking about his experience with them, talk about how
how difficult it is to live with the wolves, because yeah, you know
that I personally would love to have a wolf, but no freaking way I
could do it. Yeah, And you know, I thought it was great
that he talked about and the fact that he owns a malamw and he talks
about the fact that, like, if you're just a run of the mill
person and you think that you want a wolf dog or a wolf dog hybrid,
which you should not get. We will talk about it later, to
get a malamu, because they're as close as you can get. And you
know, as I was saying at the beginning of the episode, I've always
wanted to work with wolves, and the closest have gotten so far is working
with a team of sled dogs, like twenty plus Siberian huskies. And let
me tell you, they are plenty of dog enough for people who want wolves.
They are their third of the size. Yeah, dude, they're brutal.
They legitimately would try to kill each other sometimes, and it's no joke.
They're badass. Yeah. So I thought that was a great point that,
you know, people should just get domesticated dogs instead of wolves, because
that's why we did that thousands of years ago. Don't be stupid, I
have a wild animal in your house. How about that? Yeah, And
you know it's so ironic to me the more I thought about this interview.
You know the fact that wolves there's such a controversial species, maybe the most
controversial species besides like coyotes in America. And we love our dogs, but
we hate the two canines that we live with. Like why they are They
are wild animals and people want them to be dogs. Yeah, it's like,
why not just just appreciate them outside for what they are, which is
like a wild thing. And like Oliver was saying, they're skittish, they
don't want to come near you, so give them their space and watch them
from afar. Absolutely, do you have anything else to say? Nick?
No, I'm not sure if I got into my experience in Yellowstone at all
this episode. But if I did, let's cut this out. If not,
I was. Yeah, I was lucky enough to go up there in
November of twenty nineteen before the world went to shit, and from a very
far distance we will see the junction Butte Pack, which is mentioned in this
episode. They just had fresh kill. They're all hanging out. I guess
some amazing pictures of them so far away. It was an amazing day,
but it was just unbelievable experience. They are amazing animals and I really hope
they come back strong. If I see them in the wild for the first
time, I will record myself crying and if you join our Patreon you can
see it. That's what the people pay money for, exactly, Ashley crying
because she can't handle herself around wild animals. Thank you so much for listening
to episode three of Get Out Alive. To see more information and links for
this episode, check out the episode description below, or check out our website
get Out Alive podcast dot com. Please please please rate us on Apple Podcasts
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a new animal attack story next Wednesday