Speaker 1: Welcome to episode eighty nine of Get Out Alive, a
bi weekly podcast about animal tax why they happen, and
how we can avoid them. I'm your host, Ashley, and
today's episode is with a guest who I have admired
for years now, since I first read his work as
an undergraduate in college, and I am so excited for
you all to hear our conversation. Today's episode is really
about our relationship with wildlife in North America and how
we humans came to be what we are today. Because
in this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with
author Dan Floorries about his book Wild New World, The
Epic Story of Animals and People in North America. We
start our conversation broadly go over the history of humans
in North America, including what animals early humans had to
contend with when they got here. We then drilled down
to a species that is a quintessential North American species,
the coyote, because they really encapsulate how humans in North
America relate to wildlife. Now, besides Wild New World, Dan
has authored American Serengetti and the wildly popular Coyote America,
a book I have referenced quite a bit on this
podcast already, so if you haven't read Dan's work, I
highly recommend all of his books. All right, without further ado,
please enjoy my chat with historian and author Dan Flores.
Speaker 2: Well, my name is Dan Flores. I currently live in
Santa Fe, New Mexico, or a few miles outside Santa Fe,
because I've always liked living outside towns rather than in them.
But I'm a former professor of primarily the history of
the American West and the environmental history of the United States.
I taught at three different universities during my career as
an academic, but the longest period was at the University
of Montana in Missoula, Montana. I was there from nineteen
ninety two to twenty fourteen and held the ab Hammond
Chair of the History of the American West when I
was there, So I'm I'm an environmental writer primarily these days.
I retired early from university work so I could write
full time. But I obviously spent a lot of my
career as a historian studying the history of the United
States and the American West, and that obviously included the
history of our relationship with the world around us, including animals.
I actually as an undergraduate, I was an English major,
and it probably helps explain some of the things that
I'm interested in and how I write. I tend to
be intrigued by character and plot development and telling stories,
and so my books tend to be full of stories,
some from the past, some from the present, from interviewing people.
But I'm kind of compelled, I think, by the standard
things that English majors like to read and write, but
I do primarily things that have a kind of a
historical basis. I'm from Louisiana, originally grew up in Louisiana,
and I mean that's where I first encountered animals like
coyotes when they were beginning to expand out of the
West and across the United States. So I've been interested
in the animal story in America for a long time,
and a lot of the training that I did to
become a professor and a writer is sort of geared
in the direction of writing about animals and explaining our
relationship to them.
Speaker 1: So, given your in depth knowledge of evolution and then
just biology of so many different species, it's always interested
me that you are labeling yourself like as a historian,
and that's been primarily your career. What made you head
towards being a historian rather than being a biologist, or
was that ever even a question for you?
Speaker 2: Well, as I said, I began my education because I
knew from some early point in life, probably when I
was still in high school, that what I really wanted
to do was to be a writer. So I started
out as an English major and only turned to history
and graduate school. But the kind of history to address
your question, the kind of history that I trained to
do and have largely written environmental history, is the sort
of history that it's not about politics or who wins
wars or anything like that. It's about the relationship between
people and the natural world over time. And in order
to do justice to those kinds of topics, especially in
teaching about them and writing about them, you really have
to read a lot of other in a lot of
other fields. And as a writer, I've always kind of
been drawn to the idea of whenever I have a question,
and I have a lot of questions, as I sit
down and write, I always try to turn to what
I consider to be the best sources out there, and
those sources very often are not going to be other
works in history or certainly not novels from some English professor,
but they tend to be things that come from paleontology,
from archaeology, from ecology, from biology, from anthropology, and so
I've just spent a lot of my career reading in
a much wider way, I think than most people who
do liberal arts kinds of things ever read it. And
so that's why the books tend to have a pretty
strong scientific element to them. I mean, the Coyote book,
for example, was a short list finalist for the EO.
Wilson Prize in Literary Science Writing, for which I was
very proud, And some of the other books have often
been best sellers and feels like anthropology and things. So
I kind of take some pride in the fact that
the sort of work I have done has appeal to
people across a broader spectrum. And I think it's because
I read in a lot of different feels.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, So touching on that, you have obviously many
best selling books, like you know, Coyote, America, American Serengeti.
But your latest book within the past few years has
been Wild New World, the epic story of animals and
people in America. So what led you to write that book,
and why did you write it when you did.
Speaker 2: I think I probably view While New World as the
natural outgrowth of having written Americans, Serengetti, and Coyote America.
I've written all three of these books since I retired
from university life and had a chance to sort of
turn back to writing for larger audiences and audiences that
weren't just historians, for example. And so I think of
Wild New World as a natural outgrowth of those two
earlier books. But I also know very well that this
is a book that has been brewing in my mind
probably for most of my life. And I even tell
a story fairly early on in Wild New World about
one of the things that I think set in motion
the idea of ultimately taking on a project like this,
and it, I mean, it's actually the oldest memory I
have from when I was four years old, because when
I was four, back in Louisiana, I had my first
little animal companion was a little chicken of the kind
that you get at feed stores in the spring when
they are these little yellow chickens for sale. And so
my parents had gotten me this little chicken and it was,
you know, just a few weeks old, and it was,
as I said, my first animal companion, and this little
chicken and I used to play this chase game through
the house, and the chicken would run through the house
and I would go running as a four year old
after chasing it. And one day, as a little clumsy
four year old, I missed a beat and stepped on
my chicken and I killed.
Speaker 1: Oh God.
Speaker 2: So the story that I tell in Will New World
about sort of the beginnings of a project like this
had to do with what happened when my mother and
I went out into the backyard and buried this little chicken.
Were both standing over this little gravesite, you know, sobbing away,
and I turn to my mother and look up at
her and I say, so, Mom, I get to have
chicky again in heaven, don't I. Oh. And my mother,
who is a good Southern Methodist who channels the standard
Judaeo Christian idea about human exceptionalism compared to all other life,
and who also kind of had a reputation for all
our life giving the unvarnished version of things even to
a four year old, looked down at me and said,
why no, honey, You're made in the image of God,
and you have an everlasting soul and when you die,
you'll get to go to heaven. But Chicky is just
an animal. Animals don't have souls, they don't go to heaven.
So I'm afraid this is the last time you're going
to see Chicky. You can imagine when you're four years
old that a story like that sort of lingers in
your head and breaks your heart. Yeah, it breaks your heart.
And it also didn't ring true even as a little kid.
That did not seem to me a proper way for
the world to work. And so that sort of story
is clearly the kind of story that stays with you
when you're a child. And I really think when I
sat down and began working on Wile New World, and
that story came immediately to mind, and I began tracking
back through my life experiences, I realized that that had
influenced me for most of my life and probably led
me to ultimately writing Wile New World. It clearly took
quite a while to finally get to it, but it
was a story that was such a powerful and emotional one,
which is probably why I remember it as a first memory.
That it influenced a lot of my life's course. I
became suspicious of the idea that humans were as exceptional
as the Judeo Christian tradition tried to make us believe
we were. So that was no question, a kind of
an emotional reason for wanting to write a book like this,
but I will admit as I sat down and began
doing the research for a while New World. Another reason
had to do with my sense that Americans, most Americans
at least, did not know this story about American history.
They didn't know a lot of people obviously don't know
the big history story of North America about how we
acquired our be shary of animals and how humans arrived
here twenty thousand plus years ago and began interacting with
those animals, but we didn't don't really know the more
recent story. I mean, this is a book that tracks
down to twenty twenty two, right down to the modern period.
And I became aware as I was doing talks out
of it before I finished the book, that a lot
of what I was telling people was not something that
they knew, that they understood. This is the kind of
history that Americans don't really know. If we know history
of any sort like this, I think pretty much what
we understand about the past. With respect to animals, most
people kind of know a shorthand cocktail party version of
once there were millions of buffalo here, our national mammal
once was here, in the millions, and at some point,
for some reason, there were only a thousand of them left.
And that seems to be about as much as most
people understand about this story.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like we weirdly know about the Big Bang,
and then like Pangaea, and then we know that Europeans
came and messed everything up, But there's so much in
between that not a lot of people know about. So
your new book, it will not obviously like brand new,
but like new within the newest to you within the
past few years. Wild New World is a great recollection
of this history, both how we humans migrated here and
evolved biologically here, but also culturally. So what did North
America look like to the first Americans that crossed over
from Asia.
Speaker 2: We don't know, probably for certain, how early humans may
have found North America, but it looks as if from
a set of footprints that were just recently discovered in
southern New Mexico and White Sands National Park that feature
footprints that stepped on grass seeds that has been radiocarbon
dated to twenty two thousand years ago. That humans may
have gotten here probably by coming down the coastline and
then going into the interior as long ago as prior
to the glacial maximum of the Wisconsin Ice Age, and
so twenty two thousand years ago is a long time.
My guess is with respect to that this brand new
world that humans first saw here probably looked something like
the world in Eastern Asia and Siberia that they had
come from. In other words, that was the suite of
Pleistocene animals like mammoths and macedons and sabertoothed cats. And
of course they also would have encountered new creatures that
had involved in South America and that had crossed the
Isthmus of Panama into North America, like ground sloths, giant
ground sloths. So those would have been new. But it
would have been a world that I think humans were
very deliberately seeking out. I argue in Wild New World
that what compelled us to leave our evolutionary home in
Africa and moved first to the Middle East and then
into Europe and then into Asia, and ultimately to discover
North and South America, which were the last continents on
Earth that humans found. Was this desire to reach places
that other people hadn't gotten to already. And the primary
reason for that is that humans at this point in
our history had gone for forty thousand generations as hunters
of animals, and we were looking for animals that had
never before been hunted because those animals, in a biological
theory called biological first contact, did not recognize humans as
predators and as a danger. And so this movement of
people out of Africa, into Europe, into Asia, and finally
into the Americas was propelled by this idea of trying
to find populations of animals that were much easier to
hunt because they had never encountered humans before. And I
think in North America what we found was kind of
the long lost Eden of the animals, a continent where
indigenous evolution and by that I mean animals that had
evolved here, specifically in North America, plus migrations from other
parts of the world. Because the land bridges between North
America and Eurasia, for example, had earlier allowed animals like
mammoths to and bison to arrive in North America, we
really were encountering this ultimate American Eden of animals, and
it included not only elephants, mammoths of several different species,
masdons farther east, browsing masdons in the eastern deciduous forests.
It included predators of animals like that like saber toothed cats.
It included all manner of grazing creatures. Bison had crossed
from Asia about four hundred thousand years ago, and those
animals had also spread across the western parts of North
America in several different forms, including giant versions of bison.
Bison Antiquis in particular was the giant version that people discovered.
And again there were the predators of those species. We had,
for example, a hunting high a fast hunting hyena that
had evolved in North America. We had an American cheetah
that ran down not just bison calves, but the horses
that had evolved specifically in North America. And of course
there were indigenous creatures like prong horn antelope that creatures
like cheetahs also hunted. So it was a world that
I think the easiest way for modern people to understand
it is that it was a world places see in
America was a world that looked a lot like eastern
or southern Africa, like the Serengetti or the Massaimara, with
elephants still in place, with all manner of herd animals,
big herd animals, and the predators that were associated with them.
So it was kind of a version, an American version
of the African Serengetti, and it would have been a
very very compelling place for these first humans. I mean,
the first humans, as I said, probably got here more
than twenty thousand years ago. I particularly think that the
human population never was very large that long ago. But
when the glacial North began to break up about sixteen
thousand years ago and we got an ice free corridor
that stretched from Siberia across the Bearing straight down through
Alaska and into what is now Alberta and Montana, at
that point we began to get a large scale migration
of people who create the first coast to coast culture
in North America, which is known as the Clovis culture.
It's one I mean, we hardly even remember it or
know about it, but it was a culture that actually
lasted longer thirteen thousand years ago than the United States
has lasted at the present moment.
Speaker 1: So I think one of the main points of your
book that I like that really stuck with me was
how much animals in America actually left and came back.
So specifically, you make the point that there are two
animals that are distinctly American that we know of today
that we don't think of that way. That's the camel
and the horse. So can you explain, like specifically with horses,
where did they go, why did they come back, or
like what how did they get back to North America eventually,
and why do we think of them? As you know,
obviously there's the whole debate about like feral horses and whatnot.
Speaker 2: There is, indeed, and some of that debate I have
always been suspicious about comes from not a sound understanding
of horse evolution because, as you just mentioned, two of
the animals that evolved in North America. And so what
I do with While New World is the starting point
is the aftermath of the chick Saloub impact. That's the
asteroid that strikes in the Yucatan and wipes out the
dinosaurs and ushers in the age of mammals. So I
basically start the book sixty six million years ago with
the beginning of the recreation of North America's ecologies and wildlife.
And among the early examples of evolution in North America
are the horses, which evolve the beginnings of horse evolution
go back fifty six million years in North American history,
and camels, which began evolving in North America about forty
five million years ago. And so those two animals, which
we now don't even think of as being American animals,
actually are part of millions upon millions of years of
North American evolution. They both and this is, you know,
quite a mystery about North American environmental history. Both of
those evolutionary animals, horses and camels, which of course create
many different species and even genuses over time, are going
to disappear in North America between about eight thousand and
ten thousand years ago. It's one of the mysteries of
the Pleisocene extinctions. But in the meantime, as land bridges
had developed the Bearing Strait, for example, between North America
and Asia, camels and horses had both migrated across the
Bearing Land Bridge going westward, going in the opposite direction
than we think humans came and going across the bearing
Land Bridge took camels ultimately into Northern Africa and the
Middle East, and it took horses into places like Eurasia
and Africa. And in Africa, of course, our American horses
became zebras and quaggas. Now, the real mystery of all
this is that our original North American horses and camels
one so similar to today's camels from northern Africa that
we refer to it as yesterday's camel. I mean, it
looks almost identical, and the horses look almost identical ten
thousand years ago to modern horses as well. They became
extinct in the continent of their origin, North America, while
surviving in Asia, the Middle East and Africa. And how
horses got back here, of course, is that they ultimately
are going to be domesticated by Europeans about four to
five thousand years ago, right on the eve of their
disappearance in Europe, by the way, and Europe and Asia
horses were domesticated at almost the last minute, and then
they were returned to North America five hundred years ago
as Europeans discovered the continent and began bringing all of
their domesticated animals hogs and chickens and cattle and goats
and sheep and horses over to colonize in North America.
And so one of the reasons horses have done so
well and wild horses have become something of a problem
in modern American life is because they were preadapted because
they had evolved here to North American conditions, and so
once release, once they got loose into the American West,
horses very quickly and basically a century and a half
time reoccupied their old grazing Pleistocene nish in North America.
The problem in the modern era, of course, is that
their predators didn't survive into the modern world, and so
we're left with the horses themselves. Without their predators, are
certainly not enough gray wolves and cougar today to control
their populations, and that's become something of an issue. Whose
roots gobac all the way to the pless scene.
Speaker 1: So going back to the Plesis scene when people first
came over and talking about the Clovis people, what kinds
of weapons or tools did the early humans have to
not only defend themselves from the animals that we were
talking about a bit before, but also to hunt these
large animals to the point of extinction.
Speaker 2: For some of them. As I mentioned a couple of
minutes ago, when humans got to North America, and including
the Clovis people, who we think arrived sometime around thirteen
thousand years ago or a little earlier, they had an
economy that had been honed by between forty and forty
five thousand generations of hunters of people who had existed
by hunting animals. When the Clovis people arrived in North America,
for example, humans had not begun to domesticate plants or
to domesticate animals anywhere around the world. So this was
an arrival that took place before the age of the
agricultural revolution. But that forty to forty five thousand generations
of hunting ability and skill meant that when the Clovis
people get here, they are going to be consummate professionals
in knowing how to hunt and kill animals as large
as mammos. And what they brought with them was a
tool technology, a liithic technology based on flint tools. They
had about eighty to eighty five different flint tools, including
a spear tip, a four to five inch and in
some cases when they were just made for ceremonial purposes.
Foot long lithic spear points called Clovis points naturally today
that had a slight flute on either side at the base,
which solved an ancient problem for attaching flint. Sharp flint
tools to the end of wooden spears are at atul
darts because that flute chipped into the point enabled the
secure attachment of a wooden shaft to the point itself.
And so the Clovis point, which by the way, is
not found in Siberia or anywhere in Eurasia. It's only
found in North America. There are some similar points in
Western Europe, but nothing quite like the Clovis point, was
an adaptation, evidently to their entry into this New World,
North American landscape with all of it intact populations of animals,
and they were superb hunters of these big creatures. I
tell a story in While New World from two archaeological
sites in southern Arizona of a band of Clovis people.
We don't know how many there were, but our suspicion
is that bands of Clovis people probably number somewhere between
about thirty people and maybe as many as fifty or sixty.
But a group of them, save thirty or thirty five
in number, surrounded at a watering hole near the Santa
Cruz River south of today's Tucson a herd of mammoths
with a bull, a cow, and fourteen young mammoths, calves
and yearlings. That band of Clovis hunters killed every single
one of the young animals, all fourteen of them, each
one of them with a single point embedded into their bodies.
And then, in separate archaeological finds a few miles away,
archaeologists found the bull and the cow from that particular
group of mammos. The bull had two Clovis points in
his body and he had run about eight miles before expiring,
and the cow, who had fought to protect the young,
obviously had eight Clovis points in her body, and she
was about four miles away from where all those young
that she had been trying to protect had died. In
other words, this is a kill of an entire herd
of mammos, very very large, larger than Africaan or Asian
elephants today, and every single one one of those animals
ended up being killed in that particular attack. These were
people who were absolutely professional at hunting big creatures, and
that's probably one of the explanations for why mammoths, for example,
and quite a number of other of the large plesscene
animals of North America don't survive the advent of hunters
like the Clovis and later the fulsome people who follow
them who are sort of specialists in hunting these large
species of bison and so in Wildly World, I mean,
as I said, this is a book that covers from
sixty six million years ago down to the present. I mean,
naturally enough, we know a lot more about the years
from the time Europeans arrived five hundred years ago to
the present, and so three fourths of my book is
essentially about the period from fifteen hundred down to today.
But I try to do justice to these early periods
as much as I possibly can, and I wanted to
do justice to the arrival of people in America and
what sort of effect they had on the creatures that
were here. And what I strongly suspect is that while
they probably didn't completely wipe out every single, for example,
mammoth that was in North America, very likely for a
lot of these big places scene animals, groundsloss mammos many others.
They drove them into isolated pockets where the populations of
mammosay were separated from one another, couldn't exchange their genes,
and as we know from a population of mammos that
died on an island in the Bearing Sea, they lasted
down to four thousand years ago, whereas most of the
mamos on the continent died around eleven thousand to ten
thousand years ago. But we had a population on an
island in the Bearing Sea that lasts down to four
thousand years ago, but without a sufficient ad mixture of
genetic diversity, those animals ultimately died from an inability to reproduce.
They simply didn't have a sufficient amount of genetic diversity
to continue on. And I sort of think that may
have been what happened on the mainland too, that humans,
while not killing every single animal, they drove these populations
into disparate areas where they couldn't exchange genes and ended
up dying out that way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think you do a really good job at
doing these early people justice. Especially something I hadn't really
considered is that the advent of like the Clovis technology
allowed people to have so much distance or more distance
from these animals, they weren't sustaining as much like life
threatening damage. And you talk about how the Neanderthals they
were more like hand to hand and the damage that
they sustained on their skeletons is crazy compared to humans.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it really is. And so I was trying to
obviously do some research into what kind of life Neanderthals
who disappeared about forty two thousand years ago in Europe
and Asia. And of course, as we all know, since
most of us have done enough genetic testing to realize
that we have preserved some Neanderthal genes, and almost all
of us from Western and Northern European backgrounds, we enter
bred with them, but they disappeared, and they disappeared in part,
I think, and I certainly try to provide some examples
of this, because they were engaged in this kind of
hand to hand combat with large animals wild horses, which
of course are very difficult to kill and can be
very dangerous to try to hunt close end mammas obviously,
and the skeletal remains of Neanderthals, of which we have
about seventy or eighty from around the world indicate that
the men in particular, who were probably doing most of
this close end hunting with these large animals, suffered just
incredible injuries, eyes being knocked out, broken thigh bones. I mean,
the thigh bone is the strongest bone in the human body.
And there are several Neanderthal skeletons that show broken thigh bones,
broken arms, all sorts of sort of horrific injuries. And
what happened as time went on is as technology improved,
one of the motives for improving technology. And by the
time you get to the Fulsome people, for example in
North America, and these are the people who immediately follow
the Clovis folks and the people I mentioned a few
minutes ago. I start the book in fact, with the
visiting the Fulsome Sight in New Mexico. These are people
who specialize in hunting giant extinct bison. Those people were
using at adults, and that enables you to stand even
farther back than with a spear, so that you could
actually throw a dart with great force at these animals.
And ultimately the bow obviously, which is not invented for
another several thousand years, but quickly adopted by people around
the world because that enables you to stand back even
farther and not risk these very close in encounters with
animals that can clearly do great damage to human beings
are easily kill us. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So, of course, like we've been talking about, humans existed
in North America for quite some time before European settlement.
And despite some of those large mammals that perished at
the end of the place to see, like the short
faced bear and obviously mastodons, things like that, things changed
when Europeans arrived. So can you, like briefly because obviously
a lot happened, but paint a picture of like, once
Europeans arrived here, how did the flora and fauna of
North America change?
Speaker 2: So I attempt to do in a transition chapter between
Clovis fulsom the Pleisoscene world and the coming of Europeans.
I do a chapter in Wold New World. It's called
Ravens and Coyotes America. And I tried to do and
this was pretty daunting because nobody else had tried to
do anything like this. I tried to tell this ten
thousand year story of what happens and why it happens
from the end of the pleaci scene down to the
coming of Europeans. And the reason it's an important story
is because Native people in that ten thousand year span,
perhaps having learned the lessons of the loss of so
many animals during the Plecocene, Native people managed to preserve
the biodiversity of North America for ten thousand years before
Europeans come. In that ten thousand year period, I could
only find the example of one extinction. There was a
flightless sea duck on the Pacific coast that finally was
hunted to extinction by about twenty five hundred years ago.
But I couldn't find any other examples of extinctions in
that ten thousand year period before the arrival of Europeans,
and of course I had to grapple with why this
happened the way it did, and there are several reasons.
One is that the agricultural revolution doesn't arrive in North
America until six or seven thousand years after it does
in the Old World, and that means that people are
existing as hutter gatherer populations in much lower populations, and
so North America never acquires a population that goes over
five million people during that ten thousand year period. And that,
of course is one of the reasons that it's possible
to preserve the biodiversity of the continent with a relatively
low population of people. Another reason, though, I think is
crucial to this, is that Native people preserved what I
suspect is probably an old, original religious idea that humans
are not really exceptional compared to other creatures, that other
creatures in fact are our kin, and so they had
religious traditions and ceremonies they performed that were intended to
continue to express this idea that humans and all the
other creatures around them, including the animals that they hunted,
were kin, were part of a network. And I think
that sort of respect and traditional kinship, kind of longstanding
religion helped Native people avoid some of the excesses that
were about to take place once Europeans arrived with a
very different kind of ideological bent. Native people, for example,
although they lived for ten thousand years with billions of
passenger pigeons, they had all sorts of taboos about how
you hunted passenger pigeons. You didn't kill them on the nests,
for example. You tried to make sure that the birds
were able to breed and preserve new generations, and I
tell quite a number of stories like that in this
particular chapter, because, as I said, I was trying to
grapple with how it was possible to preserve the biological
diversity of the continent for that long. And then five
hundred years ago Europeans began to arrive. And in order
to understand European columns, you have to go back to
look at Europe over the past ten or eleven thousand years,
because what had happened at the end of the Pleisocene,
and Europe lost all of its big animals too. All
the mammoths and masdons and rhinos and steppe lions and
on and on, all were hunted out and killed in Europe,
just as they were in North America. But in the
wake of the Pleisocene, following this loss of faunnel availability,
in order to carry on a hunting and gathering lifestyle
and the Old World, which of course had been settled
by people much earlier than the Americas, Europeans had begun
to domesticate animals and plants, and so they had when
they came to North America five hundred years ago. They
had like ten thousand years of experience domesticating wild cattle
and horses and hogs and sheep and goats and chickens,
and brought with them this tradition of living not just
with crop plants, for example, with weed and barley and
so forth, but also with domesticated animals, which they brought
along with them. One of the things that does, of course,
is that it turns predators into an enemy of your economy. Meanwhile,
in North America, without any domesticated creatures other than wild
turkeys and occasionally wild ducks, North America native people had
never developed this kind of animosity towards, say, coyotes or
wolves or mountain lions that Europeans had when they arrived.
Europeans also brought with them a different religious tradition, one
that came out of the Middle East, the Judeo Christian
tradition that we're all familiar with, the one that my
mother was channeling when she told me that I was
not going to get to see Chicky in heaven because
animals don't have souls. Because the Judeo Christian tradition taught
us that humans were exceptional from everything else. We were
the only creatures made in the image of God, the
only ones that had souls and would go to everlasting Heaven,
and all the other animals. And this is right in
the Book of Genesis, in the New Testament or the
Old Testament. The Book of Genesis says quite openly, all
other creatures are made for you to use. They are
here for you to do with as you wish. And
old worlders then coming to a place in North America
where this wonderful biological diversity of many thousands of years
is still intact, sort of thought that they were coming
to some kind of garden of Eden, especially once their
diseases that they bring with them, which native people have
never been subjected to, are going to wipe out something
like eighty percent of the native population, because when the
native population crashes in the wake of the arrival of
the first Europeans and their disease epidemics, that results in
a release, an ecological release of animals like white tailed
deer and bison and black bears and on and on
and on. And Europeans are going to arrive with the
idea that God has cleared away the native people to
allow them to harvest this bounty. And of course Europeans
bring one other thing with them that native people did
not have, not just the religion that teaches them that
they're exceptional and other animals are created for their use,
but they also bring with them the beginnings of the
global market economy, so that wild animals are regarded basically
as commodities in the market. You can trap beavers and
sell them. You can kill passenger pigeons and sell them.
You can kill white tailed deer, strip their hides off
and sell them. Ultimately, you can kill buffalo and strip
their highs off and cut their tongues off and sell them.
It's all about, in addition to a religious notion that
makes you think that animals are just there for your use,
to suddenly look at animals as a way to make
America a great place by harvesting the wildlife bounty for
economic uplifting. And that's really the story that much of
the middle section last probably two thirds, certainly the middle
two thirds of while New World is about. Is about
these ideas that we bring and the results that they
produce on Sometimes animals that have been here, passenger pigeons
have been here for fifteen million years, they can't survive
three hundred years of Old worlders being here with those
two notions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and like you said, billions, like with the b
there were billions of them, and in three hundred years
we somehow took that many birds out. It is remarkable
in like the worst way.
Speaker 2: Well it really is. I mean, and you know so.
One of the stories I tell in the book, and
in fact, I even use a line from this story
as the title of one of the chapters, To Know
an Entire Heaven and an Entire Earth is the chapter
that I write about the colonial exploitation of wildlife, because
I conclude that chapter with a passage that Henry David Thureau,
sitting down to his journal, his daily journal in eighteen
fifty seven, is going to write about what he's experiencing
in his America as opposed to what he has read
from the first accounts of the Puritans in Massachusetts and
in New England from only two hundred years before. I mean,
he's reading all these marvelous descriptions of passenger pigeon flights
and huge herds of white tailed deer and black bears
wandering around within sight of these early European colonies, and
just on and on and THROA of course, is interested
in the idea of experiencing all of nature, and he's
very dedicated to the idea of watching the progression of
the spring and how everything happens, all the migrations of
the birds and they're nesting, and he begins to realize,
and this is a point I try to make a
lot of Wild New World. We tend to think of
the past as its history. It's already happened, it doesn't
have any effect on us. But what Threau realized is
that this kind of past doesn't stay in the past.
Because as he sat down with this knowledge about what
his forebears had experienced compared to what he was experiencing,
he began writing this passage where he basically says, it's
like you were to go to a symphony and suddenly
realize that there are no timpanies, there are no French horns,
there are no strings. You're only getting to hear pieces
of what should be a complete ensemble. He says, it's
like looking up into the night sky and realizing that
some demi god has come before you and plucked out
of the heavens all the best constellations, all the best
of the stars, and you just get this tiny little
piece of what's left after somebody else has selfishly robbed
you of the experience. And he concludes this passage and
that became the title of my chapter when he says,
I realize that I am that citizen whom I pity
because I want to experience an entire heaven and an
entire earth. He doesn't want to live in a world
where his forebears had acted like demigods and robbed him
of the experience is that he hoped and thought he
should get to have in his own life. And I think,
to me, that's the summation of what this well New
World story is. We don't even realize what we have
been robbed of in our present experience in North America,
because so many of us don't know this story about
all these creatures that were once here, that we once
had the Carolina parakeet along the eastern seaboard and all
the way out west to Colorado, the most beautiful bird
a North American parrot on the entire continent, and we
wipe them all out. They were all gone by the
nineteen thirties. We're never going to get to see. I mean,
my grandparents were alive when there were still passenger pigeons
flying through the skies, and I'm never going to get
to see anything like that. So that thorough idea that
the past doesn't stay in the past. This kind of
pass affects the sort of experience we have while we're
alive now, is what I was really trying to convey
with the trajectory of this book.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so there is one American species that has, despite
best efforts on Europeans part, not been able to be eradicated,
and that's the coyotea species that you have written extensively about,
talked about. So one of our patrons, Tearan, asked that,
or pointed out, what have proven remarkably resilient in the
face of human expansion. What do you think makes them
so uniquely adaptable compared to other species in North America.
Speaker 2: Well, I can tell your listener for one thing, that
it was a great joy to write Coyote America, a
kind of a biography of this animal from its evolution
down to the present day, because it does counterintuitively reverse
the story that I had to tell through a good
bit of wild New World. I mean, while New World
does at least end on an uplifting note following the
passage of the Endangered Species Act and all the animals
that we've saved and recovered since then. But the coyote,
through its own agency, was able to resist the kind
of destruction that took place with the passenger pigeon, or
the great awk, our northern hemisphere penguin, which we also like,
or the Carolina parakeet, all these creatures that we completely lost,
that have disappeared. The coyote instead managed to thrive even
as we Euro Americans spread across the continent. And it
did so because of its evolutionary adaptability and some of
the particular evolutionary traits that it had evolved over time
in interacting with larger gray wolves. So here's part of
the coyote story. Coyotes, for one thing, are native North
American animals. The caned family evolved in North America about
five million years ago. And although there's presently some question
about exactly where gray wolves emerged in that evolution and
whether or not they don't come out of Eurasia and
inner North America, we're pretty confident that coyotes never left.
They never went to Iberia, for example. They remained in
North America for all this five million year period and
emerged us into their present form about nine hundred thousand
years ago, so thirteen thousand years ago when the Clovis
people come, Coyotes are sort of there at the door
welcoming us humans into the North American world. And there
a species, a mid sized predator that concentrates primarily on rodents,
on rats, and mice. And one of the reasons they've
always hung around humans, and I think they've been doing
this from the very beginning, as soon as we arrived,
is that our encampments and our villages and our towns
and cities produce a lot of rats and mice, and
so humans naturally attract the predators of those rodents, and
coyotes from the very first stories we have of them
hung around villages and encampments. And I think, you know,
one of the things I do with Coyote America is
try to tell some of these epic Kayoote stories from
Native people, because our oldest literature in North America are
coyote stories, and our oldest literary figure is the coyote
with a capital C, who is this sort of semi
deity character for Native people who they started telling stories
about it. It appears probably ten thousand years ago, and
I think they did that because they realized that while
other creatures were disappearing in the extinction pulse of ten
thousand years ago, somehow coyotes were surviving, and they survived
by their wits, and I think humans identified with that,
and so they made coyotes into the primary character of
all of these wonderful stories that are all about human nature. Really,
those coyote stories are attempts to teach us about who
we are as another animal and as another species. But
coyottes when wolves began to arrive about twenty five thousand
years ago from Asia, and coyotes were sort of the
small dog on the block and got beat up a lot.
They began adapting and evolving a suite of traits that
made it possible for them to survive persecution and harassment.
And the primary trait that most of us know is
that when they're harassed and when the number of coyotes
begins to drop in a landscape, they tend to have
larger litters and they're able to get more of their
pups up to adulthood because there are more food resources available.
But another thing that they do is probably the more
important one. When they're harassed and persecuted, either by wolves
or later by humans, they fall back on an evolutionary
adaptation called fish in fusion. It's a fairly rare ecological adaptation,
biological adaptation that supposedly only nineteen species around the world.
Human beings happen to be one of the nineteen who
also have fish in fusion. Only nineteen species possess this adaptation.
But what it means is you can exist in fusion
form as a pack in the case of coyotes, as
a pack of animals, but you can also do very
well in fission form by breaking the pack apart and
separating as singles and as pairs. And one of the
things that coyotes have done, we've known this since the
nineteen fifties, is in the face of persecution, they go
into fission mode. They scatter as individuals and pairs. And
when they do that, they tend to colonize, and this
is the reason the attempts to wipe them out. In
the western part of the United States, which is where
coyotes were originally adapted, the attempts to wipe them out
with poison in the early twentieth century is what began
to spread them east of the Mississippi River into the South,
into the Northeast, into places like New York and Central
Park and every city basically now in the United States.
Coyotes are now in every state in the Union except
for Hawaii. Delaware and twenty eleven was the last state
that they colonized in the lower forty eight. So they
have this unique ability to survive and that, as I said,
that was very fun to be able to tell this
kind of story in a book, rather than the usual
you know, woe is me, here goes the loss, our
diminution of yet another species. It was very fun to
tell a story of a species that in fact has
survived and does very well even after all of our
attempts to wipe it out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all of our horrifying attempts. Coyote America does paint
a grim picture of like the horrible methods that we used.
I say we like as the royal We obviously wasn't
me or you, but the people who came before us
tried really hard to get rid of them in some
really really upsetting ways. But just to drive this point home,
one of our patrons asked if they are able to
self regulate in this way where they can have more
pups when some members of the community are either killed
or leave for whatever reason. And if you're experiencing issues
with coyotes, or you just for some reason hate coyotes,
I unfortunately know so many people who will kill any
coyote that they see on site. Is it best to
just do nothing at all, because if you kill them,
you will just get more coyotes, which you, in theory
do not want.
Speaker 2: Well, there are several things to say about that. As
for hatred of coyotes. I found a work done in
the nineteen seventies on American attitudes towards sixteen different American
species in terms of whether they liked them or hated them,
and coyotes in the nineteen seventies ranked dead lasts in
that list below cockroaches below, Norway rats. Coyotes were at
the bottom of the list. This, of course, is before
we learned very much about coyotes, and I think that
one of the reasons people kind of reflexively hate them,
and I hate to be the bearer of bad news
to you, is because not necessarily people of the present generations,
but their parents, their grandparents, especially from rural areas, were
essentially indoctrinated and brainwashed by the United States Biological Survey,
which was the agency that was trying to poison coyotes
into oblivion in the twenties, thirties, and forties, because that
agency also released all kinds of articles can newspaper pieces
proclaiming coyotes to be worthy of complete extermination. The arch
predator of our time as one of the articles that
are one of the terms they use, the phrases they use,
and those articles appeared in newspapers, in farm bureau journals,
and magazines, and it was a kind of a brainwashing
by a federal agency of several generations of Americans who
simply bought into the idea that, Okay, I should shoot
or try to kill every single coyote I see, because
coyotes are a threat to everybody and everything all the time.
I actually heard somebody say that one time. Coyotes are
a threat to everybody and everything all the time. I mean,
it's very impressive, particularly when it was based on a
complete lack of scientific evidence whatsoever. Because when all of
these canned stories were coming out in the twenties and thirties,
we had not yet had a single biologist do a
study of what coyotes actually ate, what role they played
in the ecosystem. I mean, it was all done kind
based on the old European folk tradition of you kill
every predator. This is just the way the economy of
domesticated animals works. Every predator has to have a death sentence.
Speaker 3: And it's a kind of a crazy thing that it
takes us until the nineteen sixties, seventies, and eighties to
begin learning enough about these animals that we can go
beyond this sort of death sentence mentality.
Speaker 2: But it actually does take us that long, and for
quite a number of people. Of course, they're still in
the grip of this fifty sixty year old kind of
propaganda that was released back in the thirties. I mean
the animals in fact, when we have studied them closely,
and a biologist named Stan Garrett from Ohio State who
has been studying the coyotes in Chicago for about the
last thirty years. He's demonstrated in his work that coyotes
in cities, basically ninety six to ninety eight percent of
them are good citizens who never have a single bad
encounter with human beings. But just like us, there's a
small percentage of coyotes that get in trouble. In many cases,
they've been fed by humans and they've come to associate
humans with food, so they start hanging out around houses.
They'll run in. If you haven't fed a coyote that
has been habitually fed, they'll sometimes run in and snap
at people and try to bite them on the leg
because they want you to give them food. And so
these are coyotes that obviously have been habituated to humans
and have been trained to associate humans with food. These
are the ones that usually get into trouble. I mean,
these are animals that have known how to coexist with
us for at least ten thousand years, probably thirteen thousand years,
maybe twenty thousand years. They've known how to do it.
All we have to do in the modern age is
learn how to coexist with them. And I mean I
can say living in a state like New Mexico, where
I mean I have coyotes just around me constantly. Here,
I listen to them every night. I saw three trot
through the yard yesterday morning. People who have had a
longer experience in living with them. Understand, you just leave
them alone. There is no point to get finally down
to the specific question that was asked, there's no point
in trying to kill them unless you have one that's
obviously an habitual problem animal. And then of course you
can call wildlife services or some sort of animal control
and you try to target that specific animal. But otherwise
just coexists with them. Their population rises to the level
of the food supply classic ecological terms, it doesn't really
get any larger. You're not in danger of having coyotes
swamp the landscape. So the best thing to do is
to not only coexist with them, but learn to enjoy them.
I mean, I wrote in Coyote America that I thought,
to me, getting to watch coyotes trot by in the
early morning through the yard past the kitchen window while
I'm making coffee. I mean, that's the equivalent of being
out on the Pacific and getting to watch a whale
breach or something. It's one of those marvelous magic moments
that you should appreciate rather than be frightened call the
authorities are run for a gun. Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: And so to touch on your point of most coyotes
are not bad actors. So let's talk about the few
that are, because I know people always have questions about them,
and they're constantly in the news. So you were on
the podcast in Paradise and we spoke to Antonia as well,
and they discussed the case of Kelly Keene, who was
a toddler who was killed by coyote in the eighties.
And then in chapter seven of Coyote America you discussed
the death of Taylor Mitchell and her death was caused
by two coyotes, which we covered on this podcast too.
How often are coyotes even attacking people and is there
a common reason that they would attack someone to this
kind of extent.
Speaker 2: Well, Taylor Mitchell's tragic and unfortunate death. I mean, a
young woman with her whole life in front of her,
goes for a hyak loan in eastern Canada and is
attacked by coyotes. I mean, there were still trying to
figure out what in the world happened. I mean, there's
the most recent speculation I've read is that the coyotes
in that particular area had been used to taking down
larger animals. Yeah, yeah, and she may have presented some
sort of opportunity for animals that had learned how to
do that, and they pulled her down and killed her.
But that is a vanishingly rare thing in the whole
story of coyotes and people in North America. I mean,
it's just so rare that it might be another century
or more before, even given the present size of the
human population, before something like that happens. Coyotes are naturally
curious about humans, and because as I said, they do
tend to hang around our houses and our towns because
of all the rats and mice that are associated with us,
they can easily become tame to the point where you
have to actively keep them wild. You have to make
sure that coyotes think that humans are so weird that
they can't really trust us, and so they have to
be a little bit stand offish when we're around. You
can't let let them think that they can walk by
five feet away and it's fine. So you have to
try to keep them wild. But almost in every incense,
whenever a coyote gets in trouble with people, it's from
one of two things. Either they have been fed and
they are essentially assaulting yards and people in yards to
try to get them to give food to the particular
animal that's become habituated, or it's an episode where a
human walking a dog during the late spring and early
summer when coyotes have pups and are defending their dens,
that the human and the dog get too close. The
coyote will attack the dog to drive it away from
her pups, and when a human tries to intervene in
such an attack, they often get bitten, usually on the
hand or the arm, but those are the by f
are the most common kinds of coyote interactions that result
in an animal actually causing harm. As I have said
before in podcasts like this, I mean I cided early
on in Coyote America, a story from Canada, a country
where there are something like hundreds, three or four hundred
dogs serious dog bites of people every year, and an
average of about three to four coyote bites of people
every year, where the stories about the coyotes are the
ones that are in the media and in the news.
The dog bites stories almost never make the news unless
someone is very seriously hurt or killed, and of course
that happens when dogs attack people, but it's the coyote
stories that tend to attract us. There's something about the
fact that coyotes are wild, as some woman said was
quoted in the New York Times, is saying, what a
coyot was seen running through Central Park? Oh my god.
And it's not even on a leash, And so wild
animals somehow just freak us out in a way that
somehow our domesticated dogs don't.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, it's so funny you say that. You
just reminded me of a video I saw on TikTok
a few weeks ago where I don't know what town
or state it was, but there's this woman screaming at
her neighbor and she's like, you have a coyote as
a pet. You're letting them in our neighborhood. Go back
to your own country. And the guy who's recording it
pans down and he has an Alaskan malamute, And I'm like,
how disassociated from the wild are we that? Like someone
can look at a malamute and be like, well, that's
a coyote.
Speaker 2: That's a coyote. Yeah. Well, as a as the owner
of an Alaskan malamute, I can tell you it's something
that when people see my dog. I've got a year
and a half old Alaskan Malamute named Kishka, and he
is the sweetest, gentlest dog. Amazing. But all you have
to do is walking along a road and you watch
the reactions of people in cars as they go by.
I mean they seem to think you're walking a wolf
along the highway. So yeah, that's the story that doesn't
surprise me, I can tell you.
Speaker 1: So finally wrapping up. So the reason I first heard
of your work was because when I was an undergrad,
I actually did a thesis on how people in Vermont,
because that's where I was based out of felt about
coyotes because there was a lot of debate going on
at the time, like around twenty sixteen twenty seventeen, about
coyote hunting contests, and the PhD candidate student who was
like overseeing my work. His name's Joshua Morse. His entire
PhD was about this topic, like how people felt about
coyotes and how they were managed in the state. The
research protocol for his study was as follows, and he
wanted me to ask you your opinion. So tell us
a story of an interaction you've had with coyote and
why it was meaningful to you.
Speaker 2: I think probably the And I will admit I've had
a lot of coyote interactions over the years, in part
because I've lived primarily in the West and there have
been coyotes everywhere I've lived. But I think the one
that probably was the most meaningful, and it was meaningful
enough that I told the story of it in Coyote
America is about walking a dog, another Alaskan Malamud, a
previous dog companion I had during the time when I
was working on Coyote America. And I was living here
in New Mexico on my place outside town, and there's
a canyon in the backyard, and I was walking this
particular dog. His name was Cody, and Cody and I
were It was in May of the year, and we
were down in the canyon and we had not gone
in a particular direction down canyon while and Cody and
I are walking along and suddenly we began to hear
a coyote bark, and then another coyote begins to bark
on the opposite side of the canyon the stream bed,
and they both came into view, and I recognized them
fairly quickly as young animals, they were probably a year
old from the previous year's litter. And so there was
one kind of a century on the left side of
the stream bed, maybe thirty five or forty feet away,
another one on the right side of the stream bed
about the same distance away, and up ahead of us,
as these two young animals were barking at us, and
Cody actually was not on a leash at the time,
but he was very well trained to voice command, and
so I called him over, and he came over and
sat down beside me and just watched these two coyotes
barking at us. And meanwhile, up in front of us,
from what appeared to be a den or an uprooted tree,
what was very obviously a nursing, full grown female coyote
emerged from out of the uprooted roots of this particular
tree and took a few steps towards us and sat
down and watched. And so what I realized at that
point was that we had wandered into a den area,
and we had encountered two centuries, two young centuries, and
the female who would come out of a den very
clearly had pups in that den. And what we did
was to turn around and start back the other direction.
We started walking back up the canyon, and these two
century animals followed us for more than one hundred and
fifty yards, keeping about the same distance from us, about
twenty five or thirty feet on either side of us.
They walked along and essentially escorted us one hundred and
fifty yards away from this den until finally they were
satisfied that we weren't returning and that we had gone
far enough. And I wanted to tell that story because
and I did tell it in Coyote America, because I
wanted readers to understand that because I talked to enough
people by this time that I realized people would say
things like these animals didn't even run from us, They
just stood there, and when we started walking, they walked
right along beside us. And what I wanted to do
with that story was to make people understand that this
is natural behavior on the part of these animals. They
are protecting their den. You don't need to go call
wildlife services to come wipe them out because they're bold
and they won't run from hum. You don't need to
go get a gun and shoot them. You need to
understand enough about coyote natural history and biology to realize
that this is completely natural behavior. And I think probably
a lot of people by now have begun to understand
that that's natural coyote behavior. But back in twenty fourteen,
when I was working on this book, it had not
come out yet, I thought that I better include that
story because it was a very common tale that I
was hearing from people that these damn coyotes wouldn't even
run away. They followed me, and it made me want
to go kill them or go call wildlife services to
wipe them out, because there's they probably were rabbit. So
what I wanted to convey by telling that story, of course,
was that this in fact is natural behavior and you
just have to know enough about the animals to recognize
it as that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if anything, they were being polite by saying, you've
stepped on our property.
Speaker 2: Please go.
Speaker 1: We'll show you the door.
Speaker 2: We'll show you the door and we will we'll show
you exactly where the door is. We'll follow follow you
along to make sure you hit the right entrance.
Speaker 1: That is awesome. Thank you so much, Dan for doing this.
Where can people find your book Wild New World?
Speaker 2: Well, Wild New World is Uh. It's published by W. W. Norton,
which is a big press in New York, so they
have landed it in pretty much most bookstores around the country.
But of course it's also available on Amazon. So you
can just type Wild New World in, or type my
name Dan Flores in and you'll pull up Wild New World, Coyote, America,
American Serengetti, and a number of other books that I
wrote in former years.
Speaker 1: And I take it you're not a big social media guy,
so where can people go to learn more about you?
Speaker 2: Well, I do have an author site on Amazon, and
when you go to the site for one of the books,
just look for the author site and it provides and
I will admit I haven't updated it in a while,
but it provides a biographical sketch, a little autobiography. I
don't know, it's probably not more than a couple of pages.
But I do enough podcasts and interviews and things that
if you google me you'll find all the kinds of
things that you'd wish to ever know. All that sort
of thing tends to pop up. So, yes, I don't
really do social media, in part because I'm writing full
time these days. I just don't want to expend the
time to do it, but you can pretty easily if
people can pretty easily find my email too, you can
go to the University of Montana, the History department at
the University of Montana, and it will give you my email,
and so if people have a particular question or want
to come, that's an easy way to do it. Awesome.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for doing this, Dan. It's been
a pleasure.
Speaker 2: It's my pleasure, Ashley. Thank you for asking.
Speaker 1: And that was my interview with Dan Flores. We had
quite a few technical issues throughout our talk, and Dan
was so patient and kind as we work through them.
I cannot thank him enough for coming on to talk
with me, and for his patients, and just for being
so wonderful. I know people say like, don't ever beat
your heroes, and this might sound cheesy, but I was
so blown away by just like how down to earth
and nice he was. You can check out the episode
description for links on where to find Dan and his work,
and you can also check out the episode description to
find links to our social media's and our website where
you can buy a merch to support the show. If
you liked this episode or like this podcast, please take
a moment to leave us a five star review wherever
you're listening, and subscribe wherever you're listening. Thank you Josh
Wall for making our new intro and his brother Jesse
Walsh for editing this episode. Thank you all for listening,
and we'll be back in two weeks for the last
episode of twenty twenty four, where we'll be covering some
attacks that have occurred throughout the year that we haven't
had a chance to cover yet. See you then,