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Speaker 1: Welcome to episode eighty nine of Get Out Alive, a

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bi weekly podcast about animal tax why they happen, and

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how we can avoid them. I'm your host, Ashley, and

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today's episode is with a guest who I have admired

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for years now, since I first read his work as

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an undergraduate in college, and I am so excited for

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you all to hear our conversation. Today's episode is really

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about our relationship with wildlife in North America and how

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we humans came to be what we are today. Because

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in this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with

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author Dan Floorries about his book Wild New World, The

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Epic Story of Animals and People in North America. We

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start our conversation broadly go over the history of humans

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in North America, including what animals early humans had to

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contend with when they got here. We then drilled down

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to a species that is a quintessential North American species,

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the coyote, because they really encapsulate how humans in North

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America relate to wildlife. Now, besides Wild New World, Dan

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has authored American Serengetti and the wildly popular Coyote America,

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a book I have referenced quite a bit on this

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podcast already, so if you haven't read Dan's work, I

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highly recommend all of his books. All right, without further ado,

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please enjoy my chat with historian and author Dan Flores.

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Speaker 2: Well, my name is Dan Flores. I currently live in

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Santa Fe, New Mexico, or a few miles outside Santa Fe,

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because I've always liked living outside towns rather than in them.

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But I'm a former professor of primarily the history of

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the American West and the environmental history of the United States.

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I taught at three different universities during my career as

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an academic, but the longest period was at the University

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of Montana in Missoula, Montana. I was there from nineteen

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ninety two to twenty fourteen and held the ab Hammond

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Chair of the History of the American West when I

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was there, So I'm I'm an environmental writer primarily these days.

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I retired early from university work so I could write

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full time. But I obviously spent a lot of my

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career as a historian studying the history of the United

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States and the American West, and that obviously included the

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history of our relationship with the world around us, including animals.

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I actually as an undergraduate, I was an English major,

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and it probably helps explain some of the things that

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I'm interested in and how I write. I tend to

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be intrigued by character and plot development and telling stories,

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and so my books tend to be full of stories,

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some from the past, some from the present, from interviewing people.

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But I'm kind of compelled, I think, by the standard

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things that English majors like to read and write, but

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I do primarily things that have a kind of a

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historical basis. I'm from Louisiana, originally grew up in Louisiana,

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and I mean that's where I first encountered animals like

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coyotes when they were beginning to expand out of the

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West and across the United States. So I've been interested

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in the animal story in America for a long time,

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and a lot of the training that I did to

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become a professor and a writer is sort of geared

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in the direction of writing about animals and explaining our

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relationship to them.

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Speaker 1: So, given your in depth knowledge of evolution and then

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just biology of so many different species, it's always interested

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me that you are labeling yourself like as a historian,

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and that's been primarily your career. What made you head

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towards being a historian rather than being a biologist, or

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was that ever even a question for you?

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Speaker 2: Well, as I said, I began my education because I

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knew from some early point in life, probably when I

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was still in high school, that what I really wanted

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to do was to be a writer. So I started

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out as an English major and only turned to history

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and graduate school. But the kind of history to address

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your question, the kind of history that I trained to

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do and have largely written environmental history, is the sort

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of history that it's not about politics or who wins

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wars or anything like that. It's about the relationship between

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people and the natural world over time. And in order

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to do justice to those kinds of topics, especially in

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teaching about them and writing about them, you really have

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to read a lot of other in a lot of

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other fields. And as a writer, I've always kind of

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been drawn to the idea of whenever I have a question,

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and I have a lot of questions, as I sit

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down and write, I always try to turn to what

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I consider to be the best sources out there, and

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those sources very often are not going to be other

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works in history or certainly not novels from some English professor,

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but they tend to be things that come from paleontology,

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from archaeology, from ecology, from biology, from anthropology, and so

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I've just spent a lot of my career reading in

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a much wider way, I think than most people who

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do liberal arts kinds of things ever read it. And

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so that's why the books tend to have a pretty

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strong scientific element to them. I mean, the Coyote book,

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for example, was a short list finalist for the EO.

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Wilson Prize in Literary Science Writing, for which I was

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very proud, And some of the other books have often

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been best sellers and feels like anthropology and things. So

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I kind of take some pride in the fact that

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the sort of work I have done has appeal to

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people across a broader spectrum. And I think it's because

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I read in a lot of different feels.

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Speaker 1: Oh yeah, So touching on that, you have obviously many

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best selling books, like you know, Coyote, America, American Serengeti.

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But your latest book within the past few years has

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been Wild New World, the epic story of animals and

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people in America. So what led you to write that book,

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and why did you write it when you did.

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Speaker 2: I think I probably view While New World as the

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natural outgrowth of having written Americans, Serengetti, and Coyote America.

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I've written all three of these books since I retired

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from university life and had a chance to sort of

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turn back to writing for larger audiences and audiences that

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weren't just historians, for example. And so I think of

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Wild New World as a natural outgrowth of those two

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earlier books. But I also know very well that this

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is a book that has been brewing in my mind

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probably for most of my life. And I even tell

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a story fairly early on in Wild New World about

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one of the things that I think set in motion

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the idea of ultimately taking on a project like this,

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and it, I mean, it's actually the oldest memory I

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have from when I was four years old, because when

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I was four, back in Louisiana, I had my first

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little animal companion was a little chicken of the kind

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that you get at feed stores in the spring when

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they are these little yellow chickens for sale. And so

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my parents had gotten me this little chicken and it was,

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you know, just a few weeks old, and it was,

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as I said, my first animal companion, and this little

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chicken and I used to play this chase game through

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the house, and the chicken would run through the house

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and I would go running as a four year old

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after chasing it. And one day, as a little clumsy

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four year old, I missed a beat and stepped on

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my chicken and I killed.

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Speaker 1: Oh God.

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Speaker 2: So the story that I tell in Will New World

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about sort of the beginnings of a project like this

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had to do with what happened when my mother and

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I went out into the backyard and buried this little chicken.

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Were both standing over this little gravesite, you know, sobbing away,

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and I turn to my mother and look up at

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her and I say, so, Mom, I get to have

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chicky again in heaven, don't I. Oh. And my mother,

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who is a good Southern Methodist who channels the standard

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Judaeo Christian idea about human exceptionalism compared to all other life,

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and who also kind of had a reputation for all

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our life giving the unvarnished version of things even to

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a four year old, looked down at me and said,

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why no, honey, You're made in the image of God,

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and you have an everlasting soul and when you die,

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you'll get to go to heaven. But Chicky is just

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an animal. Animals don't have souls, they don't go to heaven.

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So I'm afraid this is the last time you're going

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to see Chicky. You can imagine when you're four years

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old that a story like that sort of lingers in

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your head and breaks your heart. Yeah, it breaks your heart.

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And it also didn't ring true even as a little kid.

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That did not seem to me a proper way for

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the world to work. And so that sort of story

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is clearly the kind of story that stays with you

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when you're a child. And I really think when I

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sat down and began working on Wile New World, and

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that story came immediately to mind, and I began tracking

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back through my life experiences, I realized that that had

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influenced me for most of my life and probably led

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me to ultimately writing Wile New World. It clearly took

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quite a while to finally get to it, but it

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was a story that was such a powerful and emotional one,

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which is probably why I remember it as a first memory.

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That it influenced a lot of my life's course. I

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became suspicious of the idea that humans were as exceptional

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as the Judeo Christian tradition tried to make us believe

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we were. So that was no question, a kind of

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an emotional reason for wanting to write a book like this,

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but I will admit as I sat down and began

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doing the research for a while New World. Another reason

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had to do with my sense that Americans, most Americans

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at least, did not know this story about American history.

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They didn't know a lot of people obviously don't know

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the big history story of North America about how we

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acquired our be shary of animals and how humans arrived

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here twenty thousand plus years ago and began interacting with

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those animals, but we didn't don't really know the more

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recent story. I mean, this is a book that tracks

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down to twenty twenty two, right down to the modern period.

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And I became aware as I was doing talks out

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of it before I finished the book, that a lot

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of what I was telling people was not something that

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they knew, that they understood. This is the kind of

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history that Americans don't really know. If we know history

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of any sort like this, I think pretty much what

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we understand about the past. With respect to animals, most

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people kind of know a shorthand cocktail party version of

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once there were millions of buffalo here, our national mammal

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once was here, in the millions, and at some point,

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for some reason, there were only a thousand of them left.

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And that seems to be about as much as most

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people understand about this story.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like we weirdly know about the Big Bang,

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and then like Pangaea, and then we know that Europeans

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came and messed everything up, But there's so much in

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between that not a lot of people know about. So

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your new book, it will not obviously like brand new,

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but like new within the newest to you within the

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past few years. Wild New World is a great recollection

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of this history, both how we humans migrated here and

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evolved biologically here, but also culturally. So what did North

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America look like to the first Americans that crossed over

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from Asia.

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Speaker 2: We don't know, probably for certain, how early humans may

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have found North America, but it looks as if from

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a set of footprints that were just recently discovered in

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southern New Mexico and White Sands National Park that feature

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footprints that stepped on grass seeds that has been radiocarbon

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dated to twenty two thousand years ago. That humans may

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have gotten here probably by coming down the coastline and

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then going into the interior as long ago as prior

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to the glacial maximum of the Wisconsin Ice Age, and

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so twenty two thousand years ago is a long time.

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My guess is with respect to that this brand new

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world that humans first saw here probably looked something like

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the world in Eastern Asia and Siberia that they had

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come from. In other words, that was the suite of

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Pleistocene animals like mammoths and macedons and sabertoothed cats. And

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of course they also would have encountered new creatures that

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had involved in South America and that had crossed the

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Isthmus of Panama into North America, like ground sloths, giant

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ground sloths. So those would have been new. But it

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would have been a world that I think humans were

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very deliberately seeking out. I argue in Wild New World

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that what compelled us to leave our evolutionary home in

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Africa and moved first to the Middle East and then

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into Europe and then into Asia, and ultimately to discover

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North and South America, which were the last continents on

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Earth that humans found. Was this desire to reach places

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that other people hadn't gotten to already. And the primary

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reason for that is that humans at this point in

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our history had gone for forty thousand generations as hunters

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of animals, and we were looking for animals that had

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never before been hunted because those animals, in a biological

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theory called biological first contact, did not recognize humans as

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predators and as a danger. And so this movement of

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people out of Africa, into Europe, into Asia, and finally

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into the Americas was propelled by this idea of trying

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to find populations of animals that were much easier to

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hunt because they had never encountered humans before. And I

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think in North America what we found was kind of

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the long lost Eden of the animals, a continent where

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indigenous evolution and by that I mean animals that had

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evolved here, specifically in North America, plus migrations from other

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parts of the world. Because the land bridges between North

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America and Eurasia, for example, had earlier allowed animals like

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mammoths to and bison to arrive in North America, we

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really were encountering this ultimate American Eden of animals, and

254
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it included not only elephants, mammoths of several different species,

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masdons farther east, browsing masdons in the eastern deciduous forests.

256
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It included predators of animals like that like saber toothed cats.

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It included all manner of grazing creatures. Bison had crossed

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from Asia about four hundred thousand years ago, and those

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animals had also spread across the western parts of North

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America in several different forms, including giant versions of bison.

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Bison Antiquis in particular was the giant version that people discovered.

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And again there were the predators of those species. We had,

263
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for example, a hunting high a fast hunting hyena that

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had evolved in North America. We had an American cheetah

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that ran down not just bison calves, but the horses

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that had evolved specifically in North America. And of course

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there were indigenous creatures like prong horn antelope that creatures

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like cheetahs also hunted. So it was a world that

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I think the easiest way for modern people to understand

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it is that it was a world places see in

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America was a world that looked a lot like eastern

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or southern Africa, like the Serengetti or the Massaimara, with

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elephants still in place, with all manner of herd animals,

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big herd animals, and the predators that were associated with them.

275
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So it was kind of a version, an American version

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of the African Serengetti, and it would have been a

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very very compelling place for these first humans. I mean,

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the first humans, as I said, probably got here more

279
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than twenty thousand years ago. I particularly think that the

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human population never was very large that long ago. But

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when the glacial North began to break up about sixteen

282
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thousand years ago and we got an ice free corridor

283
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that stretched from Siberia across the Bearing straight down through

284
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Alaska and into what is now Alberta and Montana, at

285
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that point we began to get a large scale migration

286
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of people who create the first coast to coast culture

287
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in North America, which is known as the Clovis culture.

288
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It's one I mean, we hardly even remember it or

289
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know about it, but it was a culture that actually

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lasted longer thirteen thousand years ago than the United States

291
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has lasted at the present moment.

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Speaker 1: So I think one of the main points of your

293
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book that I like that really stuck with me was

294
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how much animals in America actually left and came back.

295
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So specifically, you make the point that there are two

296
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animals that are distinctly American that we know of today

297
00:20:16,799 --> 00:20:19,279
that we don't think of that way. That's the camel

298
00:20:19,440 --> 00:20:24,559
and the horse. So can you explain, like specifically with horses,

299
00:20:25,000 --> 00:20:27,960
where did they go, why did they come back, or

300
00:20:28,440 --> 00:20:32,039
like what how did they get back to North America eventually,

301
00:20:32,359 --> 00:20:33,920
and why do we think of them? As you know,

302
00:20:33,960 --> 00:20:36,680
obviously there's the whole debate about like feral horses and whatnot.

303
00:20:36,920 --> 00:20:40,079
Speaker 2: There is, indeed, and some of that debate I have

304
00:20:40,359 --> 00:20:46,759
always been suspicious about comes from not a sound understanding

305
00:20:47,000 --> 00:20:51,759
of horse evolution because, as you just mentioned, two of

306
00:20:51,759 --> 00:20:55,200
the animals that evolved in North America. And so what

307
00:20:55,279 --> 00:20:58,039
I do with While New World is the starting point

308
00:20:58,240 --> 00:21:01,839
is the aftermath of the chick Saloub impact. That's the

309
00:21:01,920 --> 00:21:05,680
asteroid that strikes in the Yucatan and wipes out the

310
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dinosaurs and ushers in the age of mammals. So I

311
00:21:09,759 --> 00:21:13,640
basically start the book sixty six million years ago with

312
00:21:13,839 --> 00:21:20,960
the beginning of the recreation of North America's ecologies and wildlife.

313
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And among the early examples of evolution in North America

314
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are the horses, which evolve the beginnings of horse evolution

315
00:21:31,839 --> 00:21:36,480
go back fifty six million years in North American history,

316
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and camels, which began evolving in North America about forty

317
00:21:41,359 --> 00:21:44,640
five million years ago. And so those two animals, which

318
00:21:44,880 --> 00:21:48,039
we now don't even think of as being American animals,

319
00:21:48,599 --> 00:21:53,680
actually are part of millions upon millions of years of

320
00:21:53,759 --> 00:21:57,799
North American evolution. They both and this is, you know,

321
00:21:58,079 --> 00:22:04,119
quite a mystery about North American environmental history. Both of

322
00:22:04,400 --> 00:22:10,839
those evolutionary animals, horses and camels, which of course create

323
00:22:10,960 --> 00:22:15,319
many different species and even genuses over time, are going

324
00:22:15,359 --> 00:22:19,759
to disappear in North America between about eight thousand and

325
00:22:19,960 --> 00:22:23,160
ten thousand years ago. It's one of the mysteries of

326
00:22:23,200 --> 00:22:28,400
the Pleisocene extinctions. But in the meantime, as land bridges

327
00:22:28,480 --> 00:22:33,200
had developed the Bearing Strait, for example, between North America

328
00:22:33,240 --> 00:22:39,000
and Asia, camels and horses had both migrated across the

329
00:22:39,039 --> 00:22:43,559
Bearing Land Bridge going westward, going in the opposite direction

330
00:22:44,039 --> 00:22:48,720
than we think humans came and going across the bearing

331
00:22:48,799 --> 00:22:53,680
Land Bridge took camels ultimately into Northern Africa and the

332
00:22:53,720 --> 00:22:58,160
Middle East, and it took horses into places like Eurasia

333
00:22:58,160 --> 00:23:02,079
and Africa. And in Africa, of course, our American horses

334
00:23:02,160 --> 00:23:05,880
became zebras and quaggas. Now, the real mystery of all

335
00:23:05,960 --> 00:23:12,000
this is that our original North American horses and camels

336
00:23:12,119 --> 00:23:16,039
one so similar to today's camels from northern Africa that

337
00:23:16,119 --> 00:23:18,559
we refer to it as yesterday's camel. I mean, it

338
00:23:18,559 --> 00:23:22,400
looks almost identical, and the horses look almost identical ten

339
00:23:22,440 --> 00:23:26,240
thousand years ago to modern horses as well. They became

340
00:23:26,359 --> 00:23:30,839
extinct in the continent of their origin, North America, while

341
00:23:31,000 --> 00:23:37,559
surviving in Asia, the Middle East and Africa. And how

342
00:23:37,759 --> 00:23:42,359
horses got back here, of course, is that they ultimately

343
00:23:42,440 --> 00:23:47,400
are going to be domesticated by Europeans about four to

344
00:23:47,480 --> 00:23:50,720
five thousand years ago, right on the eve of their

345
00:23:50,759 --> 00:23:54,200
disappearance in Europe, by the way, and Europe and Asia

346
00:23:54,559 --> 00:23:58,400
horses were domesticated at almost the last minute, and then

347
00:23:58,519 --> 00:24:02,160
they were returned to North America five hundred years ago

348
00:24:02,240 --> 00:24:06,240
as Europeans discovered the continent and began bringing all of

349
00:24:06,240 --> 00:24:10,440
their domesticated animals hogs and chickens and cattle and goats

350
00:24:10,519 --> 00:24:14,680
and sheep and horses over to colonize in North America.

351
00:24:15,119 --> 00:24:17,200
And so one of the reasons horses have done so

352
00:24:17,400 --> 00:24:20,319
well and wild horses have become something of a problem

353
00:24:20,640 --> 00:24:26,000
in modern American life is because they were preadapted because

354
00:24:26,039 --> 00:24:29,640
they had evolved here to North American conditions, and so

355
00:24:30,119 --> 00:24:34,720
once release, once they got loose into the American West,

356
00:24:34,839 --> 00:24:38,759
horses very quickly and basically a century and a half

357
00:24:38,960 --> 00:24:44,440
time reoccupied their old grazing Pleistocene nish in North America.

358
00:24:45,160 --> 00:24:47,279
The problem in the modern era, of course, is that

359
00:24:48,240 --> 00:24:52,400
their predators didn't survive into the modern world, and so

360
00:24:52,559 --> 00:24:57,000
we're left with the horses themselves. Without their predators, are

361
00:24:57,039 --> 00:25:01,759
certainly not enough gray wolves and cougar today to control

362
00:25:01,839 --> 00:25:05,880
their populations, and that's become something of an issue. Whose

363
00:25:05,960 --> 00:25:08,160
roots gobac all the way to the pless scene.

364
00:25:09,839 --> 00:25:13,039
Speaker 1: So going back to the Plesis scene when people first

365
00:25:13,079 --> 00:25:17,039
came over and talking about the Clovis people, what kinds

366
00:25:17,079 --> 00:25:20,319
of weapons or tools did the early humans have to

367
00:25:20,359 --> 00:25:22,119
not only defend themselves from the animals that we were

368
00:25:22,119 --> 00:25:25,039
talking about a bit before, but also to hunt these

369
00:25:25,279 --> 00:25:27,720
large animals to the point of extinction.

370
00:25:27,440 --> 00:25:30,440
Speaker 2: For some of them. As I mentioned a couple of

371
00:25:30,480 --> 00:25:34,640
minutes ago, when humans got to North America, and including

372
00:25:34,680 --> 00:25:39,480
the Clovis people, who we think arrived sometime around thirteen

373
00:25:39,559 --> 00:25:45,119
thousand years ago or a little earlier, they had an

374
00:25:45,160 --> 00:25:50,960
economy that had been honed by between forty and forty

375
00:25:50,960 --> 00:25:56,920
five thousand generations of hunters of people who had existed

376
00:25:57,000 --> 00:26:02,079
by hunting animals. When the Clovis people arrived in North America,

377
00:26:02,160 --> 00:26:06,640
for example, humans had not begun to domesticate plants or

378
00:26:06,720 --> 00:26:10,839
to domesticate animals anywhere around the world. So this was

379
00:26:10,880 --> 00:26:14,440
an arrival that took place before the age of the

380
00:26:14,480 --> 00:26:20,319
agricultural revolution. But that forty to forty five thousand generations

381
00:26:20,359 --> 00:26:25,680
of hunting ability and skill meant that when the Clovis

382
00:26:25,680 --> 00:26:31,000
people get here, they are going to be consummate professionals

383
00:26:31,599 --> 00:26:36,200
in knowing how to hunt and kill animals as large

384
00:26:36,240 --> 00:26:40,400
as mammos. And what they brought with them was a

385
00:26:40,599 --> 00:26:45,720
tool technology, a liithic technology based on flint tools. They

386
00:26:45,720 --> 00:26:50,720
had about eighty to eighty five different flint tools, including

387
00:26:51,240 --> 00:26:55,000
a spear tip, a four to five inch and in

388
00:26:55,039 --> 00:26:58,440
some cases when they were just made for ceremonial purposes.

389
00:26:58,920 --> 00:27:04,720
Foot long lithic spear points called Clovis points naturally today

390
00:27:05,559 --> 00:27:10,680
that had a slight flute on either side at the base,

391
00:27:11,319 --> 00:27:18,200
which solved an ancient problem for attaching flint. Sharp flint

392
00:27:18,200 --> 00:27:22,279
tools to the end of wooden spears are at atul

393
00:27:22,359 --> 00:27:29,720
darts because that flute chipped into the point enabled the

394
00:27:29,759 --> 00:27:35,720
secure attachment of a wooden shaft to the point itself.

395
00:27:36,000 --> 00:27:39,799
And so the Clovis point, which by the way, is

396
00:27:39,839 --> 00:27:43,920
not found in Siberia or anywhere in Eurasia. It's only

397
00:27:44,000 --> 00:27:47,319
found in North America. There are some similar points in

398
00:27:47,359 --> 00:27:51,720
Western Europe, but nothing quite like the Clovis point, was

399
00:27:52,119 --> 00:27:57,400
an adaptation, evidently to their entry into this New World,

400
00:27:57,480 --> 00:28:02,279
North American landscape with all of it intact populations of animals,

401
00:28:02,319 --> 00:28:07,960
and they were superb hunters of these big creatures. I

402
00:28:08,079 --> 00:28:12,799
tell a story in While New World from two archaeological

403
00:28:13,279 --> 00:28:18,319
sites in southern Arizona of a band of Clovis people.

404
00:28:18,640 --> 00:28:22,000
We don't know how many there were, but our suspicion

405
00:28:22,160 --> 00:28:26,799
is that bands of Clovis people probably number somewhere between

406
00:28:26,920 --> 00:28:30,160
about thirty people and maybe as many as fifty or sixty.

407
00:28:30,839 --> 00:28:34,039
But a group of them, save thirty or thirty five

408
00:28:34,240 --> 00:28:39,400
in number, surrounded at a watering hole near the Santa

409
00:28:39,440 --> 00:28:44,160
Cruz River south of today's Tucson a herd of mammoths

410
00:28:44,200 --> 00:28:50,759
with a bull, a cow, and fourteen young mammoths, calves

411
00:28:51,240 --> 00:28:58,480
and yearlings. That band of Clovis hunters killed every single

412
00:28:58,680 --> 00:29:03,000
one of the young animals, all fourteen of them, each

413
00:29:03,079 --> 00:29:08,720
one of them with a single point embedded into their bodies.

414
00:29:09,519 --> 00:29:15,519
And then, in separate archaeological finds a few miles away,

415
00:29:16,079 --> 00:29:22,119
archaeologists found the bull and the cow from that particular

416
00:29:22,200 --> 00:29:26,599
group of mammos. The bull had two Clovis points in

417
00:29:26,640 --> 00:29:30,880
his body and he had run about eight miles before expiring,

418
00:29:31,359 --> 00:29:35,000
and the cow, who had fought to protect the young,

419
00:29:35,240 --> 00:29:39,480
obviously had eight Clovis points in her body, and she

420
00:29:39,680 --> 00:29:43,000
was about four miles away from where all those young

421
00:29:43,119 --> 00:29:45,920
that she had been trying to protect had died. In

422
00:29:45,960 --> 00:29:51,079
other words, this is a kill of an entire herd

423
00:29:51,359 --> 00:29:55,920
of mammos, very very large, larger than Africaan or Asian

424
00:29:56,279 --> 00:30:01,039
elephants today, and every single one one of those animals

425
00:30:01,160 --> 00:30:05,559
ended up being killed in that particular attack. These were

426
00:30:05,839 --> 00:30:11,680
people who were absolutely professional at hunting big creatures, and

427
00:30:12,519 --> 00:30:18,599
that's probably one of the explanations for why mammoths, for example,

428
00:30:18,759 --> 00:30:22,240
and quite a number of other of the large plesscene

429
00:30:22,319 --> 00:30:27,559
animals of North America don't survive the advent of hunters

430
00:30:27,640 --> 00:30:31,000
like the Clovis and later the fulsome people who follow

431
00:30:31,079 --> 00:30:33,920
them who are sort of specialists in hunting these large

432
00:30:33,920 --> 00:30:37,799
species of bison and so in Wildly World, I mean,

433
00:30:38,359 --> 00:30:41,599
as I said, this is a book that covers from

434
00:30:41,680 --> 00:30:45,160
sixty six million years ago down to the present. I mean,

435
00:30:45,319 --> 00:30:48,680
naturally enough, we know a lot more about the years

436
00:30:48,720 --> 00:30:51,519
from the time Europeans arrived five hundred years ago to

437
00:30:51,559 --> 00:30:54,480
the present, and so three fourths of my book is

438
00:30:54,559 --> 00:30:58,279
essentially about the period from fifteen hundred down to today.

439
00:30:58,920 --> 00:31:02,200
But I try to do justice to these early periods

440
00:31:02,279 --> 00:31:06,039
as much as I possibly can, and I wanted to

441
00:31:06,079 --> 00:31:09,319
do justice to the arrival of people in America and

442
00:31:09,400 --> 00:31:12,799
what sort of effect they had on the creatures that

443
00:31:12,839 --> 00:31:17,000
were here. And what I strongly suspect is that while

444
00:31:17,079 --> 00:31:21,400
they probably didn't completely wipe out every single, for example,

445
00:31:21,519 --> 00:31:24,720
mammoth that was in North America, very likely for a

446
00:31:24,720 --> 00:31:29,680
lot of these big places scene animals, groundsloss mammos many others.

447
00:31:30,279 --> 00:31:36,079
They drove them into isolated pockets where the populations of

448
00:31:36,119 --> 00:31:40,599
mammosay were separated from one another, couldn't exchange their genes,

449
00:31:41,119 --> 00:31:44,599
and as we know from a population of mammos that

450
00:31:44,880 --> 00:31:48,799
died on an island in the Bearing Sea, they lasted

451
00:31:48,839 --> 00:31:51,480
down to four thousand years ago, whereas most of the

452
00:31:51,480 --> 00:31:55,359
mamos on the continent died around eleven thousand to ten

453
00:31:55,440 --> 00:31:58,279
thousand years ago. But we had a population on an

454
00:31:58,319 --> 00:32:01,200
island in the Bearing Sea that lasts down to four

455
00:32:01,240 --> 00:32:05,920
thousand years ago, but without a sufficient ad mixture of

456
00:32:06,000 --> 00:32:11,920
genetic diversity, those animals ultimately died from an inability to reproduce.

457
00:32:12,000 --> 00:32:15,559
They simply didn't have a sufficient amount of genetic diversity

458
00:32:15,920 --> 00:32:18,680
to continue on. And I sort of think that may

459
00:32:18,720 --> 00:32:21,680
have been what happened on the mainland too, that humans,

460
00:32:22,039 --> 00:32:25,839
while not killing every single animal, they drove these populations

461
00:32:25,880 --> 00:32:29,680
into disparate areas where they couldn't exchange genes and ended

462
00:32:29,759 --> 00:32:30,920
up dying out that way.

463
00:32:31,640 --> 00:32:34,640
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think you do a really good job at

464
00:32:34,680 --> 00:32:38,720
doing these early people justice. Especially something I hadn't really

465
00:32:38,759 --> 00:32:44,680
considered is that the advent of like the Clovis technology

466
00:32:45,240 --> 00:32:48,519
allowed people to have so much distance or more distance

467
00:32:48,559 --> 00:32:51,119
from these animals, they weren't sustaining as much like life

468
00:32:51,119 --> 00:32:54,200
threatening damage. And you talk about how the Neanderthals they

469
00:32:54,200 --> 00:32:57,960
were more like hand to hand and the damage that

470
00:32:58,000 --> 00:33:04,480
they sustained on their skeletons is crazy compared to humans.

471
00:33:05,039 --> 00:33:08,720
Speaker 2: Yeah, it really is. And so I was trying to

472
00:33:09,119 --> 00:33:14,920
obviously do some research into what kind of life Neanderthals

473
00:33:15,160 --> 00:33:19,960
who disappeared about forty two thousand years ago in Europe

474
00:33:20,000 --> 00:33:22,559
and Asia. And of course, as we all know, since

475
00:33:22,640 --> 00:33:26,240
most of us have done enough genetic testing to realize

476
00:33:26,240 --> 00:33:30,880
that we have preserved some Neanderthal genes, and almost all

477
00:33:30,920 --> 00:33:35,319
of us from Western and Northern European backgrounds, we enter

478
00:33:35,440 --> 00:33:42,440
bred with them, but they disappeared, and they disappeared in part,

479
00:33:42,680 --> 00:33:46,000
I think, and I certainly try to provide some examples

480
00:33:46,079 --> 00:33:49,599
of this, because they were engaged in this kind of

481
00:33:50,000 --> 00:33:54,240
hand to hand combat with large animals wild horses, which

482
00:33:54,240 --> 00:33:57,680
of course are very difficult to kill and can be

483
00:33:57,880 --> 00:34:02,400
very dangerous to try to hunt close end mammas obviously,

484
00:34:02,920 --> 00:34:06,799
and the skeletal remains of Neanderthals, of which we have

485
00:34:06,920 --> 00:34:10,719
about seventy or eighty from around the world indicate that

486
00:34:11,159 --> 00:34:14,360
the men in particular, who were probably doing most of

487
00:34:14,360 --> 00:34:18,199
this close end hunting with these large animals, suffered just

488
00:34:18,400 --> 00:34:23,480
incredible injuries, eyes being knocked out, broken thigh bones. I mean,

489
00:34:23,519 --> 00:34:25,920
the thigh bone is the strongest bone in the human body.

490
00:34:26,239 --> 00:34:30,039
And there are several Neanderthal skeletons that show broken thigh bones,

491
00:34:30,079 --> 00:34:35,159
broken arms, all sorts of sort of horrific injuries. And

492
00:34:35,280 --> 00:34:40,079
what happened as time went on is as technology improved,

493
00:34:40,239 --> 00:34:43,840
one of the motives for improving technology. And by the

494
00:34:43,880 --> 00:34:46,840
time you get to the Fulsome people, for example in

495
00:34:47,519 --> 00:34:50,440
North America, and these are the people who immediately follow

496
00:34:50,519 --> 00:34:53,719
the Clovis folks and the people I mentioned a few

497
00:34:53,719 --> 00:34:56,480
minutes ago. I start the book in fact, with the

498
00:34:56,920 --> 00:35:00,559
visiting the Fulsome Sight in New Mexico. These are people

499
00:35:00,559 --> 00:35:05,239
who specialize in hunting giant extinct bison. Those people were

500
00:35:05,360 --> 00:35:09,320
using at adults, and that enables you to stand even

501
00:35:09,519 --> 00:35:13,400
farther back than with a spear, so that you could

502
00:35:13,480 --> 00:35:17,719
actually throw a dart with great force at these animals.

503
00:35:18,039 --> 00:35:22,840
And ultimately the bow obviously, which is not invented for

504
00:35:23,119 --> 00:35:27,519
another several thousand years, but quickly adopted by people around

505
00:35:27,519 --> 00:35:30,280
the world because that enables you to stand back even

506
00:35:30,400 --> 00:35:34,599
farther and not risk these very close in encounters with

507
00:35:34,719 --> 00:35:38,119
animals that can clearly do great damage to human beings

508
00:35:38,199 --> 00:35:41,840
are easily kill us. Yeah.

509
00:35:41,880 --> 00:35:44,760
Speaker 1: So, of course, like we've been talking about, humans existed

510
00:35:44,719 --> 00:35:47,880
in North America for quite some time before European settlement.

511
00:35:48,320 --> 00:35:51,079
And despite some of those large mammals that perished at

512
00:35:51,119 --> 00:35:52,519
the end of the place to see, like the short

513
00:35:52,559 --> 00:35:57,159
faced bear and obviously mastodons, things like that, things changed

514
00:35:57,559 --> 00:36:01,880
when Europeans arrived. So can you, like briefly because obviously

515
00:36:01,960 --> 00:36:04,840
a lot happened, but paint a picture of like, once

516
00:36:04,880 --> 00:36:09,000
Europeans arrived here, how did the flora and fauna of

517
00:36:09,039 --> 00:36:10,239
North America change?

518
00:36:11,800 --> 00:36:16,679
Speaker 2: So I attempt to do in a transition chapter between

519
00:36:16,880 --> 00:36:21,840
Clovis fulsom the Pleisoscene world and the coming of Europeans.

520
00:36:21,880 --> 00:36:24,400
I do a chapter in Wold New World. It's called

521
00:36:25,480 --> 00:36:29,239
Ravens and Coyotes America. And I tried to do and

522
00:36:29,280 --> 00:36:32,199
this was pretty daunting because nobody else had tried to

523
00:36:32,239 --> 00:36:35,360
do anything like this. I tried to tell this ten

524
00:36:35,440 --> 00:36:41,599
thousand year story of what happens and why it happens

525
00:36:41,960 --> 00:36:44,519
from the end of the pleaci scene down to the

526
00:36:44,559 --> 00:36:47,519
coming of Europeans. And the reason it's an important story

527
00:36:47,599 --> 00:36:52,119
is because Native people in that ten thousand year span,

528
00:36:53,360 --> 00:36:57,400
perhaps having learned the lessons of the loss of so

529
00:36:57,480 --> 00:37:02,320
many animals during the Plecocene, Native people managed to preserve

530
00:37:02,480 --> 00:37:07,239
the biodiversity of North America for ten thousand years before

531
00:37:07,639 --> 00:37:10,719
Europeans come. In that ten thousand year period, I could

532
00:37:10,719 --> 00:37:15,840
only find the example of one extinction. There was a

533
00:37:15,880 --> 00:37:20,119
flightless sea duck on the Pacific coast that finally was

534
00:37:20,239 --> 00:37:23,920
hunted to extinction by about twenty five hundred years ago.

535
00:37:24,400 --> 00:37:28,239
But I couldn't find any other examples of extinctions in

536
00:37:28,320 --> 00:37:32,239
that ten thousand year period before the arrival of Europeans,

537
00:37:32,840 --> 00:37:36,480
and of course I had to grapple with why this

538
00:37:36,760 --> 00:37:39,880
happened the way it did, and there are several reasons.

539
00:37:39,960 --> 00:37:44,400
One is that the agricultural revolution doesn't arrive in North

540
00:37:44,400 --> 00:37:48,679
America until six or seven thousand years after it does

541
00:37:48,800 --> 00:37:51,400
in the Old World, and that means that people are

542
00:37:51,440 --> 00:37:57,320
existing as hutter gatherer populations in much lower populations, and

543
00:37:57,440 --> 00:38:01,320
so North America never acquires a population that goes over

544
00:38:01,440 --> 00:38:05,480
five million people during that ten thousand year period. And that,

545
00:38:05,559 --> 00:38:08,920
of course is one of the reasons that it's possible

546
00:38:08,960 --> 00:38:12,960
to preserve the biodiversity of the continent with a relatively

547
00:38:13,000 --> 00:38:17,920
low population of people. Another reason, though, I think is

548
00:38:18,440 --> 00:38:23,000
crucial to this, is that Native people preserved what I

549
00:38:23,039 --> 00:38:29,840
suspect is probably an old, original religious idea that humans

550
00:38:29,960 --> 00:38:34,360
are not really exceptional compared to other creatures, that other

551
00:38:34,440 --> 00:38:38,599
creatures in fact are our kin, and so they had

552
00:38:38,679 --> 00:38:43,840
religious traditions and ceremonies they performed that were intended to

553
00:38:44,079 --> 00:38:49,039
continue to express this idea that humans and all the

554
00:38:49,079 --> 00:38:52,360
other creatures around them, including the animals that they hunted,

555
00:38:52,880 --> 00:38:57,440
were kin, were part of a network. And I think

556
00:38:57,639 --> 00:39:04,519
that sort of respect and traditional kinship, kind of longstanding

557
00:39:05,159 --> 00:39:10,360
religion helped Native people avoid some of the excesses that

558
00:39:10,400 --> 00:39:13,760
were about to take place once Europeans arrived with a

559
00:39:13,920 --> 00:39:18,880
very different kind of ideological bent. Native people, for example,

560
00:39:19,320 --> 00:39:22,920
although they lived for ten thousand years with billions of

561
00:39:23,000 --> 00:39:28,039
passenger pigeons, they had all sorts of taboos about how

562
00:39:28,079 --> 00:39:31,440
you hunted passenger pigeons. You didn't kill them on the nests,

563
00:39:31,840 --> 00:39:34,920
for example. You tried to make sure that the birds

564
00:39:34,920 --> 00:39:38,920
were able to breed and preserve new generations, and I

565
00:39:39,039 --> 00:39:41,559
tell quite a number of stories like that in this

566
00:39:41,599 --> 00:39:44,559
particular chapter, because, as I said, I was trying to

567
00:39:44,559 --> 00:39:49,199
grapple with how it was possible to preserve the biological

568
00:39:49,239 --> 00:39:52,800
diversity of the continent for that long. And then five

569
00:39:52,880 --> 00:39:57,360
hundred years ago Europeans began to arrive. And in order

570
00:39:57,400 --> 00:40:02,440
to understand European columns, you have to go back to

571
00:40:02,639 --> 00:40:06,360
look at Europe over the past ten or eleven thousand years,

572
00:40:07,000 --> 00:40:10,519
because what had happened at the end of the Pleisocene,

573
00:40:10,599 --> 00:40:14,079
and Europe lost all of its big animals too. All

574
00:40:14,199 --> 00:40:19,360
the mammoths and masdons and rhinos and steppe lions and

575
00:40:19,440 --> 00:40:22,559
on and on, all were hunted out and killed in Europe,

576
00:40:23,039 --> 00:40:26,159
just as they were in North America. But in the

577
00:40:26,199 --> 00:40:33,639
wake of the Pleisocene, following this loss of faunnel availability,

578
00:40:34,039 --> 00:40:36,639
in order to carry on a hunting and gathering lifestyle

579
00:40:36,880 --> 00:40:39,960
and the Old World, which of course had been settled

580
00:40:39,960 --> 00:40:44,760
by people much earlier than the Americas, Europeans had begun

581
00:40:44,800 --> 00:40:49,920
to domesticate animals and plants, and so they had when

582
00:40:49,960 --> 00:40:52,440
they came to North America five hundred years ago. They

583
00:40:52,440 --> 00:40:58,039
had like ten thousand years of experience domesticating wild cattle

584
00:40:58,239 --> 00:41:04,800
and horses and hogs and sheep and goats and chickens,

585
00:41:05,679 --> 00:41:10,719
and brought with them this tradition of living not just

586
00:41:10,880 --> 00:41:14,840
with crop plants, for example, with weed and barley and

587
00:41:14,880 --> 00:41:18,559
so forth, but also with domesticated animals, which they brought

588
00:41:18,599 --> 00:41:21,679
along with them. One of the things that does, of course,

589
00:41:21,800 --> 00:41:28,840
is that it turns predators into an enemy of your economy. Meanwhile,

590
00:41:28,840 --> 00:41:32,960
in North America, without any domesticated creatures other than wild

591
00:41:33,000 --> 00:41:38,119
turkeys and occasionally wild ducks, North America native people had

592
00:41:38,159 --> 00:41:42,519
never developed this kind of animosity towards, say, coyotes or

593
00:41:42,800 --> 00:41:47,559
wolves or mountain lions that Europeans had when they arrived.

594
00:41:48,039 --> 00:41:51,840
Europeans also brought with them a different religious tradition, one

595
00:41:51,840 --> 00:41:54,599
that came out of the Middle East, the Judeo Christian

596
00:41:54,639 --> 00:41:57,599
tradition that we're all familiar with, the one that my

597
00:41:57,760 --> 00:42:00,599
mother was channeling when she told me that I was

598
00:42:00,639 --> 00:42:03,280
not going to get to see Chicky in heaven because

599
00:42:03,360 --> 00:42:07,840
animals don't have souls. Because the Judeo Christian tradition taught

600
00:42:08,119 --> 00:42:12,719
us that humans were exceptional from everything else. We were

601
00:42:12,760 --> 00:42:17,000
the only creatures made in the image of God, the

602
00:42:17,039 --> 00:42:21,480
only ones that had souls and would go to everlasting Heaven,

603
00:42:21,960 --> 00:42:24,639
and all the other animals. And this is right in

604
00:42:24,679 --> 00:42:27,679
the Book of Genesis, in the New Testament or the

605
00:42:27,719 --> 00:42:33,119
Old Testament. The Book of Genesis says quite openly, all

606
00:42:33,280 --> 00:42:37,199
other creatures are made for you to use. They are

607
00:42:37,440 --> 00:42:41,199
here for you to do with as you wish. And

608
00:42:42,039 --> 00:42:45,280
old worlders then coming to a place in North America

609
00:42:45,320 --> 00:42:50,079
where this wonderful biological diversity of many thousands of years

610
00:42:50,159 --> 00:42:54,599
is still intact, sort of thought that they were coming

611
00:42:54,679 --> 00:42:58,280
to some kind of garden of Eden, especially once their

612
00:42:58,639 --> 00:43:01,920
diseases that they bring with them, which native people have

613
00:43:02,079 --> 00:43:06,199
never been subjected to, are going to wipe out something

614
00:43:06,480 --> 00:43:10,800
like eighty percent of the native population, because when the

615
00:43:10,880 --> 00:43:15,440
native population crashes in the wake of the arrival of

616
00:43:15,480 --> 00:43:20,360
the first Europeans and their disease epidemics, that results in

617
00:43:20,400 --> 00:43:25,039
a release, an ecological release of animals like white tailed

618
00:43:25,079 --> 00:43:28,679
deer and bison and black bears and on and on

619
00:43:28,760 --> 00:43:32,480
and on. And Europeans are going to arrive with the

620
00:43:32,559 --> 00:43:35,840
idea that God has cleared away the native people to

621
00:43:35,960 --> 00:43:39,960
allow them to harvest this bounty. And of course Europeans

622
00:43:40,000 --> 00:43:43,159
bring one other thing with them that native people did

623
00:43:43,199 --> 00:43:46,280
not have, not just the religion that teaches them that

624
00:43:46,320 --> 00:43:49,320
they're exceptional and other animals are created for their use,

625
00:43:50,039 --> 00:43:52,960
but they also bring with them the beginnings of the

626
00:43:53,000 --> 00:43:58,159
global market economy, so that wild animals are regarded basically

627
00:43:58,280 --> 00:44:03,880
as commodities in the market. You can trap beavers and

628
00:44:04,039 --> 00:44:07,599
sell them. You can kill passenger pigeons and sell them.

629
00:44:07,639 --> 00:44:11,519
You can kill white tailed deer, strip their hides off

630
00:44:11,840 --> 00:44:16,320
and sell them. Ultimately, you can kill buffalo and strip

631
00:44:16,400 --> 00:44:19,840
their highs off and cut their tongues off and sell them.

632
00:44:20,199 --> 00:44:24,719
It's all about, in addition to a religious notion that

633
00:44:25,079 --> 00:44:27,760
makes you think that animals are just there for your use,

634
00:44:28,719 --> 00:44:33,119
to suddenly look at animals as a way to make

635
00:44:33,199 --> 00:44:40,000
America a great place by harvesting the wildlife bounty for

636
00:44:40,400 --> 00:44:46,199
economic uplifting. And that's really the story that much of

637
00:44:46,280 --> 00:44:51,719
the middle section last probably two thirds, certainly the middle

638
00:44:51,719 --> 00:44:55,239
two thirds of while New World is about. Is about

639
00:44:55,320 --> 00:44:58,199
these ideas that we bring and the results that they

640
00:44:58,239 --> 00:45:02,039
produce on Sometimes animals that have been here, passenger pigeons

641
00:45:02,039 --> 00:45:06,159
have been here for fifteen million years, they can't survive

642
00:45:06,400 --> 00:45:10,480
three hundred years of Old worlders being here with those

643
00:45:10,519 --> 00:45:11,480
two notions.

644
00:45:12,679 --> 00:45:15,480
Speaker 1: Yeah, and like you said, billions, like with the b

645
00:45:15,719 --> 00:45:18,440
there were billions of them, and in three hundred years

646
00:45:18,440 --> 00:45:22,719
we somehow took that many birds out. It is remarkable

647
00:45:22,800 --> 00:45:23,719
in like the worst way.

648
00:45:24,519 --> 00:45:26,719
Speaker 2: Well it really is. I mean, and you know so.

649
00:45:27,719 --> 00:45:30,159
One of the stories I tell in the book, and

650
00:45:30,199 --> 00:45:33,679
in fact, I even use a line from this story

651
00:45:33,719 --> 00:45:36,400
as the title of one of the chapters, To Know

652
00:45:36,480 --> 00:45:40,920
an Entire Heaven and an Entire Earth is the chapter

653
00:45:41,480 --> 00:45:45,320
that I write about the colonial exploitation of wildlife, because

654
00:45:45,360 --> 00:45:50,199
I conclude that chapter with a passage that Henry David Thureau,

655
00:45:51,039 --> 00:45:54,679
sitting down to his journal, his daily journal in eighteen

656
00:45:54,760 --> 00:46:00,920
fifty seven, is going to write about what he's experiencing

657
00:46:01,079 --> 00:46:05,079
in his America as opposed to what he has read

658
00:46:05,440 --> 00:46:10,280
from the first accounts of the Puritans in Massachusetts and

659
00:46:10,320 --> 00:46:14,199
in New England from only two hundred years before. I mean,

660
00:46:14,239 --> 00:46:18,599
he's reading all these marvelous descriptions of passenger pigeon flights

661
00:46:18,599 --> 00:46:22,760
and huge herds of white tailed deer and black bears

662
00:46:22,880 --> 00:46:27,800
wandering around within sight of these early European colonies, and

663
00:46:27,920 --> 00:46:31,199
just on and on and THROA of course, is interested

664
00:46:31,280 --> 00:46:34,800
in the idea of experiencing all of nature, and he's

665
00:46:35,000 --> 00:46:38,400
very dedicated to the idea of watching the progression of

666
00:46:38,440 --> 00:46:42,320
the spring and how everything happens, all the migrations of

667
00:46:42,360 --> 00:46:46,480
the birds and they're nesting, and he begins to realize,

668
00:46:46,519 --> 00:46:48,960
and this is a point I try to make a

669
00:46:49,039 --> 00:46:51,800
lot of Wild New World. We tend to think of

670
00:46:52,199 --> 00:46:56,199
the past as its history. It's already happened, it doesn't

671
00:46:56,239 --> 00:46:59,599
have any effect on us. But what Threau realized is

672
00:46:59,639 --> 00:47:03,360
that this kind of past doesn't stay in the past.

673
00:47:03,880 --> 00:47:07,920
Because as he sat down with this knowledge about what

674
00:47:08,079 --> 00:47:11,559
his forebears had experienced compared to what he was experiencing,

675
00:47:11,880 --> 00:47:16,159
he began writing this passage where he basically says, it's

676
00:47:16,760 --> 00:47:21,480
like you were to go to a symphony and suddenly

677
00:47:21,519 --> 00:47:25,960
realize that there are no timpanies, there are no French horns,

678
00:47:26,000 --> 00:47:30,320
there are no strings. You're only getting to hear pieces

679
00:47:30,760 --> 00:47:35,400
of what should be a complete ensemble. He says, it's

680
00:47:35,480 --> 00:47:38,760
like looking up into the night sky and realizing that

681
00:47:38,880 --> 00:47:42,760
some demi god has come before you and plucked out

682
00:47:42,760 --> 00:47:46,360
of the heavens all the best constellations, all the best

683
00:47:46,400 --> 00:47:49,800
of the stars, and you just get this tiny little

684
00:47:49,880 --> 00:47:54,360
piece of what's left after somebody else has selfishly robbed

685
00:47:54,400 --> 00:47:59,159
you of the experience. And he concludes this passage and

686
00:47:59,239 --> 00:48:03,239
that became the title of my chapter when he says,

687
00:48:04,000 --> 00:48:09,639
I realize that I am that citizen whom I pity

688
00:48:09,639 --> 00:48:14,800
because I want to experience an entire heaven and an

689
00:48:15,119 --> 00:48:19,360
entire earth. He doesn't want to live in a world

690
00:48:19,480 --> 00:48:25,480
where his forebears had acted like demigods and robbed him

691
00:48:25,639 --> 00:48:29,719
of the experience is that he hoped and thought he

692
00:48:29,760 --> 00:48:32,559
should get to have in his own life. And I think,

693
00:48:32,599 --> 00:48:35,599
to me, that's the summation of what this well New

694
00:48:35,639 --> 00:48:41,320
World story is. We don't even realize what we have

695
00:48:41,559 --> 00:48:46,480
been robbed of in our present experience in North America,

696
00:48:46,840 --> 00:48:50,920
because so many of us don't know this story about

697
00:48:51,360 --> 00:48:54,360
all these creatures that were once here, that we once

698
00:48:54,440 --> 00:48:59,639
had the Carolina parakeet along the eastern seaboard and all

699
00:48:59,679 --> 00:49:04,440
the way out west to Colorado, the most beautiful bird

700
00:49:04,880 --> 00:49:09,400
a North American parrot on the entire continent, and we

701
00:49:09,440 --> 00:49:11,639
wipe them all out. They were all gone by the

702
00:49:11,719 --> 00:49:14,599
nineteen thirties. We're never going to get to see. I mean,

703
00:49:14,599 --> 00:49:18,400
my grandparents were alive when there were still passenger pigeons

704
00:49:18,440 --> 00:49:22,000
flying through the skies, and I'm never going to get

705
00:49:22,039 --> 00:49:27,639
to see anything like that. So that thorough idea that

706
00:49:27,760 --> 00:49:30,320
the past doesn't stay in the past. This kind of

707
00:49:30,400 --> 00:49:33,920
pass affects the sort of experience we have while we're

708
00:49:33,960 --> 00:49:37,639
alive now, is what I was really trying to convey

709
00:49:37,840 --> 00:49:40,199
with the trajectory of this book.

710
00:49:40,880 --> 00:49:45,920
Speaker 1: Yeah, so there is one American species that has, despite

711
00:49:46,039 --> 00:49:51,320
best efforts on Europeans part, not been able to be eradicated,

712
00:49:51,480 --> 00:49:55,039
and that's the coyotea species that you have written extensively about,

713
00:49:55,119 --> 00:49:58,639
talked about. So one of our patrons, Tearan, asked that,

714
00:49:59,239 --> 00:50:01,960
or pointed out, what have proven remarkably resilient in the

715
00:50:01,960 --> 00:50:04,960
face of human expansion. What do you think makes them

716
00:50:05,000 --> 00:50:08,920
so uniquely adaptable compared to other species in North America.

717
00:50:10,079 --> 00:50:13,480
Speaker 2: Well, I can tell your listener for one thing, that

718
00:50:13,519 --> 00:50:18,440
it was a great joy to write Coyote America, a

719
00:50:18,519 --> 00:50:21,519
kind of a biography of this animal from its evolution

720
00:50:21,719 --> 00:50:28,000
down to the present day, because it does counterintuitively reverse

721
00:50:28,599 --> 00:50:32,599
the story that I had to tell through a good

722
00:50:32,639 --> 00:50:35,000
bit of wild New World. I mean, while New World

723
00:50:35,000 --> 00:50:38,880
does at least end on an uplifting note following the

724
00:50:39,039 --> 00:50:42,679
passage of the Endangered Species Act and all the animals

725
00:50:42,719 --> 00:50:46,639
that we've saved and recovered since then. But the coyote,

726
00:50:46,719 --> 00:50:52,440
through its own agency, was able to resist the kind

727
00:50:52,480 --> 00:50:55,760
of destruction that took place with the passenger pigeon, or

728
00:50:55,840 --> 00:50:59,960
the great awk, our northern hemisphere penguin, which we also like,

729
00:51:01,079 --> 00:51:04,880
or the Carolina parakeet, all these creatures that we completely lost,

730
00:51:04,880 --> 00:51:12,920
that have disappeared. The coyote instead managed to thrive even

731
00:51:13,199 --> 00:51:18,880
as we Euro Americans spread across the continent. And it

732
00:51:19,039 --> 00:51:24,880
did so because of its evolutionary adaptability and some of

733
00:51:24,920 --> 00:51:28,840
the particular evolutionary traits that it had evolved over time

734
00:51:29,519 --> 00:51:34,079
in interacting with larger gray wolves. So here's part of

735
00:51:34,079 --> 00:51:38,199
the coyote story. Coyotes, for one thing, are native North

736
00:51:38,199 --> 00:51:41,559
American animals. The caned family evolved in North America about

737
00:51:41,840 --> 00:51:46,159
five million years ago. And although there's presently some question

738
00:51:46,280 --> 00:51:51,199
about exactly where gray wolves emerged in that evolution and

739
00:51:51,239 --> 00:51:53,800
whether or not they don't come out of Eurasia and

740
00:51:53,880 --> 00:51:58,599
inner North America, we're pretty confident that coyotes never left.

741
00:51:58,639 --> 00:52:02,400
They never went to Iberia, for example. They remained in

742
00:52:02,480 --> 00:52:05,960
North America for all this five million year period and

743
00:52:06,159 --> 00:52:09,880
emerged us into their present form about nine hundred thousand

744
00:52:10,000 --> 00:52:14,440
years ago, so thirteen thousand years ago when the Clovis

745
00:52:14,519 --> 00:52:17,480
people come, Coyotes are sort of there at the door

746
00:52:17,639 --> 00:52:23,360
welcoming us humans into the North American world. And there

747
00:52:23,519 --> 00:52:27,400
a species, a mid sized predator that concentrates primarily on rodents,

748
00:52:27,400 --> 00:52:29,840
on rats, and mice. And one of the reasons they've

749
00:52:29,880 --> 00:52:32,079
always hung around humans, and I think they've been doing

750
00:52:32,079 --> 00:52:34,679
this from the very beginning, as soon as we arrived,

751
00:52:35,119 --> 00:52:37,920
is that our encampments and our villages and our towns

752
00:52:37,960 --> 00:52:41,199
and cities produce a lot of rats and mice, and

753
00:52:41,280 --> 00:52:46,639
so humans naturally attract the predators of those rodents, and

754
00:52:46,719 --> 00:52:50,559
coyotes from the very first stories we have of them

755
00:52:51,000 --> 00:52:55,480
hung around villages and encampments. And I think, you know,

756
00:52:55,559 --> 00:52:57,679
one of the things I do with Coyote America is

757
00:52:57,719 --> 00:53:00,920
try to tell some of these epic Kayoote stories from

758
00:53:01,000 --> 00:53:06,079
Native people, because our oldest literature in North America are

759
00:53:06,159 --> 00:53:10,400
coyote stories, and our oldest literary figure is the coyote

760
00:53:10,400 --> 00:53:13,920
with a capital C, who is this sort of semi

761
00:53:14,039 --> 00:53:18,679
deity character for Native people who they started telling stories

762
00:53:18,719 --> 00:53:22,679
about it. It appears probably ten thousand years ago, and

763
00:53:22,760 --> 00:53:27,440
I think they did that because they realized that while

764
00:53:27,519 --> 00:53:32,039
other creatures were disappearing in the extinction pulse of ten

765
00:53:32,079 --> 00:53:36,880
thousand years ago, somehow coyotes were surviving, and they survived

766
00:53:36,880 --> 00:53:40,440
by their wits, and I think humans identified with that,

767
00:53:40,639 --> 00:53:46,079
and so they made coyotes into the primary character of

768
00:53:46,159 --> 00:53:50,159
all of these wonderful stories that are all about human nature. Really,

769
00:53:50,559 --> 00:53:54,679
those coyote stories are attempts to teach us about who

770
00:53:54,719 --> 00:53:59,559
we are as another animal and as another species. But

771
00:53:59,679 --> 00:54:05,199
coyottes when wolves began to arrive about twenty five thousand

772
00:54:05,239 --> 00:54:09,559
years ago from Asia, and coyotes were sort of the

773
00:54:09,599 --> 00:54:12,360
small dog on the block and got beat up a lot.

774
00:54:13,159 --> 00:54:17,400
They began adapting and evolving a suite of traits that

775
00:54:17,559 --> 00:54:21,400
made it possible for them to survive persecution and harassment.

776
00:54:21,719 --> 00:54:24,519
And the primary trait that most of us know is

777
00:54:24,559 --> 00:54:27,760
that when they're harassed and when the number of coyotes

778
00:54:27,800 --> 00:54:30,639
begins to drop in a landscape, they tend to have

779
00:54:30,840 --> 00:54:33,679
larger litters and they're able to get more of their

780
00:54:33,719 --> 00:54:38,360
pups up to adulthood because there are more food resources available.

781
00:54:38,920 --> 00:54:41,280
But another thing that they do is probably the more

782
00:54:41,320 --> 00:54:44,679
important one. When they're harassed and persecuted, either by wolves

783
00:54:44,760 --> 00:54:48,880
or later by humans, they fall back on an evolutionary

784
00:54:48,920 --> 00:54:54,960
adaptation called fish in fusion. It's a fairly rare ecological adaptation,

785
00:54:55,559 --> 00:55:00,920
biological adaptation that supposedly only nineteen species around the world.

786
00:55:01,159 --> 00:55:03,760
Human beings happen to be one of the nineteen who

787
00:55:03,800 --> 00:55:08,079
also have fish in fusion. Only nineteen species possess this adaptation.

788
00:55:08,559 --> 00:55:13,199
But what it means is you can exist in fusion

789
00:55:13,400 --> 00:55:17,079
form as a pack in the case of coyotes, as

790
00:55:17,079 --> 00:55:20,920
a pack of animals, but you can also do very

791
00:55:20,960 --> 00:55:25,000
well in fission form by breaking the pack apart and

792
00:55:25,159 --> 00:55:30,559
separating as singles and as pairs. And one of the

793
00:55:30,599 --> 00:55:34,119
things that coyotes have done, we've known this since the

794
00:55:34,239 --> 00:55:38,880
nineteen fifties, is in the face of persecution, they go

795
00:55:38,920 --> 00:55:43,840
into fission mode. They scatter as individuals and pairs. And

796
00:55:43,880 --> 00:55:47,079
when they do that, they tend to colonize, and this

797
00:55:47,159 --> 00:55:50,039
is the reason the attempts to wipe them out. In

798
00:55:50,079 --> 00:55:52,320
the western part of the United States, which is where

799
00:55:52,360 --> 00:55:56,400
coyotes were originally adapted, the attempts to wipe them out

800
00:55:56,519 --> 00:56:00,840
with poison in the early twentieth century is what began

801
00:56:00,960 --> 00:56:05,199
to spread them east of the Mississippi River into the South,

802
00:56:05,360 --> 00:56:08,880
into the Northeast, into places like New York and Central

803
00:56:08,920 --> 00:56:13,320
Park and every city basically now in the United States.

804
00:56:13,400 --> 00:56:17,159
Coyotes are now in every state in the Union except

805
00:56:17,159 --> 00:56:20,920
for Hawaii. Delaware and twenty eleven was the last state

806
00:56:20,960 --> 00:56:25,039
that they colonized in the lower forty eight. So they

807
00:56:25,119 --> 00:56:28,679
have this unique ability to survive and that, as I said,

808
00:56:28,920 --> 00:56:31,239
that was very fun to be able to tell this

809
00:56:31,360 --> 00:56:35,000
kind of story in a book, rather than the usual

810
00:56:35,239 --> 00:56:38,639
you know, woe is me, here goes the loss, our

811
00:56:38,719 --> 00:56:42,119
diminution of yet another species. It was very fun to

812
00:56:42,159 --> 00:56:44,280
tell a story of a species that in fact has

813
00:56:44,320 --> 00:56:47,320
survived and does very well even after all of our

814
00:56:47,320 --> 00:56:48,400
attempts to wipe it out.

815
00:56:48,960 --> 00:56:52,320
Speaker 1: Yeah, all of our horrifying attempts. Coyote America does paint

816
00:56:52,400 --> 00:56:55,800
a grim picture of like the horrible methods that we used.

817
00:56:56,159 --> 00:56:59,239
I say we like as the royal We obviously wasn't

818
00:56:59,239 --> 00:57:01,760
me or you, but the people who came before us

819
00:57:01,760 --> 00:57:03,079
tried really hard to get rid of them in some

820
00:57:03,159 --> 00:57:07,199
really really upsetting ways. But just to drive this point home,

821
00:57:07,320 --> 00:57:09,800
one of our patrons asked if they are able to

822
00:57:09,800 --> 00:57:11,960
self regulate in this way where they can have more

823
00:57:12,119 --> 00:57:16,679
pups when some members of the community are either killed

824
00:57:16,960 --> 00:57:20,440
or leave for whatever reason. And if you're experiencing issues

825
00:57:20,480 --> 00:57:23,159
with coyotes, or you just for some reason hate coyotes,

826
00:57:23,199 --> 00:57:25,440
I unfortunately know so many people who will kill any

827
00:57:25,440 --> 00:57:28,000
coyote that they see on site. Is it best to

828
00:57:28,079 --> 00:57:30,360
just do nothing at all, because if you kill them,

829
00:57:30,400 --> 00:57:33,599
you will just get more coyotes, which you, in theory

830
00:57:33,639 --> 00:57:34,760
do not want.

831
00:57:36,480 --> 00:57:40,280
Speaker 2: Well, there are several things to say about that. As

832
00:57:40,400 --> 00:57:45,079
for hatred of coyotes. I found a work done in

833
00:57:45,119 --> 00:57:50,639
the nineteen seventies on American attitudes towards sixteen different American

834
00:57:50,679 --> 00:57:53,760
species in terms of whether they liked them or hated them,

835
00:57:54,199 --> 00:57:57,960
and coyotes in the nineteen seventies ranked dead lasts in

836
00:57:58,039 --> 00:58:03,559
that list below cockroaches below, Norway rats. Coyotes were at

837
00:58:03,599 --> 00:58:06,559
the bottom of the list. This, of course, is before

838
00:58:06,920 --> 00:58:10,679
we learned very much about coyotes, and I think that

839
00:58:10,920 --> 00:58:15,480
one of the reasons people kind of reflexively hate them,

840
00:58:15,800 --> 00:58:18,960
and I hate to be the bearer of bad news

841
00:58:19,000 --> 00:58:24,400
to you, is because not necessarily people of the present generations,

842
00:58:25,239 --> 00:58:31,280
but their parents, their grandparents, especially from rural areas, were

843
00:58:31,400 --> 00:58:38,159
essentially indoctrinated and brainwashed by the United States Biological Survey,

844
00:58:38,840 --> 00:58:42,079
which was the agency that was trying to poison coyotes

845
00:58:42,119 --> 00:58:46,119
into oblivion in the twenties, thirties, and forties, because that

846
00:58:46,239 --> 00:58:52,199
agency also released all kinds of articles can newspaper pieces

847
00:58:52,519 --> 00:58:57,960
proclaiming coyotes to be worthy of complete extermination. The arch

848
00:58:58,079 --> 00:59:00,599
predator of our time as one of the articles that

849
00:59:01,039 --> 00:59:03,440
are one of the terms they use, the phrases they use,

850
00:59:04,079 --> 00:59:08,599
and those articles appeared in newspapers, in farm bureau journals,

851
00:59:08,639 --> 00:59:12,639
and magazines, and it was a kind of a brainwashing

852
00:59:13,360 --> 00:59:19,639
by a federal agency of several generations of Americans who

853
00:59:19,920 --> 00:59:23,400
simply bought into the idea that, Okay, I should shoot

854
00:59:23,480 --> 00:59:26,679
or try to kill every single coyote I see, because

855
00:59:26,760 --> 00:59:30,000
coyotes are a threat to everybody and everything all the time.

856
00:59:30,000 --> 00:59:33,480
I actually heard somebody say that one time. Coyotes are

857
00:59:33,480 --> 00:59:37,119
a threat to everybody and everything all the time. I mean,

858
00:59:38,000 --> 00:59:42,280
it's very impressive, particularly when it was based on a

859
00:59:42,400 --> 00:59:47,360
complete lack of scientific evidence whatsoever. Because when all of

860
00:59:47,360 --> 00:59:51,559
these canned stories were coming out in the twenties and thirties,

861
00:59:52,000 --> 00:59:56,800
we had not yet had a single biologist do a

862
00:59:56,840 --> 01:00:01,159
study of what coyotes actually ate, what role they played

863
01:00:01,199 --> 01:00:04,559
in the ecosystem. I mean, it was all done kind

864
01:00:04,800 --> 01:00:09,800
based on the old European folk tradition of you kill

865
01:00:09,840 --> 01:00:13,639
every predator. This is just the way the economy of

866
01:00:13,719 --> 01:00:18,320
domesticated animals works. Every predator has to have a death sentence.

867
01:00:18,719 --> 01:00:22,159
Speaker 3: And it's a kind of a crazy thing that it

868
01:00:22,440 --> 01:00:27,199
takes us until the nineteen sixties, seventies, and eighties to

869
01:00:27,320 --> 01:00:31,360
begin learning enough about these animals that we can go

870
01:00:31,480 --> 01:00:34,559
beyond this sort of death sentence mentality.

871
01:00:34,960 --> 01:00:37,719
Speaker 2: But it actually does take us that long, and for

872
01:00:37,840 --> 01:00:40,119
quite a number of people. Of course, they're still in

873
01:00:40,159 --> 01:00:43,400
the grip of this fifty sixty year old kind of

874
01:00:43,480 --> 01:00:47,519
propaganda that was released back in the thirties. I mean

875
01:00:47,840 --> 01:00:51,800
the animals in fact, when we have studied them closely,

876
01:00:51,880 --> 01:00:55,519
and a biologist named Stan Garrett from Ohio State who

877
01:00:55,519 --> 01:00:58,639
has been studying the coyotes in Chicago for about the

878
01:00:58,719 --> 01:01:03,639
last thirty years. He's demonstrated in his work that coyotes

879
01:01:03,840 --> 01:01:09,599
in cities, basically ninety six to ninety eight percent of

880
01:01:09,639 --> 01:01:13,639
them are good citizens who never have a single bad

881
01:01:13,840 --> 01:01:17,920
encounter with human beings. But just like us, there's a

882
01:01:18,039 --> 01:01:22,360
small percentage of coyotes that get in trouble. In many cases,

883
01:01:22,440 --> 01:01:25,400
they've been fed by humans and they've come to associate

884
01:01:25,639 --> 01:01:29,360
humans with food, so they start hanging out around houses.

885
01:01:29,800 --> 01:01:32,800
They'll run in. If you haven't fed a coyote that

886
01:01:32,840 --> 01:01:35,840
has been habitually fed, they'll sometimes run in and snap

887
01:01:35,880 --> 01:01:38,360
at people and try to bite them on the leg

888
01:01:38,800 --> 01:01:41,639
because they want you to give them food. And so

889
01:01:41,800 --> 01:01:45,599
these are coyotes that obviously have been habituated to humans

890
01:01:45,639 --> 01:01:48,960
and have been trained to associate humans with food. These

891
01:01:48,960 --> 01:01:52,199
are the ones that usually get into trouble. I mean,

892
01:01:52,400 --> 01:01:56,800
these are animals that have known how to coexist with

893
01:01:57,079 --> 01:02:03,079
us for at least ten thousand years, probably thirteen thousand years,

894
01:02:03,360 --> 01:02:06,599
maybe twenty thousand years. They've known how to do it.

895
01:02:07,199 --> 01:02:09,719
All we have to do in the modern age is

896
01:02:09,840 --> 01:02:13,079
learn how to coexist with them. And I mean I

897
01:02:13,119 --> 01:02:16,239
can say living in a state like New Mexico, where

898
01:02:16,280 --> 01:02:19,719
I mean I have coyotes just around me constantly. Here,

899
01:02:20,119 --> 01:02:22,840
I listen to them every night. I saw three trot

900
01:02:22,840 --> 01:02:26,559
through the yard yesterday morning. People who have had a

901
01:02:26,599 --> 01:02:30,679
longer experience in living with them. Understand, you just leave

902
01:02:30,760 --> 01:02:34,599
them alone. There is no point to get finally down

903
01:02:34,639 --> 01:02:38,480
to the specific question that was asked, there's no point

904
01:02:38,679 --> 01:02:41,440
in trying to kill them unless you have one that's

905
01:02:41,639 --> 01:02:45,199
obviously an habitual problem animal. And then of course you

906
01:02:45,199 --> 01:02:49,199
can call wildlife services or some sort of animal control

907
01:02:49,440 --> 01:02:53,840
and you try to target that specific animal. But otherwise

908
01:02:54,280 --> 01:02:58,559
just coexists with them. Their population rises to the level

909
01:02:58,639 --> 01:03:02,880
of the food supply classic ecological terms, it doesn't really

910
01:03:02,920 --> 01:03:05,800
get any larger. You're not in danger of having coyotes

911
01:03:05,840 --> 01:03:09,800
swamp the landscape. So the best thing to do is

912
01:03:09,880 --> 01:03:13,320
to not only coexist with them, but learn to enjoy them.

913
01:03:13,719 --> 01:03:17,480
I mean, I wrote in Coyote America that I thought,

914
01:03:17,639 --> 01:03:20,800
to me, getting to watch coyotes trot by in the

915
01:03:20,840 --> 01:03:24,239
early morning through the yard past the kitchen window while

916
01:03:24,280 --> 01:03:27,800
I'm making coffee. I mean, that's the equivalent of being

917
01:03:27,800 --> 01:03:30,199
out on the Pacific and getting to watch a whale

918
01:03:30,400 --> 01:03:34,519
breach or something. It's one of those marvelous magic moments

919
01:03:35,360 --> 01:03:41,320
that you should appreciate rather than be frightened call the

920
01:03:41,400 --> 01:03:45,800
authorities are run for a gun. Yeah yeah.

921
01:03:45,840 --> 01:03:48,679
Speaker 1: And so to touch on your point of most coyotes

922
01:03:48,760 --> 01:03:52,960
are not bad actors. So let's talk about the few

923
01:03:53,079 --> 01:03:55,800
that are, because I know people always have questions about them,

924
01:03:55,840 --> 01:03:59,039
and they're constantly in the news. So you were on

925
01:03:59,079 --> 01:04:02,679
the podcast in Paradise and we spoke to Antonia as well,

926
01:04:03,159 --> 01:04:05,760
and they discussed the case of Kelly Keene, who was

927
01:04:05,800 --> 01:04:08,320
a toddler who was killed by coyote in the eighties.

928
01:04:08,719 --> 01:04:12,280
And then in chapter seven of Coyote America you discussed

929
01:04:12,280 --> 01:04:14,519
the death of Taylor Mitchell and her death was caused

930
01:04:14,519 --> 01:04:16,840
by two coyotes, which we covered on this podcast too.

931
01:04:17,719 --> 01:04:21,320
How often are coyotes even attacking people and is there

932
01:04:21,400 --> 01:04:23,639
a common reason that they would attack someone to this

933
01:04:23,760 --> 01:04:24,400
kind of extent.

934
01:04:25,639 --> 01:04:30,199
Speaker 2: Well, Taylor Mitchell's tragic and unfortunate death. I mean, a

935
01:04:30,239 --> 01:04:32,320
young woman with her whole life in front of her,

936
01:04:33,079 --> 01:04:37,320
goes for a hyak loan in eastern Canada and is

937
01:04:37,360 --> 01:04:39,840
attacked by coyotes. I mean, there were still trying to

938
01:04:39,880 --> 01:04:43,159
figure out what in the world happened. I mean, there's

939
01:04:43,320 --> 01:04:47,400
the most recent speculation I've read is that the coyotes

940
01:04:47,440 --> 01:04:50,880
in that particular area had been used to taking down

941
01:04:51,119 --> 01:04:57,000
larger animals. Yeah, yeah, and she may have presented some

942
01:04:57,039 --> 01:05:00,760
sort of opportunity for animals that had learned how to

943
01:05:00,800 --> 01:05:03,679
do that, and they pulled her down and killed her.

944
01:05:04,320 --> 01:05:12,039
But that is a vanishingly rare thing in the whole

945
01:05:12,239 --> 01:05:17,039
story of coyotes and people in North America. I mean,

946
01:05:17,239 --> 01:05:23,199
it's just so rare that it might be another century

947
01:05:23,559 --> 01:05:26,440
or more before, even given the present size of the

948
01:05:26,480 --> 01:05:32,719
human population, before something like that happens. Coyotes are naturally

949
01:05:32,880 --> 01:05:35,559
curious about humans, and because as I said, they do

950
01:05:35,639 --> 01:05:39,119
tend to hang around our houses and our towns because

951
01:05:39,159 --> 01:05:42,119
of all the rats and mice that are associated with us,

952
01:05:42,840 --> 01:05:47,119
they can easily become tame to the point where you

953
01:05:47,239 --> 01:05:50,239
have to actively keep them wild. You have to make

954
01:05:50,280 --> 01:05:54,320
sure that coyotes think that humans are so weird that

955
01:05:54,400 --> 01:05:56,679
they can't really trust us, and so they have to

956
01:05:56,719 --> 01:05:59,559
be a little bit stand offish when we're around. You

957
01:05:59,559 --> 01:06:01,880
can't let let them think that they can walk by

958
01:06:01,960 --> 01:06:05,519
five feet away and it's fine. So you have to

959
01:06:05,559 --> 01:06:10,119
try to keep them wild. But almost in every incense,

960
01:06:10,280 --> 01:06:14,079
whenever a coyote gets in trouble with people, it's from

961
01:06:14,199 --> 01:06:17,679
one of two things. Either they have been fed and

962
01:06:17,840 --> 01:06:23,079
they are essentially assaulting yards and people in yards to

963
01:06:23,199 --> 01:06:26,559
try to get them to give food to the particular

964
01:06:26,639 --> 01:06:31,639
animal that's become habituated, or it's an episode where a

965
01:06:31,760 --> 01:06:35,920
human walking a dog during the late spring and early

966
01:06:36,000 --> 01:06:40,000
summer when coyotes have pups and are defending their dens,

967
01:06:40,639 --> 01:06:44,199
that the human and the dog get too close. The

968
01:06:44,320 --> 01:06:48,559
coyote will attack the dog to drive it away from

969
01:06:48,679 --> 01:06:53,000
her pups, and when a human tries to intervene in

970
01:06:53,119 --> 01:06:56,199
such an attack, they often get bitten, usually on the

971
01:06:56,280 --> 01:06:59,880
hand or the arm, but those are the by f

972
01:07:00,119 --> 01:07:05,199
are the most common kinds of coyote interactions that result

973
01:07:05,320 --> 01:07:09,760
in an animal actually causing harm. As I have said

974
01:07:09,800 --> 01:07:13,960
before in podcasts like this, I mean I cided early

975
01:07:14,000 --> 01:07:18,400
on in Coyote America, a story from Canada, a country

976
01:07:18,480 --> 01:07:22,519
where there are something like hundreds, three or four hundred

977
01:07:22,639 --> 01:07:26,920
dogs serious dog bites of people every year, and an

978
01:07:26,960 --> 01:07:31,559
average of about three to four coyote bites of people

979
01:07:31,599 --> 01:07:35,639
every year, where the stories about the coyotes are the

980
01:07:35,639 --> 01:07:38,199
ones that are in the media and in the news.

981
01:07:38,880 --> 01:07:41,679
The dog bites stories almost never make the news unless

982
01:07:42,199 --> 01:07:45,920
someone is very seriously hurt or killed, and of course

983
01:07:45,960 --> 01:07:50,119
that happens when dogs attack people, but it's the coyote

984
01:07:50,199 --> 01:07:53,360
stories that tend to attract us. There's something about the

985
01:07:53,400 --> 01:07:57,199
fact that coyotes are wild, as some woman said was

986
01:07:57,280 --> 01:07:59,440
quoted in the New York Times, is saying, what a

987
01:07:59,679 --> 01:08:02,519
coyot was seen running through Central Park? Oh my god.

988
01:08:02,559 --> 01:08:07,159
And it's not even on a leash, And so wild

989
01:08:07,239 --> 01:08:10,880
animals somehow just freak us out in a way that

990
01:08:11,159 --> 01:08:13,039
somehow our domesticated dogs don't.

991
01:08:13,639 --> 01:08:15,760
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, it's so funny you say that. You

992
01:08:15,840 --> 01:08:18,199
just reminded me of a video I saw on TikTok

993
01:08:18,199 --> 01:08:20,760
a few weeks ago where I don't know what town

994
01:08:20,920 --> 01:08:23,520
or state it was, but there's this woman screaming at

995
01:08:23,560 --> 01:08:25,960
her neighbor and she's like, you have a coyote as

996
01:08:25,960 --> 01:08:28,079
a pet. You're letting them in our neighborhood. Go back

997
01:08:28,119 --> 01:08:31,239
to your own country. And the guy who's recording it

998
01:08:31,359 --> 01:08:34,880
pans down and he has an Alaskan malamute, And I'm like,

999
01:08:35,000 --> 01:08:40,520
how disassociated from the wild are we that? Like someone

1000
01:08:40,520 --> 01:08:42,000
can look at a malamute and be like, well, that's

1001
01:08:42,000 --> 01:08:42,840
a coyote.

1002
01:08:43,000 --> 01:08:45,640
Speaker 2: That's a coyote. Yeah. Well, as a as the owner

1003
01:08:45,680 --> 01:08:49,359
of an Alaskan malamute, I can tell you it's something

1004
01:08:49,399 --> 01:08:51,880
that when people see my dog. I've got a year

1005
01:08:51,920 --> 01:08:55,039
and a half old Alaskan Malamute named Kishka, and he

1006
01:08:55,199 --> 01:08:58,600
is the sweetest, gentlest dog. Amazing. But all you have

1007
01:08:58,680 --> 01:09:02,399
to do is walking along a road and you watch

1008
01:09:02,479 --> 01:09:05,439
the reactions of people in cars as they go by.

1009
01:09:05,880 --> 01:09:08,279
I mean they seem to think you're walking a wolf

1010
01:09:09,039 --> 01:09:12,359
along the highway. So yeah, that's the story that doesn't

1011
01:09:12,399 --> 01:09:13,560
surprise me, I can tell you.

1012
01:09:15,279 --> 01:09:18,560
Speaker 1: So finally wrapping up. So the reason I first heard

1013
01:09:18,600 --> 01:09:21,079
of your work was because when I was an undergrad,

1014
01:09:21,159 --> 01:09:24,439
I actually did a thesis on how people in Vermont,

1015
01:09:24,439 --> 01:09:26,880
because that's where I was based out of felt about

1016
01:09:26,920 --> 01:09:28,720
coyotes because there was a lot of debate going on

1017
01:09:28,760 --> 01:09:32,000
at the time, like around twenty sixteen twenty seventeen, about

1018
01:09:32,039 --> 01:09:37,239
coyote hunting contests, and the PhD candidate student who was

1019
01:09:37,239 --> 01:09:40,600
like overseeing my work. His name's Joshua Morse. His entire

1020
01:09:40,680 --> 01:09:43,640
PhD was about this topic, like how people felt about

1021
01:09:43,640 --> 01:09:45,920
coyotes and how they were managed in the state. The

1022
01:09:46,119 --> 01:09:49,000
research protocol for his study was as follows, and he

1023
01:09:49,079 --> 01:09:53,640
wanted me to ask you your opinion. So tell us

1024
01:09:53,640 --> 01:09:56,680
a story of an interaction you've had with coyote and

1025
01:09:56,760 --> 01:10:00,000
why it was meaningful to you.

1026
01:10:00,199 --> 01:10:04,119
Speaker 2: I think probably the And I will admit I've had

1027
01:10:04,159 --> 01:10:08,760
a lot of coyote interactions over the years, in part

1028
01:10:08,800 --> 01:10:10,960
because I've lived primarily in the West and there have

1029
01:10:11,039 --> 01:10:14,640
been coyotes everywhere I've lived. But I think the one

1030
01:10:14,680 --> 01:10:18,359
that probably was the most meaningful, and it was meaningful

1031
01:10:18,479 --> 01:10:24,359
enough that I told the story of it in Coyote

1032
01:10:24,359 --> 01:10:31,760
America is about walking a dog, another Alaskan Malamud, a

1033
01:10:31,880 --> 01:10:36,279
previous dog companion I had during the time when I

1034
01:10:36,399 --> 01:10:40,560
was working on Coyote America. And I was living here

1035
01:10:40,600 --> 01:10:43,239
in New Mexico on my place outside town, and there's

1036
01:10:43,319 --> 01:10:47,199
a canyon in the backyard, and I was walking this

1037
01:10:47,239 --> 01:10:50,560
particular dog. His name was Cody, and Cody and I

1038
01:10:50,680 --> 01:10:54,159
were It was in May of the year, and we

1039
01:10:54,159 --> 01:10:57,239
were down in the canyon and we had not gone

1040
01:10:57,279 --> 01:11:01,720
in a particular direction down canyon while and Cody and

1041
01:11:01,760 --> 01:11:05,600
I are walking along and suddenly we began to hear

1042
01:11:06,159 --> 01:11:10,359
a coyote bark, and then another coyote begins to bark

1043
01:11:10,479 --> 01:11:14,479
on the opposite side of the canyon the stream bed,

1044
01:11:15,199 --> 01:11:18,359
and they both came into view, and I recognized them

1045
01:11:18,359 --> 01:11:22,039
fairly quickly as young animals, they were probably a year

1046
01:11:22,079 --> 01:11:24,760
old from the previous year's litter. And so there was

1047
01:11:24,880 --> 01:11:27,880
one kind of a century on the left side of

1048
01:11:27,920 --> 01:11:31,039
the stream bed, maybe thirty five or forty feet away,

1049
01:11:31,359 --> 01:11:33,520
another one on the right side of the stream bed

1050
01:11:33,560 --> 01:11:36,960
about the same distance away, and up ahead of us,

1051
01:11:37,119 --> 01:11:40,359
as these two young animals were barking at us, and

1052
01:11:40,439 --> 01:11:43,479
Cody actually was not on a leash at the time,

1053
01:11:43,560 --> 01:11:46,279
but he was very well trained to voice command, and

1054
01:11:46,319 --> 01:11:48,920
so I called him over, and he came over and

1055
01:11:49,000 --> 01:11:53,880
sat down beside me and just watched these two coyotes

1056
01:11:53,920 --> 01:11:56,680
barking at us. And meanwhile, up in front of us,

1057
01:11:57,880 --> 01:12:02,680
from what appeared to be a den or an uprooted tree,

1058
01:12:02,880 --> 01:12:09,560
what was very obviously a nursing, full grown female coyote

1059
01:12:10,079 --> 01:12:15,039
emerged from out of the uprooted roots of this particular

1060
01:12:15,119 --> 01:12:19,399
tree and took a few steps towards us and sat

1061
01:12:19,439 --> 01:12:24,000
down and watched. And so what I realized at that

1062
01:12:24,479 --> 01:12:31,199
point was that we had wandered into a den area,

1063
01:12:31,720 --> 01:12:38,039
and we had encountered two centuries, two young centuries, and

1064
01:12:38,079 --> 01:12:41,119
the female who would come out of a den very

1065
01:12:41,159 --> 01:12:44,760
clearly had pups in that den. And what we did

1066
01:12:45,000 --> 01:12:48,840
was to turn around and start back the other direction.

1067
01:12:49,000 --> 01:12:53,279
We started walking back up the canyon, and these two

1068
01:12:53,439 --> 01:12:59,239
century animals followed us for more than one hundred and

1069
01:12:59,279 --> 01:13:03,560
fifty yards, keeping about the same distance from us, about

1070
01:13:03,600 --> 01:13:06,319
twenty five or thirty feet on either side of us.

1071
01:13:06,720 --> 01:13:10,880
They walked along and essentially escorted us one hundred and

1072
01:13:10,880 --> 01:13:15,079
fifty yards away from this den until finally they were

1073
01:13:15,119 --> 01:13:18,239
satisfied that we weren't returning and that we had gone

1074
01:13:18,319 --> 01:13:22,920
far enough. And I wanted to tell that story because

1075
01:13:23,199 --> 01:13:26,359
and I did tell it in Coyote America, because I

1076
01:13:26,479 --> 01:13:30,319
wanted readers to understand that because I talked to enough

1077
01:13:30,319 --> 01:13:33,039
people by this time that I realized people would say

1078
01:13:33,079 --> 01:13:37,800
things like these animals didn't even run from us, They

1079
01:13:37,960 --> 01:13:41,039
just stood there, and when we started walking, they walked

1080
01:13:41,119 --> 01:13:43,680
right along beside us. And what I wanted to do

1081
01:13:43,760 --> 01:13:47,399
with that story was to make people understand that this

1082
01:13:47,640 --> 01:13:51,560
is natural behavior on the part of these animals. They

1083
01:13:51,560 --> 01:13:55,000
are protecting their den. You don't need to go call

1084
01:13:55,079 --> 01:13:58,760
wildlife services to come wipe them out because they're bold

1085
01:13:58,800 --> 01:14:01,319
and they won't run from hum. You don't need to

1086
01:14:01,359 --> 01:14:04,680
go get a gun and shoot them. You need to

1087
01:14:05,039 --> 01:14:11,399
understand enough about coyote natural history and biology to realize

1088
01:14:11,439 --> 01:14:17,199
that this is completely natural behavior. And I think probably

1089
01:14:17,239 --> 01:14:20,239
a lot of people by now have begun to understand

1090
01:14:20,279 --> 01:14:24,279
that that's natural coyote behavior. But back in twenty fourteen,

1091
01:14:24,960 --> 01:14:27,640
when I was working on this book, it had not

1092
01:14:27,800 --> 01:14:30,680
come out yet, I thought that I better include that

1093
01:14:30,800 --> 01:14:35,439
story because it was a very common tale that I

1094
01:14:35,600 --> 01:14:40,000
was hearing from people that these damn coyotes wouldn't even

1095
01:14:40,079 --> 01:14:43,880
run away. They followed me, and it made me want

1096
01:14:43,920 --> 01:14:47,000
to go kill them or go call wildlife services to

1097
01:14:47,039 --> 01:14:50,439
wipe them out, because there's they probably were rabbit. So

1098
01:14:50,800 --> 01:14:53,359
what I wanted to convey by telling that story, of course,

1099
01:14:53,520 --> 01:14:56,239
was that this in fact is natural behavior and you

1100
01:14:56,399 --> 01:14:58,840
just have to know enough about the animals to recognize

1101
01:14:58,840 --> 01:14:59,319
it as that.

1102
01:15:00,399 --> 01:15:02,479
Speaker 1: Yeah, if anything, they were being polite by saying, you've

1103
01:15:02,479 --> 01:15:03,439
stepped on our property.

1104
01:15:03,520 --> 01:15:04,039
Speaker 2: Please go.

1105
01:15:04,079 --> 01:15:04,920
Speaker 1: We'll show you the door.

1106
01:15:05,640 --> 01:15:07,760
Speaker 2: We'll show you the door and we will we'll show

1107
01:15:07,760 --> 01:15:11,079
you exactly where the door is. We'll follow follow you

1108
01:15:11,119 --> 01:15:13,880
along to make sure you hit the right entrance.

1109
01:15:15,800 --> 01:15:18,439
Speaker 1: That is awesome. Thank you so much, Dan for doing this.

1110
01:15:18,560 --> 01:15:21,159
Where can people find your book Wild New World?

1111
01:15:22,840 --> 01:15:26,279
Speaker 2: Well, Wild New World is Uh. It's published by W. W. Norton,

1112
01:15:26,319 --> 01:15:28,119
which is a big press in New York, so they

1113
01:15:28,199 --> 01:15:32,760
have landed it in pretty much most bookstores around the country.

1114
01:15:33,439 --> 01:15:37,119
But of course it's also available on Amazon. So you

1115
01:15:37,159 --> 01:15:39,520
can just type Wild New World in, or type my

1116
01:15:39,640 --> 01:15:44,800
name Dan Flores in and you'll pull up Wild New World, Coyote, America,

1117
01:15:44,880 --> 01:15:48,359
American Serengetti, and a number of other books that I

1118
01:15:48,399 --> 01:15:49,640
wrote in former years.

1119
01:15:50,520 --> 01:15:52,479
Speaker 1: And I take it you're not a big social media guy,

1120
01:15:52,600 --> 01:15:54,880
so where can people go to learn more about you?

1121
01:15:56,680 --> 01:16:02,199
Speaker 2: Well, I do have an author site on Amazon, and

1122
01:16:02,560 --> 01:16:05,680
when you go to the site for one of the books,

1123
01:16:05,840 --> 01:16:09,960
just look for the author site and it provides and

1124
01:16:10,039 --> 01:16:12,159
I will admit I haven't updated it in a while,

1125
01:16:12,199 --> 01:16:17,479
but it provides a biographical sketch, a little autobiography. I

1126
01:16:17,560 --> 01:16:20,159
don't know, it's probably not more than a couple of pages.

1127
01:16:20,239 --> 01:16:26,239
But I do enough podcasts and interviews and things that

1128
01:16:26,439 --> 01:16:29,760
if you google me you'll find all the kinds of

1129
01:16:29,800 --> 01:16:33,720
things that you'd wish to ever know. All that sort

1130
01:16:33,720 --> 01:16:36,880
of thing tends to pop up. So, yes, I don't

1131
01:16:36,960 --> 01:16:39,720
really do social media, in part because I'm writing full

1132
01:16:39,760 --> 01:16:43,079
time these days. I just don't want to expend the

1133
01:16:44,000 --> 01:16:47,000
time to do it, but you can pretty easily if

1134
01:16:47,000 --> 01:16:49,760
people can pretty easily find my email too, you can

1135
01:16:49,800 --> 01:16:53,119
go to the University of Montana, the History department at

1136
01:16:53,119 --> 01:16:56,560
the University of Montana, and it will give you my email,

1137
01:16:56,640 --> 01:16:59,680
and so if people have a particular question or want

1138
01:16:59,680 --> 01:17:02,600
to come, that's an easy way to do it. Awesome.

1139
01:17:02,760 --> 01:17:04,760
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for doing this, Dan. It's been

1140
01:17:04,760 --> 01:17:05,239
a pleasure.

1141
01:17:05,720 --> 01:17:07,880
Speaker 2: It's my pleasure, Ashley. Thank you for asking.

1142
01:17:16,479 --> 01:17:19,439
Speaker 1: And that was my interview with Dan Flores. We had

1143
01:17:19,520 --> 01:17:21,760
quite a few technical issues throughout our talk, and Dan

1144
01:17:22,039 --> 01:17:24,319
was so patient and kind as we work through them.

1145
01:17:24,439 --> 01:17:26,279
I cannot thank him enough for coming on to talk

1146
01:17:26,319 --> 01:17:29,119
with me, and for his patients, and just for being

1147
01:17:29,159 --> 01:17:32,239
so wonderful. I know people say like, don't ever beat

1148
01:17:32,279 --> 01:17:34,960
your heroes, and this might sound cheesy, but I was

1149
01:17:35,000 --> 01:17:37,279
so blown away by just like how down to earth

1150
01:17:37,439 --> 01:17:40,920
and nice he was. You can check out the episode

1151
01:17:40,960 --> 01:17:43,279
description for links on where to find Dan and his work,

1152
01:17:43,520 --> 01:17:45,720
and you can also check out the episode description to

1153
01:17:45,840 --> 01:17:48,760
find links to our social media's and our website where

1154
01:17:48,760 --> 01:17:51,239
you can buy a merch to support the show. If

1155
01:17:51,239 --> 01:17:53,640
you liked this episode or like this podcast, please take

1156
01:17:53,680 --> 01:17:55,359
a moment to leave us a five star review wherever

1157
01:17:55,439 --> 01:17:58,800
you're listening, and subscribe wherever you're listening. Thank you Josh

1158
01:17:58,840 --> 01:18:01,319
Wall for making our new intro and his brother Jesse

1159
01:18:01,359 --> 01:18:05,000
Walsh for editing this episode. Thank you all for listening,

1160
01:18:05,159 --> 01:18:07,520
and we'll be back in two weeks for the last

1161
01:18:07,640 --> 01:18:10,640
episode of twenty twenty four, where we'll be covering some

1162
01:18:10,680 --> 01:18:12,680
attacks that have occurred throughout the year that we haven't

1163
01:18:12,680 --> 01:18:14,520
had a chance to cover yet. See you then,