The Basement: Dan Flores | Ice Age Giants, Camels in America, and Coyote Resilience

0:00Today I'm talking with Dan Flores. Dan is a historian of the American West and he spent 40 years writing the biographies of North America's wild animals, coyotes, bison, wild horses, wolves. 40 years writing biographies for animals that can't sue him for defamation. And it's a smart business model, honestly. His most famous book is coyote America and the story it tells is hard to believe. For most of the last century, the federal government tried to erase one animal from the continent with poison, bounties, and money from Congress, the coyote won. Today we're covering that war and the two brothers who exposed it, the footprints at white sands and the dire wolves. Real dire wolves? Finally, one that might outlive that's that kid. There's a moment where Dan analyzes a set of 23,000 year old footprints, like a witness David, a teenage girl, a toddler on her hip, a ground sloth, mirroring up what it catches her scent. That one is a good story. Let's go down to the basement.

1:07I'm excited to talk to you, sir. Well, I'm excited to be here. Before we talk about animals, I want, this is Storytelling Show and you're a Storyteller. So it's perfect. Take me back to your junior in college, your meeting with your creative writing professor. And something ends up in sports afield. What happened? Oh, wow. I'm impressed. Let's you know that. Yeah. So I was an English major as an undergraduate and I had a creative writing professor who was quite good and he published sort of Wild West kind of novels. And so I was impressed by the fact that, you know, he knew the publishing world and had an agent and all that sort of thing. So he asked us to do a piece in his class as if we were going to write it for a magazine.

2:10And so I sat down and duly wrote this piece and he read it and I frankly don't remember exactly what sort of grade he gave me on it. Although, one of the things I remember, he did say, I don't remember. He did say to me was he said, so you do, you've got a ready flow of words and that's a good thing for a writer. So that's kind of almost the only memory I had of what exactly he said. But I did have the fun before the semester was over of going into his office, having sent that piece to sports afield magazine and had an editor there after taking a look at it about a month later sent me a letter on official letterhead satiety sports afield and said, we like your piece. It was about Crozen Ravens and we're going to publish it. And so I got to go into my creative writing professor and show him a letter of acceptance from a national magazine for that piece I did.

3:12Did you get a check? I did get a check. No, it was. It was my first gig. It was, you know, they didn't, because I didn't have any illustrations. For in fact, one of the things that's particular editor's name was David Petzel. I've never forgotten him because he sort of became, he took me under his wing and sort of told me how to play the game and what he would be interested in and what to look at. And one of the things he told me was we're going to have to hire an illustrator to illustrate your piece because you don't have any illustrations. You don't have any photographs to go with it. Go and buy yourself a 35 millimeter camera, get Codacrome film, get yourself a 300 millimeter telephoto lens and follow the sort of photographs we published by a guy, one of their photographers named Edwin Bauer, followed the kind of photographs he does and when you submit things to us in the future, send me photographs and I can double your check. But the original check for that piece was $300.

4:12That's good. That's kind of be good money. Yeah, when you're in college and more than that, I think what it gave me a sense of, I remember telling my mother, you know, shit, I think I can be a writer. Of course, I think I can be a writer. I just sold the first thing I ever wrote to a national magazine. So yeah. And it's funny because it's not really fair because you go to school as a jock. You went on baseball scholarship. Was your dad semi pro? My dad played semi pro baseball. Yeah, and he wanted me to be a baseball player. Of course. Yeah. And so I did go to college on a baseball scholarship. A position. I played center field. Speed center field. Yeah. A lot of legs, okay? Yeah. I played center field and. Oh, you're a runner. That makes sense. Yeah. And I'm still a runner. So yeah, I've been running ever since ever since chasing down fly ball. But yeah, dad wanted me to play baseball. And I played several sports in high school.

5:15And but I was probably best at baseball. And so I played for a couple of years in college. And then I actually, the truth is, I got really interested in the subject matter of a lot of the classes I was taking. And I was sort of drifting away from it. And it was one of my dad's great disappointments when I told him I didn't think I was going to keep doing it. So he was. Did he ever come around? And I mean, he saw you as a professional writer. He did. And he certainly, you know, loved that. And he showed people things that I wrote, books that I wrote, and articles that I wrote. So yeah, I think I finally was able to win him over by being at least successful enough that he was able to show his friends, people he golfed with, so forth, that, you know, that his son published things. Which is great, but it's still not the same. No. My son is. He's got six foot six and left handed. And I tried to put my slider into that arm instead. He became a musician.

6:16Well, I'm proud of him, but yeah, but you can understand my dad's position on all this. That was my retirement fund. Yeah. And I don't think dad ever really got over the fact that I didn't continue with it. But that's okay. There's still proud of you. So one of my favorite stories that I've heard you tell is your 13, you see a dead box on the road, you go, you get the deer whistle, you're terrible at it, an animal comes out into the sunlight. What was that animal? Yeah. So that's a pretty vivid memory even though it goes back a long way. And I was 13. And so I had seen this fox and made my parents, I mean, I couldn't drive yet, but I had made my parents stop on the side of the road and I'd gotten out and looked at it because I was kind of fascinated with predators in particular for some reason. They stopped? But they're like, why? They stopped, yeah. Well, because I was the only child left at home and they were willing to do that for

7:19me. So they let me take a look at this animal and I had a little polaroid camera that I shot pictures of it with. And then I happened to be in a hardware store in our little town in Louisiana a few days later and I was telling this hardware store owner about this fox and he said, well, we just got this little device and that, I mean, you might be able to see a live fox and that one hit by a car. If you take this out and this is supposed to be a dying, it sounds like a dying rabbit. And so just go out and blow it and see if a fox comes up. And so I bought this thing for a couple of dollars and I knew of an old deer stand that was out in the woods. And I rode my bicycle out to within about a quarter mile of this deer stand and walked out and climbed up in it one morning. It wasn't even really early in the morning. It was sort of mid morning about 10 o'clock and set myself up in this deer stand and blew on this thing. I didn't really know what a dead or dying rabbit was supposed to sound like. So I just blew on it. It made squeaking sounds.

8:22And within about 30 or 40 seconds, this gorgeous animal comes running out of the woods into an opening directly toward this tree I was sitting in with his eyes, its eyes fixed on the base of the tree. And so I didn't dare blow the thing again. I just sat there and watched and it came looping up these beautiful, looping kind of movements. Did you expect that to work? No, of course not. Of course not. I mean, I had no idea what would happen, but what happened was very definitely not what I was anticipating. But it really made an impact. There are some pretty big warning signs in the financial system right now. J.P. Morgan is telling clients gold could hit $6,000 in ounce. City bank predicts silver could reach $90. And central banks just bought a record 289 tons of gold last quarter. At the same time, the national debt is approaching $40 trillion.

9:22And treasury officials are talking about growing all the way out of it. That could be more money entering the system and more pressure on the value of your dollars. That's why I've been telling you about gold crest metals. They focus on widely recognized gold and silver coins with transparent pricing, zero buyback fees and free insured shipping. Plus free IRA storage on qualifying purchases. Right now get their free 2026 precious metals infocate or schedule a free no pressure portfolio review. And qualifying purchases can receive up to $25,000 in free silver. Go to YFilesLuvSgold.com right now or text files to metals that 638257. Get the information and decide for yourself. Made a hell of an impact and what I think it was. And it got within about 20 or 25 feet of the base of the tree and then I think it caught a whiff of scent of me. And it turned and went back exactly on the same path that it had come towards me. Looking back over its shoulder at this tree as it was running away.

10:27And my memory of it was that it had, it looked like it was walking on stilts. It has these really long legs and these sort of yellowish eyes pointed ears. Well, I went back home and sat down and immediately wrote a letter to Louisiana Parks and Wildlife and said, I think I've seen a wolf in Cattle Parish. Is it sixth grader you're writing the government? I wrote it. Yeah, absolutely. And so about two or three weeks passed and a letter showed up in the mailbox from Louisiana Parks and Wildlife. And it was from the division that was at the time. And there was, you know, I don't think I'm certain I don't have this letter anymore. But there was a very famous guy who became one of the first directors of the Endangered Species Act who was a Louisiana and who was then looking for Remnant Red Wolves in Louisiana. And it may have been from him.

11:30But the letter basically said, you may have seen a wolf. We think they're probably are still some red wolves in your part of the state in Cattle Parish. And that may have been what you saw. But more than likely what you saw was a coyote because coyotes are starting to colonize Louisiana now. And what did you know about coyotes then just cartoons? I knew about Wiley Coyote and the road runner. And of course from that, what you get as an impression of coyotes being in the red rock deserts of the west. Yes. And I remember my first thought about that was what in the hell would a coyote be doing here in the biuse and swamps of Louisiana? I mean, it'd be like a moose coming to Louisiana. So I mean, I couldn't quite figure it out. And what I really think is that what I saw was a red wolf coyote hybrid because as I began

12:35to learn, I mean, and this gave me a course of fixation on these wild predators as a young teenager. And so I started reading everything I could, everything I could lay my hands on about them. And they could interbreed. They can interbreed. And in fact, what was at the time, the primary danger for the red wolf was genetic swamping by coyotes migrating into their range. And I think what I saw was a hybrid animal. Did you ever go back up to the deer stand and try again? No, I did. But I never, never was able to lure one back in. He heard you though. He heard me. And in fact, I had climbed up in a tree probably within a hundred yards of this animal for it to have appeared that quickly. It had to be right there every night for a year. It would have been out there. Yeah. Yeah, I was out there a lot. So your family is French Louisiana, but your last name is Spanish.

13:37That's correct. And there. Well, so the French founded Louisiana as a colony in 1714. And the primary town, the first town in what is now the state of Louisiana, was not New Orleans, which was founded in 1718, four years later, but a little town on the Red River in the central part of the state called Nacotish. And the Red River at the time, all the colonial powers, and Thomas Jefferson later believed the same, the Red River, they thought, came from the southern Rockies near Santa Fe, this sort of legendary city of Santa Fe, this town of Santa Fe, that the Spanish had founded a century before. And by this point, in 1714, when Nacotish on the Red River was founded by the French, the Spanish were beginning to settle in Texas.

14:39And they were very alarmed that the French had located a settlement and a new colony on a river that they thought would lead them directly to their capital of the northern provinces of Santa Fe. And so what Spain did was to plant a little procedure, a little post of 20 soldiers 10 miles to the west of Nacosh. It's in a little town called Robeline Louisiana now. And there's actually a Louisiana State Park there that commemorates this little Spanish settlement. But these young Spanish soldiers, all of them evidently were in their 20s. And of course, they were plunked down in a spot where there were, well, there were French girls 10 miles away. And so this duty's not so bad after all. It's not so bad after all. And there was also the only Catholic church was in Nacotish in the French city that these

15:48Spanish soldiers were supposed to be blocking from going to the west. So if you wanted to do mass, you had to go over to the enemy and journey 10 miles into into French Louisiana. I mean, obviously 10 miles is not very far away. So the short of the story is my ancestor intermarried into the French families in Louisiana. And so I ended up with a Spanish surname, but my family is now 11 generations in Louisiana. And they primarily, I mean, my 23 and a half million to Kate set the French ancestry is still about 25 or 30 percent of my ancestry. But we started marrying my family in Louisiana, started marrying into American families in the 1860s and 1870s. So we kind of got like the Red Woolf. So we got genetically swamped by Anglo-America.

16:49It's funny. So there's a Spanish presidio guarding the river. And 300 years later, you're the Flores who made it through. Yeah, I'm the one who made it. And made it to Santa Fe. Yes, that's right. That's right. We talked a little bit about this before the show. I was hoping maybe we can go into more detail. August 1978, you're on the road and you rent that room. And then the Cocktohas. Yeah, it's the Jean-Cochto theater. Why? Well, okay. So, let me give a little bit of the background that we were talking about. I sound like your father now. The father? Yeah, why would you do that? I think Dad probably said the same thing. Why would you do that? Well at the time, I had just gotten a PhD in American history from a university in Texas. And 1978 was a particularly bad year for PhDs in history. And I applied for something like about 15 jobs and I had not gotten a single interview.

17:51Let me just say it was a good year for the Yankees. It was a good year for the Yankees. But it was not a good year for having a PhD in American history. So I had not gotten a single interview with my PhD, which I'd spent a lot of effort and time obviously getting, a lot of time in school. But I had going back to when I'd been an undergraduate, I had this background of writing for magazines. And so that first piece that I sold a sports appeal, that was not the last one. I continued to write for the outdoor magazines in particular all during these years. And so I kind of had the idea, okay, if I can't get a job at a university, maybe I can just, I know some editors in New York. I know I was actually writing a column for outdoor life on conservation in their regional section of the so-called mid-south. They had this yellow insert of an outdoor life of various regions.

18:56And I was doing a column for them. You're making a living? On conservation. Well, I was making a little bit of money. So I had the idea, I'll just call on these editors that I know and I'll see if I can't get more assignments. And so what I'll do is I'm going to move to the most interesting town that I have found in my travels around, particularly the West. I wanted to go West because my ancestors in Louisiana, I had some of those French ancestors were Indian traders who had gone into the West and I had sort of grown up with those stories. And I had seen a Western national park when I was four years old and had been sort of just kind of intoxicated with the feel of the air in the West and the blue skies. I don't believe in genetic memory. Yeah, well, you know, I don't know if it was genetic. I think because I forgot about the trip and I had an aunt tell me like 25 years later, and I'm 30 years old and I'm trying to explain to her why I'm fascinated with being in the

19:57West and going to the West. And she said, well, maybe it has something to do with when you were four years old and we took you out to New Mexico and that national park tour. And I kind of suddenly went, holy cow, you're right. You took me out when I was four. And then I began to remember something about it. But in all those years in between, that had faded away and I couldn't, I sort of explained it the way I just did to you that I knew I had these ancestors who had gone West. So anyway, Santa Fe, New Mexico was the town that as I traveled around the West that I thought was the most compelling and interesting place. And so with no job, I just drove out to Santa Fe. And on the way out, I stopped at one of the universities that had had a job that I had applied for. And just on a whim, basically went into the building that housed the history department and told

21:02the secretary there that I would like to talk to just meet the department chair. And I had walked in, I was wearing T-shirt and cut off Levi's and moccasins. And she said, Dr. Barr, are you willing, you have time to talk to a student? And she said to his credit, sure. Come on in and I say, well, Dr. Barr, actually, I'm not a student. I'm one of the people who applied for one of the jobs you have. And I was driving through, I thought I'd just come by and introduce myself. And he said, well, I really appreciate you doing that. But unfortunately, those jobs have been filled. And so we're only like three weeks away from school starting. So I wish you luck. So I left and I drove out to Santa Fe. And what I did was I went to this little movie theater, this little art movie theater called the Jean Cautote Theater. And they had some room to rent above the theater. And so I paid a down payment and two months rent on a little room, single occupancy room,

22:06really, right above the ticket booth, in fact, of theater. And as we were talking beforehand, and as you know, this was a movie theater that George are Martin of Game of Thrones, two years later, bought in Santa Fe. So if I had managed to live there, he would have been my landlord. But when I drove back to Texas to get everything to leave my apartment that I was in, while I was loading up my car, the phone rang. And I picked it up and this voice says, so this is Dr. Hall and Bar from this particular university, are you this Dan? I said, yes, he said, are you still interested in that job? When you came by and talked to me, I remembered a couple of weeks ago, you didn't have a job and you were still interested. And I said, my first, first thing I said to him was, but I've already rented a room in

23:07Santa Fe. And then I thought, holy cow, I've gone this long. Okay, when the classes start. And so I ended up giving up that room in Santa Fe and I shall lay having a career that went for 36 years as a university professor. What is it about that theater? You know what's always frustrated me about the annual checkup. You wait forever to get an appointment, rearrange your schedule to actually go, get your lab tests done, and after all that, you spend 10 minutes with the doctor and here, everything looks normal. But I have questions. How are my hormones? Am I deficient in anything? Why is my energy different than it used to be? What can I be doing now to stay healthy as I get older? Everything looks normal, doesn't really answer any of that. That's why I'm excited about superpower. Instead of just checking a few boxes once a year, they give you a much deeper look at what's actually happening inside your body. Your membership includes 150 plus biomarkers every year across two lab tests, a baseline

24:11and a progress check. Looking at your heart, liver, thyroid, hormones, metabolism, vitamins, and minerals, and more, then superpower turns that information into a personalized health plan so you can actually understand what's happening and what you can do about it. Go beyond your annual checkup and finally understand what's really happening inside your body. For limited time, our listeners get $50 off to unlock their health membership. Head over to superpower.com slash basement for $50 off your superpower membership. And after you sign up, they'll ask you how you heard about superpower. Tell them the basement sent you. Well, I mean, it's still going. Right. And why did George buy, why is it so interesting? Well, it was an art theater and, you know, I think he's got interest in obviously in film. And he did then. I think he was already working on the Game of Thrones, the Song of Fire and Ice series. And still waiting on that George of your list.

25:12No, I know. Yeah. He's a slowwriter, which he readily concedes. But yeah, I think he just, he probably had the thought even then that this is how he was not only going to publish the books, but this is how he was going to reach a larger audience with them, that he was ultimately going to try to sell these stories in Hollywood or somewhere so they could be made into films. And of course, ultimately Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon, all the rest have been the result. But I think he was already interested in that then. And so having a movie theater was something that he could sort of call on, I think, every day and satisfy his, his fascination with film. And yeah, he still, he still has it all these years later. That's a fun idea. I mean, Tarantino's Theater in LA is a lot of fun. Yeah. Um, coyotes.

26:15Everyone asks you about, not coyotes, but everyone asks you about the natural side. But I think your book said natural and supernatural. It does. Tell me about the supernatural side of the coyote. The coyote, I would argue, after having written this book and done the research to put it together and having also written other books about other animals, and written about bison and wild horses and jaguars and pronghorn antelope and grizzly bears and wolves and a whole host of animals. But I'm convinced that the coyote is the most interesting indeed, fascinating animal in North America. And I don't think I'm alone in believing that. And my evidence for saying that, based on the fact that at least 10,000 years ago, and

27:22maybe longer ago than that, probably during the time of the Pleistocene Extinctions, when Wollimamas and Cybertooth cats and step lions and all these fantastic creatures are around, but disappearing. If, you know, if one is at a particular stage of the Pleistocene, these are the animals that are around you, the way elephants and rhinos and hippos and lions and leopards are in Africa today. But at another stage of the Pleistocene, what you're seeing is those animals disappear. You maybe have a memory that your kinship line, your grandparents or something were the last to see a mammoth. And your uncle was the last to see. No one has seen the Cybertooth cat since. So there's the sense of disappearance too. And obviously by 10,000 years ago, 32 general of animals in North America aren't gone.

28:25But one of the animals that did not disappear was this little jackal-sized wolf, the coyote. And I think that there was a fascination with that animal, but prepared native people to assign it a very unusual role in their stories of who they were, how they had originated, how the world came to be. And that assignment was to make the coyote into coyote with a capital C. Of course, they even no doubt used a different word for the animal. But what we today refer to as the coyote avatar, our semi-deity of Native American stories, we usually designate with a capital C as opposed to the little animal that's trotting by as you're hearing about this. And that animal was given an enormous responsibility for making the world what it was.

29:34And coyote with a capital C became not only a sort of right-hand semi-deity, which I regard as supernatural beyond the natural. As the, the emissary of the first cause, whatever that first cause was. And so in the Christian tradition, the best analogy you could use is so there's a God and there's Jesus of Nazareth who comes down to earth. The coyote is the figure out of the Paleolithic world in North America who does the actual work on North America. The first cause never shows up, which tribes would have that legend. Almost every tribe that resided within the original range of coyotes in North America and that was in the American West, basically from the Great Plains westward.

30:35Well, coyotes in New Ottawa, isn't it? Yes. So that's Mexico. That's Mexico. And that, the word that we use to, to designate the animal is from, yeah, from the Noah language, which is the, the Aztec language. So it's all over. It's all over. They were found from basically southern Mexico to probably the edges of present-day Saskatchewan in Alberta. Coyotes did not range, and this is all based on paleontology and archaeology because of course we don't know otherwise, but based on paleontology and archaeology, there are no remains of coyotes. For example, in the Pacific Northwest. And from essentially the central coast of California southward, you find evidence of coyotes in the paleontological size, but not really up in the Bay area and in northern California. So the northern part of the coast didn't seem to have them, but east of the cascades

31:39in the sear, in the north and then from the central coast of California southward, all the way to south of Mexico City, there were coyotes and they extended, they're range extended almost to the Mississippi River. And everywhere those animals were found, the local people treated them as this avatar semi-deity figure. What did the deity do, dirt? Well, in the legends. He basically, and it's a he, by the way. There are some stories that refer to, I mean, in the, what I titled a chapter in coyote America that's about this is I call it Old Man America because I really think he's our oldest literary figure in North America. Yeah. Yeah, all of our early stories that go of the farthest back in time are about coyote. There are some stories about a female coyote, but there are very few in number. Most of the stories are about a male coyote, but he basically is the, the act of creation.

32:46He creates the topography of North America. He makes the rivers flow the way they flow. He has the Columbia flow westward from the Rockies and the Missouri flow eastward. He also creates and locates humans in their various places in the west. Everything here is about the west because coyote does not range east to the Mississippi River where there are a host of other kind of paleolithic figures who occupy a kind of a similar role. There's spider, there's rabbit, there's, there are giant humans who do this. There's a host of different kind of figures, but coyote occupies by far the largest range of any of them. He creates topography of North America. The rivers he creates, he places people in there. I think the first cause is the creation of people, but coyote is responsible for placing

33:47them where they go on the landscape. He has to fight monsters that are in North America and get them out of the way so people won't be harmed by monsters. What monsters is he fighting? Well, there's a great story from the Shashonis of his battle with a monster that's in the Northern Rockies in order to make the country around the Northern Rockies where the Shashonis end up settling, safe for the people to be there. And coyote has to battle this monster and it's a very involved tale of all the kind of encounters that he and the monster have before coyote prevails. Give us a little taste of it. Well, he has shashonis in my blood so I'm really interested. Oh yeah. He prevails largely through a trick and it's been a while since I've read this particular story, but as we all know, coyote is referred to and a lot of literature is a trickster figure and so he manages to trick this particular monster into sacrificing itself. And that's sort of the model for a lot of how these coyote trickster stories work is you

34:49pull off a trick that basically prays on and this is what I came to argue and I will say I think I'm probably the first and maybe right now the only person to make this argument about the coyote stories. I argue in my book having read a bunch of those stories that what's important about the trick is not that it's a trick, not that the monster falls for a trick, but that the trick itself prays on the foibles of human nature. And so it's not the trick that's important, it's why the trick works. And that's what the stories are really intended to convey to you. They're intended to convey, unlike say the Jesus of Nazareth stories where Jesus is a perfect figure and your goal as a follower is to emulate that kind of perfection.

35:54The coyote is portrayed as being a figure who has good traits, but also lots of really bad traits like like people exactly like people. And so the coyote's role is actually to me, rather more useful in being able to say, okay, there are these attributes out there like gluttony and lust and being addicted to things and being a narcissist and being an absolute buffoon. And all of those traits are used in these stories as part of the trick and the people who fall or the, in this case the monster in the shunny story who falls for the trick, falls for the trick because of one of the particular foibles of human nature. So the purpose of the story is obviously is to teach people about who we are.

36:55They are very clever, they're very smart, they're often very, very funny and what coyote essentially comes across is as, okay, he's this biological force that takes huge pleasure in life and in being alive and in sensuality and in sort of getting the most out of the moment. But he's also a narcissistic buffoon. Sure. And so you have to look at both sides of the human story and that's how you learn about human nature. I mean, to me that's a very sophisticated body of literature that teaches the people who hear those stories and they are rendered orally about themselves. That kind of answer is a question I was going to ask you is during this time you've got all these majestic animals like the Peruvian tribes or their worshiping jaguar. So you get it.

37:56And why would the native tribes choose this little jackal? But maybe what they observed was this creature is mostly a lot like us where a mammoth is just a, I think a lot of it had to do. I mean, you're right. Even the Mayans, the jaguar and the eagle are the two most sacred animals. But I think the reason the coyote was picked is because it was seen as a survivor and it was a survivor that lived by its wits. And that I think people saw as admirable. They were watching mammoths and saber-toothed cats and lions and horses and camels all go extinct and the animal that was surviving all of it was this little small jackal like wolf and it was doing so by being smart. And I think that appealed to people. I mean, I've pointed out in in coyote America that the coyote, coyote has done this not just once with the plice of scene,

39:02but did it at the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century when we Americans were engaged in the biggest destruction of wildlife and world history really. I mean, we had reduced 30 million buffalo to fewer than a thousand animals in the previous 80 years. We were about to wipe out the most numerous bird on earth, the passenger pigeon, our wonderfully beautiful parents, the Carolina parakeet were going to be gone within about three decades of 1900. I mean, we had lost our northern hemisphere penguin, the great awk. I mean, we were just wiping things out right and left and everybody who was paying attention noted that I mean, wolves were disappearing. The one animal that was not disappearing was the coyote. And one of our great animal riders Ernest Thompson wrote a piece to lead peace in Skrivner's magazine in 1900 coming up with kind of an apocryphal

40:03explanation for why that was. But everybody was noticing it. All these animals are disappearing. For some reason, this one isn't. Well, that is a great transition to take a break when we come back. Maybe you can tell us about the Murray, Murray brothers. Oh, yeah, sure. The Murray brothers, absolutely. Before we get to the Murray's, just quickly, what is a coyote? How does it relate to dog wolf? Where is it in that in the branch? Well, it's the same genus, canus. It's closely related. So it's, there's an interesting story about wolves in America. Gray wolves are not the same animals as eastern wolves and red wolves. Eastern wolves, red wolves, and coyotes. And we've only known this really for about a dozen years as a result of genetic work on their genomes. Those all seem to be the canas that that after the evolution of canas in North

41:10America some five million years ago, those three coyotes, eastern wolves, and red wolves seem to be the animals that remained in America and did not leave. And gray wolves represented a population of animals that actually migrated into Eurasia, spent a couple of million years really outside North America before they started returning in a series of waves about 30,000 years ago. They left and came back. They left and came back. That's interesting. Yeah. And so they are different enough from coyotes that even in the years in the 1920s and 1930s when wolves were being wiped out in the West, gray wolves were being wiped out. I mean, there were just small numbers of them left. And they're looking for mates. They, gray wolves found mates among ranch dogs rather than with coyotes that were all around them. But, and this is the origin of the so-called coy wolf in the east.

42:12I was going to ask you about the coy wolf. Yeah. Coyotes do not hybridize with gray wolves, but they readily hybridize with the two kind of wolves that remained in North America along with them. Excuse me. And so red wolves and eastern wolves will both very readily hybridize with coyotes. And that's what's created this population of animals that we refer to these days as coy wolves. Yeah. They're part wolf and part coyote. But that animal does not exist in the West because gray wolves and coyotes as a result of that long separation in time. They have behavioral, probably behavioral differences that prevent them from. And I, you know, I had an interesting time once at the Predator Research Facility in Logan, Utah when I was working on the coyote book, talking to the people there. They have about 100 coyotes in captive pans and they're endlessly doing experiments with them, trying to figure out, you know, various things about them. Their individuality, for example. But one of the things they attempted, they told me,

43:19was to impregnate a coyote with gray wolf, with gray wolf semen. And this female coyote gave birth to a litter of puppies that were part gray wolf and part coyote. And she immediately killed them all. Wow. So it can work, but they didn't want to do it. Yeah. Why do you think that is? Well, as I said, I think there are behavioral differences that prevent them from breeding. But is that a competitive between the species where they detect? They are very competitive. In fact, the, you know, one of the things I wrote about in coyote America was about the so-called fish and fusion idea where one that one of the things that it enables coyote success is that they are able to both exist as pack animals and as singles and pairs, which is called fish and fusion. And the argument about how they evolved that is that that came from coexisting with gray wolves that harassed them.

44:22And so when gray wolves basically were virtually gone and it was humans who had replaced wolves as the harassers, coyote still had this adaptability to function even though we were trying to wipe them out. Sure. Yeah. But that came from their relationship, their earlier relationship. And it was obviously, I mean, when wolves, for example, were reintroduced into Yellowstone, almost the first thing they did was to reduce the coyote population by about 60%. The wolves did? The wolves did. I mean, they attacked coyotes everywhere they could find them. They dug up their dens and killed their puppies. Wow. So that mother smelled that and said, nope. She smelled that and said, that's not going to happen. Yeah. I'm not going to raise animals, no part wolf. So yeah, she killed those puppies. That's amazing. Yeah. All right. So the, so the Murie brothers, yeah. Science, a science agency becomes a killing agency to keep its funding. Yeah. The Bureau of Biological Survey. It already sounds ominous. Yeah. Which had been

45:24created in the 1890s, essentially to do a survey of what animals were left after, you know, this mayhem of the last years of the 19th century when we were killing so many animals. But by the early 20th century, a purely scientific agency like that was having trouble getting funding from Congress. And meanwhile, ranchers all over the country, but especially the West, were complaining about wolves and coyotes and mountain lions and asking because the federal government by this point had set aside the national forest system. Right. And the ranchers were convinced that these public lands were becoming the breeding grounds for predators. No Teddy Roosevelt fans out there. Yeah. No Teddy Roosevelt fans among that particular group. And so they'd say, you did this to us. It's your responsibility, feds, to deal with this predator problem.

46:30And unable to get funding for a purely scientific mission, the Bureau of Biological Survey decided in about 1905. Okay. That's what we'll do. Congress will give us money if we pledge to be the agency that solves the predator problem. And so the biological survey at that point began very steadily sort of redefining themselves as the solution to the existence of predators in America. And particularly under the leadership of young man, a Minnesota without a great deal of education. His name was Vernon Bailey, but he was really good at trapping animals and really good at figuring out how to kill animals. And he began writing for the biological survey. These yearly reports advising forest service managers and national park managers how to get rid of your predators.

47:33So what basically happens to get to the Murie Brothers, which I know is where we want to go with this discussion, is that the biological survey operating under these old world mythologies about predators. I mean, in the old world, after all, you know, we've been hurting stock animals for 8,000 years. We had been domesticating and hurting cattle and sheep and goats and so forth for a very long time so that predators were kind of public enemy number one. Sure. And then brought that sentiment to America where the native people, not for one thing, not having not being razors of domesticated stock, had always looked at animals like coyotes and wolves as, I mean, these are, they teach us about hunting. They teach us about how to care for families. They are really dedicated to their mates and their packs and their pubs and their, we name our clans

48:37after wolves and coyotes. We name our children after these animals. We seek them out as total animals and as spiritual guides and vision quest. So there was this huge respect for predators and admiration for them among the native population. There's more money in cattle. And here come the Europeans with all their stock and of course they want to make war. I mean, the first environmental act that Europeans pass in North American history in Plymouth, Colony in 1816, 32, is to put a bounty on wolves. Wow. I didn't know that. Yeah. That's the first environmental act that old worlders implement in America is to place a bounty on wolves to try to get rid of them. I mean, England had, they had gotten rid of all their wolves by the 1400s. Yep. So, you know, these are people who have never been around wolves. They're kind of shocked that suddenly they are in a place where wolves are

49:38very common and easily seen. They're also shocked that with all these ideas they have from Europe about wolves being dangerous to people that as these early settlers, particularly in New England, right. In fact, we've never known it yet for a wolf to ever set upon a man or a woman or a child. They don't seem to be aggressive at all towards people. All this is kind of worrisome and but it doesn't change the agenda that they're going to get rid of these animals. So, this has been going on since the 1600s and now we have a federal agency that dedicates itself in order to get funding originally to the idea of, okay, we're going to step in. We're going to replace all these old bounty systems that territories and states have set up and we're going to be professional about this and the way you professionally approach the so-called predator problem is you start hiring hunters to go out

50:41and they don't shoot wolves and coyotes. They basically spread poison bait across the landscape. Strict nine is the particular poison they use and start poisoning the predator populations into extinction. What take us to what happens when an animal ingest strict nine? Well, it's not a pretty sight. In fact, there was a term that these hunters used. They called it the strict nine signature and it was what you saw of an animal, what you saw in its body contortions that had been killed by ingesting strict nine. It basically wrenched them so powerfully that it arched their spines and stuck their tail straight out as if the animal had been hit by a bolt of lightning and left this sort of, I mean, I describe it in

51:48one of my books as it's almost like seeing an animal shaped into a question mark with its body humped up and its tail sticking straight out. That was the characteristic strict nine signature of an animal that had been killed by this poison. It's not a quick death. It's not a quick death. I mean, one of the stories I tell in and while new world is about Vernon Bailey, who I mentioned a minute ago, who sort of becomes Tady Roosevelt called him wolf Bailey because he was the guy who knew how to get rid of these animals. Vernon Bailey writes his superior in Washington and says, so what would you say would be the correct dose of strict nine when I put strict nine into these little base they would they would sprinkle these little pieces of meat or sue it around usually a dead horse or something and they would soak them in strict nine.

52:48They want should be the proper dose to kill a wolf humanely. Let's say an under three minutes. The response he got back was this, you had best go into a hospital that has a mental institution and have yourself checked in because no employee of ours in his right mind would ever ask such a question. The ranchers are not interested in any compassion directed towards wolves or coyotes. Oh my god. You kill them with as big a dose as you wish and don't think one more time about showing any kind of empathy for these animals. They, I mean, and this is just one and going right down to today when we are trying to recover wolves in America, we are still employing some of the

53:52cruelest strategies for reducing their numbers or holding their numbers in check as many of these state governments in the West now call it that you could possibly imagine and sort of approaches that we would never use because sport hunting, of course, is supposed to be ethical and be all about fair chase. But with these animals, everything is basically legal. You can kill them in any possible way and we do. I mean, we're killing them with wire snare traps now that basically snare a wolf or a coyote and every time this panicked animal attempts to move the wire snare tightens a little bit more until it finally completely strangles them. So that kind of cruelty is one of the features of this story and one of the crazy things about this story is that by the 1920s, these hunters for the biological survey have spread more than three and a half million

54:56poison baits across Western America. And one of the things they've learned how to do is they've realized that wolves in particular are so strongly committed to their packs and to their mates. That, I mean, and I use a quote from one of the hunters that says this and while they were all, if you kill one animal out of the pack and you bait all your subsequent strict nine tablets or pieces of suet with the scent of that animal, you can kill every single animal in the pack because they will all be looking for the lost member of the pack. And if you put that scent on the bait, you can kill every one of them. And that works. It worked so effectively that, I mean, I'll give you one example in the state of Montana in 1899 Montana in that year. And they were still using the bounty system. This is before the federal government comes to play this role I'm describing.

56:00The state of Montana in 1899, bounded 21,000 wolves in the state. When the Bureau of Biological Survey takes over the job and it gets permanent funding from the federal government in 1915, but it had been doing this for several years before that. But now it's getting well-funded and it starts hiring a lot of people. I had more than 350 hunters going out in order to bait the West with strict nine by 1915 by 1920 Montana, which had killed 21,000 wolves in 1899. In the year 1920, they killed 20 wolves in Montana. That was how effective this strategy was. And only 20 because they were gone. They were gone. Wow. They were gone. So that by the middle of the 1920s, I mean, there are still lingering animals when some of the sort of primary wolf hunters, a guy named Stanley

57:04Young and EA Goldman, who are major players in the biological survey, which by the way becomes the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In 1944, they published a two volume book. It's in every library in the country called the wolves of North America. And it's basically a celebration of how we have wiped wolves off the face of the continent. All the wolves are gone from east of the Mississippi River. I mean, there are none left except for a few red wolves, they think from Florida across to Texas, down along the Gulf Coast, all the other wolves are gone in eastern America. And in western America, west of the Mississippi River, all the Rocky Mountain States have only 100 wolves left. There may be 50 wolves left in California. There are about 150 Mexican wolves in Arizona and New Mexico and on down into Mexico proper. And the only wolves that are really left is there some

58:06red wolves left, as I said, along the Gulf Coast. And there are a few wolves up around the great lake still. But we have basically wiped them out by 1945. Were they still dropping poison during this whole time? Absolutely. They're still dropping poison. Is it killing every? It's killing. Yes. I mean, the collateral damage is enormous because... Like, carrying birds and eagles, ravens, magpies. Oh, what a disaster. I mean, some of the stories that are told, and I mean, I feel obligated in these books I've done, like Kaya de America and Wild New World, and American Serengeti too, to tell these stories because I think a lot of Americans don't really know this and they're hard to listen to. But one of the stories about this kind of thing is that you put poison baits out around, say, a horse that you've killed for this purpose to attract predators. And as these hunters start approaching this bait animal,

59:07a dead horse, about a quarter a mile away, they start encountering animals that have been killed by the poison around this bait animal. So they start finding raccoons, foxes, eagles, magpies, ravens. I mean, skunks. Everything that's going to be possibly attracted to little pieces of meat are fat that's left out around this baited animal. So that, I mean, one of the hunters described, he said, it's like a spinning centrifuge that sprays dead animals out for a quarter of a mile, all in a circle all around our bait. And what we're really going for, of course, are wolves and coyotes, but we're just killing the shed out of all kinds of things. Can you imagine that she's just a number of animals killed? It's, I mean, none of us has been able to make any kind of estimate. What we all know, though, at least those of who have studied this story is that the populations

1:00:14of animals coyotes accepted everything else is just crashing. I mean, we are losing animals in America like, I mean, you can hardly believe with the single exception of the things we want to hunt. And so we have state, fish and wildlife agency set up to make sure that we have Bob White Quail, and we introduce animals like, like Chinese peasants and white tail deer we want to protect and elk we want to protect and grass and turkeys and all those things that people want to hunt. But everything else, and in part, it's because the government is telling people, look, the more of these predators we kill, the more stuff you're going to get to shoot, the easier it is you're going to make it possible to get your deer or your elk. And so, sport hunters, and of course, the firearms manufacturers are all in on this too because the more game animals you

1:01:16have out there, the more you're going to sell firearms and ammunition and all that. So the whole I mean, they called it a buffalo rifle. Yes, they did. Absolutely. So the whole project becomes convinced the public that predators are evil, that they're the desparados of the animal world. They're, you know, like John Dillinger or something. And the biological survey actually has a marketing arm that publishes newspaper articles. I mean, I've read one of them when I was doing the research for these books. It was in the Washington Post about how the G-Men, the hunters are going to go out and kill the desparados of the animal world with all these photographs of mountain lions and bears and coyotes and wolves, just like they're saving us from, you know, John Dillinger and sure and Bonnie and Clyde. And so it's good to throw a little anti-Mexican racism in the marketing as well. Why not? Of course. Yeah, why not? So we sort of are doing this

1:02:22based on these old world hatreds of predators that have harassed domesticated stock for a long time in the old world. Plus these kind of folklore mythologies of these animals as evil and they will attack your children and they'll, if they find you in the forest, the pack of wolves will dry, I mean, we still do movies showing scenes like that. Everyone knows Little Red Riding Hood. Absolutely. Everybody knows these stories. And so they play on all of this and sort of convince generations of Americans that this is a reality. And they do it all just finally going to get us to the Murie brothers without having done a single, freaking scientific study of the role that wolves or coyotes have played in American natural history or ecology. So kill with chemicals first, do the study later. That's the study later. That's America's, that's their platform. We've been doing that for a long time. We've been doing it for a long time. And the first studies, I mean,

1:03:25when the Murie, so Olaus and Adolf Murie are these brothers from the Upper Midwest who are trained ecologists. And this is one of the things, by the way, that begins to rescue the game. Indian ideas about all these animals, we just brushed aside. Of course. What do they know? But starting in 1915, coming out of the work of Charles Darwin and evolution, a new science called ecology, which is the study of the relationships of animals in the natural world and of botany and all the rest, emerged and the ecological society of America had its first meeting in 1915 with 300 members showing up. Among them were very famous figures like Aldo Leopold, for example, who's going to become a major player in this whole story. And it's the science of ecology that starts saying, look, before we go out and just kill all these animals and wipe them out.

1:04:30And I mean, the campaign to wipe them out in 1931, in an act called the Animal Damage Control Act, manages to get Congress to promise $10 million to exterminate animals like wolves and coyotes completely off the continent. So Congress is pouring money in and this is 31. 1931, the Animal Damage Control Act of that year. That's, yeah, we can't afford that in that year. Yeah, well, right. I mean, it's, you know, the stock market has collapsed. But there's money for this. The Great Depression is, but there's a million dollars a year for 10 years as the plan. We're going to give the biological survey and the animal damage control unit within it, a million dollars a year for the next 10 years from 1931 to 1941 to produce the extinction of these animals. All without doing any science. And so the ecologist, the ecologist like Aldo Leopold and a young man

1:05:33named Joseph Grinnell, who is George Bird Grinnell's nephew, who becomes a major player in the state of California and for the National Park Service and arguing things like, you know, we've got these national parks and the people who go there are fascinated in all the animals and we're supposed to preserve these national parks in order to represent American nature. Why don't we let the predators stay? Joseph Grinnell wrote an article for Science magazine in 1915 proposing that. And of course, the National Park Service is, it gets its organic act the next year. We finally have a National Park Service. So there are arguments by the ecologists that we need to let these animals have some places where and the parks seem to be the best place for it where we can see American nature actually enacted with a putting strict nine in the parks at any point. Absolutely they were. In fact,

1:06:35Vernon Bailey had gone to like Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks in the 19 teens to teach those park managers how to get rid of their predators. I mean, we killed the last wolf and Yellowstone National Park in 1927. And until 1995 when we reintroduced them, there are no wolves in Yellowstone. And I'll just add one other little bit before I finally do get to the Mary Brothers because that's where we're going. But another way of getting rid of wolves and coyotes, this came from the state of Montana. You know, and I keep dragging on Montana, but I live there and taught in the university there for 22 years. And so I know a good bit about the Montana story here in Montana, of course, is doing really egregious things with wolves these days. In 1905, the state of Montana actually passed an act that required state veterinarians who came across or were brought to their facilities,

1:07:41a wild coyote or a wolf to infect that animal with sarcoptic mange and then release it into the wild in order to spread mange to the wild populations required required them to do so. And the manager, the first superintendent, I should say, of Glacier National Park actually put in a request that he be delivered animals that had mange into the park so he could more expeditiously kill wolves and coyotes in the park. Now, the National Park Service in Washington denied his request, but he actually entered in a request that he get mange infected animals. And even today, when he go to Yellowstone to look at wolves in places like the Lamar Valley, if you see five or six or 10 wolves, you will almost certainly see an animal or two that has got mange. I mean,

1:08:44it's still still still infects those populations. Yeah, more than a hundred years later. What kind of statistics were available about wolf attacks in the parks? Were they going after visitors? No, of course they weren't. Of course not. I mean, in fact, when Stanley Young and EA Goldman wrote there, these sort of leaders of the biological survey, wrote there the wolves of North America, they had a chapter dedicated to trying to find evidence of wolf attacks of humans. And basically, I mean, I'll give them credit for their honesty. They had to say at the end of the chapter, we don't really have anything. I mean, there's, you know, they came up with one of the stories I remember from reading it that made me laugh is there was a famous book written about the Great Plains in the 1840s. And the author of this particular book had described at one point being bucked off his horse and losing

1:09:50his hat. And it sort of knocked him unconscious. And when he came to his hat was lying seven or eight feet away. And a wolf was standing over it sniffing it. And they used that in the wolves of North America as an example of possible wolf predation on a human. This is the, did you die with COVID or of COVID? Yeah, it goes best the same thing. Yeah, exactly. You know, you show them in the wolf. I'll show you the crime. So all this is happening. And there's no science. Nobody has studied these animals. And so the biological survey and the national park service finally decide in the middle of the 1930s. Okay, let's hire these murray brothers, two of our best trained naturalists to go out and demonstrate that they were referring to the coyote during those years as the arch enemy of our time. The arch of our time. Yes, the arch in the arch predator of our time they were

1:10:56referring it to. So let's send Olaus murray to Jackson Hole and Grand T. T. Tawza National Park. And let's have him study the coyotes of the Grand T. Tawza so that we finally have evidence to buttress our endeavors of wiping these animals out. And let's send the national park service as well let's send his brother Adolf murray to Yellowstone National Park. And let's do a study of the coyotes there. The wolves are gone from both places. So let's do the coyotes there. And that'll finally give us all the evidence we need for this campaign. We've embarked on really since 1620. Right, since the time of the settlement of the Massachusetts Bay calling. We've got a million a year coming in. We've got absolutely. So let's we've got a million a year coming in. Let's send these guys out and we'll do the studies and we'll finally provide the scientific evidence to support our programs. The only problem was these two scientists were dedicated to science and the truth. And when they

1:12:03began studying the coyotes of Jackson Hole and the Grand T. Tawza and basically it was the the winner elk range in Jackson Hole in particular that Olaus murray was working on. And Adolf, I mean he spent five years doing this study in Yellowstone. I mean, he really did a remarkably good study. What they concluded was that coyotes actually it turns out not only are not a threat to wildlife because what it looks like is that all the animals that they prey on they've been praying on for a very, very long time. We don't know how far back but evidently a really long time before we ever got here. And all those animals already have adapted to the predation by coyotes. So I mean in in Yellowstone Adolf murray went down one animal after another mountain goats. No

1:13:09reason to suspect that coyotes have any deleterious effect on mountain goat populations. Big horn sheep same thing Mule deer same thing. I mean he just goes down the list. I've studied all of these. I've looked at the scat. I've observed coyotes and how they've interacted with the young and the old and there's no evidence that they have any effect on wildlife populations other than to make them healthier because they tend to take out what predators tend to go for with the cost benefit analysis. If I don't want to get kicked in the head are stabbed with antlers. They tend to go for the animals that are injured that are old that are very young. They don't go after the really healthy ones that are the breeding population. So they put all of this in their studies and one of the things they conclude OOS in particular said as far as I can tell 80% of what coyotes actually do is beneficial to humans. And the remaining 20%

1:14:13is neutral in its effects. What's the benefit? Well for example he discovered the major prey of coyotes actually. It's not elk calves. It's not Mule deer calves. It's mice and rats. And so of course they produce a beneficial effect for agriculture because they go after the animals. So yeah 80% of what they do. So we finally have done the studies. They're published by in the federal register. Copies are distributed to Congress. The Bureau of Biological Survey gets a copy from OOS study because they had sent him and the National Park Service gets eight offs study from Yellowstone. And what do we do? Throw those studies out the window and keep right on. Of course we do. Of course we do. Yeah. We keep right on going. What ever happened to the Murie Brothers? Did they become activists? They did. They both actually resigned from the government

1:15:18agencies they were working for. And I mean they did some really important things. They worked in what became and in fact suggested that we set aside the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. OOS worked among the Caribou herds in Alaska. Adolf worked and recommended the and also in Alaska and recommended among sheep particularly and recommended that we set aside the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge which he did in the 1950s. OOS is the guy who basically he was sent by what was now the U.S. by a Fish and Wildlife Service to Montana to take a look at what has become the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge. And they were thinking of just setting aside some small piece of land up there and how would you you know maybe as a wintering waterfowl spot on the Missouri River

1:16:21and he recommends instead a giant national wildlife refuge on the Missouri River. So they do that but they both ultimately end up leaving the government service and they work for the wildlife society I mean for the wilderness society for most of the rest of their lives. I had never heard of them before reading your work and I feel like more people should know about those. Oh yeah they're they're very famous individuals. There's a lot of work in in Western Wyoming and Yellowstone and in Jackson Hole and are well known in places like that. They're well known in Alaska otherwise a lot of people have never heard of them but they were a couple along with Aldo Leopold a couple of our mid 20th century naturalist and ecologists who really did important work that helped get us over this hump to the point where we were starting to use ecology and some sense of history to realize we've got to stop this. This is crazy. This attempt to wipe these animals out and what we have to do ultimately

1:17:28which of course we end up doing when the Endangered Species Act has passed is we've got to start recovering wolves. Coyotes are okay. Now they're still being poisoned and finally in 1972 Richard Nixon will end the Poisoning or the poisoning of coyotes on public lands but nonetheless the wolf issue was the one that they because Adolf also went to Mount McKinley and did with his wolves of Mount McKinley that was released in 1945. He produced kind of the first of the modern wolf stories where he gets us a look at this animal that has been here for five million years and finally we're beginning to realize something something real about it and we can begin to manage wolves on a basis of reality and science rather than this old world folklore. Well it only takes like 20 or 30 years

1:18:29to wipe out the wolves. Why did the coyotes survive? That was one of the really interesting stories of the 20th century war against these animals. The arched predator of our time the coyotes were called after the wolves were basically gone and there were a number of attempts to figure it out what was happening and one of the ones I mentioned it earlier and I'll go back to it and tell you the story because it's a I think it's kind of a pretty great story in this whole narrative. Ernest Thompson's seat was a Canadian who ended up becoming a major player in the American Boy Scouts. He ended up in fact moving to Santa Fe and founding what's now called Seton Village. I mean he built the several houses and became a major player in the American Boy Scout movement but he was in his

1:19:33early years a predator hunter and he had come to the west especially to New Mexico in the 1880s to try to hunt down and kill a particular wolf the Lobo of Carumpa it was called that had alluded a whole host of other hunters and Ernest Thompson's seat and thought that he could pull this off and so he did so and he did so by using he managed to kill this wolf and he did it by using the tactic that I mentioned a few minutes ago that the later federal hunters were used where he realized that all of his attempts to set traps for Lobo were ineffective this animal was too smart it had learned too much about all the techniques that people that hunters were trying to use to kill it but what made it vulnerable was its love for its mate and so Seton managed to capture Blanca the

1:20:45mate of Lobo and killed her and then he baited his traps with her scent and he did a double set where he put a set out that he thought Lobo would dig up with his front paws and then put a set about three or four feet away two or three sets in fact that Lobo's back feet would get into and he managed to catch this animal and here's how he wrote because he within a few years within about 20 years he was no longer a predator hunter he was now a writer of the Jack London ilk in the beginning of the 20th century there were a whole host of these writers about animal stories and John Burles was one Jack London obviously was one and Ernest Thompson's seat and was one and one of the stories he wrote was about Lobo and how he described the way this wolf died he said

1:21:48they caught Lobo and they wanted to take Lobo alive so the ranchers could kind of gloat over this wolf finally being captured and they staked it out in a ranchers yard and Seton said it lay on a rise with a chain around its neck looking off into the distance where it and its mate had roamed the countryside and started itself to death it wouldn't eat and basically died by starting itself to so he wrote that story and then the story that I particularly have admired was his story to try to come to grips with why are wolves disappearing why were we able to wipe out bison why have 15 million pronghorn antelope shrunk to 5,000 why are passenger pigeons nearly gone and coyotes are still here no matter what we do to them there seem to be as many as there ever were

1:22:52if not more so he writes this story that as I said was published in scripteders in 1900 called Tito the story of the little coyote who learned how and it's this allegorical story about this coyote this little female coyote who is a pup is captured by a rancher as he's killing the coyotes parents and the other pups in the litter he captures her he changed her up in his yard and she grows up as a captured animal that they throw scraps to but as she grows up she is able to observe all the strategies and techniques this ranching family is using to wipe out as Satan describes it the coyote kind and they're using dogs and they're using traps and they're using guns and they're using strict nine poison and Tito is sitting in the yard watching all of it and at some point after she's a couple of years old she manages to get away and she goes out in

1:23:57the nature and she finds a mate and as Ernest Homsdolson tells a story she then has a litter of pups and she teaches her pups and all her pups offspring are going to learn the same lesson through basically coyote culture being handed down all the techniques that people are using to try to wipe them out and so they know now as a result of Tito all the strategies and he says the human analog of this and there is a human analog is Moses Moses Moses who as a young Jewish child is taken into an Egyptian family and raised in Egypt among the people who are attempting to wipe out his people and he learns all the ideas and all the techniques that they're going to use to do so and then gets away and rescues his people so that's the story that he tells in Skrimner's magazine

1:25:03in 1900 and the native tribes are like we told you oh he told you that this yeah of course it's a great allegorical story but it's not the scientific version of how they do it and we've already mentioned it but it's what we don't find out about coyotes until we spend some 500 million dollars of taxpayer money by the 1970s and have killed eight and a half million coyotes in America doing this and not only there are there just as many coyotes in the west as they're always were but now with wolves wiped out in the east coyotes are spreading across the Mississippi river into Louisiana where I was growing up into upstate New York and beginning to colonize all the eastern states you so so they are being killed but they're replacing themselves they are replacing themselves and spreading and spreading they're going north into Canada where they get all the way

1:26:08up into the Arctic is it possible if there was no strict nine program that they wouldn't have spread I think two things were required the strict nine program was one but I think wiping out wolves in places like the east in particular now the expansion of coyotes to the Arctic indicates that they were able to expand into country and Canada that still had wolf populations but I think the elimination of the kind of predatory niche that wolves and coyotes fill in the east expedited their movement because they were going into places like Virginia and New York and Vermont and New Hampshire and Massachusetts where there was no competition from another predator and also more people more food more rats more people more food more rats more mice right dear populations that were beginning to with no predators of course dear populations are

1:27:09beginning to explode in states like Pennsylvania so that was the pull and the push was the attempt on the part of federal governments and state governments and just individuals because by now I mean there had been a story in scientific American for example in 1920 that said any red blooded American who sees a coyote ought to shoot it on site it's a patriotic act it's not and it's 1920 it's the reason I mentioned that date specifically because this is right after the Russian revolution this writer in scientific American says you should shoot coyotes as a patriotic act not because they have any value they're not worth as much as the ammunition it takes to kill them but because coyotes are after all the original North American Bolsheviks they're communists and so we need to kill them on site so just ordinary people are shooting coyotes every time they see

1:28:14the government is trying to poison them with strict nine and by the 1940s I mean we've introduced a whole new host of poisons to use against them I mean it's part of the chemical revolution of World War II is we have things like I mean there is a particular poison I mean see if I can remember the scientific name of it in any case it's a it's a strict nine is it the 1080? 1080 is one I'm just trying to think of the scientific name for 1080 but 1080 is the most important one of the of the age because and it's given that name because it takes 1080 tries on the part of the federal poison engineers to come up with this perfect poison but we come up with four or five different poisons to kill coyotes so we don't just use strict nine anymore and as I said a minute ago I mean we've killed by the 1970s we've killed eight and a half million of them have spent five hundred million dollars trying to wipe them out and they're spreading across

1:29:20all of America they get to Delaware the last state in the east they occupy in 2011 so you got them in central park you got them in Chicago got them in central park yeah we've got at at least four hundred of them in Chicago yeah four hundred coyotes are living in Chicago and it's a you know it's one of the kind of great reverse nature North American stories because what we always think of and this was one of the reasons I've told people over the years I had so much fun writing this book is because usually when you write about environmental stories in American history you're writing you know about this everything is just falling apart and it's this sad kind of outcome but with the coyote story it's the reverse it's like we throw everything we've got at them and we can't wipe them out and the thing that replaces ultimately the tito the story of the little coyote that learned how

1:30:22is a couple of scientists in the late 1950s doing a careful enough scientific study of coyotes to come to these conclusions which they published in all the major journals the journal of mammology ecology all the rest this is why we're not able to wipe out coyotes coyotes have evolved an adaptation called fish infusion which we've mentioned already where they respond to harassment by breaking up their packs and scattering in singles and pairs whereas wolves of course would if you baited your traps with the scent of another member of the pack you'd eventually kill all the members of a wolf pack but coyotes won't go for that coyotes don't go for that they respond to that kind of harassment by scattering wow and the result of scattering is that they're also

1:31:23colonizing into new places and so this is why the attempt to wipe them out in the west pushes them towards the east and what they conclude is that you could wipe out you could kill 70% of the coyote population in a given area year after year after year and you would not wipe them out that they would replace their populations with the numbers that were left because they would respond to this by recruiting larger litters by having larger litters and in an area where you're trying to wipe coyotes out it's possible for coyotes to raise say a litter of six or seven or eight puppies to get them all up to adulthood whereas when the landscape has a healthy population of coyotes they have a litter of maybe five and only two or three right survived to adulthood but they respond that quickly

1:32:26they respond that quickly yeah and this is how they're able to overcome our attempts so what we finally get to of course is where we are now and every city in america has a coyote management policy and they're all following the same notion which is we have to learn to coexist with them we've got to learn to live with them in our midst and learn not only how to coexist so you don't feed them you don't try to lure them in because if you feed them that's what gets people bitten that's what gets their pets snagged out of yards and things i was in the in the hollywood hills for years and that's when my cats became into our cats is because i lost to coyotes man absolutely yeah we saw them every day yeah and coyotes and great horned owls of course will I mean one of the reasons they do that coyotes in particular is because just as they do in rural areas and in wild areas in cities they

1:33:27establish territories and they regard animals like cats and dogs as competitor predators in their territories and so they will often attack a dog or a cat roaming out not because usually they're hungry but because this is a competitor that's invaded my territory am i more neat and they were just killed yeah that's usually what happens i used to tell people when i do the book first came out and i was doing a ton of talks about it if your animal is left lying on the ground that's probably a coyote kill if it's gone that's likely a great horned owl kill especially if it's a cat because great horned owls haul cats off and yeah to the roost and eat them yeah i was an outdoor cat guy for years but no more no i know i so we have a cat my wife and i and new mexico and that cat very definitely stays inside you know and it's it's beneficial in every kind of way because roaming cats as we all know now take a huge toll on urban birds yes and so one of the effects

1:34:32of coyote presence in urban areas with people keeping their cats inside is that the bird population is going off so the coyotes now are are they they're approaching the dairy and gap aren't they they are approaching the dairy and gap yeah that's one of the really fun and interesting things about the modern story um so tell us what is the dairy and gap for people who don't know because it's an amazing place yeah it's an amazing place it's a very thick dense jungle full of jaguars and mountain lions and monkeys and uh impassable and impassable if you watch uh yeah pluralist that sci-fi show yes he makes it through the dairy and gap barely yeah barely and so yeah it's almost impassable and it's the strip of land between uh Panama and Colombia that tiny little strip that connects north and south america together and one of the great stories about coyotes now and this is the story i tell in the forward to the new version of the book the 2026 version of

1:35:34coyote america is that coyotes uh in about the last seven or eight years have crossed the Panama Canal they have colonized south of mexico all the way through central america to Panama they've crossed the Panama Canal which they did in 2018 and they are now on the northern edge of the dairy and gap which is a big national park and attempting to find their way through and the biologists who are studying this that were tracking them uh we're recording that that coyotes were going south at a rate of about 40 miles a year wow towards the dairy and gap now they've got to the dairy and gap and dairy national park and of course everything has slowed down but the notion is that because coyotes are very individualistic and there are some of them that are epic explorers always have been that there are going to be coyotes that make it through that that enormous jungle and when they do and get on the Colombian side they're going to get into open country where the trees

1:36:39have been thin where there are open grasslands and pastures for stock and at that point south america is going to become an effect sort of what is our planet be mars for us south america is going to become planet be for coyotes and they are going to fairly rapidly colonize all of south america well hang on a second let me ask you about that because while the coyotes are moving south the crab eating foxes moving north that's right and they're almost at the dairy and gap that are so that will be the first time in three million years where these species are together again that's right what happens that's one of the great things about it well my you know the coyotes are the bigger dogs yeah so the coyotes will prevail in any kind of a counter with the foxes but those two animals are about to become the first mammals in three million years to cross between north america and south america and coyotes I think in any sort of sort of face to face encounter are going to prevail and very likely

1:37:46will be aggressive towards the foxes but they're going to be foxes I think they get through as well I think so too yeah because they kind of different things it's going to be interesting to see what happens yeah but hadn't happened in three million years yeah that's amazing this is a big story um let's take a quick break and when we come back I want to talk about the ice age okay let's do it storytelling time put put us on a lakeshore white sands in Mexico 23,000 years ago there's footprints in the mud what's happening well it looks as if a young woman who's probably in her teens um sets off on a walk along the lakeshore and she's got a child on her hip um of course there's no way of telling whether it's her child or she's doing child care for someone else but she's walking

1:38:47along with a child on her hip and she walks it appears about at least judging from the number of steps that are preserved we don't know exactly what happens on either hand but she walks probably a hundred yards or more along this particular lakeshore um to a spot um and then at some point probably on the same day she returns from where she's gone and goes back in the other direction and in the interim she puts down the child uh I don't recall uh now from the study how many times but she puts the child down at least enough to show that they're the footprints of a small child uh sort of walking around her footprints and in the interim between walking on the outward journey and her return going back uh a mammoth a woolly mammoth or a columbian mammoth

1:39:52and a dire wolf and a ground sloth all cross at right angles to her path and the ground sloth it appears must encounter her see her because the ground sloth from its footprats the interpretation is that the ground sloth rairs up in a alarm these are large animals then yes these are very large animals of course uh you know a dire wolf may be a wolf of 150 160 pounds uh mammoth is going to be the size of an African elephant um a ground sloth is essentially the size of a grizzly bear yeah a very large animal but it responds to apparently the presence of this young woman by raring up on its hind legs uh and what the the scholars who have tried to interpret

1:40:53its movements from its footprints believe is probably a alarm and that's an interesting conclusion because what it implies is that a ground sloth is interpreting the presence of a human as a danger and that obviously could mean that humans have already begun to pray on the local ground sloths or the local animals of this particular spot um it's a you know a story that obviously we have to extrapolate a lot to be able to tell but that seems to be sort of the gist of it at the moment and you know I know that archaeologists are working to uncover more evidence from that site and we've subsequently discovered another site in Utah which I don't recall a great deal about but there are

1:41:53some other early footprints uh that we think may relate to a similar period in in human history something before uh the the height of the Wisconsin ice age uh and that's really pretty remarkable because what what it implies is that there's no possibility of crossing the land bridge to get to to America and it means that humans must have come by boat along the shoreline and where they came inland we don't know although there is a site uh on the snake river in Idaho uh that seems to date from about 16,000 years ago and that particular site has lithics that are very similar to the kind of lithics that have been discovered in Japan from that age so there's really yeah so there's some evidence then that coming by boat following the kelp highway um going inland where it's possible to go inland

1:43:02and we don't know exactly where uh across the western part of North America people ended up but southern New Mexico was obviously one of them yep possibly southern Utah is another and we think that somewhere in Idaho along snake rivers probably yet another so do we think that the megafauna extinction was because of human migration there was it from overhunting is it settled? It's not entirely settled but I would say so I can't I can't say with any kind of justification that the consensus is that humans are responsible I think there's still a lot that we have to figure out um where I think we are now is that every other suggestion has not really panned out nope and we try to bunch because just as with

1:44:10global climate change we don't want to think that people were responsible and so uh and to me there's an interesting convergence between the denial that humans were are involved in climate change and the denial similarly that humans could have you know accomplished the extermination uh the extinction of large animals in north and south america well you've got the footprints that are 23,000 years old the megafauna extinction is 13,000 years ago so you've got 10,000 years where humans are living with these large animals yes is there is it happened slowly or I thought the extinction is a little bit more rapid isn't it yeah it is more rapid so I mean and you raise a very good point because if the the incursion of humans in north america 23,000 years ago actually does produce a global population of humans so that's the question now does this produce some global population so far we

1:45:13don't have evidence of that what we've got evidence of is in two or three spots there's evidence of an ancient human in habitation but we don't have anything like what happens when the clovus people come right because when the clovus people come they spread from Atlantic to Pacific all the way to the tip of south america and there is evidence all over the place I mean there are clovus sites just everywhere so it's very clear that there's a clovusia america 13,000 years ago and those people arrive they do sort of what Europeans do in north america 500 years ago and go from short to short we don't have that for this 23,000 year old occupation or the 16,000 year old one and there of course are sites in south america that date back to 16,000 or so years what we have of these really ancient sites are these little small spots so that's the question and it's an

1:46:14important question because one of the things that the arguments for clovusia over hunting really makes is that the animals are encountering really professional and good predators and the human form for the first time and they're unprepared and so they're easy marks I think that's probably true I think it's well I actually think it's very likely true and I I sort of follow the line of argument that these early populations in north america did not become what clovus became in other words they didn't spread it all across north and south america they were isolated into small spots they may be lasted for a couple of hundred years and one of the as I think I mentioned earlier when we were talking about this one of the reasons that some of the the paleontologists and

1:47:15paleobiologists and archaeologists think this is because of the rapid expansion of the clovus people as if they were passing across a continent a landscape that was empty of any kind of human blocks either there was nobody there or if there was somebody there there weren't very many of them because the clovus people just sort of sweep through both continents as I said earlier in 300 years what do you think the impact I don't mean to use a pun but the younger dryus the rapid climate change we got warm they were very cold yeah warm again yeah was there an impact I think there was probably some impact and a lot of people certainly like to use the younger dryus as a a possibility you know and it's based on the idea that about 12,000 years ago 11,800 years ago there is an impact probably the argument is by a comet because we don't have any evidence for

1:48:19a meteoritic or asteroid kind of impact as we do for chick salube for example so for a comet that impacted probably North America because there's no evidence of extinctions anywhere else so it's not a global thing like the chick salube impact and that it produced two effects one was probably what we refer to these days is kind of a nuclear winter where a lot of debris went up and obscured the sun and may have had an impact on animals that's what produced the cold right and then the idea that there may have been widespread fires in the wake of the cold episode I think there are two problems with it and this is the reason why the serious scholars who I know and have talked to don't really think it's that good an optional explanation anymore although there are a lot of people out in the world who like it sure it's fun yeah it's fun but the reason the

1:49:23scholars I've talked to don't like it is they say there's two problems with it one problem is that all these animals had lived through the height of the Wisconsin ice age yes and so they're not likely having survived that to be taken out by a relatively minor cold snap around 11 or 12,000 years ago and the other argument of course is one that people have used for a long time the only evidence we have of animals that become extinct are the big ones that people like to hunt all the small animals all are fine right they're everywhere and they survive everywhere but what goes extinct are the very creatures that humans across Asia and finally into north and south america like to hunt and those are the ones that we end up losing so you've got animals that are big and slow and then the big cats I guess you'd hunt because they're dangerous or the fact I mean one of the

1:50:25arguments about the big cats for example is that if their prey base gets taken out then they're unlikely to be able to shift to another prey base rapidly and to survive it's a it's an argument that's not foolproof I mean we don't really quite have you know the ultimate yes this is what's happened and it's one of the reasons I think that what we're probably going to have to do is to look at animals one by one look at species one by one what happened to the horses I mean my god that's right now a completely unanswerable one yeah horses evolve in north america they spread across the bearing straight into Asia and Europe and Africa where they survive yep but they become extinct here that's just a tough one and camels the same thing right where the national animal is the bison but it should probably be the camel yeah it should probably be the

1:51:25camel they evolve here 45 million years ago and spread across just as horses do across the bearing straight and survive elsewhere right but also become extinct here and so it's you know it's hard to square that the only thing you can kind of argue is that and you know there was a a very famous argument at about 2005 that maybe this is a possibility that as humans arrive they're bringing new pathogens with them that are infecting some of these animal populations but we would see that we would see it and of course the one thing about pathogens is that you know they don't kill everything there are always some members of a species that are going to have some resistance and if they survive they'll pass their resistance down to subsequent generations so it's right now we just don't have enough information to say for certain I mean although a lot of

1:52:26people will say it's pretty pretty conclusive that we probably did take out the mammoths sure the other animals I do suspect we may have driven into these separate populations where they couldn't exchange genes because of course that's what happens to that last population of mammoths that gets on an island in the bearing sea that's right and last down to 4,000 years ago yes and then they finally go extinct because they don't have enough genetic diversity to continue to survive so it's a it's a story that I think remains to be told in its entirety and that somebody is probably going to you know become very very famous by figuring out precisely what happened uh but right now it looks like probably the best answer we have is the arrival of of humans that unquestionably had some impact on these populations my instinct tells me all that is right but there's one thing that we're

1:53:27missing yeah very well it's because very strange yeah well let's let's pretend that America is a haunted house of animals and you're the medium because we have animals that have evolved to outrun big cats big cats aren't here anymore yeah so what other adaptations do we see that are are really needed well that one is one that I have always loved to tell and that's the story of the pronghorn of course you know so there was until fairly recently uh really a kind of a mystery about pronghorn's because their only predators are wolves in coyotes and either of which can run more than about 40 miles an hour and yet here we have prong horns that run 65 miles an hour so why the overkill why 25 or 30 miles an hour faster than your predators can run and why also do females among prong horns

1:54:29sort of put the males to a test to see which one is the fastest one and that's the one they breed with and why do they do what's called selfish herd grouping which we know of basically from Africa and then biologists paying attention to pronghorn's realize wow they do this too they do this thing where they group as a herd and they push the low status animals out to the edges of the herd so if they're attacked by a predator it's the low status animals that get taken out and yet adult prongwords don't really have any predators it's just the fonts that get predated so the result of those mysteries produced our kind of it's the ghosts of the Pleistocene yes story that what prong horns have really preserved is an imagery of what it was like 10,000 years ago when they were being pursued really by fast hunting hyenas and by American cheetahs

1:55:36and that speed that they developed and that ability to inhale huge gulps of air and those giant nostrils that they have and those big eyes that scan the arise on all the time that those are all adaptations to back in the Pleistocene when they were hunted by cheetahs and they've managed to hang on to for 10,000 years that's a pretty remarkable thing when you see pronghorns out in the natural world and know that story and that it changes the way you look at them it does yeah boy that the coyotes and the wolves once they run it's too bad man I know and you know wolves can outrun coyotes so one of the things of course it happened when wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone and they started taking out coyotes is that they would run down individual animals and they're actually YouTube scenes you can google them they're not very fun to watch or wolves will run coyotes down and the coyote disappears in a kind of a mob scene of gray

1:56:41wolves yeah but they'll just make more they'll make more they absolutely will they know how to do it let's talk about buffalo and bison a little bit sure um so bison becomes the national animal I guess that was Obama administration yeah 2016 but there's not really a lot of true bison left are there well bison is the correct scientific name but of course I think what you're referring to is the fact that we think most of the animals that we manage to preserve do carry cattle genes yes and there's a story there there's a bunch of stories but um so the bison are our national animal and I my hats off to Barack Obama for doing that

1:57:45because I think what that does is I mean I think the same is true of of the eagle as kind of a national bird and a symbol of America it causes modern populations of us to look at those animals and wonder a bit about their stories and of course if you know much about eagles at all I mean so the eagle is a very beautiful animal and we have lots of them around but by the early 1970s American eagles bald eagles were almost gone remember yes I mean we barely rescued bald eagles are the symbol of the country the avian symbol of the country we barely rescued them and we did it through the endangered species act and bald eagles kind of became the poster bird for the success of the endangered species act and the bison I think by Obama making it into the national mammal it makes it possible to do the same thing where you if you

1:58:50consider that animal as kind of this iconic American animal and you understand that you know in the cocktail party version of things well once upon a time wasn't there was there a whole lot of them and then there were almost none of them if you can even get that far and ask the question so why was that why did that happen why did something like that sort of simplification of our present day national mammal happen then you can start grappling with the story of what we did with a lot of these magnificent creatures and the bison story of course is uh it's it's one that I sometimes suspect and talking to people from other parts of the world they know the bison story better than a lot of Americans do I mean I talked to people from Australia and England and France who seem to know more about it sometimes than many of the Americans

1:59:53what are we getting wrong well I think for one thing often all we know is that at one point there were a lot of them and then there were almost none right but if we do know more I mean one of the stories that got told early in the 20th century by a former Buffalo hunter named John Cook who wrote a book called the Border in the Buffalo in 1905 and who basically invented a bunch of stuff in order to convince the American public at a time when Teddy Roosevelt was president conservation was a big word people were regretting that we had almost wiped out the buffalo this former Buffalo hunter named John Cook writes a book and says Buffalo hunters like me actually should be getting a national medal wow because we were just enacting the federal government's secret

2:00:54policy of wiping out Buffalo deliberately in order to enable native people to be conquered and put on reservations and this is a true story it's a story he certainly tried to come up with a good argument for right yeah and to bring civilization to the west because wild animals like Buffalo and wolves could not be allowed to be present in a civilized country so this is the story that for most of the 20th century we basically told ourselves about Buffalo that the federal government had deliberately done this we all grew up with the stories that they're being shot from trains and all they were definitely shot from trains and they were shot down by the millions by basically by people who also wiped out the passenger pigeons who also wiped out pronghorn antelope and elk and big horn

2:02:01sheep and mule deer I mean all those animals were reduced to a tiny fraction because of capitalism directed at wild animal populations I mean we thought when we came over here and we started with beavers of course that all of North America was filled to the bram with wild animals and animal parts are a great kind of commodity item in the global market economy sure you can kill beavers and you can strip the pelts off of them and sell them all over the world you can do the same thing with sea otters you can do the same thing with seals sure you can says everything yeah all of these and so the truth is and I mean I'm one of the people who has tried to investigate the earlier version I just told you I have never been able to find any evidence that the federal government deliberately tried to do any of this the truth is the United States federal government never passed a law to

2:03:06regulate animals in North America until 1900 we stood back because we believed in capitalism and let capitalism work yeah this is the market economy you simply let it work and see what happens and if it wipes out buffalo if it wipes out prong horns if it wipes out passenger pigeons that's just the way the market works that's the way it works yeah so it took a whole group of sort of proto conservationists George Bergrenel who was the editor of forest and stream magazine was one of the first to begin writing editorials and arguing against this and he talked Teddy Roosevelt into forming an organization called a Boone and Crucket Club that began to lobby to finally get the federal government to say okay which they did in 1900 we're going to pass a law to end the market hunting and the shipment the interstate shipment

2:04:12of animals killed for the market in the United States because federal government at the time they believe that's the only thing they can do we can regulate shipment between states right interstate commerce we can't regulate anything else correct so yeah this is what they tried to be so controversial it was very controversial but it's the beginning yes of kind of what ultimately will lead to something like the Endangered Species Act in 1973 so I argue that while there were people in the government who understood that letting Buffalo be wiped out by the Buffalo Hunt was going to disadvantage native people to be sure there was no policy of doing it what there was was a policy of standing back and letting it happen and see what the market and what capitalism was going to produce and if it produced the benefit of having native people no longer be able to go out and leave

2:05:15their reservations in hunt then that was a good thing but some of those native people would get it on the market oh absolutely they did I mean that's one of the you know sort of unfortunate stories of the whole native or the native act and involvement in the global market economy it was native people learned from the very beginning of colonization was that in order to reap the benefit of this new metal technology that Europeans were bringing to American shores and that included not just firearms but things like hose and rakes and marrow heads and all these things that were made of metal yep in order to trade for that what the Europeans wanted they wanted beaver peltz they wanted buffalo robes they wanted in the south deer scans for the leather trade and so the actual truth is native people all over America like all the rest of us and I've

2:06:20tried to couch it that way when I've written about this I mean they're humans just like us and they're confronted with a time when for survival in order to compete with your fellows the only way to make it is to actually engage with these newcomers and this kind of trade and unfortunately to the detriment of American wildlife populations they do so and it makes perfect sense yeah in talking about trapping and the market everybody knows about the Lewis and Clark expedition but you wrote a book about a different expedition that had twice the funding and nobody has no has heard about it nobody has heard about it why why not well there's something you know called historical memory yes and so there are things that we deliberately remember especially as a part of a kind of a national consciousness and there's a story we tell ourselves absolutely and there are things that we very deliberately

2:07:24do our best not to remember and in some cases even sweep under the rug and this was my first book it was called initially Jefferson and southwestern exploration and I wrote it because I had the look of coming across this story that I knew very well there was almost no one even in the historical community that knew anything about this and particularly in that larger community of people who are fascinated with Lewis and Clark for example and that is a very large contingent of Americans that with my family has family legends about being part of that expedition well I mean you know I grew up in Louisiana romantic about the Lewis and Clark expedition. We were Missouri Charbonneau's yeah well I mean there you go man so yeah you definitely were a part of the expedition then so like so many other people I was fascinated with this and I happened to

2:08:32talk to an archivist one time about a project that I was working on and in the course of the conversation she said so you're really interested in the Lewis and Clark expedition there's been a lot done on that not a whole lot of room to do very much but are you aware of Jefferson's other expedition and of course like everybody else I said what other expedition I think I'd probably said I may do enough history at the time I may have said you mean the pike expedition as she said oh no I'm not talking about the pike expedition that one was named a sent out by Jefferson anyway that was sent out by James Wilkinson American military no Jefferson had another a southern version of the Lewis and Clark expedition and I said well my god when and what and so she told me she said I have a microfilm version of the official report from this expedition

2:09:40from 1806 and the leaders of it were a man named Thomas Freeman and a young naturalist named Peter Custis who yeah who never heard of either one of them and with good reason and as hardly anyone else as hardly heard of them so I ended up becoming really fascinated with this because I mean obviously this was like okay there's another Lewis and Clark expedition I mean it's not led by Mary where the Lewis and William Clark is led by two other people to another and when I began doing the research on it and I had the university where I was teaching at the time acquire the Thomas Jefferson papers so I could look at sort of the how this all began and all the things that Jefferson wrote about it and I had spent you know a lovely year and a half reading in his own handwriting Thomas Jefferson's lovely letters about all this your book is cinematic yeah well this story yeah it's it is kind of cinematic and I you know it is a it's a story that it's like a Apollo 13

2:10:44it's one of those Apollo expeditions that you have great hopes for yeah and it doesn't work Freeman we have a problem yes we have a problem and so that's in fact the the kind of gist of this particular story tell us tell us the story yeah I'll summarize it pretty quickly for you so Jefferson never intended that Lewis and Clark was going to be the only part of he's sent it into the Louisiana territory and if you think about it for a second you realize of course not of course not you don't just send one up to the northern part I mean there's a huge amount of territory so he plans this southern expedition that is going to go into the southwest and he doesn't think of it in Lewis and Clark terms where it's going to go to the to the Pacific because of course Lewis and Clark were all about we're going to do the old northwest passage we're going to finally find a way through to Asia this expedition was intended to map all the rivers of the southern

2:11:44Louisiana purchase that flowed into the Mississippi and those rivers Jefferson believed all came out of the southern Rocky Mountains and so initially what he planned for a second expedition that he hoped would leave like within six months or a year of Lewis and Clark going up the Missouri is he was going to send an expedition up the Red River of the south that's the river if people don't know about it that is the boundary between Texas and Oklahoma today he was going to send an expedition up that river and he believed from maps that the famed geographer Alexander von Humboldt had given to Jefferson that the Red River had its sources and the southern Rockies near Santa Fe so this was finally going to be one of these expeditions to get out to Santa Fe back to Santa Fe back to Santa Fe and then Jefferson his initial plan was I'm going to have the party crossover from the headwaters

2:12:47of the Red River to the headwaters of the Arkansas River the next river to the north that flows into the Mississippi and come down the Arkansas and so instead of going to the Pacific it's going to go out to the Rockies and sort of do this loop out the Red River and back on the Arkansas River well by the time he manages Jefferson managed this finally to find leaders for this expedition and to come up with all of the necessary scientific instruments for making it work and as you mentioned at the outset he gets an appropriation from Congress that's twice the size of that for the Lewis and Clark expedition and the party he organizes is going to be a much bigger party exploration party than the Lewis and Clark party probably needs to there's activity there it needs to because of because of two things really one is that unlike the Missouri River Columbia stretch

2:13:53that Lewis and Clark traverse this southern stretch is going to take you on the borders of Spain and Spain is not eager to have an American exploring party along its borders until the boundary the southern boundary of the Louisiana Purchases determined right because we bought that from France and Spain said you you we own that Spain says Spain actually said we own all the way up to the Missouri River you get by that yeah you if this is not yours and France having never really explored any of this country was unable to say what the boundaries were and Jefferson for his part published a tract in 1805 that said United States believes the real grand is the southern boundary which of course would have included Texas and New Mexico and of course yeah so here we have the two countries United States saying that the boundary is the real grand and Spain saying the boundary is

2:14:54the Missouri and in between is all this territory that the red river flows through and the other thing that makes it difficult to just to do the original plan is that there is a hostile group of native people called the Osages along the Arkansas River who make it known that any exploring expedition on our river is going to be intercepted so to cut to the chase of this story in 1805 in November of 1805 Jefferson believes he's found his leader so young man named Thomas Freeman who is an Irish immigrant who had been a surveyor who was a primary surveyor for laying out Washington DC and was a very well-known surveyor and astronomer although he was he was an adopted American who had been born in Ireland that's why we don't know him yeah it's one of the reasons we don't know him Jefferson called him to Washington for a personal dinner in November of 1805 and Freeman

2:16:02and Jefferson sat down for three hours and Jefferson presented Freeman a seven-page letter of exploring instructions eliminating the Arkansas River from the trip sending him only up the red river to its sources near Santa Fe and also including this passage which Jefferson had actually pulled out of the document that he gave Maryweather Lewis and the passage said if you are stopped or encountered by another force either authorized or not authorized by European nation firmly resolute in turning you back from your exploration I would prefer that you return with the information that you have gathered already then to risk the lives of American citizens in an aggressive confrontation do not engage do not engage so when Freeman left that meeting he went home

2:17:11wrote a letter to a friend of his which I managed to find in the National Archives a piece of and in that letter Freeman said I have been given the assignment of exploring up the red river to the vicinity of Santa Fe in the far country of northern Spain how would you like to be my cash here in that country he says to his friend and then he says he concludes his letter with this line it's going to be a dangerous mission but the more danger the more honor I will stick or go through wow yeah okay so meanwhile Jefferson has settled on you know which he never did for the Lewis and Clark expedition he never got a scientific naturalist to add to that expedition he has

2:18:12settled on a young man from Virginia who's completing a medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania named Peter Custis from a very famous Alamora County family Martha Custis some people will remember was George Washington's wife and Peter Custis is joined to the expedition after Jefferson tried to get a couple of more famous naturalists William Bartram in particular who was the most famous American naturalist at the time who had written a famous book called Travels in 1791 Jefferson approached first but William Bartram was 65 years old and he said this is a little bit too arduous for me to take on so Jefferson settles on on Freeman he adds a military expedition to the party under the command of a guy named Richard Sparks captain Richard Sparks who was a good friend of Mayor Weather Lewis's so the whole party when they finally add French and

2:19:14Indian guides to it comes up to almost 55 people the Lewis and Clark were hardy was in the low 40s and they start up the Red River in April of 1806 passed the last settlement which is Nacarish the town that my family comes from and Louisiana and above Nacarish extended the biggest log gem in North America it was called the Great Raft and a lot of people argue that it was a thousand years old thousand year old log gem that extended up the Red River for more than a hundred miles and so to get around it they had to go through swamps and little bayous out to the east finally managed to get above the head of it headed on up the river Peter Custis collecting plants and both Freeman and Custis writing journals of treating with the Indians and presenting excuse me American flags to the native people and they finally an early or late July right on the verge of August of 1806

2:20:22having gone about 650 miles up the Red River they get basically about to the eastern border of Oklahoma and discover as they round a bend that there is a Spanish force of more than 200 troops are right across the river Spain has sent two different military contingents they were sent they were sent okay from this this one was the Texas contingent sent from Nacadoches which is a Spanish settlement in east Texas that had a Presidio and an 800 man force from Santa Fe wow had been sent eastward in case the Texas expedition was unable to stop these Americans but when confronted by this Spanish force Freeman consulted his letter with Jefferson had given him and he turned around and basically went back what happened to honor well yeah honor went out to win though and there are two hundred spaniards in front of you yeah all armed with arc buses and

2:21:25who knows what else but the Americans decided to turn around and go back and the reason of course that nobody in American history and among the public has ever heard of this expedition is that while you want to celebrate a Lewis and Clark that goes all the way to the Pacific and comes back and is the toast of Washington an expedition that comes back with its tail between his legs having been turned around by another country yeah that's not the sort of thing that you want to remember now I mean I wrote a full book about it and you know and and found the journals the original journals of Freeman and Custis and particular Custis stuff on natural history was really terrific material but they're all sorts of you know sort of unfortunate circumstances that even follow that because Jefferson hired a guy to write a redaction of the two journals combined into one sky was named Nicholas King and he wrote a version of the expedition that somehow either he couldn't

2:22:32read Peter Custis his handwriting I'm not sure but he not only combined the two two journals into one he mangled all the natural history work so all these careful scientific binomials that Custis had used for all these plants and trees and animals he had seen end up going out to the American scientific community so mangled that anyone who saw them when I said Jefferson sent an idiot right on this expedition it reads like a movie so much an option it it's always I know it's a crazy story and I I have often thought of returning to it I mean one of the things I have done with it and one of the last of the you know as you probably know I do a podcast or have been doing one it's it's done finished now but I've done a podcast called the American West and a couple of the last episodes I did of it was essentially a historical fiction of what would have happened if if the Spanish commander had said okay we're gonna let you guys go

2:23:37ahead but you have to stay on the north side of the red river until we finally come up with the boundary between Spain and so I I need to listen to this I did a historical fiction where where Freeman and Custis get to continue on into the southwest do you want to spoil it or or no well I'll I'll say this okay about it and I certainly encourage people to take a look because a lot of research and personal exploration into the countryside went into doing this no the story so romantic yeah well it's and and the the historical fiction version of it as well I mean I went into all the places they would have gone and but the the truth of the matter is this Alexander von Humboldt was wrong in his maps to Jefferson right the red river did not come out

2:24:37of the southern Rockies near Santa Fe the red river has its sources on what's called the Yanowas de Cato Plateau in West Texas and Eastern New Mexico so it drains off the top of this gigantic plateau through a series of canyons the most famous of which is Palo Duro Canyon in the Texas Panhandle and Jefferson told Freeman specifically not only in person but in the letter he gave him I do not want you to go beyond the sources of the red river and so I'm working on a deal here yes working on a deal and so Freeman is going to get to the western edge of the Yanowas de Cato Plateau in my historical version or my fictitious version of it with Santa Fe still 10 days away the southern Rocky Mountain still out of sight and Jefferson has told him this is as far as I want you

2:25:38to go so it still ends up being a failure right because he's not able to get to Santa Fe as he knew probably the country wanted him to do what they wanted to do I think is to start the Santa Fe trade which you know in 1821 after Spain loses the southwest to Mexico the new Republic of Mexico Mexico opens up the trade between the United States and Santa Fe and it becomes this very lucrative trade route but and I think that's what Jefferson had in mind was opening the Santa Fe trade but I think you're right I mean the floor is as were there guarding it for a hundred years absolutely were hey are you still advising colossal I am advising colossal although I'm going to miss their their fall gathering they're doing a September gathering in Dallas that will be their the second of their big colossal bioengineering summits I was at the one last summer and I in fact

2:26:41was one of the first speakers for that summit but they're doing one in September that I'm going to have to miss just because of I've got had already agreed to do a talk in Colorado right on top of it but yeah I'm still on the advisory board or the conservation board yeah I mean I think they mostly do conservation but they're known for yes for de extinction what they're best known for because of the dire wolf story of course is de extinction how do they make a dire wolf well they made a dire wolf and this is this is sort of how de extinction works what you do is you try to find the existing animal that most closely resembles genetically the species you're interested in that became extinct and so in the case of the dire wolf that's of course the gray wolf mm-hmm so what they did with the gray wolf genome and the gray wolf genome has been reconstructed

2:27:44so we've got a very good genomic baseline for gray wolves what colossal did was to go into the specimens collections around America and the dire wolf is very specifically an American wolf it's not found anywhere else in the world so you know unfortunately for George or Martin there would have been no dire wolves in medieval westeros wherever westeros was which looks an awful lot like sort of western Europe but yeah but the dire wolves are actually American wolves and what colossal day was to go into the museum specimens collections and they found two skulls that they were able to extract enough DNA from to be able to recognize and one of these skulls was 73,000 years old and one of them was 13,000 years old with viable DNA

2:28:47viable DNA and with that DNA signature from those two skulls they were able to recognize 28 different alels that were not found in the gray wolf genome that were distinctive to both of those dire wolf skulls and so what they did was to use CRISPR genetic engineering to engineer those 28 alels into a gray wolf genome and produced puppies based on that genetic information that as we all have seen because of course this became a global story what it has in remis and calisi and calisi that's right have you seen them yet? I have not seen them I've only seen because I don't think they're they don't release where they are no they do not release where they are and although I have a strong idea where they are I'm not at liberty to say

2:29:51either no don't and I have not seen them of course and I have seen personal videos that people who are with them have have taken of them and they are as we all know because there have been plenty of released photos and some and some video too they are and this actually was a surprise because the assumption was that dire wolves were likely to be red it turns out that those genetic signatures from dire wolf genes produce pure white yes animals I mean all these animals are gloriously white and of course they are larger they're approaching two years old now so they are considerably larger than gray wolves I don't know exactly how much the two males way I know the female is slider than the two males but they are really remarkable animals and here's what I would

2:30:53say about this genetically I think they represent something very close to dire wolves but of course we don't have dire wolf culture right to teach them right so they don't have a mother they don't have a legacy coming down from wild dire wolves that they can absorb and one of the things we now know about while animals of course is that they just like us they have culture they learn things they have a tito they I mean with particularly with canids I mean the sort of instruction period is very long I mean it's not as long as we instruct human infants and children but it lasts for a year or two anyway and these wolves don't have that so what we have are animals that we think probably look like dire wolves but they can't be dire wolves because they don't exist in the wild and they have no

2:31:58dire wolf cultural legacy to call on that's what I was going to ask you is that a real dire dire wolf and it probably isn't no I think what a lot of a lot of ecologists and biologists have argued and I think they're probably right is that without those critical aspects I mean what you have is an animal that may well look like a dire wolf it's morphology may be dire wolf but it can't be a dire wolf because it doesn't know how to be one is there any ethical issue with the extinction well yes there are ethical issues obviously because what you don't want ultimately and this is going to be the fate of these particular animals I mean and I think what colossal head and mind here was they wanted to demonstrate because they were working and still are working on four or five different different de-extinction yeah we're waiting on the mammoth right they're working on the mammoth they're working on the dodo they're working on the thylacine that has many and tiger

2:32:58yeah so they're working on a lot of different things the dire wolf came first because it was the easiest one yeah out of that group to do canids are relatively more easy than particularly than birds are uh and there were also donors a colossal is it's it's a for-profit company it's a multi-billion dollar company yes it is and there were donors who wanted to see a dire wolf and so there was there was some some of that happening I have ethical concerns but I want to see a mammoth yeah I do too and and I want to see a thylacine and sure so the the issue of course is that these animals these dire wolves, Romulus, Remus and Calisi are not going to get to be anything other than caged animals what you want ultimately and this is one of the things of course that we talk about when we have our summits and our conferences and the conservation uh board assembles and uh we're able to

2:34:00offer our thoughts and our advice to colossal and the people who are running colossal is that what one ultimately wants to see is some way of releasing these animals into the wild oh I've read this book though yeah well yeah you have read it we've all seen the movie too of course but it depends on acquiring some piece of ground and of course before the Russian invasion of the Ukraine the idea was we're going to get a Siberian place to seen park and this is where animals like this are going to go now that's become problematic because of the war and it's difficult to come up with other places that you can think of in northern Canada say or Alaska and Canada's probably not in a cooperative mood with the United States right now so we've got Siberia eliminated as a result of the invasion of the Ukraine we've got Canada pissed off and Alaska is about the only possibility and you know right now we're basically

2:35:06an administration hoping to drill all across the northern reaches of Canada even offering bids in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge so finding a place for things has been the next problematic step and if you have mammoths if you have dire wolves demonstrating that you can do it is one step but you don't want to leave it and then no so that's kind of where colossal is at the moment you think they could develop a culture over time yes I think they probably could I think if you have subsequent generations but they have to be in the wild in order to do it I mean they can certainly develop a pin culture but that's not the culture you want yeah you want them to be in the wild and you want them to to have the experience of being able to interact with prey I mean that's what's going to produce some kind of

2:36:09dire wolf culture and it may not be the dire wolf culture of the Pleistocene because all the animals of the Pleistocene are not going to be on hand right the prey isn't there but it might be you know it's going to be something but yeah this is the issue I mean you know so that it doesn't just look like a stunt that we've finally been able to come up with the scientific ability to do we have to think in terms of some kind of recovery so one of the things is happening in New Mexico and one of Ted Turner's Ranges for example is the Bolson tortoise which isn't an extinct or was an extinct nearly extinct Pleistocene tortoise is being recovered by colossal and is being released and that's an animal of course that you can release yes and not really worry that people are going to go holy shit I mean you've got a giant wolf that you've turned loose right yeah the tortoises you know not gonna scare anybody but yeah it's that and as you said and I appreciate

2:37:10you saying this too what colossal is most involved with is trying to prevent wildlife around the globe from going extinct and from using genetic engineering to assist in providing a healthier kind of diverse genetic possibility among the founding populations of those animals in order for them to succeed I think this is a science that's going to stick around yeah it is there's no doubt about it and they and they are you know and I haven't heard the latest in a few months but the last time I did here I mean there are countries and governments and conservation organizations all over the world that are partnering with colossal to help with these kinds of things yeah they're doing great work last story that it went from you if you don't mind as if you can tell us about Chicky

2:38:11yeah Chicky okay I have a reason for asking okay so this is a story that I had never told before until I wrote while new world except to personal friends and and to my wife who's heard it uh but it was a story that you know really kind of uh changed my way of thinking about the world and part because it's the oldest memory I have you know a lot of people argue psychologists of the human condition argue that usually your your earliest memories are from about the age of four and I was four years old and I had my first little animal companion which was a little yellow chicken of the kind that you can get at feed stores in a spring little fuzzy thing yeah a little fuzzy thing and you know I'm four years old so I'm not really imaginative with the name

2:39:12and so I name it Chicky and so Chicky and I was this first little animal companion that I really fell in love with and I gave it water and I fed it and it slept with me as it was growing up and I don't even remember how long I had it although I think it was probably on in the nature of maybe a month or six weeks not a really long time uh because it was still a little little small chicken when this happened but uh it would uh Chicky and I would do these games of chase through the house and we would run through the house and Chicky would dart under the kitchen table and I would go after Chicky and so I'm a little clumsy four year old and one day I'm chasing Chicky and I accidentally step on Chicky and kill my little pet chicken so I'm traumatized obviously uh and my mother says well let's go you know let's go bury Chicky out in the backyard and uh she got a

2:40:16little box and we went out and uh dug a little grave for Chicky and put Chicky and in the box and I gave Chicky some little pieces of food and a leaf and I don't remember what else but two or three things I put in with Chicky I think probably my mother's urging who told me this is one of the things you do and close the box and and uh covered Chicky up with dirt and as we were doing it of course tears coming down my face I turned to my mom and I said so mom I'm gonna get to see Chicky and heaven right and my mother who was always this sort of you know straight to the mark honest kind of person even if you were four years old said why no honey so you're a human and you have an everlasting soul and when humans die we get to go to heaven but

2:41:23animals don't have souls they're just animals so when an animal dies it's just it's gone and the reason of course this is my earliest memory is because of the power of a story like that which is sort of the classic Judeo Christian story of humans are the only animals made in the image of God we're the only ones with souls everything else is made for our use and I think from the age of four with that idea in my head that produced those books that are sitting over here it did because that did not seem right to me uh not having known this little bird and love this little bird that was not something I was willing to accept and so many many years later I think that was the origin of books like coyote america and while new world in american sir and gidi

2:42:30well I'm a pet guy I'm an animal guy I obviously you are so when one of my boys goes when my cats don't I get to see him again well here's what I think is probably the truth I think the truth is the soul as a distinction to make humans exceptional from all other creatures is a fiction it's a nice fiction but I think there are no souls for either humans or animals and probably at the end there's not much to look forward to no matter if you're a cat a human or a little chicken well that's dark but I guess I'm not gonna care I think if it happens that way yeah you're not gonna care that's the end of things but yeah that's kind of I've not been able to find any good

2:43:33evidence for being able to look forward to a kind of an afterlife that includes me and all the animals that I've had throughout my life and you know I mean when I think of them now and some of the ones I've lost I mean my stomach goes into knots of course right now for animals that I lost 50 years ago I mean I had an experience going for a run just about a month ago where I happen to think of this dog that I had one time and what happened to him at a moment when he was still young he was crazy about me and I was crazy about him and I lost him in a really stupid accident that I should have been able to avoid for him what happened he got run over on a street following me and what I mean it was a really stupid thing I it's gonna turn my stomach into knots just telling it but I had

2:44:34this young dog had followed me to a convenient store and he had waited for me at the door and I was inside the store buying something when I came out he was not there and my assumption was that he had probably just turned around and went across the street because the house was just a block or so on the other side of the street and so thinking that he had gone home and stupidly not calling for him I walked across the street and got home and he wasn't there and about the time I turned around to go back I heard tires screeching on the road and he had been around the side of the building finally realized I wasn't inside anymore and it started at home and it got across the street and got hit by a car and I mean man I can't think of that one without really kind of being torn up about it and I've had two or three what was his name his name was Gandhi Gandhi yeah I think you're going to

2:45:37see Gandhi again well stick with it yeah if you know if there are everlasting souls I can guarantee you Gandhi has got on thanks for coming in today this has been a pleasure it's been my pleasure too it's been great fun anything you want to tell the folks where to find you what books websites well I don't do social media smart so you know and I apologize for that my wife does Seraph Dan is her name she's a former professor in a writer too and so whatever social media we need she usually does but I don't do social social media I don't have a website but my stuff is easy to find it's in most bookstores and of course Amazon has an author site for me and so all the books are there and they're easily come by but most local bookstores have them too and I always am a great advocate for

2:46:39local bookstores same damn florist was here here's the Gandhi man no kidding thank you so much everybody that was damn florist let's start with the law I didn't believe in 1905 Montana ordered its state bed to infect coyotes and wolves with mange and turn them loose to carry it home I looked it up it's a real law real program and the other still wolves are still catching today now white sands in 2021 the US Geological Survey and a team of British geologists publish dates for the footprints 23,000 years old skeptics attack the number so the team ran it again two more ways the footprints won then there's the buffalo Dan says there is never a federal policy to exterminate them just a government content to watch the market do it other historians point at the generals who cheered the slaughter on but nobody's ever found an order on the paper trail Dan's right now chicken every book Dan has written goes back to the day his mother told the four-year-old that his chicken had no soul Dan still thinks she was right nothing waiting

2:47:44up chickens over us that he choked up over a dog he lost 50 years ago I'll tell you what I told him I think he's gonna see Gandhi again Dan doesn't do social media which might be why he's the happiest man to ever sit in that chair start with coyote america at your local bookstore and everything I mentioned is linked below until next time be safe be kind and other you I'll appreciate one secret code inside the Bible said I was I love my you and both and the parent on my phone as well as me so I'm saying it like I should within another conspiracy theory becomes the truth

2:48:45my friends and it never ends know it never ends I feel the crack at and got stuck inside my home within chaos truck I've been only to a whare do you stand look you've read faith the moon landing alone on a film set I would shout out people there the right well he is just for the smiling man I'm told and his name was cold I can't agree I'm dancing with the fish head no fish on Thursday night sweet day J2 and when I'm hungry I'll do the night I'll ever want it was to just hear the truth so the world knows I'm your face all through the light

2:49:50oh the muffins I didn't have a solar stove to to each the city underground Mysterious numbers, nations, planets are phoned to, plastic stockade, and what the dark watchers found. When a simulation comes you worry though, the black nights that are light and told me so, I can't believe I'm dancing with the vision, head to fish on Thursday nights with day two, and what the night will be up to tonight. Oh, ever what it was to just hear the truth, so what the night will be up to tonight?

2:50:56Head to fish on Thursday nights with day two, and what the night will be up to tonight. Oh, ever what it was to just hear the truth, so what the night will be up to tonight? Yeah, good enough to dance, good enough to dance. Yeah, good enough to dance, time does not go, because she is a camel and we can't look dance, we're not feeling anything. And I'm not feeling anything. We can't look dance, we're not feeling anything. And I'm not feeling anything. I'm not feeling anything. I'm not feeling anything.