00:00:09 Speaker 1: From Mediators World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Kel's we Can Review with Ryan kel Kell and now Here's Kel. An Ecologist Meredith root Bernstein at a zoo in Paris recently observed Vissan warty pigs using tools during their nesting process. The Visan warty pig is a critically endangered native to six Vissan islands in the Philippines, although due to habitat loss and hunting, the San warty pig currently can only be found on two of the six Yan islands. There are only an estimated two hundred left in the wilds of the Philippines, but among those, they have been observed rolling objects against electric fencing to see if the fence is live or not. The pigs a group of pigs is called a sounder by the way, would roll rocks against the fence and listen for that tell tell tick tick tick sound of the electric pulses grounding on the rock. If the rock hit the fence and it didn't make the tick tick tick sound, the pigs would move through it. But if the fence ticked, the pigs would move on, potentially saving their bacon from a painful shock. If that observation is accurate and the conclusion correct. It doesn't sound like a big stretch that a pig would be able to move some dirt around with the stick, which is what they've been observed doing. Tool use and animals is always an interesting topic, as the ability to use tools has long been considered a part of what makes us human. Now, the sample set that our ecologist observed is very small, and the tool use was witnessed under the unnatural conditions of a zoo, But this observed behavior may mean that we still don't know all there is to know about an animal humans domesticated some eleven thousand years ago, which I think is pretty neat, not to mention the fact that an ecologist with the name of Route found pigs using tools. Speaking of tools, this podcast is powered by Steele. If you have branches and leaves falling all over your lawn, head on over to Steele cal s T I H L C A l dot com and check out all the non stinky, quiet, neighborhood friendly power solutions to your problems. My battery operated chainsaw lives in the truck this time of year, I find it mighty helpful. This week, we've got aliens and UFOs, spots, stripes, Avian allies, and so much more. But first I'm gonna tell you about my week I'll start off by telling you that The New York Times just published an article addressing recreation and wilderness. Should our public places be sanctuaries or playgrounds? If you are a listener to the Weekend Review, then you already know our public lands and the management thereof is a lot more complicated than that. This article also touches on bicycles as well as bicycles powered by electric motors or motorbikes, and their effects on wildlife compared to hiking. I'll just let you know I don't think it is a great article, but it did have a great paper within it, a meta analysis of recreation effects on vertebrate species richness and abundance. This paper was published in August of two thousand nineteen, and it's a good one, well done. I encourage everyone to look it up and read it. People have an effect on wildlife just by being out in the woods where wildlife live, no different than if a mouse walks through your living room. The mouse has an effect on you where you live. I also had a minute to dig up a really good article from the June of two thousand sixteen issue of Bicycling Magazine. This article outlines the use of Strava, an app that bikers used to keep track of their personal times on trails or roads, or a mix of both, and they can use that data to make fun of each other and try to outcompete each other as well as just outcompete themselves. This data has been used against biking in some cases by proving the occasional point of other trail users that bikes go too fast on certain sections of multi use trails. The point of bringing up this article is not to show off my quote myopic perspective on use of lions belonging to everyone, not just US hunters. End quote. That quote is from a one star review I received on iTunes, but not that I am pulling the article. Your strata data could be used to ban cyclists from trails. California cities are using speed and GPS info to bolster anti cyclist measures. Here's what you can do to keep your local trails open to mountain biking. I am pulling that for you, not because I am sticking it to the bike community, but because this is an excellent article demonstrating how a portion of the outdoor recreation community can and should police itself in a multiple use system. This article is a worthy read regardless of your outdoor pursuit of choice. Dig it up, go read it. Meat Eater Season eight will be releasing on Netflix October eighteenth. Considering it as fall. Don't binge watch this fantastic, inspiring educational content. Go outside, breathe the fresh air, and when eventually you become exhausted, then you may return to the Tube and watch my good buddy whom I love like a brother, Stephen Ronnella and a bunch of other folks, eat good food, travel amazing places, and learn right along with yourselves. Meat Eater Season eight October eighteenth, only on Netflix. And finally to wrap up the housekeeping. Thank you so much to everyone that read the story about my new Mexico l hunt, love and loss at the meat Eater dot com. Many of you reached out on Instagram and through email at ask cal at the meat Eater dot com to tell me about your own experiences and how those experiences have shaped you as hunters, conservationists, and people. Really good stuff, So thank you. I appreciate it more. And you know, I apologize for not being able to return everybody's emails and messages. If you have no clue what I'm talking about. I lost all the meat from my elk on a recent hunt in New Mexico. If you've never been through that experience is a terrible and tragic thing. One angle a listener and reader brought up that got my wheels turning is a real head scratcher and and has to do with food waste. According to the Natural Resources Defense Counsel, the average American throws out a combined four hundred pounds of food per year between restaurants and at home food waste. The U s d A estimates that in two thousand and ten, accumulative one hundred and thirty three billion pounds or one hundred and sixty one billion dollars worth of food wound up in the landfill. Now, I would wager that this cumulative food waste happens for the most part without us consumers thinking of it. In my case of food waste, I was basically slapped in the face and knows with a conservative two and twenty pounds of once edible now rotten elk all in one stinky lump. Now, waste is waste, and one figure doesn't justify or make the other figure easier acceptable. But I would wager that if everyone had to take stock of their own food waste in a face to face sort of way, a sort of smelly, shameful New Year's ritual, we'd all be a heck of a lot more conservative with our dinner plate it's bulk purchases and shot placement. I think about food a lot, to the point that I may just get more enjoyment out of the cutting, packaging, planning, and sharing of meat than the hunting of meat itself. Possibly I think about how people used to procure food versus how they procure food now, or how they will procure meat in the future. The discussion of how will begin to colonize Mars has got me to thinking a planet where literally nothing is forage hunted, or even grown out of native soil, leaves humans eating lab grown meats spawned in vats and insect protein. I'm all for new things, but I will hold off on the Mars menu until you know I end up on Mars. To be clear, I am all four space exploration and the idea of discovering life beyond ours, But it is so much more convenient when the space life comes to us. Recently, a couple of New Mexico elk hunters had to run in with quote oddly clothed, very tall figures with strange heads, and a large white object. This all happened outside of Taos, New Mexico, near Pot Mountain. Pot Mountain is named after pottery, not the drug. The two men, aged forty one and twenty six, had gone out to locate elk prior to the season. That first morning, one of the men found what, at first glance appeared to be two other hunters in the area. Although only thirty five yards away, the two figures managed to give him the slip before he could close the distance and talk to them. Later, he described to his hunting partner that the figures were too tall and the heads were too big to be hunters. That next day, the two men headed out to explore the rest of the zone as they were still elkless. While driving the roads of their zone to determine why the elk were not present, they noticed a large white tent like structure. As they were driving past the structure, mid debate on what its purpose was. They lost sight of it as the road dipped, and just like the figures the prior day, when they got to where the tent should be, it was gone. Furthermore, the two explored the area where the tent had been, in the area that should have shown the normal signs of a camp were completely untouched. This is not the first time hunters have reported strange encounters in Idaho. Another group of hunters back in two thousand reported a gigantic triangular craft that passed over their campsite. Two of the hunters even got to look at the object through their binoculars. The question always comes up as to what is the credibility of the witness who is involved in these encounters? Is it trustworthy? Joe Rogan episode one thousand, three hundred sixty one features an interview with a former Navy pilot who had a documented experience involving a UFO. We can take that account as credible as this was an incident reported by one of our best and the US government. Man, if you're a skeptic, keep in mind UFO just means unidentified flying object. We saw something and we don't know what it is. The reason I take the New Mexico bo Hunter's account as credible, as in these guys saw something they can't explain, is based solely on the fact that they gave up their public land hunting spot and they aren't getting anything out of it, no money, no fame. They fully admit in the article from the Taos News that they're always elk in the pot Mountain area. That's why they stuck around, and that's what made them go a little further and look a little deeper in the area than they normally would have. They blew up their honey hole for no reason, and that's what gives these two credibility. The only hole in their story, as far as I can tell, is when the older hunter, the forty one year old, described the two could be hunters, he said their heads were too big, leading me to believe he either hasn't been hunting that long or doesn't have an Instagram account. Moving on with a couple of quick hitters from our What Animals Teach Us desks? Do you remember when we reported on the escaped zebras in Texas well? A recent study by a group of Japanese researchers in which they applied zebra stripes to black cattle. Zebra striped cattle reduced fly repelling behavior such as twitching and tail flicking by and the number of flies observed on the zebra striped cattle was less than half of the amount of flies on the unstriped cattle. According to a paper titled the Economic Impact of stable Flies on Dairy and beef cattle production in the US, the economic loss due to flies is estimated at two point two billion dollars annually. If cattle are squatting flies, they aren't eating currently. In order to combat flies, pesticide sprays or powders are used. In theory, a non toxic paint could replace all those pesticides, and hey, if it works for cattle, think of the deep and mosquito free summer scene in a fashionable human application. Time to invest in that spray tan technology. Another interesting thing in regards to animal patterns, this one with spots instead of stripes, and giraffes instead of zebras. Some interesting research is being done studying the relationship between the coloration of a giraffe spots and how they relate to the animals social status within its tower. Tower is what you call a group of giraffes. By the way, The research found in the Journal of Animal Behavior suggests that mail giraffes with darker spots are more dominant and solitary, while the lighter spotted males are more social. Previously, it was thought that coloration was related solely to advanced age. This research, conducted over a twelve year span involving sixty six males and Namibia's a Tosha National Park, would contradict this. Of the sixty six males, only nine of the males had their spots fade with age. Quick fun fact about the giraffe spots is that we now think that the spots act almost as reverse solar panels, as it turns out that under each spot is a dense patch of blood vessels that could promote heat dissipation. If that's not cool enough, no pun intended drafts have valves within their veins that prevent blood from rushing to or from their heads as they maneuver their six foot plus long necks from ground height to tree height. Additionally, the veins and arteries and the legs of a giraffe are actually smaller in diameter and thicker walled in order to prevent blood from just following gravity and pooling in them. But back to the social experiment, the solitary dark spotted males and the social light spotted males deployed different mating strategies as well. The dark spotted males would travel from tower to tower, spending the periods in between towers alone, and the light spot atted males would stay in the towers with the females at all times. The dark spotted giraffe was the dominant male while in the tower, but when he was gone, the light spotted males could mate with receptive females, which again they never left. The dark spotted giraffe, the original tall, dark and handsome, mysterious stranger, would often show up to new towers only to find they did not contain a receptive female. But when the tower did contain a receptive female, the dark spotted dominant male was allowed to mate. You can come to your own conclusion on what's the best mating strategy. I am sure you already are. I think for our own social experiment, those of us in the single scene should use the giraffe as an example of what you're looking for in a potential partner, not the fictional unicorn for my bold listeners. Maybe try this out and let me know how it works for you. Hey, I'm looking for someone's social and fund to hang out with. You know, a real light spotted giraffe. Or maybe you're more of a risk taker, not afraid to be alone, so you're looking for that dark spotted giraffe. You get it, let me know how it works out. Moving on to our California Desk, I'm beginning this segment with a disclaimer. I'm not beating up on California or California ins when I feature California content. I've spent a lot of time in the state. I have a lot of folks from California that send me articles. And with the exception of one really odd running at a bar possibly in Carl's Bad the winner of eleven twelve that involved Junior say out and for the record, he and his table were behaving very appropriately. Also for the record, one of my friends had to make the point of saying, hey, pro football guy over there. Then there were a bunch of wickedly intoxicated Sunday football fans who were definitely not behaving and some of which were definitely interested in fighting. Only people of my size. Aside from that incident, I have had nothing but pleasant experien drances in the state of California, and I mean, you know, ill will. So that being said, we were going over to our California desk to talk about rodent removal rats specifically. Back in June, California e p A officials sent out an email learning everyone that the use of a second generation anti coagulant poison would be used in a courtyard to control growing populations of rats. This courtyard was shared with the daycare center for the government facility, and it was the daycare center that had to basically keep the kids inside due to the amount of rat urine and feces found on and in the play equipment. Now, if you remember from our earlier episodes of Cal's Weekend Review, I talked about how mount Lions had been found with rat poison or poisons associated with rat poison in their system. The anti coagulant poison does not kill immediately the rats or gophers or whatever critters eat. The rats or gophers tend to wander around before expiring, giving other animals more opportunity to eat what they see as easy prey. In a doped up rap. This is not new or uncommon. This is why poisons are known as indiscriminate killers, and the use of poisons should be closely monitored, which the State of California has done by restricting the use of second generation anti cooaluance to licensed professionals. California e p A received some two forty three pages of emails, ranging from outrage in regards to the use of rat poison, to outrage in regards to not strong enough poison used, and a few that even offered some alternate solutions. These are quotes removed from emails from Owls for Peace courtesy of the Sacramento b sent cal e p A Under Secretary Serena McElman quote. Although we recognize you may have found an affordable OWL rental contractor and not thought to inform us, we would rest easier in our minds if we knew with certainty that are keen eyed a Vian allies were swooping down soon against the rodent menace. Should you be considering the vicious mongoose, however, we would suggest you reconsider they are unreliable. That's all I've got for you this week. Thank you so much for listening. If you're liking what you're hearing, tell a few friends, maybe even that dark spotted draft at the coffee shop. If you want to right in let me know how I'm doing, do so at ask cal that's a s k C a L. At the Meat eater dot com. Drop me a review wherever you can by hitting that for this right hand star, and I'll talk to you next week.

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