00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening to podcast you Can't Predict Anything, brought to you by first Light. This week, first Light is celebrating its annual White Tail Week, where you can tune in for tips, tricks and tactics, as well as incredible deals site wise. Check it out first light dot com, f I R S T L I t E dot com. 00:00:40 Speaker 2: You hunt Big Game two? 00:00:41 Speaker 3: I have? 00:00:42 Speaker 4: Yeah, Yeah, I've got a I haven't hunted big game in about four years now, but I've shot a lot of deer, antelope, elk, bighorn, sheep, you bears, and I just I train dogs and a bird hunt. That's what I do now. 00:00:57 Speaker 5: And so that's podcast. Yeah, earlier this about in the podcast, I. 00:01:08 Speaker 1: Might bring that pigeon down here in a couple of days. Let him walk around up here. 00:01:12 Speaker 5: At home, build a little roost for him in here. 00:01:15 Speaker 1: Pretty tame, extremely tame. Nice when you all it tries to do is get into the house. You're kidding me, because it knows people are in the house. 00:01:23 Speaker 4: Did you raise it? 00:01:24 Speaker 1: My kids did? 00:01:25 Speaker 4: It's not going to be a shooter then, right, No, you got to. 00:01:28 Speaker 6: Pass for forty of his uh roostmates went to bird dog trainers. 00:01:37 Speaker 7: Yeah, but this was so what's his name? 00:01:41 Speaker 1: Peanut butter? Peanut but because there was peanut butter and jelly but jelly, Uh, John had to get euthanized. Yeah, I had a health had a congenital birth effect as far as we can tell. 00:01:51 Speaker 4: Come on, you really did euthanize it. You didn't train it? 00:01:55 Speaker 1: Yeah, well it had as it started passing its own intestine. Oh my god, real buzz kills. Yeah, yeah, Brody is over. 00:02:07 Speaker 5: Is peanut Butter aware of the windows outside and know where? 00:02:12 Speaker 1: But it knows where the door is. It goes to the door. 00:02:15 Speaker 4: Unbelievable. 00:02:17 Speaker 2: Does it live outside? 00:02:18 Speaker 1: Lives outside? 00:02:19 Speaker 4: Oh? 00:02:19 Speaker 1: Nice, it's at a bird sitters house? Right now? 00:02:22 Speaker 5: Did he fly over there? 00:02:27 Speaker 1: You got the pigeon Gooso comes back home. 00:02:29 Speaker 2: This is the start of the show. 00:02:30 Speaker 1: We're already rolling. Give me your book. There you go, Phil, where's a good spot. 00:02:41 Speaker 2: That's a great spot. 00:02:42 Speaker 1: That looks good. Yeah, we're missing the bottom. 00:02:44 Speaker 3: Quarter of the book of the cover, but we've got the time. 00:02:48 Speaker 1: That's better. That's better. Joined today by Diane Boyd, who came on the you were on the show. 00:02:57 Speaker 4: A while ago, probably five years now. 00:02:59 Speaker 1: Five years ago, way back in episode one, six six days. Okay, that was a great episode. 00:03:04 Speaker 4: Thanks you made it great. 00:03:06 Speaker 1: We did an episode called Hunting with Teeth with Diane Boyd lay out your can Can you lay out your your an abbreviated form of your resume so people know what you're all about? 00:03:16 Speaker 4: Oh golly, yeah. I started working with wolves in Minnesota in nineteen seventy six. I was just a child prodigy, Not really, I'm just old. And anyway, I picked up Minnesota wolves. I went worked in Wild the Wolves in Northern Minnesota, and then I worked as a for one summer before I came to Montana as a depredation control trapper and research collar northern Minnesota. And then I moved to Montana in seventy nine to pursue a couple of graduate degrees. And I basically started with the first wolf that walked down from Canada and have maintained wolf reintroduction, recolonization information, all those yeares so kind of from the first wolf to three thousand wolf. Now that's what we got in the West. 00:04:01 Speaker 1: Got it? And reason I like the reason I like Diane Boyd and reach he's back on the show. Is you caught a lot of the hysteria and a lot of the on each side. If I don't know it, it's not right, especially in today's climate of an election season. I don't want to put it as the left and the right. How do you put it the inn and the yang? Now? Okay, if this can you see the book and my hand film, if this is attitudes of wolves, and this is what this side is that they're going to kill your children, okay? And this side is that they snuggle fawns. 00:04:45 Speaker 6: They're going to save the planet, that they're gonna. 00:04:48 Speaker 1: Yeah, they're gonna save the planet, and and and and reverse climate change. Diane Boyd is, I don't want to have you be the middle finger. 00:04:57 Speaker 4: That's a bad thing. 00:05:00 Speaker 1: I'm gonna move this finger over where the middle finger lives. 00:05:03 Speaker 5: Great because it's like diet. 00:05:05 Speaker 1: Yeah, she gives the middle finger to the sides. 00:05:09 Speaker 7: I like that. 00:05:09 Speaker 2: Never that way. 00:05:12 Speaker 1: And she's got a new book coming out, A Woman among Wolves, My Journey through forty Years of Wolf Recovery. When is it available? Right? 00:05:21 Speaker 4: So it's coming out September tenth, it's being released and you can pre ordered on Amazon and Barnes and Nobles. It's up there now, got it. 00:05:31 Speaker 1: My mom's husband, my mom got married. After my dad died, my mom got remarried. Now that guy passed away. You know he called Barnes and Noble. He called it books and Nobles. 00:05:40 Speaker 2: Wow, makes sense. 00:05:43 Speaker 1: Yeah, it was MacDonald's and it was Books and Nobles. 00:05:49 Speaker 2: Uh, case you forget later. I think you should ask Diane. She's gonna read her own audiobook. 00:05:56 Speaker 1: Oh listen, I'm gonna tell you the audiobook. Don't don't have them to do a person. Don't bring in a soap opera person. Who's going to do the audiobook. 00:06:08 Speaker 4: It's got to be you. Do you want to start a little bit? So my Graystone Publishing sold the audio rights to a media company. 00:06:16 Speaker 1: Ye, and that's how that's normal. 00:06:18 Speaker 4: They hired a professional actress to read. 00:06:21 Speaker 1: Did you really come in there and complain? 00:06:23 Speaker 7: Well? 00:06:23 Speaker 4: I didn't know that, And then when I found out, I just said, well, you know, I know the story pretty well, and I do a lot of public speaking, and I think I've got an engaging voice, even with my Fargo accent. So they had me send an audio edition and they wrote me back and he said, well, if you want to do the reading, we're going to have to basically train you and it's going to take a lot of time and blah blah blah blah. 00:06:47 Speaker 1: So you know why they're telling me that they got these holsers that do it all the time. Okay, and they come in they know they're going to get it done in two days whatever. Don't let that happen. I let that happen before, and I've mentioned bunch of times. I let that happen before. I got the thing in. I turned it on and I could not cross the room quick enough to turn it off the minute that person opened their mouth, Because like, you live your work, yeah right, and when you're writing it, you're it's you. You're it's you know what I mean. You're doing it, you're saying it, you're reading it to yourself, you're making it perfect, and then some other person picks it up and touches it. It's like watching It's like, are you married? No, If you were, it would be like watching someone handle your husband. 00:07:39 Speaker 4: That was an impossibility. I was married briefly, Okay, I get it. 00:07:44 Speaker 7: You get it. 00:07:45 Speaker 1: Picture that you were still married. You really liked him, and you had to watch someone else, right. 00:07:53 Speaker 4: No go. But anyway, I the other thing was they're doing this. They wanted to be done when the book is released in September tenth, and I'm going bird hunting. I mean, I got stuff to do, and I actually just don't. At this point, I just threw my hands upisode whatever. Yeah, I'm okay, thank you though. 00:08:15 Speaker 2: Next time, next time. 00:08:17 Speaker 1: I appreciate the advice. 00:08:18 Speaker 7: Yeah, I knew. 00:08:20 Speaker 1: Whitetail Week coming up here at me Eiter one week only nine to thirty to ten six. White Tail Week's the best time stock up on whitetail gear with deals from first like FHF Gear, Phelps, game calls, Dave Smith, Decoy's at the me Eater store, plus a full week of white tail content we've done he's in the past. It's like, you know, there's a TV channel that has a they celebrate a fish all week every year. It's like that, but it's for people that like white tails. Oh you know, it's funny. I'm working on this new project and we got to do a bunch of scuba diving over the last week, and we had these underwater It's like an you can talk underwater. It's a special mask like you don't, you know, normally use a you have like a breathing apparatus and a regular mask. But it's this big contained things you can hold a button like talk underwater to people, it's hard to be heard and h it's just it's not a perfect system, as you can imagine talking underwater and someone so we rented this equipment from this place that rents this stuff out, and like, well, how in the world on Shark Week are they all talking to each other underwater? He goes, Oh, they dubed that all the uh mid uh this is you folks will appreciate this. Sometime between mid and end of September, The Fucked Up Bullshitters Calendar is out. It's the third in our ft up series. We the Deer Stands Taxidermy and now it shitters. Some of the world's best and worst worst not best, yeah, the best of the worst old shitters laying around out in the woods from the Arctic to the Midwest and probably points south. 00:10:22 Speaker 2: Did you do captions this time? 00:10:23 Speaker 4: Oh? 00:10:24 Speaker 1: Yeah, great captions. 00:10:25 Speaker 6: Oh yeah, I don't know that I'd say that they're all the worst because some of them are just intriguing intriguing, like you you'd want to give them a run. 00:10:34 Speaker 1: Yeah, carved out a giant tree stumps. So like one, Yeah, one is sort of I don't know what. It looks like, a giant redwood or a sequoia or something. I don't know what it is, probably not. No, it's a cedar, a huge Western red seedar, that's what it is. And they carved a shitter out of a Western red seater. It's beautiful. So in the caption process, we sit around thinking of what would be funny, and we're like, something to do with e walks would be funny, and then you work that into a caption. There's one that is very Southwest and when I looked at it, I thought of the Alamo. And so then you work up a caption that's like a joke about the Alamo. That's all that process. 00:11:14 Speaker 2: Are there any uh outhouses or ships that you wouldn't want to Oh? 00:11:19 Speaker 1: Yeah, there are. I'd say the one I wouldn't want to do the want need of an upholstery job. 00:11:28 Speaker 6: I wouldn't touch that thing until someone's mm hmm. 00:11:32 Speaker 5: There was definitely something that made me lose my faith in humanity, like gross like stuff. 00:11:38 Speaker 1: That didn't make the cut. There's nothing gross about the count. 00:11:40 Speaker 5: No, no, no, we had some gross submissions, a lot. 00:11:47 Speaker 1: Of gross submissions. There was none of our submissions has none of the submissions are like poor etiquette. None of the submissions. There's no there's no fecal matter. There were a. 00:11:59 Speaker 5: Couple that you guys didn't see that. 00:12:00 Speaker 3: We're being used the people send in. 00:12:04 Speaker 1: Oh you cut those out. We have no people in it. 00:12:07 Speaker 2: I didn't. 00:12:07 Speaker 3: I didn't think they'd make the cut, so I didn't send those alone. 00:12:10 Speaker 1: It's twelve months, that's how many months, or in a year, it's twelve months of beautiful photography of if you were wandering around out in the woods, or wandering around up in the Arctic, or wandering around wherever, and you came into a and you came across an old shitter, and you're like, gow the stories that old shitter could tell, that's what this calendar is all about. 00:12:37 Speaker 6: And they're all shitters you'd tell someone about. Oh, you're like, you wouldn't believe what I found. 00:12:41 Speaker 1: Oh yeah, If you were hunting with your buddy or whatever, and you went off to go check on something and you encountered one of these shitters and you came back. I don't care. If you saw two booner bucks fighting and stuck together, you'd run back to your body and you'd be like, you would not believe the shitter. I just saw it. 00:13:03 Speaker 3: Oh. 00:13:03 Speaker 1: Plus, there's two booner bucks stuck together over there. That's how that that's the quality of these shitters. 00:13:10 Speaker 2: Like recently, I was was last hunting season, I was up on the Rocky Mountain front, and that Augusta showedo zone. You've probably Randall. Seems like you've been to every bar in every small town in Montana's you've probably been to this one. But in their bathrooms they have pictures of uh some outhouses. And one of the favorite ones I've seen, it's like it's you can see the front, but the outhouses out in the flats and it's got these it looks like two telephone poles that are wedged like between it's like upper corners at the eve and the ground, just basically meaning that the wind blows so hard there that if this outhouse isn't supported with telephone poles, like you know at an angle. 00:13:52 Speaker 1: It's gonna lift it off. 00:13:54 Speaker 5: Yeah, or at least that was brutalized by the wind. Pretty good. 00:13:59 Speaker 1: Yeah, just there's just you're looking down a hill and you can just see the the shitter blown off away. We also had a lot of tandems, and we only put one tandem in because I don't I don't really understand, like my when my little kids were littler, I could see them utilizing a tandem, but. 00:14:21 Speaker 5: You wouldn't park next to you on in the morning. 00:14:24 Speaker 1: They're not going to utilize the tandem, right. 00:14:27 Speaker 4: I know of a use for a tandem out house at the pace. So my first year up there in seventy nine, got Giardia and there was a two seater outhouse and there was a moment one day when I needed to use both holes at the same time, just saying. 00:14:47 Speaker 2: Yeah, do you know what the next installment of ft UP. 00:14:52 Speaker 1: I want to do. It's a it's a photographic challenge. I want to do fish cleaning stations or just fucked up old fisher man. But I'd like to do fish cleaning stations, just the nastiest, grossest fish clean stations. But it's hard to capture the smell. Never scratch and sniff. When you were a kid, if you could scratch and sniff old fish cleaning stations. 00:15:20 Speaker 5: Hit too nice. Now after the fix up joke. 00:15:24 Speaker 1: It wouldn't even be good anymore. I know we got ruined for that. Yeah, I'm not sure, but this one is. This one is great if you know someone else appreciates an old out house. Oh one of these old out houses that got caught on fire and put out. And I was trying to think of a taco bell joke fire too many flaming hot cheetos. But I think on that one, the joke landed around like it was from Southeast Alaska, and I think the joke was something about how hard it is to get anything to burn in southeast Alaska, but nothing wants to burn there, so how would you get, you know, some kind of joke like that. A couple thoughts from Helfelfinger on a past episode. It's a rebuttal, it's a retraction. It's actually not. It's a fortification. But half a Finger had a good quote. It's not his quote. He wrote it down. A retraction never gets the traction of the reaction to the original action. Once again, a retraction never gets the from the top. A retraction never gets the traction of the reaction to the original action. A great illustration of that would be when it came out two I can think of years ago, it came out that like a guy supposedly got died from eating squirrel brains, and then it was all that was everywhere. Every news agency picked this article up, and then it came out, well, actually, no, he just died of a brain disease. And in his past he had eaten a squirrel brain. So of the one hundred or two hundred people that die of this every year, he happened in his history had eaten a squirrel brain. And it just didn't quite get the traction of the reaction to the original action. I was commenting. I used to always tell people. I used to somehow, somehow, it was told to me that automobile insurance companies often pushed to reduce deer numbers so that to reduce their premium load from all the claims made from crashing and cars hitting things. So agricultural interests, and I would say, automobile interests, automobile insurance interests would like to suppressed dear numbers. Now helfle Finger, I don't know where he hangs out. He's saying automobile insurance companies plural have told Helfflefinger personally they have no interest in spending any money to reduce audio collisions because they just run the numbers and charge whatever premium they need to cover collisions with deer, while they want to spend time or money on something that might reduce deer collisions like overpasses, when they can just simply take it into consideration when they do all their math, they pass it along to the consumer also, so Hefflefinger commented on that. Hefflefinger commented on this. We were discussing a plan taking route in Oklahoma and elsewhere of taking this is a little bit complicated. Some white tailed deer farmers, white tail deer ranchers that hell you call them, that believe they have some deer that are resistant to CWD, meaning they'll have a population deer and some de just don't get it. And they're saying, hey, we should take these deer that don't get it and seed wild populations with our resistant deer in the hopes of sort of speeding along or making you know, these deer have a g mutation that makes them not so susceptible. Let's put them out in the wild, and hopefully they'll breed with wild deer and eventually we will create this CWD resistant wild deer herds, which just strikes me as like incredibly dubious health. A finger says, deer with that genetic combo are not resistant to c w D. They just don't die as fast, and it's not a good thing to have CWD positive deer running around for a longer period of time in the environment shutting infectious prions. I can't remember if I decided on preons or prions. 00:19:59 Speaker 6: What do you say, primes? 00:20:01 Speaker 1: Okay, so I'm gonna stick with the Pandora's box is that when you intensively select for those CWD related genes in captivity, you are also selecting for other genes that are close to them on the same chromosome. Genes that are physically close to one another on the same chromosome are inherited together at a higher rate. We have no idea what those other nearby genes are. They might be genes that lower reproductive rate, produce smaller antlers, a higher susceptibility to other diseases. Tameness, who knows. It's just a bad idea to circumvent natural selection for a lot of reasons, and this would never move the needle on CWD spread or prevalence in the wild. These genes associated with deer surviving longer with CWD are in fact increasing in frequency in the wild populations through natural selection, but very slowly. Steve's point is right. Ha, that's my favorite part of the letter. I don't even know what I said. This makes me feel like when I once every five years and I go bowling, and I always get like at least one strike. Steve's point is right that releasing a few more of those animals from captivity is not going to change gene frequencies in a free ranging wild population and has the potential to do harm. He goes on to say, if you like Sonoran hot dogs, Guero, which I do, well, I think that's what he's talking about. Who's gonna take a stab at this? 00:21:41 Speaker 2: Guero Canelo? 00:21:43 Speaker 1: Guero Canelo very good, top ten and two sound number one in his opinion, But prices have gone up in a way that the exceeds the quality of the food. 00:21:55 Speaker 2: He says, no, no, no, no, Guero Canelo is where I always take you. He's giving you a another option. 00:22:05 Speaker 6: Yeah, we plugged Guero Canelo in a Trivia episode. 00:22:08 Speaker 1: Oh, and he's saying, las cerrita del roro, h is a better Mexican hot dog. 00:22:17 Speaker 2: I think it's La care delro but you're close. Is that as good? That's in Tucson as well, Yes, where the Snoran dogs are famous, and it looks way different. And I think he can didn't he read what goes on there and what is? 00:22:36 Speaker 1: Or he wrote sorry, but yep, Jim, if you Jim's got his eyes on a good Mexican hot dog. Another rebuttal. This is a rebuttal from Bubbly Doug. 00:22:51 Speaker 2: We're gonna eat him in January. 00:22:52 Speaker 1: Half a finger. Bubbly Doug are sort of the main rebuttal generators and clarification generators, but. 00:23:00 Speaker 8: This is from Doug's splash like a friend. 00:23:02 Speaker 1: Doug's friend you. Doug's friend is very annoyed about something I said about c w D. And I've said this, and I've said it before. I don't love if I'll say it again. But there's a there's a point I often make, and and all it always irritates some people, but I just I say it because it's just it's a true feeling that I have in discussing chronic waste and disease in deer, I often say the thing most scary. This is not what I say, but I'm trying to say it in cleaner terms. What's horrifying to me is that some hunter out there. It horrifies me that some hunter out there would contract CWD from a deer and it would jump the species barrier. And so because it because it's so alarming to me, it's so scary to me, I'll often say that that I'll put some statistic around it where I'll try to say, you know, I might say something to the effect of ninety percent of my concern about chronic waste and diseases, it's going to pass to some that some hunter is gonna get it. And if it were to jump the species barrier, just it would just change deer hunting. It would change deer management, it would change deer hunting, it would change the perception of deer, like we put a huge cultural value on deer if they were this thing that was causing you know, like like these sort of like horrible prolonged deaths from like prion diseases and humans. I mean, it's it's just disgusting to even think about. So when I track see when I when I follow news about CWD and try to advocate on behalf of research around CWD and trying to stop the spread of CWD. A huge part of my motivation is that, like, it just makes me sick to think about anyone, my kids, whatever, somehow doing this and the implication how it would affect my diet. That's kind of like the main thing I'd like to eat. Dear me, Uh, this does not go over well with some people, and don't Ug's friend who's a landowner farmer in the state of Washington. She says, if Steve's biggest concern with CWD is the potential risk to humans, it feels contradictory to the values he often expresses as a conservationist. You could be a humanist and a conservation at the same time. But back to the letter, it gives the impression that he values animal welfare less than he claims, which stands in contrast to his usual corn arguments against vegans that he likely cares more for animals and understands them better than they do. It's frustrating to hear him repeatedly say that his greatest worry is the disease jumping to humans when animal welfare is at stake right now, it's not just Doug who's upset about this, me too. And she goes on as well to counter my observation that if another thing I've said about CWD, then we'renna leave. I'm gonna leave the subject behind for a minute. Another thing I will frequently say about CWD is how can it be? Or why is it that I'm so afraid of it jumping the species barrier to humans. I would feel that livestock producers would be more afraid than I am, because, as I said, a cow in a sheep look a hell of a lot more like a deer than I do. 00:26:31 Speaker 5: All you gotta look at is like what happened with mad cow disease written right, they can imagine that across the entire United States. 00:26:38 Speaker 1: Correct what it would do to the cattle ustry. And this person is countering. She's saying, I don't think they're not worried about this. I can't really do a tit for tat on that issue. I understand what you're saying about animal welfare. I'm just telling you a thing that like, like, for instance, when my kids out playing in the road, okay, and I get nervous that they're chasing there, that they're that they go to chase their baseball across the highway without looking. And I'm like, man, the main thing that worries me about my kid chasing the ball across the highway is that my kid will get hit by a car. Someone would say like, well, that doesn't go with your view as a conservationist, because why are you not so worried about the deer that get hit on the road. Aren't you worried about animal welfare? I'm like, yes, not as worried any about my kid get hit on the road. 00:27:34 Speaker 4: Yeah. 00:27:34 Speaker 5: I mean I read this as like the only thing you're concerned about is humans. But what I said, I know, but that's what it kind of sounds like she's saying here, like you can be concerned about humans and worry about the deer herds too. 00:27:48 Speaker 1: Yeah. When I see a deer run across the room, I was like the driver I freaked out on. I was in the pastor's seat and I freaked out on. The guy'd be like, slow down, dude, how do you know there's not more. 00:27:58 Speaker 2: I think that she's just I think it's a she. I don't know why it is because. 00:28:05 Speaker 1: And the fact that he says she. 00:28:06 Speaker 2: But I think she's pointing out that maybe there's a constant O middle when you talk about CWD, about that part, I always qualify that part. 00:28:16 Speaker 6: I also think it's hard to I mean, the CWD is going to be a lot worse for deer if people get it from deer, Like, if you're concerned about deer as a whole, if it jumps the species barrier, CWD is going to be a much worse outcome for our white tail populations as a whole. 00:28:35 Speaker 1: And if it jumps the species, yeah, if it jumps the species barrier into cattle, and all of a sudden, we have to have the same conversations about deer and CWD as we do about free ranging buffalo and cattle because of brucellosis. And people are like, hey, man, if the state owns the deer, keep those deer away from my place. 00:28:56 Speaker 6: Yeah, it's a it's a much darker picture for not only people, but the health of deer as a whole if that were to happen. 00:29:04 Speaker 1: And I don't omit. The other thing I don't omit the other thing the same way. When I'm driving, or I'm right in the car and I see a deer cross and I see that the driver that I'm with isn't thinking about how there's probably some following it, and I'm like, dude, so now come on. But if I saw a kid run across the road, my reaction is going to be even stronger. I'm gonna get out and yelled the kid. 00:29:27 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:29:27 Speaker 3: I think it's perfectly normal to be more worried about your kids than deer. Then you are worried about like the welfare of a deer, or deer is a population. 00:29:38 Speaker 1: I do worry. 00:29:39 Speaker 6: Yeah, let me ask you this. 00:29:40 Speaker 3: I think it's pretty valid. 00:29:41 Speaker 6: If I could guarantee you that it would not jump the species barrier, but you could get rid of it by snapping your fingers, would you still get rid of CWD? 00:29:51 Speaker 1: Oh? Yeah, I mean that's the course. 00:29:52 Speaker 6: And let's say it's like you can you can be worried about one thing more than the other, but still have concern for cw D as a problem for deer. 00:30:02 Speaker 1: If we could spend money and get rid of EHD in blue tongue, I'd be like, oh, let's go spend the money and get rid of HD. In blue tongue, Yeah, it's like it upsets any It upsets equilibrium and causes a lot of trouble for deer hunters when their area gets wiped out. It's like rags the riches on deer populations, where you get a lot of deer and all of a sudden you're like, well, we got a lot now, but now that we got this many, just wait for EHD to come through and then they'll be laying dead on the side of some pond. I would still think we should spend much money, and like, here's the thing too, from their perspective, that's the reason I'm always advocating on research, Like, knowing that there's that risk out there, study the hell out of it. I think they should be. I think there should be a lot of money getting pumped into studying it. It's not like that perspective is not adversarial to want to control what's going on. Who else to talk about? 00:30:52 Speaker 6: Wolves? 00:30:53 Speaker 8: Me? 00:30:58 Speaker 1: Where do we start? Let me ask you this question. Can I remind you of something you told me the last time? 00:31:05 Speaker 9: Oh? 00:31:05 Speaker 1: Yeah, sure, the last time you were on the show. And I want to pick this up and have you extend that logic. I want to see if you still feel that way, and if you would extend it to Colorado and just just run with this. You said something that surprised me when you were on the show before. You had said, had we never did we humans America's Americans? Whatever? Had we never conducted had we decided to not do a reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone National Park in the frank Church Wilderness area, meaning have we not gone and live captured wolves elsewhere and brought them to turn them loose? We probably would have. I can't remember the exact way you put it. We probably would have eventually landed in the same spot we're at right now. From natural migration. 00:32:03 Speaker 4: Yes, I still feel that way. And the only so wolves are expanding globally in Canada. They're all over the Midwest here in our west Europe, and the only place where wolves have been reintroduced was Yellowstone and the frank Church Mexican wolves, red wolves. But wolves have globally expanded without any reintroduction. There's wolves in the Netherlands. Now, there's wolves in Denmark. Nobody put them there. Wolves have been getting there on their own and the wolves did get to Colorado. They've had the first reproduction I think it was twenty twenty or twenty twenty one from Wyoming wolves, and those wolves ended up boot them being killed, but they were getting there on their own. And I feel very strongly that where Colorado is at since twenty twenty is about where we were at in Montana in nineteen seventy nine eighty when a few wolves started walking down on their own power from Canada and slowly got a toe hold, so to speak, and repopulated on their own. 00:33:08 Speaker 1: Can you mentioned the Great Lakes? Can you move over? Can we move over real quick to the Great Lakes? And you can touch on that real quick? Talk about that for a men like no reintroduction? Right, if we look at in the northern Great Lakes, we have Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, anyone else have a stable viable population. 00:33:32 Speaker 4: No Ile Royal. There was a recent reintroduction to Ile Royal because the wolves are dying out other than that Michigan waters. 00:33:40 Speaker 1: Yes, can you give a little crash course on how were they ever gone gone? 00:33:47 Speaker 4: No? 00:33:48 Speaker 7: Good question. 00:33:49 Speaker 4: So when I left Minnesota in nineteen seventy nine working with wolves, there was just under a thousand wolves, nine hundred to one thousand wolves in Minnesota. There was a handful in Wisconsin, probably less than a dozen. There was maybe twenty five in Isle Royal that had gotten their late forties early fifties by crossing the frozen Lake Superior ice and that was it. And now there's I'm trying to think of the numbers of wolves in the Midwest. It's over a thousand, might be a couple thousand, three thousand. I'm trying to think, have. 00:34:17 Speaker 5: They been extirpated from Michigan. 00:34:20 Speaker 4: Yes, they're extirpated from Michigan and Wisconsin. They were never extirpated from Minnesota because the northern fourth or third of the state is too remote roadless, so there always was a stronghold. And I'm trying to think. 00:34:32 Speaker 1: You're not calling me a liar when I say that I saw a wolf track in the eastern up in nineteen ninety four. 00:34:37 Speaker 4: Are no, no what I saw? 00:34:39 Speaker 1: I fight you? 00:34:40 Speaker 2: No. 00:34:40 Speaker 4: Absolutely, I'm saying viable populations breading reproducing established packs. 00:34:45 Speaker 8: No. 00:34:45 Speaker 4: Because my friend Dick Theo was documenting wolves recovering to Wisconsin starting and I think I think he saw his first wolf track in like seventy two or seventy three, they were trying and Michigan same thing. And actually there was a reintroduction into Michigan in the up. It's nineteen seventy, seventy four to seventy eight, somewhere in there. Seventy four you can read about. It's in my book. And they took four wolves from Minnesota and they transplanted them, reintroduced them to northern Michigan. It was during just before deer seasons, were they really and they eventually all four were killed pretty quickly, So that. 00:35:22 Speaker 1: What people guns, animal rights people. 00:35:26 Speaker 4: Failing sorry for him in the Michigan winters. So that was actually the very first wolf for introduction that I'm aware of, and people don't. 00:35:35 Speaker 1: Often who did that reinduction. It was like the state was it real hot politically at the time. 00:35:41 Speaker 4: You you didn't know about it. I'd say, no, it wasn't right. 00:35:43 Speaker 1: It's no internet, right, no. 00:35:45 Speaker 4: Internet, no Facebook and on social media. So it was done. They were held a little while in a pen and then they were let go, and that was the model for how they were going to reintroduce to wolf seat to Yellowstone. So Yellowstone wasn't Yellowstone, Ido. Wasn't the first reintroduction Michigan. 00:36:03 Speaker 1: Was they took them from Minnesota and put them in Michigan. Yes, I'm from Michigan. I didn't know that. 00:36:07 Speaker 10: Google it. 00:36:08 Speaker 4: Try it Michigan wolf for introduction if you're so, and look in the seventies, I think seventy four. So yeah, but none of them made it. And it wasn't that they didn't know how to hunter, didn't know how to find their way around because they're wild wolves, just that too many people with guns. So anyway, that was you asked. That was the first. And then of course our wolves were coming down into Montana from the North Country from Canada on their own. 00:36:35 Speaker 1: What year were they so in the Rockies? So let's leave the Upper Midwest out of it. Yeah, so we'll go from like the hundredths of Meridian west or whatever. Kay, in what year can you say with some certainty there were no wolves south of the Canadian border in the whole west in the Yeah, in the whole West? 00:37:01 Speaker 4: Well the statement so wolves have always trickled down, So I can't say there was never a wolf. But in terms of a viable breeding surviving. 00:37:10 Speaker 1: Oh no, no, I want to hear about that a little bit. 00:37:11 Speaker 4: Okay, So by they say generally by the nineteen thirties wolves were extirpated as a viable population in the West. But I know of individual people like what you just said, who saw wolves, wolf tracks a wolf. There was a wolf shot in Glacier Park in nineteen fifty three. There was another wolf shot outside of Bulbridge in nineteen seventy. There's individual shot, they get run over, they show up. But in terms of a viable, reproducing population, nineteen thirties is pretty well the date that they've chosen. 00:37:42 Speaker 1: Okay, But since from nineteen thirty up until they will come to focus on when a vible population came Yeah, at any time along that there could have been singles that would come down from camp. 00:37:58 Speaker 4: Yeah, and I hearing from people who live over on the on the Rocky Mountain Front, the Blackfoot Indian Reservation, Glacier Park, it's pretty remote, inaccessible, badger to med and people have seen wolves there more commonly than other parts of Montana. And then of course they don't survive in eastern Montana because. 00:38:18 Speaker 7: They got nowhere to hide. 00:38:19 Speaker 4: They show up, boom, they're dead. 00:38:20 Speaker 1: Got it. 00:38:21 Speaker 4: So there's been a little bit, but not reproduction. 00:38:25 Speaker 1: Okay, And then when did they start coming down and getting a foothold? And how did that? How did that work? They keep using toll holding foothold, which. 00:38:34 Speaker 4: Is which is there's They don't forget legholds anyway, one of my better tools. Sorry, did you find it? 00:38:43 Speaker 5: Yeah? 00:38:43 Speaker 4: Go ahead. 00:38:44 Speaker 5: A failed attempt by Northern Michigan University and the Michigan DNR to reintroduce four wolves to the Upper Peninsula occurred in nineteen seventy four. See Eventually wolves move from Wisconsin to Upper Michigan following strong prey populations in the early nineties. When'd you see that wolf track? 00:39:03 Speaker 1: I saw a wolf track in nineteen ninety four? 00:39:05 Speaker 5: Eastern up that that corroborates your your story, Try and trap right again. 00:39:16 Speaker 1: That's not far from the final resting place of my dog, Duchess. 00:39:20 Speaker 5: Wolves got her? 00:39:21 Speaker 1: Huh Nope, two guys named Ben and Matt got her. Oh man, yep, well they were supposed to. Oh oh, I gotch she was crippled up. Oh god, sorry god, HER's not the right word. 00:39:35 Speaker 4: Thank you for the back job, Brody. 00:39:38 Speaker 5: Thanks. 00:39:41 Speaker 1: So the question was oh from nineteen so nineteen thirty there's around nineteen thirty, there's no viable population of wolves left in the lower in the American West. 00:39:53 Speaker 7: Yeah. 00:39:53 Speaker 4: They even went in the parks with poisons and traps and rifles and killed all the wolves inside Yellowstone and Glacier and all the parks. Yeah, they were pretty well gone. Coyotes didn't disappear, but wolves did. 00:40:05 Speaker 5: Why is that white coyotes stick around? 00:40:09 Speaker 4: I think because they're smaller, they have a higher reproductive capacity, they breed more often, they're breeding in smaller units, and people weren't so focused on eradicating coyotes. You know, you see a wolf, by god, we've got to kill every last one coyote like well whatever, it just not doesn't it generate the emotional impact of hatred? 00:40:30 Speaker 2: Gotcha? 00:40:31 Speaker 5: What about Mexican gray wolves? 00:40:32 Speaker 2: Were they always? 00:40:33 Speaker 5: Were there always some north of the border or had they been eliminated? 00:40:38 Speaker 1: Also? 00:40:38 Speaker 4: It's interesting, so the Mexican wolves were basically eliminated except in Mexico, and there were a few into the southwest, Arizona and New Mexico right at the border area. They captured every last one. Then they could fund find out of the wild. Roy McBride went there and I think the last wild capture was about nineteen seventy early ninety seventies, and they moved them into captive breeding facilities to help build up the species, but their founding population was seven. There's a lot of genetic concerns obviously with a bottleneck of seven. So they're always managing and manipulating them to try and maximize genetic diversity, including taking pups from captivity at a young age and then finding a den in the wild where the mothers got wild pups, and they'll go sneak a couple of the captive pups like ten days old. However, really and with a while once because that has the desirable genetics. 00:41:38 Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, what's that bird? Does that? 00:41:41 Speaker 4: A coward? 00:41:41 Speaker 2: Right? 00:41:43 Speaker 4: They call them a parasite though, instead of an improvement. 00:41:45 Speaker 7: Okay, so yeah, So. 00:41:49 Speaker 4: The Mexican wolf, they were pretty well gone. And interestingly, one of my first years in the Northwark I think it was nineteen eighty, Chuck Johnkle brought up a Mexican carnivore biologist, Pepe Trevino, and he showed me a polar eight you know, photograph he brought up of a wolf. It was like in a barn or a shed, and he said, is that a wolf? Well, yeah, he says, and I know it's a wild one because this is a Mexican wolf from the Chiuaua area of Mexico and it was coming to a ranch and it was a male wolf and it was bringing deer legs and meat to the ranch dog, who was a female on spade because it was the last mate choice out there, and they ended up the rancher could have just killed it, everybody did, but he didn't. He called some authority said if you don't come take this wolf away, we're going to kill it. So they went and captured it and held it in his barn until they moved it to the zoo. But it's kind of a sad story, yeah, the very last one. 00:42:46 Speaker 1: Yeah. But we played this on this podcast some time ago and it was some bird from was I think of some bird from Hawaii and it was the I can't remember some bird species and it was just down to one. It was down to a male or a female and this bird species with duet I heard it. Yeah, And so they have this recording of the last bird. Let's say it was a male, the last male of the species doing the duet without his without accompaniment, because he like does his part and you wait and the female supposed to Yeah, and it was gone. 00:43:28 Speaker 2: I heard that. 00:43:28 Speaker 4: It's kind of terrors at you a little bit. 00:43:30 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:43:30 Speaker 4: Yeah. 00:43:33 Speaker 1: Have you ever heard a guy named Frank Glazer. 00:43:36 Speaker 4: Old Pilot, different guy Don, that was Don Glazier, No, I haven't. 00:43:40 Speaker 1: He has a book called Alaska's Well, there's a book about him called Alaska's Wolfman, huh. And he had gone up to He gone out to Alaska very early and was a market hunter for people building roads and people building railroads and whatever, and eventually just became this very accomplished hunter. And at the time they were trying to get they were trying to do economic improvement for Eskimo groups in northwest Alaska, and part of this economic improvement plan was to introduce reindeer herding, which never never really took so as they were trying to go into Eskimo communities and the fads are trying to get Eskimo communities establish raindeer populations, but they're having the hell of the time with wolves, and so Frank Glazer, in addition to a lot of aerial gunning, was doing bait operations and he would go into an area and get them poison bait yep, strict nine. He'd be able to go get them all. 00:44:51 Speaker 4: Yes. 00:44:51 Speaker 1: In his book he talks a lot about all the other stuff that would turn up at the bait pile, a lot of stuff, but it was so affect that he doesn't talk about its effectiveness with pois in this way, but it was so effective. He has some anecdotes in there where he gets them all and then someone will say, there's this part of it where an Eskimo tells him that he saw it's like seven come across the ice and it was like six white wolves and a black wolf. And a couple days later he goes to his bait pile. There's six white wolves and a black wolf at the bait pile. Just very effective, yes, yeah, And even talked about you want to set it on a high knob like he's got like he took like a real approach to it, you know, like he was good at poison and wolves. 00:45:36 Speaker 7: He's a good predator, good at poison wolf. 00:45:39 Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, well, I mean poisonous. How they wiped the wolves out of the West. It wasn't so much traps and guns it was poison. How else are you going to get every last one? That's it? 00:45:49 Speaker 1: Yeah, when they started coming down, what eventually what factors eventually led them to you know what, what factors led them to kind of get a toe hold? Was it ESA protection where you were where people were more afraid to shoot them because they'd get in a bunch of trouble. 00:46:08 Speaker 4: Yeah, I think I mean Rachel Carson and you know, the whole wave of ecology and being environmentally a where it started in the late sixties, and then the ESA came about, the Act came out seventy three, I think the final version. Wolves were protected in seventy four, and there was just a little change of mindset. And the interesting thing was that they would find the north Fork of the Flathead, you know, right along glacier. Because back in the seventies, people like myself and other people, they just wanted to move to a quiet place where there were a few people and could enjoy wildlife and have a simpler life. They weren't laggers or hunters or ranchers. Well, there were some, there were some, but mostly just sort of go back to earthers and have a better quality life. So they didn't mind wolves, and these wolves happened to find that valley, that corridor of tolerance, and they that's how they found their way. They didn't work on the Rocky mount Front, it didn't work in eastern montann it didn't work. 00:47:00 Speaker 1: And I know because of cattle, yes. 00:47:03 Speaker 4: And so they found this little zone and they were able to one came, and then two years later her male came and they made it. And then more wolves come down. But it was the tolerance of the local community that found wolves interesting and novel versus dangerous and threatening. 00:47:20 Speaker 1: Where were you? Then? 00:47:21 Speaker 4: I came to that valley in nineteen seventy nine, the first wolf that survived that we got a radio collar on Kishnina. She arrived in nineteen the fall of seventy eight. We put a radio collar in April fourth, nineteen seventy nine, and I trapped there for forever, just trying to catch more wolves. And there weren't other wolves until about two years later when this male came down and joined her. But the meantime, you know, she wanted her out looking for a female like that poor bird in the wale. Yeah, looking for a male, right, And eventually found one and they made it and had the pops and so forth. So that process just they filtered on their own four paws without any assistance whatsoever, and no fanfare and no people from Washington, d C. Carrying crates and they just they just walk down. And I think that's why they made it there was just socially acceptable and tolerant because it wasn't forced on anybody. 00:48:18 Speaker 1: You tell that story in your book. Yeah, how did you get a collar on that? Or was it collers at the time or so. 00:48:23 Speaker 4: The British Columbia Barry researcher Bruce McLellan's been up doing embarrassed. He's now retired, but he saw the wolves and wolf tracks and he contacted Bob Riem at the university and Bob hired a wolf trapper from Minnesota, Joe Smith. Uncommon name, but it was Joe Smith. And he came out and set traps and caught that wolf. And then I came out in September to replace the crew that was there and follow her, and I was a trapper and to try and catch more wolves. And that's kind of how it started. So she was already collared, although I know some there had one neighbor who didn't really like wolves and said that I brought the wolf with me, which you know, or that a sled dog got loose but slid. You know, you don't see sled dogs that are three feet off the shoulder with yellow eyes. 00:49:11 Speaker 7: I mean, it's just all the stuff. 00:49:13 Speaker 4: But that was how they got there. They walked and she had to come along ways because they poisoned off wolves in southern BC and Alberta in the rockies, just like they did in the States, because they were afraid of rabies. And they started poisoning wolves in the sixties, late sixties, and so. 00:49:28 Speaker 1: There was a zone they were at it late. 00:49:30 Speaker 2: Yeah, there was a. 00:49:31 Speaker 4: Zone when there weren't wolves along the border. There weren't wolves in Waterton and vanmf. So this first wolf, Chrishtina, may have come from as far as Josper, but she came quite a ways. We didn't have genetic resources back then to determine where she came from. Of course now we could if we'd had a sample, but we don't have a sample. 00:49:50 Speaker 1: Did you when you say you were a wolf trapper, then were you trapping problem wolves too? 00:49:59 Speaker 4: Yes? No, I don't mind at all when I. 00:50:03 Speaker 1: So or whatever word you want to. 00:50:05 Speaker 4: Do well, you'll enjoy the chapter north Holm in the book, but did you like the North Holme chapter? So I started working with wolves as a sty eyed, waistlink blonde haired hippie wolf hugging lady and I. 00:50:18 Speaker 1: Came from Niver want me through that descriptor now story. 00:50:24 Speaker 4: I was a bit enamored with wolves. I was a university college student Dave Meach, who's like the wolf god. He's still working full time at eighty six studying wolves. He's published more scientific papers than anybody I know. Anyway, I got to work on his captive project and then I got to go to northern Minnesota and work, and I learned how to catch and collar wolves and track them. And then I was hired as a year after this, so I'm pretty early in my career. In nineteen seventy nine, I was hired as a livestock depredation control trapper and research trapper. So when there weren't wolves killing livestock, I went out and form and collared wolves that were just wild and added to the database for stie Fritz was post docking PhD stuff. So my job picture you live in North Holme. Picture, you're a conservative guy from Michigan with a few cows and you have a few acres and some young blonde galoy's going to come up and save you from. 00:51:18 Speaker 7: The wolves, right. 00:51:19 Speaker 4: I mean it was a hard roto. So that was my job and I learned so much that summer. It was so important to my career development and having me be in the middle finger as you described, of behavior of public wolves reaction on my part. So there were truly farmers, they don't call them Rochester farmers that had chronic depredation problems and there were some farmers that had none. I worked with both, but getting into that community was real challenging, and I could tell stories forever about that. 00:51:57 Speaker 1: How would you generally handle those situations? 00:52:00 Speaker 4: Okay, example, I try to use there's no point in feeding them a lot of scientific data. They don't care. You just have to work with them and develop a relationship. I use my sense of humor. There was like, for example, I was working in there and I kind of stayed on my own and I tried to stay away from people, just do my job because I was young in inexperience and I kind of didn't want them to know that. 00:52:23 Speaker 10: Right. 00:52:24 Speaker 4: Well, one day I'm at the gas station that a guy pumping gas. They've actually pumped your gas back. Then says, you know, you got to pick up the local paper and see what Bing wrote about you. I said, well, who's Bing girl. He's what he's like close to God. He writes our local news column and the weekly paper, and he knows all the goings on. So I go buy the paper and I open it up and there's being being Elhard's column and he talks about who visited who and what they were having the church bazaar at and then he says, and by the way, we have a new community member. There's an attractive, young blonde lady wolf Trapper. And next exact quote and next to his words, he had a photograph of a six foot tall cardboard cut out wolf and he's got his arm around it and is sitting outside at his house and he says, Lady wolf Trapper, I have a problem. Wolf's like, what do you do? 00:53:22 Speaker 8: Right? 00:53:22 Speaker 4: I'm twenty four years old. I'm like, oh my God, and knowing that how I deal with this guy is going to make or break my summer. So I thought about it really hard. I went home. I mate took out a bunch of cardboard and tools, and I built a perfect replica of a nun fourteen new house wolf trap, complete with double long springs made out of cardboard and a fake chain made like your kids make the Christmas loop chains. And I wrapped it in black electric tape so it looked like it had been dyed black like a real trap. And I got a jar of my stinkiest wolf bait and I crammed it full of cardboard. I drive to his house the next day and I pulled up in the government truck and he comes out in his porch and he kind of stands there it smirks, and he crosses his arm and says, well, you must be the lady wolf trapper. And I said, yes, sir, I am. Please meet you. I'm Diane Boyd. And he says, say you get to take care of my problem wolf. I said, I am. And I walk around the back of my truck and I pull out this cardboard trap and the corrugated cardboard stinky goo. And I walk over and I say, so this this trap, in this bait, will I guarantee we will catch yours particular subspecies of wolf that's causing you your problem. And I reach out with it like this, and he stands there and he looks at me like for Mediani five feet away, and he just kind of stands there, and then finally he breaks. Soon his granny comes over and he puts his hand on my shoulder, says, come on in. The wife just took a pie out of the oven, and I sat there and had blueberry pie with him and tea and coffee, and we chatted quite a bit. And the next week in his column put a photograph of my trap and he said, the lady Trapper come paid me a visit, and my problems taken care of. And you know what, he actually said some nice things about me in his column. With the rest of the summer, when I'd catch a wolf, he'd put it in the column. And so it's like, that's how I work in the community. You can't fight it. Just put your head down, think hard, and move forward and try and do something a little creative. Just you asked. That's just one of the stories. 00:55:25 Speaker 1: But yeah, that's good career advice for everybody. 00:55:29 Speaker 4: Just be a pain in the neck. 00:55:33 Speaker 1: When that was happening and the wolves were coming down, Let's talk about that scenario that you said. You know, we might have eventually landed where we landed. There's no way it would have been the same timeline. 00:55:44 Speaker 4: Right, Probably not, But you know, once so once we had our first wolf in seventy nine. By nineteen ninety five without any reintroductions, just simply not trapping, poisoning and shooting them. By nineteen ninety five, just before the post wolves in the Yellowstone in central Idol, we had seventy seventy five wolves in eight packs with nobody reintroducing them. Doc northwest Montana Marion nine mile callous spell all through northwestern and western Montana. The Marian wolves became famous because they started killing livestock in the It was about late late eighties, so they were there and because nobody forced them out, they were just kind of existing. In those wolves that cause problems, you know, shoot shovels shot up, and the other ones kind of left to be. So in the nineties there were wolves dispersing. 00:56:37 Speaker 1: One of my telling those numbers again, so the number of wolves, yeah, pre reintroduction. 00:56:42 Speaker 4: So by nineteen ninety five there were about seventy to seventy five wolves in Montana in eight packs. And if you go back to the old US fish and Wilife Service website. You can find the data there. It's published. I'm not making this up. I mean I don't. I only talk truth and my book is Stories of Truth. So they were there. They had collars on. Sometimes this one pack was giving a guy at livestock producer problems, but mostly they were just making a living. There were wolves on the Rocky Mountain front. They were moving down and they were as far as Missoula, the Nine Mile Wolves, I'm sure you heard of them. So the wolves before they were introduced them to Yellowstone, there were two wolves that had gotten there already pre nineteen ninety five. One was shot just south of Fox. 00:57:27 Speaker 1: Creek fire you had gotten a Yellowstone. 00:57:29 Speaker 4: Yeah, and one was filmed, yes, So that was like nineteen ninety one ninety two. So it's just like Colorado. Those wolves came from Wyoming and Colorado now and they found their way down and they began reproducing, and then the reintroduction happed on top of it, which is what happened with Wyoming. With a Yellowstone in central Idahole. So the wolves were starting to get down and the reintroduction happened on top of them. But the two that were seeing didn't survive long enough to reproduce. They weren't viable, they didn't have packs. They were just sort of passing through, just like we saw in Montana a lot prior to Kishnina and the successful breeding. 00:58:09 Speaker 1: Uh, it's gonna sound like a dumb question because I know it's probably not too challenging, but uh, when they kill Kyle's what when they kill Kyle's how do they generally approach it? 00:58:21 Speaker 4: You mean domestic cattle, not Kyle. 00:58:23 Speaker 1: Sorry, yeah, kill cattle. 00:58:25 Speaker 4: It depends on how many wolves are, depends on the experience of the wolves. But in every kill is different. I just remember in Minnesota I had to go skin a lot of really disgusting, maggotty carcasses of cows and haffers. If it's a calf, they basically eat at all, so there's not much to fined. You might find an ear tag in a pile of scat or something, it's hard to prove they were there. But the big cole, you find bites. They're pretty effective predators. It again, the hind, the belly, the neck. Sometimes they're not. They're not efficient killers like lions. I mean lions live alone because they can kill an Alkalholm. A wolf pack needs other members because they don't have fit sabers on four pods to help them hold and contain their prey. They just have teeth. 00:59:11 Speaker 5: Do they key in on calving season for cattle? 00:59:15 Speaker 4: I have always wondered why they don't more? I mean they can, yeah, because. 00:59:20 Speaker 5: It seemed like those wolves that were reintroduced in Colorado. Yeah, just this past Calvia, they really that's when they really started to get in some trouble. 00:59:29 Speaker 4: Yes, and those wolves before they were transplanted, they were livestock killers. So yeah, if there's calves around and cattle wolves, you will know there are wolves there. If you know, if you're gonna have problems, you have them. But not every wolf is a livestock killer. And sometimes they might kill a calf or two and never have a problem. Sometimes they might come in and kill repeatedly until you remove the wolves. It really depends on the situation, and it kind of depends on how their ranchers managing their livestock herd. Do they ever heard or out there? Do they have guard dogs? Are they turned out in a national forest and a grazing lease in May and then they're not picked up till October nobody looks at them. I mean, you know, it really depends on the management of the stock a lot. 01:00:15 Speaker 1: Uh. You just said something that I can't remember with the hell you're talking about, but it caught my attention. Oh, I know, can can one I guess what I was kind of getting at. Can one do it effectively? 01:00:33 Speaker 4: Depends and if you're talking or can they kill it one adult? Coll effect? 01:00:36 Speaker 1: Can one wolf kill one adult kyle? Do you ever see? 01:00:38 Speaker 4: That'd be tough. The kyle would probably have to have something wrong with it, but it's usually more than one. 01:00:44 Speaker 1: And then you just get a hold of it and hang on to it. 01:00:46 Speaker 4: Basically. 01:00:47 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:00:48 Speaker 4: Yeah, When did. 01:00:50 Speaker 1: You say that Colorado put in known livestock killers. Yeah, explain what that means. And if that's like you're not in your head that is that behavior? Do you feel like it's hard to unlearn that? 01:01:03 Speaker 4: What I would say is, if I wanted to reintroduce wolves with minimal problems, I would see wolves that have only had wild meat. It's like the wolves that were introduced to Yellowstone and Central Idaho were taken from Canada where they had never been exposed to livestock, but they had never been exposed to buffalo either. I mean, they're pretty good at killing bison now they had to learn it because they're very formidable. I wouldn't want to try and kill a bison with my teeth. But so I think I don't know all the background and why they chose those wolves. They probably had a shortage supplies and a shortage of time to get the job done, and they had this opportunity to get those wolves. They weren't all livestock killers, but the ones that are causing the problem now had a history before they were put there. 01:01:50 Speaker 1: What is the I'm a little I haven't followed it as closely. What is going on with the ones they put in Colorado? Like, how has that gone? How many and what are they doing? 01:01:59 Speaker 4: Oh boy, it's a big exact numbers. I couldn't tell you. I'm not that involved. But there's a male I forgot his number. They put him in and he's paired with a female. They had at least one pup, and I saw on my news fees this morning they've seen three, now three pups in this particular pack, but they had only documented one up until yesterday or whatever. And they were put in at the end of the year, like December or so, and they started killing livestock in April. I believe it was when the pups were born. And they're now debating how are they going to manage the situation. They no matter what CPW does, they aren't be a happy, winning outcome, because if they remove all the wolves and kill them all, you're gonna have the wolf protectionists screaming at him. If they don't do anything, they're gonna have the livestock growers scream at him if they take I actually had this conversation with the journalist yesterday. He says, well, how about if we just take one, say we know the male has been a livestock killer, can the female survive long and protect and feed those pups without help? And I said, well, I can give you two examples. In nineteen eighty two, when Kishnina had her first litter of pups in the Flathead in fifty years, her mate was killed in June and those pups were seven eight weeks old, and he was killed accidentally by the Grizzly bear trap people. She was caught in a Grizzly bersonaire and he subsequently died accidental death and still just as dead though, so the female had Yeah, so doesn't him. It's kind of like got your dog right. Anyway, the female had seven pups to deal with, and he raised kids, and you raised dogs. You know how much food they start to consume as they become teenagers. Oh my god, talk about a full time job trying to feed seven growing pups that are fifty sixty pounds by fall, and I thought they're not can never make it. They all made it through winter. We were seeing tracks of eight wolves in the snow. So there's one example. The other example was so that was keeping the female remaining. And then in the nine Mile in the early recolonization, those wolves got to nine Mile, Montana on their own near Missoula. The male and female had pups. The mother was poached over Memorial Day, which is pretty early. So those little guys were maybe four maybe five weeks old. They were probably still drinking milk from mom, but they already had getting regurgitated food certainly, so it only had the male to raise the whole litter of pops. And Mike and Mannis who was studying him at that time, and Barto, Gary University, do you know, bloody bart Barto Gary. He's passed now, but he was the most vary, the most voracious hunter right now. 01:04:46 Speaker 7: We loved him. He's a university exactly. 01:04:48 Speaker 4: We call him Bloody Bart. 01:04:50 Speaker 7: I can tell you stories. 01:04:51 Speaker 4: He whatever he shot, he would kill. So he had the had permission to go shoot deer or pick up roadkill to supplemently feed those pups because they were fully in danger. This would be like nineteen eighty eight or so to do anything fishing. Walley Service was mandated under the essay to do what they could to keep them alive as an endangered species. So they got these permits to go do that. That male raise those pups without a female, and they all survived. So yes, the wolves are incredibly resilient. So then this journalist asked me yesterday, so should they take the male or the female? I'm like, oh my god, you're asking me a Sophie's choice question. 01:05:27 Speaker 7: I can't tell you. 01:05:30 Speaker 4: And you know, we talked about it at length. And starting with two wolves adults that have both been killing livestock, and then you're going to take one wolf away to try and hopefully minimize it, you might be causing more of a problem because the remaining parent now has the burden solely of feeding hungry pops, and maybe it's going to kill more livestock because of that. 01:05:53 Speaker 5: And those pups are going to learn to do it too. 01:05:55 Speaker 4: Yeah, this is the problem. So it's I just think maybe thinking ahead a little bit ahead of time may have headed this problem off. But it's amazing to me that all those wolves they put out, they only had one reproducing pack. You think they would have had more. But this is a problem. 01:06:14 Speaker 1: How many did they put down? 01:06:15 Speaker 5: Ten total? I think? 01:06:17 Speaker 1: And then are all ten still alive? 01:06:19 Speaker 5: One of them got killed by a mountain lion, which is kind of ironic. It's usually the. 01:06:23 Speaker 1: Other way around. 01:06:24 Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, but I'm not there may have been another one that died somehow. 01:06:29 Speaker 1: The mountain lion got one. I think I knew that. 01:06:31 Speaker 5: Maybe I forgot it, but I think most of them are still. 01:06:34 Speaker 1: There, and they formed one reproducing pack. 01:06:36 Speaker 4: Yeah, it's surprising to me because they did it before breeding season and then they'll be reintroducing more wolves. And of course you heard Washington State is now refusing to give them more wolves. It's becoming this huge political. 01:06:48 Speaker 1: But they got I thought they got him from the nets person there. 01:06:50 Speaker 5: They got him from Oregon originally and one of the well not the state, might have been the nests person that originally said yes, we'll contribute to but that just got They just said we're not doing it right. 01:07:04 Speaker 4: One they had from Oregon, I think state in the state, but I wasn't the new ones. Weren't they going to get the next batch from Washington? Wasn't it was? 01:07:14 Speaker 5: I think it was it was a tribe where that whoever it was, just said Nope, we're out. 01:07:21 Speaker 1: We're not doing What is the argument to not let them have them? 01:07:25 Speaker 4: Politics? 01:07:25 Speaker 1: I'm sure explain the politics. You know it's politics, but you don't know what. 01:07:35 Speaker 2: She doesn't study politics. 01:07:38 Speaker 4: So I'm just saying every decision made about wolves is based on politics. It's not based on biology. 01:07:44 Speaker 1: So why of course, because biology is largely politics. When people say like I don't want to be political or everything's. 01:07:54 Speaker 4: Political, everything is political. 01:07:56 Speaker 1: There's nothing that's not political, right, I mean every decision is political. I know, creating national Force was intensely political. Yeah, Like, what's not political? I mean most actions are taken by elected representatives in this country or appointed appointed by elected. 01:08:16 Speaker 4: Everything is I know, we don't have to go there. 01:08:20 Speaker 1: No I mean, but it's like I don't like earlier, I had a headache and I took two ivy profen that are like two hundred and fifty milligram ibuprofene. The fact that you can go by two hundred fifty gram milligram ivy profen is I don't know the history on it. That's probably political, Oh, no, doubt. 01:08:36 Speaker 4: So I would guess because there's I would guess that because the Colorado reintroduction has had a lot of problems. 01:08:43 Speaker 1: The Native Americans say yeah, I'm sorry, and. 01:08:45 Speaker 4: The Native Americans are probably saying, you know, we just don't want to deal with it. So I wrote A I was telling you honest. I wrote A was asked to write a document for the National Walley Federation about Wolve's returning to Colorado. And it's basically called less and is learned from everywhere else for the Colorado can use as a base as a template for reintroductions, and sixty pages long. It's on It's on the Colorado Parks and Wildlife website. 01:09:11 Speaker 1: Is that in a in your book? 01:09:13 Speaker 4: No, No, it's not. 01:09:16 Speaker 1: It's stabled into the end of your book. 01:09:17 Speaker 4: No. 01:09:18 Speaker 6: Maybe you can read the audio version of that when. 01:09:22 Speaker 4: God anyway, it laid out all of the problems that challenges people have had elsewhere where the wolves are coming back on their own or reintroduced, How agencies federal and state dealt with them, how local communities dealt with them, how conservation groups and and uh a DC or animal it's no longer that. Now it's wildlife services work together sometimes or not. Just all these things. There's a template. There's nothing that needs to be reinvented about wolves being on the landscape. It's it's old hat. 01:09:54 Speaker 5: So this is pretty interesting. The Colorado things, Yeah, the they were going to get them from the Colville Nation fifteen of the moment, that's Washington, Washington. The Colville Nation said no because Colorado Parks and Wildlife wouldn't agree to give the Southern You Tribe like management over wolves on the Southern You tribes. 01:10:16 Speaker 1: Oh, political out of tribal solid area. 01:10:21 Speaker 4: That that's an interesting point. Thank you for clear that clarification. I knew it had something to do with people, and I knew it wasn't. 01:10:27 Speaker 1: Yeah, I bet it had something to do always. I want to get back into some of this. I want to ask you another question that that Karin highlighted, it's a good one. Uh, you're familiar with the like with grizzly bears, you're from with the distinct population segments. Okay, that there's so they it's kind of like looking at part of this whole idea is with grizzly bears is being like, Okay, when we're talking about grizzly bears being on the landscape, where could they actually be? Like what areas could actually support bears? Right? 01:11:05 Speaker 4: I mean ecologically? 01:11:06 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean there's a handful of everythings. But I was gonna bring up that there's a there's a distinct population segment that doesn't have bears, but it could where it's. 01:11:16 Speaker 4: The bitter Well they've taken getting there. 01:11:20 Speaker 7: Yeah, they're getting there. 01:11:22 Speaker 1: And there was at a time there's talk of putting them there. Yes, Okay, so if you were gonna maybe I set that up the wrong way. Let me just let me skip all that crap about the DPS. Okay, if if you were going to make a map, if you were going to make a map of the United States, all of it, Okay, and and I said, uh, Diane, go in and and and color in the areas where you think there's a chance of having viable wolf populations, meaning there's enough habitat, enough wild food, low enough chance of intense friction. Right, how would you start to color that map? 01:12:18 Speaker 4: Well, the last qualifier just put on is the deciding factor for everything. I mean there's oh god, yeah, I mean so historically wolves had the widest distribution of any mammal in the world except for humans. I mean they live from the Arctic to the desert. They live in every biome, every habitat. They can eat anything their habitat. Journalists, they're food generalists. They're like a you know, one hundred pound kayah that way. So they can live anywhere, I mean they did. I mean they covered the entire United States, so where could they live. They would live anywhere where us humans will tolerate them. And they're trying to get back. I mean wolves are showing up in Illinois and Missouri and you know they just get shot, and but they would be there. I mean they would. They would find a way to live in Central Park if we didn't kill them. They'd be eating poodles and whatever out there. But there's not who knows, so squirrels RFK. 01:13:14 Speaker 1: You have to lay it dead one of those, yeah, on the trail. 01:13:20 Speaker 4: So that's a hard question because they would live everywhere, So we don't have to color in a map because they just color and everything. 01:13:27 Speaker 1: I mean, I get to that last qualifier. 01:13:29 Speaker 4: Yeah, then then you have to constrict it. So the wolves has shown us now in Montana. Anyway, Let's pick Montana because they're all sitting here and thinking about Montana. So wolves basically live in the western one third or one quarter, and they've been doing this for decades now because that's where we tolerate them. But they keep showing up at Miles City and I Galaca and they get shot and they don't make it. That's not an ecological issue at all. They would live there. They did, so I don't know. 01:14:01 Speaker 1: Well they did under different circumstances. Okay, let me let me requalify. Okay, let me requalify, because it's going to throw out. Did you say Cleveland earlier? Did I make that up? 01:14:11 Speaker 6: I didn't hear Cleveland. 01:14:13 Speaker 1: You said something Missouri, she said, Let me let me read. Let me read you my qualification and not live on that. Somehow we make this deal. Humans can't kill them, but they can't eat any human generated food sources. Cool, now. 01:14:34 Speaker 4: Hit me, there would be nowhere. No, I'm serious, because the only pack that I'm aware in Montana that has never come into contact with livestock is the one up in northwest corner Glacia National Park. And there is livestock in his southern portion of the Norfolk or there was Ladenburg sold this stuff. But other than that, the can always come into contact with people who are raising sled dugs, people of lama farms, people of livestock, chickens, whatever. Just because we've taken over all the while life. 01:15:10 Speaker 5: Happened at could they make a go of it without causing too much trouble? And like Maine New Hamps, like the Upper. 01:15:17 Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm not going to give up on this map idea. 01:15:20 Speaker 2: I can. 01:15:20 Speaker 5: It seems like main they could. There's certainly plenty of white. 01:15:24 Speaker 4: Tails there, right, they'd have to get there. 01:15:27 Speaker 1: Yeah, Okay, stop being so obstructionist. Somebody you understand what I'm trying to ask. 01:15:37 Speaker 4: No, I don't. Actually, I'm not. 01:15:39 Speaker 5: Steve coming semi full of wolves loose and Maine where can moose? 01:15:44 Speaker 1: Okay, let me let me say this. Okay, I'm not trying to I'm trying to color in the country of where however you want to put it? Man, where could you visualize? Where do you think when the dust is settled in a hundred years, And don't don't hit me with like, well, you know, is there a zombie apocalypse or in a hundred years? Where are wolves? 01:16:08 Speaker 4: If they lived where there weren't human conflicts? 01:16:11 Speaker 1: No, no, no, forget all those, OK, meaning new direction? Yeah, meaning it appears that it wound up being that northwest Montana was a suitable place for wolves. 01:16:24 Speaker 4: Yeah, it is right. 01:16:25 Speaker 1: It wound up being that the northern Great Lakes, Yeah, the northern third of Minnesota, the northern third of Wisconsin, the northern third of Michigan wound up being like a pretty good like it is from the wolves perspective, a good place for wolves. 01:16:40 Speaker 2: Yeah. 01:16:41 Speaker 1: What are the chunks that are probably like that that don't yet but could. 01:16:49 Speaker 4: It's it's hard to answer because I'm not Anvoidum. I'm just saying they go everywhere, and they get shot, they go to eastern Montana, So I would color in eastern Montana. They don't make one hundred years from out, They're not going to make it either. 01:17:02 Speaker 7: So I met him. 01:17:03 Speaker 4: I'm at a lost kind. I'm not trying to avoid. I'm at a loss how to answer. They would live in Illinois, they would live in Missouri because there's plenty of places where there's enough habitat for them. They just for habitat all. They needed someplace where they find large hooftungulates, they don't get shot by people, and they have a secure place to raise pups. There's plenty of places throughout the country like that. 01:17:26 Speaker 5: Do you think we've reached, like we've filled in the areas that people well, that people are going to tolerate, Like they're where they are now, and they're probably not going to be in a lot of new places. 01:17:38 Speaker 1: I disagree. 01:17:39 Speaker 5: No, I'm asking like, like will there like are they where they are now? And that's probably all the space. 01:17:47 Speaker 4: I think there would be more wolves expanding across Montana, certainly. I mean they're showing up in the Snowy's and they're showing up all over and if they can get a foothold and have a pack, then at some point, if you're hunting and trapping them, there always be a few remaining. But this stronghold is the western portion because it's mountainous, because they're not seen because there's less road access, because there's the Bob, the Glacier Park, to scapegoat wilderness. Those are all those things that these wolves need to live. I don't see that. There's a lot of places that are very wild across the eastern Montana bird hunt, an lo hunt. But there's always a conflict there. There just always is with livestock, with hunters, with whatever goes on. And I'd love to hear what you think. So in terms of mapping, right now, wolves are all the way through Minnesota. You got wolves around the Twin Cities. Now you don't know maybe you don't know that, but they're filling into southern Wisconsin. They are moving south. It's a really slow wave. Nobody's reintroducing them. I got to point that out. It's on their own and they have been making it to the other states but get killed. So what because I don't kind of totally maybe get your question, or maybe I'm less optimistic than you, where do you see them going where they aren't? Oh, Utah would be a place about it. 01:19:00 Speaker 1: It's funny you say that. It's funny you say Utah because I was at an event. I was at an event this winter and Utah's governor spoke at the event, and Utah's governor made a pledge to the audience that there would be no wolves in Utah. And I remember thinking, I don't know that that's your call. 01:19:24 Speaker 6: What he mean that he means. 01:19:30 Speaker 1: He was saying and addressing the audience, which was an audience of of uh people that do a lot of work for big game habitat improvement, right, big horns, sheet mule deer or whatever, putting it, putting ungulates on the ground, putting game animals on the ground. He made a pledge that there will be no wolves in Utah, and I remember thinking. 01:19:53 Speaker 8: Like, don't worry hunters. 01:19:54 Speaker 1: Yeah, but I remember thinking, well, the way it sits now with federal protection, that's not really your call. And I don't know what. I appreciate the sentiment, but I don't know what tools you have at your disposal. 01:20:05 Speaker 4: So I get that what you're saying, but that agrees with what I say, because wolves have made it to Utah. And we had a wolf go from Yellowstone, go all the way to the Grand Canyon and started on its way back, a colored wolf from Wyoming from Yellowstone and they got shot on the way home. They get shot. I don't know how to better tell you, but they just get So maybe. 01:20:27 Speaker 1: He said that he was just saying if they come, we can. Wasn't that he's going to do something, that's just someone's going to shoot. 01:20:34 Speaker 7: But I think that's what he's writing. 01:20:36 Speaker 4: Yeah, people will kill them. 01:20:37 Speaker 6: I think what you're saying too, though, is that I mean there are areas of the country that have other than Northwest Montana, that have sufficient habitat security, like you in a hundred years, you know, I would imagine all the way down the spine of. 01:20:55 Speaker 1: The Rockies right. 01:20:59 Speaker 6: Over maybe the Cascades down I don't know that they go down the Sierras, you know, like they have Like that's what. 01:21:05 Speaker 2: I question is California. Yeah, California would be maybe a little more tolerant. They have they have six packs or something. 01:21:16 Speaker 1: And if I asked you my question twenty years ago that you're trying to like dodge and obfuscate, I'm not if I had asked that question twenty years ago, would you have said, would you have said Lake Tahoe. 01:21:27 Speaker 4: I think wolves have a good chance of being in Utah except people kill them. So I don't know if that's a yes or no, that's a yes, okay, And I'm really trying to it's not I'm not squirming, I'm not uncomfortable. I'm just saying I have lived with wolf killing for so long, and where they're going to be tolerated is where they're at. And wolves getting in California's great, but they're going to start killing people's pets and they're going to be not tolerated as well. 01:21:53 Speaker 5: What about like the wolves? If the Colorado plan goes, is they some people would like it to go. They're they're gonna push into New Mexico, Arizonah. Yeah, So my question is what happens to those Mexican wolves then? 01:22:07 Speaker 4: So I love this question and half a finger and I will disagree on this. 01:22:11 Speaker 1: So okay, can you guys, can one of you make the question really clear for people? Because I think a lot of people aren't to understand. 01:22:16 Speaker 5: What they're I think she's probably the better. 01:22:18 Speaker 1: Yeah, do you mind, like why we're even asking that? Like what we're talking about. 01:22:21 Speaker 4: As I explained about the Mexican wolves there, they are a unique subspecies. It's the only population really that's got its separate subspecies classification for protection other than the red wolves, which are a different animal. So they come from a very unique gene pool of seven founding members. They're trying to protect that gene pool. So if you read I mean every time a Mexican wolf starts to go north, it disperses like a wolf is gonna do. They live by their feet and they go north, they go and catch them and bring them back. They don't allow them. Oh yeah, they don't allow them to travel out of the recovery area. What you could google the on, but they don't allow it because that if. 01:23:03 Speaker 1: One of the Mexican wolves out of Mexican Wolf area, they fetch it and bring it home. 01:23:08 Speaker 4: Yes, it's a defined zone and so and so because number one, that was the promise early on with the plan. But they've expanded the Mexican Wolf Recovery area slightly, but they don't want those wolves to mix with other gene pools. And those Colorado wolves will eventually make it down to four corners and come down and they will approach and get in. I would soon get to the Mexican wolf population. And then what are people going to do. They're going to start killing one wolf species subspecies to protect the other one. I think I mean, you've had some really good genetic people on your programs. I've so enjoyed their discussions. If you were trying to preserve a rare species with a unique genetic pool that was highly inbred, like the iroil ones were, and then they all went to extinction because they were two in bread, wouldn't you want to have some gene flow from the most similar population adjoining and bringing new genes. 01:24:02 Speaker 5: Because historically the. 01:24:05 Speaker 7: Right but it was it. 01:24:07 Speaker 4: But even though there was all connected all the way to Mexico to Central Mexico, they were still had unique genetic markers because they have a different habitat than the rest of the wolves. It's a different habitat, so they're been isolated on their own way. But that's my humble opinion. I'm a lumper, not a splitter, and I think it would behoove Mexican wolves to have some new gene flow. And I am not in a maybe a majority opinion, but I think people who have genetics background would agree it's going to happen. They won't be able to stop. 01:24:39 Speaker 1: It, well, sounds like they will maybe try. 01:24:42 Speaker 4: They will try, They're already trying. They do move all these wolves back every time they go out of the. 01:24:47 Speaker 1: Rescoveries are they getting them? 01:24:49 Speaker 4: They catch them everyone, everyone of them collared. 01:24:51 Speaker 1: Just about so they have no idea. 01:24:54 Speaker 4: And also when a wolf is in an area, you do. 01:24:57 Speaker 1: A little baby and like you put the baby in the mill of room the while it crawls away and you go get it and set it back. And they thought about it. Get an invisible. 01:25:06 Speaker 6: Fence, right, I mean, that's how we deal with dogs wondering. 01:25:09 Speaker 4: I don't think that would work for them, but anyway, And when wolves go to an area, they leave scatt they kill things. People see them. Everybody's got trail gameras everybody and the brothers all looking for the biggest delcor water. You see them, You see him, right, you know they're there. They're not small and sneaky like lions. They're just not. They instead of sneaking around and hiding in a rock crevices, they come into town in Harley's I mean wolves animals. 01:25:36 Speaker 1: That's a T shirt. That's a T shirt. There's two I want to talk about, just to give you a little taste of what's common. I want to talk about mountain lions, Okay, difference mountains and wolves. Yep, I want to talk about why wolves don't kill people. 01:25:52 Speaker 4: That's a good one, But first I. 01:25:55 Speaker 1: Want to talk a little bit more about Colorado. Okay, crystal Ball for me, and you're totally excused, like like this is just crystal Ball land. This is if you had to make a guess. Yeah, what is Give me a timeframe. What's going on in twenty years in Colorado? Just take a wild stab. I'm gonna known. Diane Boyd is taking a wild stab. This is not an academic exercise. She's taking a wild stab. Twenty years what's the wolf land? What's the landscape in Colorado? What's going on? 01:26:29 Speaker 4: People will still be fighting where their wolves should be or should not be there, And despite our human intentions, they will continue to expand their populations and fill up appropriate habitat in Colorado, and they will have to kill some for killing livestock, and the other ones that aren't killing livestock will continue to find habitat and reproduce. And I think there'll be more wolves. 01:26:48 Speaker 6: So it'll be Montana twenty years after nineteen ninety six. 01:26:51 Speaker 5: What about the hunting season? You see that happen eventually hunting for wolves? 01:26:55 Speaker 4: Yeah, I think that when you get enough wolves to create social tolerance. Season is a good idea. It's probably not such a good idea for individual wolves, but in terms of creating tolerance on the landscape, and I think you have to give the tools to livestock producers that they can take care problems themselves. I mean, that's what they did in Montana early on. I just say follow the model that worked in Montana. It's worked pretty well. I mean we went from one wolf to you know, thousand wolves pretty quickly. 01:27:24 Speaker 1: And then in your crystal Ball can you extend that crystal Ball scenario to the Mexican gray wolf. They're all making love and they're just mixed in together. 01:27:37 Speaker 4: Should have hefelfinger here too? 01:27:38 Speaker 1: So well, yeah, but this isn't what you want to have. Yeah, this is just your guess work. 01:27:44 Speaker 4: People will still be fighting over Mexican wolves, and Mexican wolves may hit I'm just trying to think, they may hit a critical mass where they're not all colored, and then some of them will escape beyond the the geo fencing of their their loud recovery zone and began going elsewhere. But if they continue to heavily, heavily handle and manage the wolves and collar everyone that well, they're not all collared, but manage its a significant portion population. It's going to be really hard for those wolves to sneak through, but that's going to be And I just think the wolves from the north will come down and start integrating. I'm hoping they will. And I think Mike Phillips would disagree with that too. But the other people I know, biologists, we talk about this. It's like, yeah, let them, let them blend, Let's see what happens. It's sort of like this this animal of the northeast, the Koi wolf dog thing. Nobody really knows what it is, but that animal has made a really successful living. It's found a niche that was partially formed but what we tolerate and how we modified the landscape, so this animal that lives there now is doing really well well. Mexican wolf gray wolf mix probably be the same way. At least they'll have more genetic variation. They probably won't go extinct due to inbreeding. Who knows, but you asked my crystal ball. I think there would be more wolves. I think they will fill in more places and there will always be the battles to have them on the landscape always. 01:29:12 Speaker 1: I feel like, you know how there's sports betting. I think there should be a way that you could like that we could run like a bookie thing and have uh Colorado wolf betting. H I mean you got them. 01:29:26 Speaker 6: You can bet on anything though, Yeah, I mean I wouldn't be surprised if you could get odds on Colorado's wolf population in ten years. 01:29:34 Speaker 1: Yeah, and people could make like bets and you could win money and lose money. 01:29:39 Speaker 4: I think to the more the more radical people get, I think it will cause more people to feel sort of moved towards the metal. Like this fellow over in where was it Daniel Wyoming who ran over the wolf with the snowmobile this winter? You must have And he crippled it so couldn't get away, and then he ties it up and brings it into a b All of this is illegal, which is a minor thing, but it's really immoral. And he brings into a bar and people are laughing with it and getting their pictures taken in and finally hauls it out back and shoots it. Well, that's just one animal, but it had huge ripples throughout the country, and that's affecting wolf policy because of one guy's action. And I think those people that maybe didn't really care about wolves or maybe dislike them somewhat moderately, see that is that is not fair, Chase, that is not acceptable to me as a hunter or a human being, and we have to put brakes on that. I kind of see the more radical people get. I'm hoping that people come to the middle more. That's my hope. 01:30:43 Speaker 1: Why don't wolves kill people? Because they do it Romania, I've wondered that for a long time. 01:30:48 Speaker 4: Well, sometimes come on, So it's not more common there, No, But there's all those like crazy old stories about. 01:30:57 Speaker 1: That's not None of that's true. 01:30:58 Speaker 4: So in my book, I could read you a little paragraph about statistics, but do you want me to find it. I'll have to look for it for a moment when you're talking. I'll look for it. But wolves have occasionally killed people in modern times. Documented Kenton Carnegie was killed up in northern Saskatchewan and in the eighties early nineties by He was at a remote camp and these wolves were coming into the dump. So think of think dump bear not afraid of people. And he went out one evening alone with his camera and he was found the next morning, I believe, and he had been killed and partially consumed, and it appeared to be wolves. There was wolves and bears both feeding on him, but it looked like the wounds were wolf probably, So that's one guy. And then there was a woman jogger in Alaska who was jogging and she was attacked members killed. I don't think she was consumed. I don't remember on that, but it was definitely predation they killed her. And there's been a few, I guess attacks encounters of wolves that have been habituated, especially like on some of the islands off of British Columbia and Washington where people kayak and they're feeding wolves out on the beaches and wolves get friendly and they come in and bite somebody in their sleeping bag. Because they don't stuff like that Algonquin Park habituated wolves that becomes a problem. So those are the cases that I know of. And then Mark mcnae wrote a really long document published you could google his name, Mark McNee of all the wolf encounters that he could find that were verifiable olden days. A lot of wolves were rabid. I mean a lot. I shouldn't say that. A lot of the encounters with wolves that had bitten were rabbid. Okay, that happens with every species, bats, foxes, it doesn't matter. But if you look at what other predators attack humans, people are killed every year by black bears, grizzly bears, some deer, some elk, mountain lions, coyotes. That's not true with wolves. And so you say, why don't why don't people kill wolves more often? Oh? My, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, right. 01:33:06 Speaker 2: That's what I mean. 01:33:07 Speaker 1: And there I think it's an interesting question because they could. 01:33:09 Speaker 4: Oh absolutely. I look at any of us in this room. If one of us was out in the woods by ourselves and a pack of eight wolves came along, we'd be toast. 01:33:18 Speaker 2: Yeah, I could handle three, but eight probably. 01:33:22 Speaker 5: Domestic dogs kill all kinds of people, Yes, but they could. 01:33:26 Speaker 2: Right, So what what is your hypothesis as to why not? 01:33:32 Speaker 4: My thought about that is, well, we, first of all, when we domesticated dogs, we changed the gene pool. They have the dogs here, but he's on my foot right now, Okay, I'll make sure doesn't pull any cables. Over the course of time we have When we started domesticating livestock about eleven thousand years ago, we changed our relationship with wolves. Prior to that, it wasn't much. There was no reason I have conflict. As a matter of fact, I talk about some archaeologists, some ancient people study wolves, and anciently they their theory was that humans in primitive times would watch wolves haunt successfully. So wolves and humans live in the same family structure group of animals that are related. Usually they would watch them hunt and they end up learning that if they could follow the wolves, they could steal meet from them. So they would watch the wolves, and when wolves picked out something, then the wolves humans really humans could go over there with their adladdles or spears, drive the wolves away, take the meat they wanted, and then leave, and then the wolves clean up the scraps. This was their hypothesis, so they actually it was no way a synergetic or altruistic relationship. It's brutes arrival, but they sort of collaborated and out of that, eventually we learned that we could make dogs, I guess, but I think over time, once we started to desticate animals, especially livestock, those wolves that were aggressive towards people were weeded out and killed. And I think that gene pool has been so heavily selected against. I think the behavior is still there. That's the only thing I can think of, because how many people have successfully domesticated allions made a different animal out of it, or bears or coiotes, right, these other things that kill us people haven't And we've spent so much time competing with wolves of their livestock and killing them that I just think that aggression towards people is no longer there. And maybe with the crystal ball, maybe three hundred yards from now and we haven't been killing wolves, maybe that'll change. I don't know. I don't know, but it is an interesting question. 01:35:44 Speaker 8: I was gonna just wanted to weigh. In episode four sixty six Dire Wolves and Ancient Hunting Dogs, we touch on some of what you just mentioned Kith Angela Perry and what does she say that same thing we talked about that? 01:35:57 Speaker 4: Okay, I'm gonna have to look that one up. I didn't hear it. 01:36:00 Speaker 5: Whe do they fall? Like maybe this is a weird question, but where do they fall on the intelligent scale scale compared to like a bear or a mountain lion or like like would that play a role and they're like understanding of how to interact with humans, like, are they smarter than. 01:36:16 Speaker 4: A bear or Ah, the bear researchers would say hell no, right, but I can tell you. I mean I've trapped a lot of animals in my life, everything from weasels to grizzlies, and the wolves are the hardest animal to catch. Bears are not hard at all because they don't need to be. They're the top thing and they eat everything. Wolves have had to learn to sneaker on strict nine baits guns, and because they're a social species, they have to communicate well, they have to collaborate. They're different. I mean, none of these other predators that we've been talking about are social and living groups. And I believe that gives wolves a need evolutionarily to be high intelligence. They have to work, I do they I mean you can look at your dog, which is kind of a challenged version of a wolf. I mean, they're not that good at anything, and they're incredibly bright. I'm trying to use the right political term here, but they're incredibly brilliant. I mean, if you look at what you can train a Melania or a border Collie to do, and the wolves are much smarter than that. They just are so that's my humble opinion. But again the Baar researchers would argue that, and case you have to. I mean, we're looking at a human lens to value intelligence. 01:37:33 Speaker 1: That's really interesting, man. That's to say that a wolf is smarter than your pet dog. 01:37:39 Speaker 4: Oh yeah, they don't have to be smart. We feed them, we house them. 01:37:44 Speaker 10: They don't need. 01:37:45 Speaker 4: To be smart. 01:37:46 Speaker 3: They don't have to kill an elk every couple of days, right, and yeah, it's. 01:37:51 Speaker 6: Like a wolf with a restrict plate or something. 01:37:56 Speaker 1: Our dog is not an exceptional dog. It's totally fine that everybody lif loves it, but it's not exceptional anyway, used to for whatever reason, would like to chew on rose bushes and chew on raspberry bushes. It like the for whatever reason, the thorniness of it. And I have one time just took my kids out and we put a bunch of cayenne in the dirt around a rose bush and she went up to it and got a nose full of that. Right, has never ever gone. 01:38:27 Speaker 4: Near same thing with you know e callers and training and no dogs are. 01:38:31 Speaker 1: Sorry when you think about how getting hard to catch the dog's like, dude, you know, to make that connection, right, So you think it's something being hard to trap, like you sting its toe one time, and there's just something about that situation. 01:38:46 Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean the old timers when they're read the books, the Last of the Loaners and the last renegade wolves and guys trying to catch them, the stuff they did to try not smart these wolves. Sometimes. Well, one of the worst things I read was they've been trapping this this, this couple of wolves, the last ones in the Southwest, and they just couldn't catch the male, and so they ended up catching the female and then they took her and used her for bait, and the wolf went in the next day. That was it. He was done and they spent. Yeah, kind of sad. 01:39:16 Speaker 1: And Cormick McCarthy's the Crossing. He's trying to catch a Mexican gray wolf, which he then brings back across the border, but he winds up he can't catch it, and eventually makes a set in his fire pit because he would see that a wolf now and then come and sniff around. So instead of making sets normal sets, he made a set in his fire, let this fire burn down, cool off, and then made a set in there. I think that's how he catches it. That's how he gets it, gets it, I don't know. Then he brings it back to Mexico because he can't bring himself to kill it, Like he's supposed to catch it and kill it, but can't. He brings it back to Mexican and it quickly dies. Anyways, that's how Corny McCarthy soone kills it. Anyways. 01:40:00 Speaker 4: Wow, that's a cheerful story. Well, I mean, when it comes to wolves, there's no good ends for any large carnivore in the wild, you know. I mean, they don't end isn't good for them, no matter what it is. But they try and live a really full life, and most importantly they dry and leave their jeans behind. If they can do that, they've succeeded. 01:40:19 Speaker 6: But you're saying they don't move to a golf course. Watch a lot of network telling there. 01:40:23 Speaker 4: Was Okay, this is not in my book, but we my last couple of years of working, we got a call from somebody living in a gated community between Whitefish and Callous Spell and called up said we've got some wolf pups in our driveway. And it's like, oh, okay, great, thanks, I'm thinking it's got to be skyotes. Yeah, they're living in this gated community in an urban area. So anyway, I said, I said, we took some videos. I said, great, can you send me the video? So they email me the video. It's like, oh my god, those are wolf pups, no kidding, in their driveway next to their mailbox and they're playing in the culvert that goes under their driveway. It's like wow. So we go out there and talk to other neighbors and several people had seen them. And so this is a gated community with people with huge houses. They're all realthy. They love wildlife. That's where they live there. There's huge amounts of green space in the community. There's white tails everywhere because no hunting is allowed. Talk about Nirvana for wolves. They're protected, they got endless food resources. No one's going to hurt them. So we tried to catch the adults through a male and female. Had no luck. 01:41:29 Speaker 1: These are what reasons did you want to catch put a collar on it? 01:41:31 Speaker 4: Oh, I want to know what happened at the end of the summer. Okay, So what happens what's going to happen when they leave this? You know, ten square mile gated community. We couldn't catch them. They were so smart about people. We had them on trail cameras, couldn't get them to step on the magic pan the size you know of an oreo cookie. Literally. And then after summer came and the wolves went on and they left and they have to disperse the bigger happy hunting grounds square miles on average for a pack they just won by one got shot gone, So but they can't live in ten square miles. They have to move on. But it was so interesting to me that those wolves set up in that community. Yeah, so, I mean they will try to live. 01:42:14 Speaker 2: That wasn't by accident. 01:42:16 Speaker 4: I don't know how smart is a wolf. 01:42:18 Speaker 2: I don't know, yeah, smarter than Can you contextualize that a little bit more about how there's no good ending for a wolf because I think we all in this room understand what that means when you say that, but I think that a lot of people out there are When you say that, it almost sounds like you're saying, oh, they're all going to end up getting shot. But that's not what you're saying. 01:42:37 Speaker 4: No, I mean, a wolf is an apex predator, top predator. It's always hunting to hunt. It's always having to compete for food, so they get In Yellowstone Park, the largest cause immortality is wolves killing other wolves protecting their territory. They trespass and they get killed outside of the park, even when I was doing my work when they were still protected. Eighty five percent of mortality is caused by humans. They don't live very long. Take a guess and how long. So if we put together the data from Yellowstone Park in Minnesota and Montana, take a guess in the average longevity of a wolf from the time they're detected, because some die in the den young, so by the time they're four or five weeks old in their scene until they die, take a guess annual mortality. Take an average average age at which they die. 01:43:28 Speaker 1: Four eighteen months. 01:43:29 Speaker 2: I'm going to go six months, four point. 01:43:33 Speaker 4: Three, four point three. 01:43:35 Speaker 1: Did you read that? No? I didn't. 01:43:36 Speaker 4: You're right on the money four point three. 01:43:38 Speaker 6: I was gonna go with four point six, but then I hedged my bets and you thought you were going to surprise us. 01:43:42 Speaker 4: Randall for the four he gets the trip four point three years. 01:43:47 Speaker 2: Oh, it's years years. 01:43:49 Speaker 4: So they most of them don't live long enough to reproduce what is the like to randal ding ding ding. 01:43:57 Speaker 1: A doctrine he does, and are you out? Like so do I? 01:44:03 Speaker 5: Not including Yellowstone perhaps, but like, what is the survival rate of say a litter of six pups, how many of them will reach sexual maturity? Is that a pretty high survival rate if. 01:44:16 Speaker 4: They make it to the till like the second year, they do pretty well. The first year when they go between a year and two years, when they're starting to dispersal and they're starting to look around them, the pups themselves, like they pups generally make it. Generally when the time they're little till their first year, they do really well because they're all protected, their fed until they get trapped or shot during hunting seasons or or if they get Sometimes humans have introduced parbo virus in distemper in an environment, and if that gets into the litter, mortality is very high. 01:44:48 Speaker 5: Do they ever do that thing that bears sometimes do where a male come in and kill No, they don't do that. 01:44:55 Speaker 2: Nope. Yeah, I was gonna ask other than humans, what's killing wolves? 01:45:00 Speaker 4: Deer elk avalanches? The first wolves? The wolves kill each other? Yeah, I just said that in Yellowstone, So like the first mortality, Recorded Mortality and Yellowstone Park I was told was a UPS driver killing a wolf when he ran it over. I thought, could you imagine being that ups? Turf's like, oh my god, I just killed the national icon about it. 01:45:25 Speaker 1: I hope is hiring. 01:45:28 Speaker 4: So yeah, and they get killed by lions, they starve. I did have one wolf dining an avalanche. 01:45:37 Speaker 2: What about bears? The bears get after him. 01:45:40 Speaker 4: They can if it's one on one, but when you had a whole wolf pack. Yeah, wolves kill, wolves kill black bears. Wolves will kill a grizzly cub if they can, but usually they can't. But one on one, I think, Well, wolves are pretty fast. 01:45:53 Speaker 1: Do they go way out of their way to kill coyotes in places? 01:45:57 Speaker 4: They do? Yeah? In Yellowstone Park they filled them digging up coyote dens and killing the pups. Pretty gruesome. 01:46:04 Speaker 1: Do they got it in for Red Fox too? 01:46:06 Speaker 4: No? So there's this yeah in the book, so trophic cascades we're going to get in a little bit. And I just want you to know that before I wrote this book, or while I was writing this book, I ended up working with Jim Hafflefinger, Dave oz Been. I mean, it was really a hell of a good team. I was asked to be the senior author for the latest. We did an update on everything known about wolves in North America. We ended up being forty thousand words long and an eight hundred reference bibliography. It was a scientific work. It was grueling, it was interesting, difficult. This was my anecdote for writing that this book, so because this was more fun and personal. But the science is in that book. It's a major chapter. You can get it online. But I learned a lot. We had Dean Cloth from Canada. We had Joey yet And who does the Red wolves. We had Brent Patterson who does the Algonquin wolves. We had Adrian Wineban who does the Midwestern wolves. People from every social I mean every segment of the population. I learned a lot. So in terms of getting back, we all wonder why don't wolves kill people more often? But what was the question? I'm sorry, I'm rambling. Foxes. Yeah, so Tofa Cascades. So they documented Yellowstone like ooh, this is big earthshaking information that coyotes had kind of taken over the cana and niche in Yellowstone and kept the foxes population subdued, and then wolves came back and killed lots of coyotes, and then the fox population responded by increasing because wolves don't really care about fox they're not really a competitor, and foxes benefit from wolves they clean up kills. We documented that earlier in the North Fork years, because when I arrived in the North Fork there was we never saw fox anywhere up there. The first fifteen years we had people out all winter tracking on the snow. We never saw a fox track. I never caught a fox in a trap. And then when the wolves started building up populations, I was collaring and studying coyotes at the same time, and the coyote population. As the wolves went up, the coyotes went down, and then we started seeing fox. I got fox standing on my property. Now fox are everywhere, Wolves are everywhere, Coyotes not so much so. 01:48:27 Speaker 1: He's a wolf sees that kyote and he just recognizes it as a competitor. 01:48:31 Speaker 4: You think something to get rid of, and. 01:48:33 Speaker 1: He sees a fox and he just doesn't get too worked out. 01:48:35 Speaker 7: It's kind of a nuisance. 01:48:37 Speaker 4: It's a difference. 01:48:37 Speaker 6: That's funny because I've I feel like I've heard people make that observation just in different parts of the West, like in Idaho specifically, people say, the coyotes have really dropped in numbers and we're seeing foxes now and we never really saw him before. 01:48:52 Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, that's that's interesting too, because in Michigan where I grew up, it was always fox like, you know, trappers targeted red fox. That's just when coyotes came in in the early nineties when they really exploded in that area. I mean, the fox vanished. 01:49:08 Speaker 4: Man, do you need more wolves? 01:49:10 Speaker 1: What's sounds like. 01:49:15 Speaker 2: A mutual friend of ours likes to use that as an analogy to humans, where he's like a wolf likes to go around the landscape and go that ain't good for me and mine getting rid of it. And we're on a landscape going, oh no, let's bring in more wolves. We might have less elk or less this or that, but let's keep them around. And he's saying, like, why are we the only sort of apex predator that would tolerate or even think of having competition as like a good thing, instead of saying, let's just get rid of all of them like a wolf might do, so that there's it's better for it for it's its species. 01:49:56 Speaker 1: You know, that's a good point, like like wolf a it's wolf lovers love all these things about wolves, but they don't like to see it in people. 01:50:06 Speaker 4: M M. 01:50:08 Speaker 1: You know, if you're like man, that could be a lot of competition. I don't want that here, just thinking like a. 01:50:14 Speaker 4: Wearable I have a question for you. So when Krinn called me, she said, you have experienced increased enthusiasmic excitement, hatred, whatever wolf issue has been building still, like we see it all the time in Montana. 01:50:33 Speaker 1: I've seen this. 01:50:34 Speaker 8: Well, well we talk about this, we talk about right now and then on the podcast and then yeah, people right, I mean the feelings. 01:50:41 Speaker 4: Are feelings are running higher about wolves now than they were twenty years old. 01:50:44 Speaker 1: Well, no, no, no, I would say that. I would say that feelings, whatever high running feelings there are are high running only because of what's going on in Colorado. And then that reignited the entire debate. But I would not say generally, well, okay, there's a there's another hot area. Another hot area is in Minnesota, Wisconsin, my home state of Michigan. I just came from and got a lot of earfolds about this. Hunters are really disappointed in the collapse of deer numbers and then not and then the states not having any authority to come in and do any kind of wolf control. And there's a little bit of a question of like how bad does it have to get and do we really need to like trade our deer hunting for wolves, and we can't seek a compromise and more of a balance them being like I don't want to be apologetic about liking the deer hunt. I want to be able to deer hunt and have success. 01:51:48 Speaker 4: So what are what are this? I mean, Wisconsin had a huge wolf season and they really kill a lot of wolves, And what is the wolf season in Michigan? 01:51:57 Speaker 1: And well there's none because they got put back on the. 01:52:00 Speaker 5: Sea to protect them. 01:52:01 Speaker 4: Yeah, so an their back. 01:52:02 Speaker 5: They've closed it. They've had it, they've closed it. 01:52:05 Speaker 4: So we've had this discussion about should should wolves be listed or not? Right everywhere where they've come back, all of them in Western states, Midwestern states, some of the western states, they have exceeded way beyond expectations of delisting criteria. Yes, four years on end. So what is the value of the Endangered Species Act if you don't follow the rules of the criteria. 01:52:34 Speaker 1: And I'm not saying I can tell you what it is. It's not anymore. It is my favorite animal protection Act. 01:52:42 Speaker 5: It's very valuable to the people who that's how, you know, create lawsuits. 01:52:47 Speaker 1: They don't want to talk about the numbers. They don't care about the numbers. 01:52:49 Speaker 4: I've had lots of people ask me when I do public texts, do you feel wolf should be relisted? And I say relisted like in Montana? Do you feel wolf should be realisted? They're delisted in Montana? Yeah, And I say then I say, okay, geographically which area Montana? And I say, well, you know, I don't like to see dead, bleeding wolves hanging off of tailgates, but they have exceeded recovery standards. There are approximately a quarter million of wolves worldwide. There are how many whooping cranes, how many blackfooted ferrets? And I can't say biologically that we have any reason to have Montana wolves or Midwestern wolves on the endangered species lifts where they're connected to Canadian populations that go into tens of thousands. On the other hand, do I like what I see going on with the management of wolves in Montana in particular, and the very strong anti wolve sentiments. No, But does it mean that they should go back on the list. No, so can people through increased harvest intentsive harvest knock wolves down to from the spout a thousand now or nine hundred two one hundred and fifty, which is the trigger point at which the ESA says, ooh, you've now endangered this population and we're going to put them back on the endangered species list. It would be really difficult because right now people can hunt trap night shoot predator called dig dens. I mean, you can do almost anything with wolves for half the year. 01:54:19 Speaker 5: We've talked about this before, like in the case of Montana or Wyoming or Idaho, like it would never be in the state's best interest to knock them back to that point because then the FEDS would come back in and exactly. 01:54:33 Speaker 4: But what I'm saying is people are the pro wolf public. I sit in the middle, but I'm obviously passionate about wolves. So the pro wolf public thinks that by increasing all of these parameters to allow more take I don't like the word harvests more kill, that we're going to put them down one hundred and fifty. I think you can't do that without poison. 01:54:58 Speaker 2: Because you're right that's the point you're is it. Even as liberal as it is here for six months out of the year, we're still not able to knock them back that much. 01:55:06 Speaker 4: Right, We've caught them back some, and I mean, like this guy in Daniel's Montaneo, Dianuel Wyoming, it just is disgusting. I just you shouldn't do that with an elk, with a bear. With a wolf, should just behave like that with a wild animal. But with the liberal seasons we've got, and this year they did increase, their harvest is up to I think two hundred and eighty six for the last license year, which is a little more than the year before. But we've had years where there's been three hundred. The population isn't changing a lot. But on the other hand, using the method they used to estimate wolf populations through palm, I think patch occupancy model, it's an integrated patchcy model. Occupancy models are designed to estimate occupancy where they are. They're not designed to estimate abundance or numbers, so they're using a model for not what is designed to do. So I don't know that it's a real good representative. What I would say is I'm sorry, no go ahead. There's other factors to look at, like go to the Livestock Loss Board website. It's public information for Montana or any agency or the USDA, you know, Wildlife services, and you can look at the number of livestock losses by predator. They list them by predator or by death cause, and you will see, especially in Montana, the number of livestock depredations in Montana is getting was less in twenty twenty three than it was for the previous years. The number of complaints was less, the number of wolves taken for killing livestock was less. If there are wolves on the landscape Montana and there's livestock, they will kill them occasionally. So I would say these other indices should be incorporated into the model because I think when you see less and less and less depredation, it's because there's less wolves. Even though people are killed more this year, and if you look at the percentage statistically, it's probably not real significant. But maybe more people were out hunting last year to hind kill wolves because it was a milder winter. We don't know, We can't. 01:57:14 Speaker 5: Did you say it was to eighty six that were killed or it was two eighty six was the quota. 01:57:19 Speaker 4: No, that was what was killed between shooting and trapping. Yeah, I think that's the current number. You can look it up and it just that was just released. But there's many things to look at. But what I can say is there's there's adequate wolves, and I'd say there's adequate prey. And I was looking, did you see that chidge who Just in Fergus County near Lewistown, several several large landowners got together and wanted the state to kill fifty thousand elk because the elk are taking over the private large landowner's habitat and they don't allow people to come in and shoot them. So they're all these elk and they wanted to have this power to kill fifty thousand elk extra outside of normal hunting season. 01:58:09 Speaker 1: Fifty thousand five. 01:58:11 Speaker 5: That was that United Property Owners thing. 01:58:14 Speaker 7: Right back, BHA YAH and BHA. 01:58:17 Speaker 4: And Montana Sportsman's Alliance and all these hunting groups said no, you have to create access. And I think if people are really concerned about elk numbers, because if you look at the tables the statistics, there are more elk in Montana now then there's been in a long time. And in Wyoming they're issuing unlimited number of elk takes in twenty twenty three, I believe, or twenty twenty four. It seems from my perspective, you would know more you guys deal with your hunting company. It seems to be more of an access issue than it does a predator issue. And if I were a hunting big part of a hunting conservation promotion group, I would be working on the access issue more and working with our legislators more and our governors more. Know you know what these rich out of state guys or whoever own these ranches said, they're not letting us on. I would I would be really concerned about it. What do you guys feel about that? 01:59:10 Speaker 1: I mean, I think that's the in some areas that's the biggest conversation around elk numbers is you have just you have elk that are learning over time. Elk are learning safe zones. There are big acreages where hunting's not allowed, and there are big acreages where people have an objective of getting a couple of big bulls and they don't want something to mess up those big bulls. They don't want people to push them off. They kind of like them during hunting season. They don't like them when they're doing crop damage, and they're reluctant to have Joe Blow running around on their place. And they kind of want the best of both worlds. They want they want individual access, then they want state help. And what they don't want is a sign saying come one call right. 02:00:09 Speaker 4: They need more wolves. 02:00:10 Speaker 7: Just kidding, I'm just kidding on that. 02:00:14 Speaker 4: But you see the problem again, it's always humans. But if you look at the species keep responsible for killing sheep and cattle, it's number one. Grizzly bears kill almost three times as many livestock animals as both lions and wolves, and lions generally kill a few more than wolves, but it's hard to confirm totally. 02:00:36 Speaker 1: Because lions kill more livestock than wolves. 02:00:39 Speaker 4: The confirmed kills. The hard thing is when a wolf kills a cattle or a calf or whatever, there's six or eight them feeding on it, so there's often not enough evidence less to determine which predator responsible. So there's a lot more probables for wolves than there are lions, but confirmed it's more lions and wolves. 02:00:58 Speaker 1: Where you got wolves and mountain lion overlapping, what's killing most. 02:01:01 Speaker 4: Of the game lions. Do you look at the Bitter at Elk study. Yeah, so it's surprising to me. So there's been three studies that Fish, Wildlife and Parks has done. And this is an agency that's not real pro wolf, right, let's just say so, they do these studies. And when I was looking at the research study plan and the results, I was shocked because I thought wolves would be the primary predator. But you can go on the FWP website google the data. They did three studies that were long term, multi region studies, one for moose, one for mule deer, and one for elk. And they looked at the populations of this the game animals three different areas over multiple years, and they put a lot of callers out and they looked at mortality. So and the bitter at Elk study, probably all familiar lions killed more. And when they increased the harvest on black bears and wolves lions still. 02:01:54 Speaker 7: That had no effect. 02:01:56 Speaker 4: And the more they were just lions killing everything. 02:01:58 Speaker 1: They thought the same thing in Idaho. Wives your way out. 02:02:00 Speaker 4: Killing wolves, yes, and when So when they did the moose study, what do you think the number one killer of moose was it was grompy. 02:02:07 Speaker 2: What you think lions? 02:02:09 Speaker 5: No, black, No, it was tis. 02:02:14 Speaker 4: It was climate and habitat exactly they killed like it was fifty six percent of the most mortalities documented. The rerelated to climate. That would be ticks, uh, mostly probably ticks and things related. Predation was a very small section of the pie, and I was surprised of the predation section. So you beans killed almost the same percentage almost as the predators a little less of the predation section. It was wolves first, I think bear a second, lions there, but wolves was slightly more. But yeah, the environment changing. 02:02:47 Speaker 1: The habitat Milder's got way lions was lions. 02:02:51 Speaker 4: So why do people want to keep increasing. 02:02:53 Speaker 1: Wolf because the lions were because the lions were always here. That was kind of the thing that we talked about with Idaho. Is you had you had? I don't. I'm gonna butcher not. These are not the right numbers, but it paints a somewhat accurate portrait. It'd be like prior to wolves coming into the Idaho Panhandle. I don't. Again, this is not the exact number, but it's not crazy. It'd be that lines are killing thirty out of one hundred elk calves. Let's say, yeah, okay, something like that. But that had always been true, and everything about elk abundance and everything about what like what statically normal, right, just normal life that was going on, and then something comes in and it adds ten. Okay, So now forty out of one hundred elk calves are dying from predation because there's this new additive thing, and socially and otherwise with the population, it winds up being that ten percent tips of balance that we'd become used to. And so you know, people had seen it's always been normal, yeah, and then now it's not normal no more. What happened different? This new thing that the baseline had always burned? Right, You'd always lost those thirty yepp and you had an elk population that reflected that level of predation, and all of a sudden, now you have an elk population that doesn't reflect that. It reflects something new, and it's going to be lower. 02:04:18 Speaker 4: So you're saying, all the wolf coming back is the additive, none of its compensatory mortality. 02:04:24 Speaker 1: Man, I know the terms you're using, but I can't answer that. 02:04:28 Speaker 4: So you're not seeing lion populations diminishing down to twenty percent of the elk caves say instead that the oh that the wolves are now taking ten percent that the lions would. 02:04:40 Speaker 1: Take it must have been additive, because how else can you explain the map. I mean, like, this is the thing that that people have to accept, Like the really pro wolf people have to accept that this is true. And when they're when they're kind of being honest, they acknowledge it. Meaning on one hand, they like think hunters blow it out, everything out of proportion, and hunters are like, oh, we're gonna lose all of our dear and l right, and they criticize hunters for that. At the same time, they'll say, oh, if CWD is from having two dens of populations, wolves will help. And you're like, well, I thought that you're saying that hunters are wrong and that wolves don't lower game numbers. Now you're saying they do. Or they'll say deer and elk are over browsing, right, wolves will help. It's like, homet let's back up, because earlier you told me it doesn't matter the ways, that doesn't matter for deering out numbers, so it does matter for deering out numbers. Right. It's like you can't argue, and you know this better than me, but you can't argue. Like in the Greater Yellstone ecosystem, when wolves came in in the mid nineties, there's no other word for it. Elk numbers collapsed. 02:05:47 Speaker 4: They collapsed. 02:05:48 Speaker 3: But and the. 02:05:48 Speaker 1: Panhandle Idaho elk numbers just like there's no other word for what happened. They collapsed. 02:05:53 Speaker 4: But do you know about the winters that the wolves came into. Idoh is the heaviest winters ever recorded. The wolves came into Yells and twenty thousand elk on the northern range of Lamar is not a normal range of numbers of animals that should be there anyway. 02:06:08 Speaker 1: Okay, I mean you know all that. 02:06:10 Speaker 4: I think we talked about this last time. But the winters of ninety six ninety seven, that was the second winter they put in. I thought that you can sit there, maybe you can, but tell me that thirty wolves are going to kill ten thousand outs. 02:06:22 Speaker 1: No, it wasn't. I don't think that it was. I think that it was very long term. Yeah it was. It wasn't that year. It wasn't like the ones they brought in. Yeah, yeah, I mean, but correct me if I'm wrong. Like you know it better than me. But is it not fair? Is it not fair to say that, let's talk about the Idaho Panhandle. 02:06:38 Speaker 4: I don't know about the idol Pana. I can talk about the lamar pretty. 02:06:40 Speaker 1: Good, Okay. Wherever the lamar. 02:06:43 Speaker 4: Yeah, Yellowstone, Northern Herd. 02:06:46 Speaker 1: Okay, bad winners or not? I mean, come on, that had unless I'm wrong, that had the incoming wolves and the expansion of wolf populations. Elk had a big change on elk because that's also if we remember, we're all supposed to celebrate them for bringing the beavers back, which has now been walked back and not true. So it did something to elk, right. 02:07:12 Speaker 4: Yeah, and you could pull up the table. But the elk, the alk numbers fell off really fast in that hard winter. And like in Montana in ninety six ninety seven, Carolyn sim was doing white tail deer study in northwest Montana and forty percent of the white tail died win or die off and had nothing to do without Okay. So I'm just saying with wolves. 02:07:32 Speaker 5: It couldn't like And in the case of the bitter, the way someone described it to me, I can't remember who was Like the elk, there could sustain like some certain level of predation and maintain a certain r number. But when you put it the wolf on top of it, that was like just enough to be a tipping point to push. 02:07:54 Speaker 4: Them over the edge or push them on a private land where people don't allow them. You're hunted. That's what's happening in. 02:07:59 Speaker 5: The bitter But like in the case of like a bad winner, you stack wolves on top of that, maybe the elk, yeah could have you know what I mean, Like it's just one more thing they've got to deal with. 02:08:11 Speaker 4: So I mean, I just read the scientific literature and I'm a hunter too, But in Yellowstone there are so many factories. It's really I would say it's unfair to say one is to blame. It's a huge puzzle with many factors. And since the wolves come back, the olk numbers have definitely decreased. But I think they're actually had a better sustainable lever. I mean, do you know in the sixties they're in their gunning and killing elk because there were too many elk and there were not enough predators. They were shooting them like a thousand a year or whatever. They don't have to do that anymore. There's what six sixty five hundred elk in the northern herd now versus twenty thousand, and it's kind of stabilized at that. And the wolves have stabilized at about one hundred, and they've switched to bison. They a lot of their food value now is bison, which I must mind modeling me. I'm not saying they can't limiting. I'm just saying there's a lot of things going on, and I think the humans really got used. I've been on one of those late gardener hunts and. 02:09:06 Speaker 7: Oh my god, what is zoo in the eighties. 02:09:09 Speaker 4: Yeah, because there were too many elk they had to do that. Well, they don't do it anymore, and people are pissed off about it because I want to go down there and get my late gardener hunt. Well, that is not a sustainable population to have to have people go in and kill starving elk in February. I mean, we can look at it anywhere you want. 02:09:25 Speaker 1: Can we go back to our crystal ball in Colorado? 02:09:27 Speaker 4: Oh? 02:09:27 Speaker 1: God, yes, was it a twenty year? We were talking about ten ten twenty years. Okay, let me hit you with this. Yeah, let's say there are one hundred deer in elk in Colorado today? How many deer in elk are there in twenty years. 02:09:46 Speaker 4: Due too? 02:09:47 Speaker 1: Because of wolves? 02:09:48 Speaker 4: Oh, because of wolf. 02:09:49 Speaker 1: There's one hundred now, Yeah, one hundred deer elk are in Colorado now. And you do your twenty year crystal ball. Where has that population settled out? 02:09:57 Speaker 4: Eighty or ninety maybe might be one hundred. The other is people population. We keep growing in and building. Well, it is part of it because people build an elk winter range. Look at the Paradise Valley, for God's sakes, they've destroyed a lot of elk wind arrange where they elk used to doing. 02:10:11 Speaker 5: Well, that's where the wolves could do that tipping point there. Yeah, get because like Colorado's elk or like in places, their numbers are already crashing because of black bear predation and elk calves. And then you get like development of winter range and then a huge amount of recreation like hiking and biking, and then you throw wolves on top of that, and it's like you could look at it that way, you know what's going to happen. 02:10:38 Speaker 4: I just look at what's going on in Montana, where we had wolves for forty years. In Wyoming they've had wolves for years, and elk numbers are higher than they've ever been, So I don't know how. I mean, you could look at whatever end of the scale you want to look at. I'd like to kind of come to the middle. There'll be places where wolves can impact populations. Lions certainly have, bears have people have Because we're building holding up into habitat that is absolutely critical. For those on gillets in the winter, they don't have it anymore. So where do they go They become victims to prey animals or they get hit on the roadway. My god, driving down from Livingston to Gardner and the winters like slaloming through white tail and elk everywhere. It's awful. So we could pick whatever data set you want to use. But they've co existed long before we were ever in the landscape, That's all I'm going to say. And before when Lewis and Clark came to this country on the with the West, wolves a lot of wolves and grizzlies, and there was never more wildlife than there's ever been. Because we've changed everything and we have an expectation to have it perfect, you're never going to have that. 02:11:40 Speaker 1: When I when I encounter rapidly anti wolf people. Yeah, right, Yeah, and then they'll tell me how they want to go hunt in Alaska. Yeah, but you wouldn't like. 02:11:51 Speaker 6: It, buddy, because. 02:11:54 Speaker 1: Because it's ninety seven percent of historic wolf habitat is occupied by wolves, you wouldn't like it. There's no hunting there wolves. What's the hunt in Alaska? 02:12:03 Speaker 4: Does that what you tell them? 02:12:05 Speaker 9: Yeah? 02:12:05 Speaker 4: Is that true? 02:12:06 Speaker 1: No, of course it's not true. Okay, I'm demonstrating absurdity by being absurd. Thank you, Steve. 02:12:12 Speaker 7: I'm shocked. Okay. 02:12:13 Speaker 1: It's my favorite. I mean, I love it. It's my favorite place to go. But I'm just saying I point out to them, like, don't lay it on me that they're incompatible, because tell that to right, That's that everybody dreams of going on hunting Alaska. It's like, well, let me tell you something wolves while something moves there. A couple of years ago, we'd watched how many do we see one night? Fifteen pretty much every evening fifteen to come through. 02:12:36 Speaker 4: Wow. 02:12:37 Speaker 1: Right, So I'm just saying it that that perspective, and every time, like every time we talk about predators and every time we talk about wolves, I always feel the need to clarify like my perspective on it, I think it is. I think it's immoral to remove native species from native habitat. I just think it's like playing God in a way that, however you want to conceive of God, it's playing God in the way that God would not agree with. Right, It's like it's immoral, I think to eliminate species from Earth. I like seeing the tracks. I like hearing them. I like seeing them. I do not think they should be eradicated. I like to try to achieve a balance of holding a bunch of different people's interests in mind, because it's the only way we're going to survive and live as humans. I think that what as you said, I think that what's been achieved here in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. It's not perfect, but it's working, and I think you would alleviate a ton of the social stress in the Upper Great Lakes if they were allowed to pursue a similar path with regulated hunting. I don't know anybody when when wolves walked into Colorado, of the people I hang out with and associate with, and hunt with and talk with all the time, when wolves showed up in Colorado, I don't know anybody who said to me they ought to get down there with helicopters right now and find those wolves and kill them. No one said that to me, right h With the reintroduction, I've had people basically say that if they could do that, they would do that. It was like there's something about it that just burns people. Of course you don't want to there's something about it that they don't want to them because it's like it's like there's a way that we accept things that we perceive to be natural, and there's a way we accept people accept things that perceive to be something getting shoved down their throat, uh and wolves walking into Colorado. People kind of had a huh oh. 02:14:55 Speaker 2: They they had like a doctorate degree and pushing that ship down their throats down there. I couldn't believe when I read that stat of like Grant County is where they released the first group, right, and I think that was one of the few counties that overwhelmingly voted against it. It was like a sixties high sixties, maybe seventy percent against it, and that was the county they chose to here you go, But they couldn't. 02:15:19 Speaker 4: Reintroduce him into Boulder and Denver. 02:15:21 Speaker 2: I mean that's where the boat was while we're on Colorado again. I think it'd be great. It'd be great to get your thoughts, as you know, a biologist with so much experience on the ballot box biology that they're proposing down there, and just I guess in general, what your thoughts are on ballot box biology and if you think that's going to be a and even you can leave the Mountain lion ban alone, hunting band alone, but just in general that if you think that that works as a way to manage wildlife in our country, well. 02:15:57 Speaker 4: Obviously you feel strongly one way. That's a quite loaded question, but I the way you put it, I you'll read in my book. 02:16:05 Speaker 2: Well, the reason I'm interested is because I feel like you do sit in the middle and you connect with a lot of people that I would like to connect to, and I feel that we would probably land somewhere on the on the same end of the spectrum and want the same outcome. So I'd like to hear how you talk to people about this. 02:16:25 Speaker 4: So I I've never been in favor of wolf for introductions anywhere because they come back on their own and there I feel strongly we can never now test it because it's too late. But I feel strongly that there's a better social tolerance just what you're saying if they come back on their own, like they have done most places in the world and in the Midwest. But now that they're here, you can't go backwards. And wolves got to Oregon, Washington, Utah, Colorado, California, it's through dispersal, but they were dispersed animals from a reintroduced population, so they will never be thought is native either, which I think that's a shame. If we would have let natural recovery happens just like three you did in Montana, like it started doing Colorado, like it's done in the Midwest, I think we would be further ahead politically, but we'd have less wolves by this point in time. But how many years I mean, they were introduced those wolves almost twenty thirty years ago. Now would we be at the level we're at now? Probably pretty close, because once wolves hit critical mass, they take off without the social baggage. That's how I feel. You asked, That's how I feel, So I don't know if I answered your question or not. 02:17:37 Speaker 2: Well, I guess as someone that's worked with wolves, like did you like having in your toolbox. I don't know. Did you ever consider yourself a manager of wolves? 02:17:50 Speaker 4: I'm not, was never up at the top level I've managed. I've done some going out and putting out propane cannons and hanging flattery. Yeah, I've done some of that. 02:18:00 Speaker 2: But you advise people that sort of set management strategy. 02:18:04 Speaker 4: Yes, And I've come and asked to be a anonymous commentator on various federal plans. 02:18:09 Speaker 2: Yes. So is it nice to have in your toolbox hunting as a way to manage these animals? 02:18:17 Speaker 4: I think socially you have to have it. I'm not a wolf hunter. I have no desire to ever have to kill a wolf. I don't It's just not who I am. Is it a socially acceptable tool? Does it creation social tolerance? That's that's what people are pushing and believing, And I think with reintroductions that may be true. It's a tough one. Like I said, I don't want to shoot wolves, and I take lots of dead wolves on tailgates. When I was working for fishwallfe parks, they come in. I tagged lions and otters and martins and wolves, and I always ask the people the story how did you get the wolf? Tell me the story of how you hunted it. That made a difference to me when I looked at it dead wolves, a dead wolf. But when I heard some he said it was amazing. I had an Elk tagnose out and I heard the wolves howling, and this wolf walked out, and I thought, my god, that's a magnificent animal. I really want to I really want to have it. I want to have a pelt or whatever. I could understand that. And then people come and say, these hate, these bastards, we should shoot everyone them in the state. That really was difficult. And when I think of that kind of management that I feel doesn't do justice to us as hunters or biologists or to the wildlife itself. And I really think a big push we should have is working with the public on educating I hate that term, on exchanging ideas with people what wolves are and are not. I think there's not enough information out there for average person who wonders, well, how many yolk does a wolf coiller? Or are the impacting game? Put out all the information unbiased in a format that people can use. I don't care if it's a rock amount on Elk Foundation Google or Outdoor Life or whatever. Montana magazine put put it in a format that's available for people to read and understand. They better at ELK study. 02:20:05 Speaker 2: They did. 02:20:06 Speaker 4: They put quite a bit of information out, but that's fade ay. The wolves are still killing all the Elk. It's like, way, did you. 02:20:13 Speaker 5: Read the article? 02:20:14 Speaker 4: But people are biased because of their culture, so I but I just think enough information helps helps calm down the flames on both ends. I am a believer in that, and I hate the term edgy. I hate it say we need to educate so and so about that. It's like, oh God, can. 02:20:31 Speaker 1: We know what that means? That means I need to tell that person what I think. 02:20:34 Speaker 4: That's right, that's right, but to exchange information, that's what well, the public needs to be educated. 02:20:41 Speaker 7: No, I don't. 02:20:41 Speaker 4: I hate that term, and I heard agencies promote that all the time. But anyway, cuts of your book, my book, I want to hold it up, doctor Diane boy I'm teasing about randall. 02:21:00 Speaker 1: Have PhD written out there? 02:21:01 Speaker 4: Of course not, but it's in the back under the bio because I don't want I don't want people to see doctor Dian Boyd and not buy it because they their biases. They just see it's diyanboid. There you go, that's a bias. Definitely. 02:21:13 Speaker 1: They'd be like, oh. 02:21:18 Speaker 4: That one. 02:21:19 Speaker 1: They'd be like some Berkeley egg ahead. 02:21:21 Speaker 7: Telling me about please exactly, Diane K. 02:21:25 Speaker 1: Boyd not a doctor. There you go, she's a doctor back here, Yeah, Diane K. Boyd, a woman among wolves. My journey through forty years of wolf covery. I haven't read it. Uh, I will read it. 02:21:44 Speaker 4: I'll give you a personal copy. 02:21:46 Speaker 1: I will read it, read it and again. 02:21:50 Speaker 8: Uh. 02:21:51 Speaker 1: When we talked before and I loved it. It's so good to hear your perspective on these things. I think a lot of what you're saying, I think you're gonna what you're saying is going to be is going to be very challenging. Two people, no matter what how they look at wolves. You you offer a very challenging perspective because it doesn't fall in line. It doesn't fall in line with the narratives that you would get depending on your culture. It's like you're you're offering a really educated, nuanced view of things that have come from being in the room for a lot of discussions over the year. I'm not like, I can't say that you know. I can't say that someone would be able to go and determine that everything you've said is exactly true or right. But it's a challenging, like you're offering a challenging, pretty gracious, highly educated perspective on how to think about predators, and I appreciate you coming with us and doing that. 02:23:01 Speaker 4: Well. 02:23:01 Speaker 7: Thanks. 02:23:02 Speaker 1: Help people find your book and read it. 02:23:04 Speaker 4: Thanks. When I wrote it, I was not allowed to put in scientific references or footnotes. I have my list at the end of suggested readings. But I wrote it so that anybody can pick it up, whether you like wolves or don't like wolves, or don't care, regardless of your outdoor experience. Anybody can pick that up and get something from it. And I don't preach. I tell through stories and I wave science and let the reader come to their own conclusions about certain aspects of wolves being on the landscape. So it's a different kind of a book. And I lived it. I lived these wolves. This is my story, and then it morphs into present time in twenty twenty three. And if you just like a good adventure story, there's a lot of stories. I could read you a short thirty second paragraph if you want. Hell. 02:23:47 Speaker 1: Yeah, let's close with that. 02:23:48 Speaker 4: Close it the opening introduction. 02:23:50 Speaker 1: Yeah, we're going to close with this. So she's gonna get done. You're gonna go buy the book. We're just going to end the show. Phil's gonna turn the machine off when it's done. But this will give you a taste of how it's written, and I'm looking forward to it. 02:24:00 Speaker 4: This is probably thirty five years ago. My pickup banged and rattled along the potholed inside road in the northwest corner of Glacier National Park. Boxes of wolf trap and jars of bait slid across the truck bed. I was in a hurry, my mind focused on the wolf cotton a trap somewhere ahead in the Lodgepole Pine Forest. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed motion in my rear view mirror. I looked up to catch the glassy reflection of vivid yellow eyes framed by a wolf's black face looking over my shoulder from the back seat. How did I get here? Opening paragraph, Diane, You you got to come back. Appreciate it, thank you, thank you. 02:24:42 Speaker 1: Honest. 02:24:42 Speaker 5: You got to keep your shoes on during this podcast, I'm still recorded. 02:24:57 Speaker 11: The koyas away wone shooting start with shut swell being sign of breakfast, and we laid down the bed it's been on day and nin. 02:25:21 Speaker 10: Windyll them cotting with trees lost step lesly every breeze. 02:25:34 Speaker 11: Master footsteps that I took. 02:25:40 Speaker 1: You on. 02:25:40 Speaker 2: The noise was wide like a live Brian. 02:25:47 Speaker 1: Learn more from namn trees before. 02:25:50 Speaker 9: Everybod than ever made shiver shoot swept. 02:26:01 Speaker 1: Waves up in. 02:26:04 Speaker 9: My reading up here. Sometimes you're burning up. Sometimes you're going with because you mean you're the fever. 02:26:18 Speaker 1: Ragon, don't you Mainer. 02:26:23 Speaker 9: The fur Bagon. 02:26:43 Speaker 12: Go on through the plain still called Basbley in greens. 02:26:51 Speaker 7: Gets there all out in them wield. 02:26:56 Speaker 9: You smileings the you rye all and your minds be surprised. 02:27:05 Speaker 2: That old river. 02:27:07 Speaker 12: Minyl fever makes you shiver, That fever makes you sweet, wakes. 02:27:19 Speaker 9: You up in babing permade of you. Sometimes you're burning up. Sometimes they're gold man with because you Mainer fever w only you anger the fer bging that fear macey shiver, that fere amazing sweat wis you have and min be pernain unjust. Sometimes you're burning up. Sometimes you're colding w because. 02:28:35 Speaker 1: You made yourr feeder cry. 02:28:45 Speaker 10: You may you may CA, You ain't time. 02:28:59 Speaker 8: You wait. 02:29:00 Speaker 9: Turded favor, domag wait fav