00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is me Eat Your Podcast coming in you shirtless, severely folk bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You can't predict anything. Hey, everyone, welcome to the Me Eat Your Podcast. This is as high as we've ever been in that we're in the nineteenth four of a hotel right now, Seattle, Washington, the Western Um. Yeah, this is the Yeah, as high as we've ever been, looking out on Puget Sound. And I'm here with couple folks. But the most important one right now is are you still go by professor? You can't be a professor anymore. I'm not a professor anymore. Now, So what are you now? Uh? Just a citizen, right, I guess? Oh yeah, I can say that. We're here with the writer Dan. Now. We had this debate earlier because I had always thought I had always like floorries. That's correct, Okay, I thought this this guy, your former student, doesn't know that. What were you trying to tell me? It was? I've always heard flores, yeah, within Flores, yeah, Flores. Yeah, it's uh, it's because it's pronounced uh with a Louisiana French accent, like it's floor. Yeah. So writer and citizen Dan Flores who I met when he was Professor Dan Flores years ago. I was in graduate school and I had to. I think it was part of the recordment. You take a seminar or something outside of your discipline. I was a writing, a writing student, and I took a class. Um, I took your class. What was your that class called? You remember the when I was in it was it was an environment all writing seminar, I think is what you took. Yeah, And I was just humiliated in it. Um, way out of my league. All these guys I knew all about writing about things that they were sure happened instead of things you thought might have happened. Um. Which is part of the being a historian. I think that they try to train you and that I recall you might have that class. Yeah, but I was like I was out gone. There was some good students in there. Man. But I met Dana took that class, and it was just had a profound impact on me. Um. The body of literature that you know, we looked at and just like a way of thinking about things. Um. We had your student on who Who's here? Randa Williams on talking about his dissertation he did, and you were involved in that as an advisor. Yea, um, but just just again, can you hit what um in your own words, like what an environmental historian is and does and looks at. It's not it's that terms not a term people are familiar with outside of academics and scenes. Yeah, it's a it's a kind of term that you end up explaining to people in bars quite a bit, uh when they ask you, you know what you do or what you write about? I mean, basically, it's a it's a way of thinking about their relationship between people in the natural world. And so it's and and doing it using history, which of course causes you to to examine changes over time. And so it's a environmental history and it's only been around for about thirty five or forty years now as a as a field of study. In fact, we're in Seattle right now because the American Society for Environmental History is meeting here. This is its annual conference, and it held its first one in nineteen seventy six, So they'll give you an idea of how recent this feel has been around. But it's basically a way to uh to look at the history of how people have interacted with nature and that's a broad enough, uh spectrum of study that you just get the right and think about all kinds of things, you know, not just the environmental movement itself or the history of conservation Teddy Roosevelt. But uh, I mean in Randall's case, for example, he he got to think and write about how hunters have played a role in American culture in the twentieth century. And the thing I've been interested in most in the last few years has been, uh, animals and the relationship between people and animals. Yeah, and you have two books coming out right now? How many books? How many like book length manuscripts have you published? Uh? These two will be the ninth and tenth. Uh so, and that dates back to about four My first book came out in hundreds of academic papers, well hundreds. But I've written an academic popular and academic articles. Yeah, a lot of a lot of popular things. I probably have published more popular things than academic pieces, but I've done I don't know, actually I'm just having a hazard guess, but maybe two or three dozen academic papers and peer reviewed kind of journals, and then I often spun off, you know, popular article or two from those kinds of things. Oh that is that how you work generally, Like you'll find stuff through your research that would be like, you know, would be suitable to a popular audience. Yeah, so you know, I mean, writing for academic journals is a wonderful things. How you make your reputation in a field and get a professorship and and all that sort of stuff. But uh, they don't pay you any money for those kinds of things. And I always I mean, I started out as a magazine writer before I ever became an academic, so I always had in my mind when I would do an academic piece, so how can I spend this off somehow as a you know, as a popular article and uh reach a bigger audience with it for one thing. Uh, make a little bit of change from it as well, but primarily kind of reach more people. And so yeah, a lot of the things I've done is as academic and scholarly things have ended up, as you know, either getting absorbed into a book or or published as a as a popular article. So what are what are the two books you have now? And why in the world are you published in two books at the same time. Yeah, that's an unusual thing. Um, So the books are American Serengetti, which is UM just a day or two away from officially being out UH. And the subtitle of that book is UM the Last Big Animals of the Great Plains. And the other book is called Coyote America Unnatural and Supernatural History. And that book comes out about the middle of May. And you're writing them both at the same time. Well, I wasn't really And you know, the truth is, the books are connected to one another because UM the Coyote Book or a Coyote Book was originally contracted to the publisher of the American Serengetti book, and which was a university press publisher. And I've retired from the University of Montana two years ago, and as I got close to retirement, I realized that, so there's not really much point in writing books for university presses anymore. I mean, that's really great when you're a professor and you get rewarded by your university for doing that and in the field for doing that. But I knew I was about to retire, and so to reach bigger audiences, I wanted to do a book. UM start writing books basically for UH commercial presses, And so I had acquired an agent who asked me about three or four years ago, so what are you working on now? Said, well, I've got a coyote book that's contracted to the University of Kansas Press, and uh. He said, well, why don't you write a proposal out of that and let me take it to New York and see if I can sell it? And I did and he did. Uh. The problem was, so that was all great, but the problem was University of Kansas Press didn't take all that kindly to us sort of taking their book away from them. And so the only way to kind of resolve things with with Kansas was to promise them another book, which, yeah, which they agreed to, but they also said, okay, that's fine, we want to keep the same deadline you had with us, however, And so basically this time last year, I had a deadline for the Coyote Book in New York of January, and I had a deadline for the American Sarrangetty Book in Lawrence, Kansas of May the first. So I finished up the Coyote book and uh, in hailed a couple of times, took a couple of deep breaths, and uh, since I was already used to getting up every day and writing four or five or six hours. I just kept ongoing and in another four months or so, managed to finish off that. Yeah, that American sarrang Getty book. But in a way, you've been researching that book for your entire career. Indeed, I had, and I you know, and I had, I had written some of it actually, um already, I mean I ended up I ended up revising pretty considerably the things that I've already written. But yeah, I had worked on Buffalo. Uh years ago. I had written a kind of a major scholarly peace about Buffalo that sort of reimagined, reconceptualized what happened to him in the nineteenth century. That became a pretty successful academic article. Yeah, I've I've had a lot of great luck just telling that story for you, being like you know what I was reading. Yeah. I always credit you, though, man, Yeah, well, I mean yeah, and you uh you did credit me, and I appreciated that in your in your Buffalo book. But I so that story I kind of uh you know, I knew pretty well, and that provided me with a starting point for the chapter that's on Buffalo in this American Staring Getty book. But Leo the premise of the American when you say the last big ones, you mean the last big ones that are here now? Are the last big ones like the ones we lost at the end of the Places scene. Yeah, that's an excellent question. I mean, I actually talk about both versions of the American Serengetti. The Pleistocene version um doesn't get as much coverage as the historic version of the American Serengetti, but I spend a good bit of time talking about it because down to ten thousand years ago, I mean, we really we had an African analog on the American Great Plains. Uh, with all the the charismatic megafauna that we're here. I mean, we had elephants in the form of mammoths. We had uh, we had camels. We had of course, huge herds of giant bison that were sort of the counterpart to wildebeest herds in Africa. We had a lion, the step Line, which was actually a larger lion than the African lion. We had giant and very grass isisle short faced bear that was down to about twelve years ago was probably one of the most formidable predators anywhere in the world. Some people think that humans weren't able to to migrate to North America until about fifteen thousand years ago because these short faced bears were there at the bearing straight and they presented such a formidable barrier uh to humans that we basically they had to become extinct before humans were able to get to North America. So there was this large beast she area of animals down to ten thousand years ago. A giant hunting, very fast hunting hyena. Uh. There were cheetah like cats that were related to cougars um cougars are kind of their descendants, but they were uh, curved fang cats, one called a scimitar cat. And of course, uh, you know, the the these cats that we imagine from the plies to saying running down the calves of of mammoths. But most of that beast sherry, with the exception of five or six animals, when extinct about ten thousand years ago in an extinction scenario frankly that we still don't quite understand. I mean like we don't understand it temporarily. We don't understand it temporarily or in terms of costs. For example, one of the most common creatures of the Pleistocene, American Serenghetti were bands of wild horses. Some biologists believe that they comprised as much as twenty of the biomass of grazing animals on the Great Plains down to about eight or nine thousand years ago. And they the thing about horses is they migrated across the Bearing Strait and they ended up in Asia and in Africa, where they became zebras and quaggas and and related animals, uh and European horses. And they survived in all those places. But for some reason that we don't grasp, about eight or nine thousand years ago, all those horses became extinct in North America. And so we lost this giant biomass of grazing animals in the form of wild horses that completely disappeared from the Pleistocene serengetti. And we don't know exactly why. I mean, some of the speculation is that they contracted diseases. Um. Some of some of these is the blitz Creek hypothesis totally out of fashion, though it is not out of fashion. Yeah, and so there's a paleog Yeah. The so the ideas range from the Blitzkrieg that you mentioned, which was popularized by a paleo biology saying Paul Martin now Paul Martin at the University of Arizona, who wrote a bunch of really compelling books. The most the last one he wrote was called Twilight of the Mammoths, and his argument was that about fifteen thousand years or so ago, humans began migrating out of Asia into North America, confronting a bit of animals that had never seen human predators before. And these these people were very accomplished predators with a very sophisticated tool kit, and the Blitzkrieg model speculates that in a period of less than three hundred years, these people expanded from Siberia into the America's all the way down to the tip of South America and wiped out most of these speed She's that we're confronting human predators for the first time and just sort of collapsed in the wake of this assault. It's out on one hand, it's outlandish. On the other hand, when you look at the if, when you look at how where things went extinct win and when people showed up there, and then you have things like Mammoth's on Wrangle Island, up until four thousand years ago, and no one had ever stepped foot on wrangle. It just gets weird, man, it does get weird, and it's Martin argued, and other people have argued that as humans spread out of Africa, we actually kind of did this all over the world. Uh. You know, some of the really good examples of it are, for example, in the islands of Polynesia, where as soon as humans arrive, um for instance in a y uh thirty, some species of flightless birds become extinct within a couple of hundred years because they're such easy targets for human hunters. And humans usually arrived with dogs and sometimes with hawks, and this suite of animals that we bring along with us as domestic that's sort of play a role. And and the simplification of the ecologies of all these far flung places that we get into. Yeah, in Europe. And I'm not arguing, like I don't know enough to argue for it against it, but I'm just talking about the parts that are compelling is that Europe had versions of all these things we're talking about in the American when what you describe as the American serengetti, but they went through it thirty years ago, and we know that humans were like that. You know that the human hunters like basically us, like people that were they alive today, could fly an airplane. You know that they arrived there around those times and you saw the same thing happened again. But on the other hand, it's just like, how in the world could you kill them all? Yeah, it's uh, it's it's with atladdles and that's the primary su primary weapon they had at laddles and sometimes just stabbing spears, but lay the other ones out. I kind of hijacked it with the blitz screen thing is so fascinating. It's not as fun as it's more fun than the things like the disease. Yeah it is. And so uh, the best evidence, by the way, for the blitzkrieg is in North America is with mammoths. I mean we we've only recently, for instance, actually discovered kill sites of horses in North America from there have been some discovered in the last seven or eight ten years. Yeah, and those are the first one. So part of the problem with the blitzkrieg model is that, Okay, so if that's your model, then you expect to go out there and archaeology paleoarchaeology is going to yield up all these sites with slaughtered animals, sort of the way it does in Europe. At with horses in France. I mean, there's a spot in France where something like thirty or forty thousand horse carcasses were killed and butchered by human hunters driving off cliffs. Well, I mean, that was the speculation for a long time. It looks like what they were actually doing was driving them into corrals. They were driving them into corral. Such a horrific vision driven off a cliff's yeah, it's a horrific vision. And there's a there's a wonderful nineteenth century illustration of horses pouring off a cliff in France. But it looks as if what they actually were doing were billing corrals and crawling them and then then kill them. Some people argue, in fact that the reason we have modern horses, which most of which spring from European and African sources, is because about six thousand years ago we domesticated them before we could kill them all off. We finally domesticated them, and that's what enabled them to serve in the mythology of plains tribes horses sometimes play a role, or am I wrong? I remember someone pointing out that, like the like this idea of of the mounted planes hunter was a two was like a brief phenomenon's it started to years ago. But they're like, how could it be so ingrained? How could the horse become so quickly so ingrained in the mythology. It just had such a profound impact on them. Well, I mean, some some tribes. I saw an exhibit in in Calgary several years ago that was curated by the Blackfoot Confederacy and at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, and and these Blackfoot elders said in the text of this exhibit that there mythological stories remembered horses from thousands of years ago, and so they argued that they had preserved a memory of horses from back in the Plies to Saine, and when in the seventeen hundreds they encountered European horses, they were able to draw on some mythology about these animals. Um, you hear the term collective memory, Yeah, and a collective tribal memory is I mean, you know, I don't denigrate that at all. It's it's entirely possible that that was the case. But I would say that Martin's argument about a blitzkrieg is most evident with mammoths, where we do have kill sites with projectile points like Clovis points embedded in the skeletal material of the recovered animals, and they're there are a lot of of Clovis sites with mammoths. Do you remember that you and I visited one of those slights together, Well, I wrote about that. That's sort of like that's how the American Serengetti book opens, In fact, is when that with that visit that you and I made over to Blackwater Draw, uh and sort of giving ourselves our own personal tour because I were called. We drove all the way over there from Santa Fe and the place was close, so we just hopped over the fence and and gave ourselves a tour. But uh, yeah, so the Blackwater Draw, I mean, that's that's the the the original Clovis site in North America where butchered mammoths were first found with with evidence of human hunting. But there's not much evidence for the other animals. I mean, you'd think that there would be all these camel sites out there with butchered remains and points and horse sits and and so that's been one of the problems more recently last ten or fifteen years with the Blitz Creeg model is that there's not there aren't the sites out there. Maybe we just haven't found them, but except for the mammoth site, there's not much out there. There's a I believe at Lyndenmeyer, the Lindenmeyer site near Fort Collins, Colorado, there was a foreshaft made from a camel bone. Yeah. Yeah, So there's evidence obviously that they were using yeah, picking it up. They were at least exploiting the remains of camus, whether they were camels where they were killing or not. So what is the horse sight that turned up? It's one. It's one near Boulder, Uh, Colorado. Uh. And I've not read much about it or visited it, but it's one that uh was unearthed I don't know, maybe seven eight years ago. So there is a horse sight near Boulder that shows evidence of human butchering and evidently human kills of horses. The problem with that, of course, is that you'd think if the horse comprised thirty of the biomass of all these grazing animals. There would be scores of sights like that, and we've struggled to try to find any at all. So that's led some people to say, Okay, what actually happened to these animals was a changing climate. We know that about the time, so two things happened. A copy said about the time all these animals disappeared, humans arrived from Asia and the climate started changing, and the climate was cycling into a much warmer and drier regime. And so one of the arguments about what happened to all these original American Serengeti animals is that they basically succumbed to a changing climate. They were evolved to kind of an ice age climate, and when the climate turned warm and dry, uh, it basically dried up their habitat, and so they disappeared as a result of that. And then one of the more most recent explanations is a disease explanation, which is so far mostly speculative because we don't other than people saying, Okay, we can't figure this out. There's got to be some other reason, and maybe it's disease. The problem is that right, carnivore exactly and I think people focus on all these large animals, but we lost many many small animals, lost a lot of small animals, although at least in In Martin's argument, it's mostly the large animals and a lot of the small animals are intact. But Martin even argues that I mean, so, for instance, some of the I mean horses specialized in stiper grasses and needle and thread grasses, and those grasses are still all over the West. So it's like the fodder that they were grazing is still there, but the animals disappeared. So the truth is right now. This is one of the great mysteries of North American environment. I would too, I'd love to know anybody had to keep the secret, but we have not figured it out yet. All we know is that that version, that much uh African like version of the Serengetti disappeared between eight and twelve thousand years ago. So what do you call in the Serengetti like? Lay it off me. In terms of geography, it's the It's basically the American Great Plains, so the Hunter Meridian to the Rockies. Yeah, it's the hundredth meridian. Uh. In some instances for some species slightly further east. Uh, but basically about the hundredth meridian to the Rockies and from Texas uh into Alberta and Saskatchewan. So just for people to get a grasp on it to be like the Texas Panhandle, right western Oklahoma, western Kansas exactly, kind of all of the Colorado, all of the Dakotas, yeah, all the all the dakotassa, portions of New Mexico, Yeah, eastern New Mexico and up into a handful of Canadian provinces, right yeah, up, And basically the plains sort of start grading as you go farther north, they begin to grade into aspen motts uh at about oh, I don't know, maybe the fifty second parallel fifty one or fifty second parallel as you go north, and the Canadian US border is the parallel. So a couple of degrees north of the Canadian border, you start losing the savannah's the grasslands, and you began to have that country broken up by copses of trees. So that's basically it. So it's this, it says long north south stretching uh province east of the Rocky Mountains that stretches about fifteen to sev hundred miles north and south, and from the Rockies eastward goes maybe four hundred miles. So it's that area, and that area for eight hundred thousand years has been one of the marvels of the world in terms of enormous numbers of big animals, grazers and all the predators that that preyed on them. And yeah, so that's it. So earlier you're talking about I asked you if you meant the ones that used to be here are the ones that you here? Now you're taking like the whole dynamic view of it. What's here? What's here? Now? Do you get into who lived and why do they live? I guess because you can't. You can't say why they lived if you don't know what why the other ones succumbed. I mean, it's uh. You know, this is one of the things about sort of ecological history or environmental history is that, you know, as John Muir said about things, everything is connected everything else, and so it becomes kind of impossible to just look at a snapshot, say the nineteenth century, when we know there were millions of buffalo and the Great Plains without understanding how they got there, and the reason they were there in our historical account from the nineteenth century is because of that extinction that happened ten thousand years ago. Only a small handful of animals survived that extinction. Bison were one of the primary survivors of it. Gray wolves became a primary survivor, grizzly bears, uh, coyotes, elk of course, pronghorn antelope, which is really one of the most fascinating animals of the Great Plains, because those animals are still completely adapted to the Pleistocene serengetti they are. They're able to outrun Pronghorns can outrun today their fastest pursuers by twenty And the reason they run so much faster than gray wolves do, for instance, is because they evolved to outrun cheat us and hunting hyenas. And so here they are ten thousand years later, still adapted to out running all these animals that disappeared thousands and thousands of years ago. You know, I was I touched on this a little bit in something I did recently, and I pointed out there uh great reluctance to jumping. Yeah, and it had many many people come forward with videos and photos of them in fact jumping, but a great reluctance to jump, great reluctance because they evolve done on grassland plains without the necessity of jumping very very little timber. And that's one of the reasons why when you if you watch prong horns, I mean, their technique for going through a barbed wire fence usually is to turn sideways and go through the strands. I mean, they don't do what you would think looking at them, a gazelle would do, which would be too easily bound over it, or what a mule deer does. Instead, they'll they'll go at a fence and go through the strands of barbed wire, sometimes in a big cloud of hair. But all those those creatures then survived, and the reason, for instance, prong horns and bison become so numerous is because they inherited grasslands where most of their grazing competitors have vanished. And so it's possible for bison, for instance, which ten thousand years ago probably I mean bison were maybe only five million strong, but with all the other grazing animals gone, it's possible for bison to expand their populations into the thirty million animals that we're here, uh in the nineteen hundreds are the eighteen hundreds, and so it's a it's a version of the American Serengetti that sort of is the next step down historical timeline, with a smaller contingent of animals, but nonetheless one that had so much magic and poetry to it that when Europeans began traveling to the Great Plains in the early nineteenth century, the early eighteen hundreds, I mean, one of the most common literary motifs of the nineteenth century West are these rhapsodies about the multitudes of animals that people were were encountering so much that I mean European sportsman Uh Sir William Drummond Stewart in the eighteen thirties, uh Sir George Gore in the eighteen fifties took on a little John, bloody little John. These guys came over and they basically they conducted uh safaris on the great Planes at the almost slashes at the same time that the first safaris were happening in Africa, when British sportsmen were going into South Africa in the eighteen thirties, At the same time that William Drummond Stewart was was doing these high end guided safari hunts in the American West out on the Great Plains, and uh, I mean the stories of those are pretty remarkable. Give a snapshot of the abundance of some of the animals besides the ones we hear about, like you know, everyone's heard, yeah, I mean just you know that looked like clouds moving and took days for the herds of the past. But you never hear someone articulate like how many you know a prong horner antelope we're on the landscape, or how many big horn sheep? Were people ever encountering those in a way that would be surprising to us? Now, Oh yeah they were. I mean one of my favorite descriptions of those animals is uh John James Otto Buns in eighteen forty three. I mean, here, you've got a guy, you know who is the most celebrated, uh nature painter in the United States. Uh. He had just completed in eight thirty eight The Birds of America that made him a worldwide literary and artistic figure. Had gone on a book tour of Europe with his hair cascading down around his shoulders and dressed in Buckskins is kind of the classic American noble savage. And he returns to the United States after this very successful book tour and decides he's gonna do the same thing for the mammals of America that he had just done for the birds. He had painted four and thirty five American birds, all life size on the page, and so he decides he can't obviously paint elk and buy some life size on a page, but he's going to try to do something similar. He's gonna try to to portray all the great native creatures of North Americ Okay. In order to do that, he's got to make a trip to the west. So he and his sons Um and a couple of companions in three go up the Missouri River and he gets into western North Dakota um approaching the Montana border, and right some of the most extraordinary descriptions of the multitudes of animals that he's seeing that I've ever read. I mean, he says that no one could conceive of the numbers of animals of many different varieties that they were seeing day after day after day from the proudest steam vessel, the Omega that was pushing up to Fort Union, and he closed one of my favorite lines of his. He wrote his wife a letter and he closed it with he was writing late at night, and he was describing for all these animals. He was saying. Every day, he said, I've never seen so many wolves in my life. I mean, we're going up the river and there's a wolf lying on the sandbar. There's another one climbing up the bank on the other side. There's some sitting out on sandbars in the middle of the river watching us like dogs. There was a picturesque heard of bison at the same time, cantering along and in front of us in the river. I heard of about thirty elk or swimming the river. And the racks of the bulls are projecting out of the water, and the tips are sweeping along the surface, and their mountain rams. And he just goes on and on, and he finally says to her, I've got to stop writing. I'm not gonna be able to go to sleep. I'm too excited to keep going. I just I can't write anymore. And he he gives you this, you know, this lived sense of what it was like to see all these animals. Now you know what I've done and in the book is okay, I've provided the what we think what biologists think were the numbers of these animals. We think there were probably, depending on the climate, between twenty million and thirty million bison. Thirty million when the climate was good there were plenty of rains and the grass was lush, probably twenty million when there were droughts. And so it's it's not a static figure. It obviously it's consistent of what we see today with wild the numbers I mean lesser versions, but I mean it's it's nothing to have populations increase and decrease like that, absolutely, and I mean pretty on a pretty short time scale and a short time scale. And that's how that's exactly how it functioned. It's it's more a an algebraic kind of equation than it is some static figure. But the static figure that we have, and the same thing happened with these animals too, for prong horns, is about fifteen million UM four we've got at present, let's say about six hundred thousand. Yeah, so from fifteen million, and I mean the one of the stories I tell in the book is that the Yano Sticado Plateau of West Texas eastern New Mexico. That's the country where you and I went to look at the Black Water draw elephants side. Uh, that was one of the best pronghorn ranges in the West. It probably had during the heyday of pronghorns, as many as two and a half three million pronghorns. Vernon Bailey of the United States Biological Survey made a trip across the Yanno Staccato in and at that point he counted thirty two thirty two of them were left in eight h in that particular part of the of the Great Plains. So what happened to all those I mean, you hear like we've gone into such a scruciating detail by what happened all the Yeah, you know, like all the facts that went into the near extermination of the buffalo or bison, and and uh, you know where what they were being used for in the commodification of them. You never read about some guy just stacking up a shipload antelope and sending the hides and tongues off in rail cards. But they did that. They did exactly that. And the reason they did that was because after the Civil War, I mean, you've got this this large contingent of young American men who have fought in the war for both the Union and the Confederacy, who no weapons, very well, they know how to shoot. And many of them return home, especially the Confederates, to a devastated region where you couldn't really make a living. And one of the things they did, we think probably as many as twenty thousand of them probably did this is they went out onto the Great Plains and for as long as the animals lasted, they hunted for a living. They hunted for the market, and once the bison were gone, they turned to each of the other animals in turn supplying supplying meat locally and export and export that's right, hides, uh, dried flesh, whatever, whatever you could basically get by shooting these animals down and selling them to the American or the Canadian or the European market. And so once the bison were gone, they turned their hand to prong horns and began doing exactly what they had done with bison. Two prong horns, I mean, they shot them down. They one of the things you could do with prong horns. They were reluctant to leave their ranges, their home ranges, and you could get a band of them running and they would not exit their home range, and people, these hunters on horses could just work their way around in the center of this this running herd of antelope. And after they would make the rounds of about a ten or twelve or fifteen mile home range three or four times, they were completely exhausted, and at that point you could almost walk up to them and club them in the head. And so using techniques like that and also UH in places like the Black Hills, they would surround prong wars in the winter when the snow was too deep for them to get away, and just kill them by I mean like like hunters killed harp seals uh in the twentieth century and just clubbed them down and basically ripped their hides off the Sometimes they would sell the meat, but mostly they were selling the hides. But it's not a good it's not a quality high high, but it was what was left the bicenter gone. And so they do this in turn to to prong horns to elk um and I mean by nine five the big horn rams of the Great Plains UH, the mountain sheep are gone to in places like the Northern Plains bad lands, they're gone. Yeah, and in the and in that case, you also have like you we mentioned earlier, like there's always this idea that disease may have played a role. I think with big horn sheep. As sheep came out, you also have doubt about it. And you know you have pneumonia which may with that particularly am one might have been more devastating, like people now and then try to make the case that what happened that you can't explain what happened to the buffalo unless you look at disease. I don't know if that that just seems to be an idea that's sort of always out there. No, it's definitely there, and I think it's it's correct. The problem with it, And I mean, so here's an example of it. We know that the last eight hundred to a thousand bison that we're out there that were being rounded up to provide the nucleus of the herds we have today, they almost hall all had bovine tuberculosis. Uh. They were infected with that. Some of the herds ended up uh getting brucellosis by nine hundred. Not all of them did, but some of them ended up with brucellosis, which is another exotic disease. And one of the diseases that we don't know much about the impact of but probably didn't have some impact because there's sure evidence that it was out there is that sometime after eighteen hundred, anthrax probably got among the western bison herds. And so these are all Eurasian livestock disease with non native animals. Yeah, and especially when when oxen and cattle were being driven over the immigrant trails through the Buffalo range from the twenties, possibility disease transmition down. There's a possibility as they transfer, and it almost certainly happened. The problem with it is that it's really hard to quantify. We don't really know what what kind of effect it had, except that it probably had a pretty considerable effect. So very very obviously the same thing happened with sheep. So what what's the time frame like there? When guys, when when you say that you had all these market hunters who are making money and sometimes good money, hunting for the buffalo hide market, when they had turned their attention to analop or turned her attention to helt it still it probably took decades, right, I mean, to get things to such a depleted To get things so depleted that we started to take legal action to try to protect animals and regulate hunting didn't happen as slowly as you would think. I mean, it was pretty quick because there were a lot of guys out there, and a lot of them had become very skilled in doing this. Uh, they knew the weaknesses of the animals. And I mean, I'll give you one example, and uh, there's a cowboy named George Wolfforth who is rounding up stray cattle um on the Texas Yano Esticado in a canyon where I used to live, and I lived in West Texas, Yellow House Canyon. He he rides up one morning out of Yellow House Canyon, and of course there's this gigantic plateau out in front of him that stretches a hundred and fifty miles east and west and north and south about three hundred miles and at a slight pitch to from west to east, that's right. And he rides up on this out of the canyon, up on this plateau and it's a foggy morning, and he's sitting on his horse looking for strays and sees the fog beginning to lift, and as it lifts, and this is night, this is as it lifts. What he sees, he says, as far as the eye could see, and the fog made it this sort of mystical, unreal kind of image. All he could see on the plane where there were no more buffalo, he saw no more wolves, he saw no bears, he saw no elk. All he could see were bands of prong horns and bands of wild horses. Those were the last two surviving animals. And when it was only prong horns left, when the elk had either been killed or driven into the rockies. Because that's what happened to some of these animals, uh, They basically fled to the mountains from this kind of pressure. When it's nothing but wild horses and prong horns left, the hunters went after the prong horns, and mustangers went after the horses. And I mean we know, for example, after the horses for what, well, not meat, No, no, not meat. They were after them for two things. Basically, they were especially hired cowboys from the ranches that were then beginning to populate the great planes. We're shooting them down because they were competition for grass, for Yeah, for cattle, and so they were cowboys were hired just to go out and shoot them down. But by about nineteen fifteen or so. Uh. And you know you have to when you think about wild horses, now, what you have to realize is that wild horses, remember, had gone extinct in the place to scene, but we had reintroduced them. We Europeans had reintroduced them to the America's uh in the fifteen hundreds. And one of the remarkable environmental stories in North America is the success of the horse when it's reintroduced to the place where horses had evolved. Because North America's where horses had evolved fifty six million years of horse evolution. So what factor drove in to extinction that then went away in time for them to come back, We have no I did, but when they were bazaars l But when they were reintroduced, they went feral across the Great Plains, I mean in an instant. You've written about that, like you've written about the the routes they were through trade and theft and wandering. Yeah, they got primarily the horses got loose in the West as a result of what's called the Pueblo revolt of six eighty in New Mexico. It's when the Pueblo Indians drive the Spaniards out of New Mexico for a dozen years and capture all their hurts. I mean they trade, for example, sheep and goats to the Navajos, which is what creates the modern Navajo economy of of hurting those animals. And they traded horses up the Rockies. Within about fifty years, horses had gotten from New Mexico all the way into Canada, traded up both sides of the Rocky, both sides of the Rockies, which is what creates the Great Plains horse riding Indians. But a lot of horses got away and scattered in to the Plains as a result of the Pueblo revolt. And so that's sixteen eighty. We think by eighteen hundred, wild horse urge on the Great Plains probably numbered as high as between one and two million animals. I mean, they became the basis of a major economy in the West for about a century. How many horses live in the US now not wild horses? Uh No, I don't know. I probably knew that figure at some point, but I don't recall how many, but we've got about forty to fifty thousand wild horses. But one of the interesting things about that that's a controversial animal. It's controversial animal. And one of the reasons is because it's not the Great Plains where they are. They're out in the sagebrush deserts, so the Great Basin, particularly in Nevada, and so it was the Great Plains where they really went feral when they were returned here. And we think probably by nineteen hundred the number may have been as high as three million wild horses on the Great Plains. But about nineteen fifteen we discovered, uh that Americans had sort of created a new economy with pet dogs and cats that needed food, and so the Midwest, especially the Kettle Ration Company, began to build pet food plants. And what happened to most of the wild horses in the West by the late teens and twenties was that they ended up getting caught by mustangers and shipped by rail to Illinois and turned into cans of dug food. In Illinois kept kept slaughtering horses up until very recently. Up until very recently, now, JR. Simplot, you know when you buy a French fry you know, very likely came off, you know the result of j R. Simplos work. JR. Simplot got his start. Can you explain that? I'm sorry? Like like he's a simp. JR. Simplot as a major provider of seed potatoes, and I think they do a lot of they do, my rights that they don't know what they still do provide like McDonald's French. Yeah, he got you know, he got his start. He bought uh a bunch of teachers somewhere We're getting paid with these bonds because of some school funding shortages, and he started. He bought the bonds at fifty cents on the dollar or something like that and used and then when the bonds mature, turned around using to buy a bunch of piglets and went out in the desert and fattened all those piglets on wild horse meat. And that was sort of the start of Simplot. Then, I when I was when I lived in Miles City, Montana, we had a guy in his nineties and lived next to us, and in the thirties he had been a must are well. He was raising pigs on horse and he said that they would have the most beautiful sheen the pigs would get the most beautiful sheen, he said, a very tight curl in the tail, perfectly erect ears like every sign of a well fed pig. He was reluctant to send the pigs to slaughter with meat in their belly. He would finish them on barley, just to clean their system out. He said, they would visibly deteriorate quality and before his eyes and barley and he would take a horse, take it into the pig pen, shoot the horse tied off to a fence post, pull the hide of the tractor, and sell the hide for three bucks. Then he'd give the pigs a day or two and they'd eat it down to the bone. And then before the bones was splinter he'd going to throw all the bones out of there. One day, him and his brother were cutting wood and he cut his thumb off on the saw. His better flicked dead into the pig pen. Pigs eight that send those off. That's a great storys day. And he was just like, what did finger that? THO? I don't know how to fathom up. Yeah, so someone bought a pig that had actually been eating folks. But um, it's just like the picture he paints like how horses were used and viewed is bizarre. Well, yeah, that's so that's one, uh, one way that they were used. I mean, I can tell you to others. There was an attempt actually in the eighteen nineties to use horse meat in the United States to feed the poor in the eighteen nineties. Yeah, there's a I've got a newspaper article from nine seven. In fact, it's over here on the Pacific coast, I think, let's see it from Seattle, someone arguing that's what we ought to do in order to to feed America's poor, is that we should feed them because we've got a lot of horses, with plenty of wild horses too, And that's what one good use of horse meat would be, is to feed the poor. But one one way that I guarantee you lots of wild horses ended up sacrificing their lives for kind of a dual good as people saw it in those days, was they would be caught and led out, shot and then laced with stryct nine in order to kill the one last big animal, charismatic animal of the old American serengetti, which was gray wolves. And so the technique that the biological survey used for the teens and twenties and into the thirties when there were still plenty of horses around in order to poison wolves, uh in large numbers, and to try to eradicate coyotes as well, was to lead horses out and shoot them and lace the carcass. You'd inject before the vastar system shut down, you'd inject the strict nine in there to to distribute it, so it would distribute it through the through the body. That's right. Yeah, And that was again for better grades, for better cattle country to get rid of, to get rid of, but on cattle, yeah, for the for the sake certainly for the sake of converting that landscape into a working agricultural society. And you know, I mean, one of the things I say in this book is first of all, thinking about the great planes as uh, this grand wildlife spectacle that you could without any stretch whatsoever, referred to as the American Serengeti. Is a kind of a way to reconceptualize it. To me, in the proper ecological way, this did exist, because we've kind of in a way forgotten that it existed. The only story that we've preserved out of any of this really is the story of of bison, and we haven't really preserved the story of all the grizzly bears that were out on the Great Plans, for example, feeding on the bison surplus, and the dead animals that bison that drowned in the rivers and so forth. We haven't thought too much about wolves, or of driving elk into the mountains, or of the prong horns slaughter, or of what happened to the wild horses. We've just thought about bison. But if you think of it in the hole, it's easier to conceptualize it as this really was an American Serengetti that we had, And what's so striking about it to me is that we almost wholesale converted it into this agricultural, privatized landscape, agricultural empire, whereas the colonial powers in Africa they didn't really do that. I mean, they made sure that we ended up with Serengeti National Park and the Massimer National Preserve and Kruger National Park in the Veld in South Africa. So in Africa we ended up with these big game parks to preserve the African version of this and in North America he declared it fly over country. Declared a fly over country, and a place that you just ignored that really wasn't interesting enough for people to even stay there. I mean, it's been. One of the stories of the Great Plains is that unlike any other region of the United States and the twenty twenty first centuries, it endlessly is hemorrhaging population and losing people. So one of the I mean, the way I end this book is that, um so that it's not a complete downer about what we did and it's just all gone. Is that. I mean, one of the really uplifting parts of this story is that you get to the twenty first century and in Montana along the Missouri River, we've got this organization called the American Prayer Reserve that is so far raised about a hundred million dollars in the last ten or twelve years in order to try to tie together uh two big public lands, the Charlie Russell National wild Life Refuge and the Missouri Breaks National Monument with the private lands that lie in between them. And what they're trying to do is to as ranches come up for sale, to try to buy them with yeah, and willing buyers with the idea that we can ultimately create this this preserve uh that will kind of be really uh a Yellowstone of the Great Plains, I mean, and they're hoping for an aerial extent that's gonna be twice the size of Yellowstone. Also, it's two million acres. They're hoping. American Prairie Reserve is hoping for as much as three and a half to four million acres of land where we actually can do what has happened in the parks in Africa and recreate this American serengetti with all these these animals restored grizzly bears and gray wolves and prong horns and bison of course, and you know, possibly uh the full suite of animals that were there hundred and fifty years ago. Are they seeking a park designation? And you know, no, they're not, at least they're not saying they are now. They're they're sort of arguing at this point that uh, it's going to be uh, it's gonna be private enterprise that creates it. It's gotta be accessible to the public. Um, they're running black management right now on some of it. Yeah, public access hunting we'll see, you know, just to editorialize a little bit, I think they'll find tremendous amounts of support um with outdoors and if they are ticking, if they clarify and articking that that a little bit, but which might do them some good. It would do them some good. It would bring a constituency that they may not have anticipated, I think, because unfortunately just to I don't know if it's editorializing or not. But when I hear that, I can already hear the voices of you know, a lot of people that we deal with every day. When they hear that, they're going take it all the way from me. But you gott understand that they're dealing with in the private land. They're dealing with private land, already deeded land, right, So I mean, in some way you could argue what they're doing right now. They're not decreasing access. Um. I want to I want to move on to the to your your coyote. Yeah, but first I want to ask you something because this has always bothered me. Is there a proof that there were not elk in the mountains. I always hear that this idea that elk were pushed into the mountains. Don't you think that it was? There was elk across the entire range. They were eradicated in some areas and continue to survive in some areas. I think there were elk in the mountains. Yeah, yeah, like people when people say, I I hear that so much, but just doesn't make sense to me. I think, you know, there were grizzlies in the mountains, There were elk in the mountains. There were there were big horns sheep in the mountains. Obviously those animals were also out on the Great plains, and they ended up the ones that were on the Great Plains ended up either being killed or or fleeing to the mountains, but just gradually pushed by pressure, because I mean you can you can push animals. I mean we see it today, like pressure moves animals. But I just have a hard time imagine that they very quickly, Yeah, yeah, to to like an alpine environment. I'm guessing that they were just evenly distributed, and you saw the great abundance. Now we think of him as a mountain animal, but they were planes animals. Oh man, they were planes animal for sure. Yeah, there's no doubt. All right, So layoff the Kyote Book. I call m coylets. I know the proper terms maybe coyote. Well, I call it wildly coyote. I don't call him wildly coyote. You know, you don't say wild coyote. You know. It's funny. My kids been watching Um I let him watch Looney Tunes just because I relate to it, and m they watched a lot of road running wildly coyote. And outside of my house was a phone pole that like provides part of my house that's leaning at a precipitous angle. And my brother was visiting. He commented how that phone pole is gonna tip over, and my son asked, well, the whole house tip over too, And my brother said, I think these kids watch too much. They learned physics from Wiley. And while Yoe, of course, can fall off the highest cliff in the solar system and it, you know, it flattens him. But he who gets up and walks away from you can't teach your kids the natural laws but water that show. But yeah, so, so lay out the Kyote book for me. I'm gonna call him kyotes just for consistency. Yeah so, and but but what I will say about that is and I tell the story and two places in the introduction and then in a chapter called prairie Wolves, which is what they were originally called in America the books Kyote America. The book is called Coyote America, A Natural and Supernatural History. But I lay out the story in two different places in that book. Why you say coyote and I say kyote. Yeah. And I always said, anybody who's ever killed one, say yeah, Well, that's that's served. That's sort of it. People who killed them, who managed them, who attempted to poison them to extermination back in the nineties, I'll call them coyotes. And the origin of that too syllable pronunciation goes back to the mountain men who were in the uh Southwest in the southern Rockies in the eighteen thirties and eighteen forties, because they for the first time, we're encountering a name other than prairie wolf. Everybody in America who first encountered coyotes in the early nineteenth century, starting with Lewis and Clark, That's the name Lewis and Clark gave them, was prairie wolf. That's what everybody calls his old trapping books refuses that name. Yeah, and I would be like, what in the healthy time about the one day had occurred to me that he talk about, But he was writing, Yeah, that's right. And there I've seen examples and by nineteen fifteen or so where people are still using the term prairie wolf, that was the Anglo American name for an animal that they had never seen before. Because coyotes, I mean, they back up with their evolution a little bit, and because this is a really they've got the probably the most fascinating biography of any animal in North America. And it is uh a surprising and unexpected story really that coyotes have. They are part of the evolution of the canad family that took place in North America beginning five point three million years ago, and that produced all the wolves, all the jackals, and the coyote east of North America all around the world. So all the jackals of Africa and southern Europe, all the wolves of the entire globe all come from the evolution of a North American family of animals, the canad family, that evolved five point three million years ago. Yeah, and so what's so for one thing, it makes coyotes, I mean they're a distinctively North American animal in part because they not only evolved here, we think probably in the southwest is where this family of animals evolved. But unlike jackals and wolves, coyotes never left North America. They remained here. Wolves, on the other hand, became cosmopolitan, followed the big herds of animals that were migrating across the Bearing Strait and across the the Connectivity Bridge to Europe and ended up in Europe and Asia and everywhere else. Jackals ended up about a million years ago, separating from the coyote line and and getting into Africa and southern Europe. Coyotes never left. They stayed in North America, and they were found only in the West, from the Great Plains westward when America is like Lewis and Clark first encountered them, so nobody who was settling Plymouth or Jamestown ever encountered a coyote. Lewis and Clark get to what is now Nebraska in the fall of eighteen o four, and in the stretch of about it's about three weeks, they encounter all the classic animals of the American West. They encounter the first bison, they've ever seen. Uh. This is in middle of August of eighteen o four. They counter pronkorn antelope they encounter, they say, a deer with strangely large ears that hops rather than runs. The mule deer. Uh. And then they say, and we keep seeing this fox, a kind of fox that nobody has ever seen before. And after about a week or so of describing seeing this fox, one of the hunters in the party finally shoots one, and William Clark lays it out on the grass and he starts looking at it, and he says, this is not a fox. This is some kind of wolf. It's a small wolf. But but this is a wolf. And he says, I think the best name for it, since we're out in the prairies is a prey wolf, And so Lewis and Clark name it a prairie wolf. And for more than a hundred years many Americans refer to coyotes as prai wolves. But in the eighteen thirties and eighteen forties, Americans start going across the plains to Santa Fe. After, for example, Mexico becomes independent of Spain. In one they open up the trade between Missouri and Santa Fe. And so all of these traders are going from St. Louis to Santa Fe, and along with them go mountain men to trap the beaver streams like kick Carson. And when these guys get to Santa Fe and they start pointing out there goes a prairie wolf. The people in Santa Fe say, no, that's a coyote. And so these Americans listen to that word coyote, and what they're actually hearing is a Spanish version of a no waddle Indian word. And or nowat is the name of the language. No what is the language that the Aztecs spoke. And some of the settlers who had gone to to found Santa Fe in sixteen had been either Aztec or know what speakers, Indians who had been probably subjugated by the Aztecs and forced to speak the Essex language. And so they got to Santa Fe and they saw these animals. They used the old Aztec word for them, which was the original pronunciation, was coyote. The Spaniards heard coyot, the Indian word, they converted it to coyote in a Latin pronunciation. And then Anglo Americans started showing up in the eighteen thirties and they they hear coyote and his Frederick Ruxton, one of the chroniclers of the mountain man life and the Southern Rockies, says, as we all sat around the campfires in the Southern Rockies in the thirties and the eighteen forties, you could hear the mex that can say coyote. The Indians say coyote, and all the trappers would say they couldn't pronounce that with three syllables. They would say coyote. And of course those guys went back to Kentucky and Virginia and Illinois, and when they heard people say, so, did you see any prairie wolves out there, they would say, so, you mean coyotes. What we've ended up with, then is kind of a a bifurcatid pronunciation where rural people in America, and as you said a minute ago, people who tend to shoot coyotes, that's what they say. I just that's a coyote. But in the sort of more literary circles of urban places, yeah, they used the term. They used the term coyote as the as the classic pronunciation, and I think it's probably what they're trying to do is to pay homage to the Spanish pronunciation. Nobody says coyote anymore, but but a lot of a lot of people say coyote. That's fascinating, man, I had no idea. Yeah, so they're So that's one of many gems that's in your book. Yeah, that's one of the things that you're going to discover. You're also going to discover, as I said, that these are North American animals that evolved more than five million years ago, and one of the fascinating uh consequences of that today is one of the things we've got going on in the eastern United States is the emergence of an animal called the coy wolf, and it's an intermixture and interbreeding between coyotes that, under persecution by the federal government and state governments over the last seventy or so years, have expanded their range out of the West all over North America, and not just all over North America, not just a Maine and Florida and Virginia, but into all the major cities of the United States. They've done that because they've been persecuted, but it's taken coyotes into places where there are remnant Eastern wolves. And one of the things that's happened is that they are freely interbreeding with the red wolves, the endangered red wolf of the South, and with these Eastern wolves that are still found in eastern Canada and creating a new predator that is on Minnesota, Wisconsin and New York and Virginia and the Deep South. They're creating this animal where they run into Eastern wolves. That's where they run into from the Great Lakes, basically eastward in Canada, and thens are going, yeah, when when they how does of work is it? Is it a male wolf female kyote? It's yeah, it's usually that way. Yeah, it's usually uh, male wolf and female coyote. But evidently there have been crosses that have gone the other way. They produced viable offspring. And the reason they do is because red wolves and Eastern wolves are also from this North American wolf stock that never left North America, and so they're closely related biological aid coyotes, and so they easily interbreed. But in the West where we have gray wolves. Gray wolves, for example, in Yellowstone, when they were introduced into Yellowstone in ninety six, the first thing that happened was that gray wolves knocked the coyote population back in Yellowstone by fifty They gray wolves do not interbreed with coyotes. They kill them. They attack them. And the reason we think this is happening is because gray wolves are are a set of wolves. There are five subspecies of them that left North America, evolved for a couple of million years, probably in Asia and in Europe, and then only began returning to North America about twenty thousand years ago. So they had had enough separate evolution and another part of the globe that by the time they returned to North America, they no longer recognized any biological ties with with coyotes or with American wolves like red wolves, and their reaction to coyotes has not been to interbreed with them, but to basically attack them and kill them. Yeah, and Kyle's returned to favor on foxes. A lot of red fire, there's a lot of gray foxes. And and that's when they roll in. That's that's right. It's the big dog, little dog thing, and it happens at every every level. But I mean, I was telling you, I mean before we we started on air here that what we think explains the cleverness, the wiliness, and the survivability of coyotes. I mean, if you think about this for a second, we managed to wipe wolves out in North America. We extra pated wolves, We did everything we could, even including passing a law in one that earmark coyotes for total extermination in the United States, and have not been able to do it. Despite spending billions of dollars and developing a whole witches brew of poisons to try to eradicate them, we have never been able to do that. So one of the things about the coyotes story is that this is a story that turns upside down. Are our notion about the human relationship to nature, where we think we arrive and everything goes ship bang because nothing in nature is able to resist us. The coyote story is completely the opposite. These guys have forecundity. It's attributed to the fact that for the last twenty thousand years they have been persecuted by gray wolves, and they evolved an ability to survive under persecution and even to colonize new areas under persecution. So what we think is going on is that coyotes haven't evolved their wiliness and their ability to survive and our in our presence and under our persecution. Just as a result of the last two hundred years of us trying to wipe them out, they brought to bear these evolutionary adaptations that go back at least twenty thousand years as a result of their interaction with gray wolves and what they evolved or it was a whole suite of these kind of remarkable adaptations. One of them that's probably the most important one is called fishing fusion adaptation. Now, what it means is coyotes and they're only about nineteen mammal species around the world that can do this. One of the other ones happens to be us. We do this, and what it means is they have the ability to exist both communally in the in coyote terms and packs or as singles and pairs and so, whereas wolves are only pack animals. And it became kind of their Achilles hill when the government was trying to poison them out, because you could kill one wolf out of a pack and use the scent glands of that wolf to bait your your meat cubes, and you would in turn, in a few days, kill every single animal in the pack, as they would be drawn to the scent of that lost companion. But coyotes, when you try to do that, their response is to go into this fish and fusion kind of adaptation and they just scattered to the winds. And what they do is when you're persecuting them and driving their populations down, one of the things coyotes, I mean, we all love how coyotes howl. What they're actually doing with those howls is they're taking a census of the coyote population in a territory. And if they howl at night and they don't hear responsive house from other pairs or packs of coyotes, that triggers an autogenic response to hormonal response in them, so that they have larger litters. And so as you drive the population of them down and they take this howling sensus and don't hear other coyotes in the landscape, they produced larger litters. And what these larger litters often prompt them to do is to go into what's called colonization mode. So they start going out to the ages of their territory and expanding and colonizing. And what it's meant that is that once we started trying to eradicate them. That produced the spread of coyotes all over North America. I mean, in response to our persecution, they scattered everywhere. I once watched a movie, a documentary that was highly critical of coyote hunting, okay, and it was like a pro kyote movie, highly critical of Kyle hunting. And the thing he makes the point, he's like, the more you hunt them, the more we're gonna have. But then I want to think it o. So if that's true, then I would think that you would welcome hunting because you like them, and it makes more of them. It does. Indeed, if you live in and you want them, you should send your cousin in Nebraska. That's right, go out and go out and blast away at them. Yeah, it's so they you know, they make up this this creature that in a lot of ways throws environmentalists for a loop. I mean, I had a conversation a few months ago with a couple of women who wanted to do a coyote documentary, and we sat down over the conversation and it emerged fairly quickly that what they wanted to do was to do a documentary to save the coyote, and so I had to say to them, so you realize that they don't need your help. They are perfectly capable, thank you of saving themselves and go about it in a completely nonchalant manner, trotting by looking at you with those yellow eyes and sort of see you later. You know, so long, it's been good to know you. And they don't really need your help. Uh, they can do it very well on their own. So it's it's not the hand of the handful of a small handful of species like that. Yeah, very small handful of Canada geese. And these guys are you know. The truth is, and if we thought of them this way, I think it might change the way people think of them. I mean, what they are is they're a wolf. They're a small species of wolf. And so what you know, if you if you sit in back East in your study and you lament the loss of wolves in America and you would love to see wolves return to America and a coyote trots through your backyard, that's cause for celebration because the fact is that's what they are, and they have managed to uh to re inhabit our landscapes, including our biggest cities. I mean, one of the great recent stories of coyote was a group of people walking out of a bar in Queen's Last Spring and looked up. They heard a sound and looked up and a coyote was on the roof of the bar and queens looking down at them, and they snapped pictures with their phones, and somebody, of course calls the police, who alert animal control, and the animal control people arrived. The coyote is just sort of walking back and forth along the roof of the bar, and people by now gathered out in the street, traffics going by. Here's this kyote a few feet away, And as soon as the animal control truck comes around the corner with lights on, the coyote looks back behind him. There's an abandoned building with broken glass in the windows, and sort of like some Hollywood action hero, he just sort of hops off the roof of the bar through the broken glass of them. If the building has got that's great man, you know, uh, I kind of we're getting We're I'm gonna wrap it up, but I want to remind remind you something that you said all those years ago when I was in your class. I'm trying to think of what year it would have been somewhere here or something like that. Yeah, we were talking about a famous battle, um Adobe Walls. Tell everyone what the Battle of Adobe Walls was. I know there's like part one in part two. But you you were getting you were driving out a story about where one of the participants from the Indian side, from the Native American side, one of the participants described what went wrong at that battle. Jock supposed to the narrative of what went wrong from them from the Euro American side, So you can. I'll remind you later what it was. But you just at the stage for what that battle was. Yeah, well, I mean and I remember the story. I tell you too. They the Battle of Adobe Walls was battle between buffalo hunters and the Texas Panhandle who were holed up in this old trading fort, uh which is up above the present day Amarillo on the Canadian River, and a group of Comanches and Southern Cheyennes, who, by the Treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek of eighteen sixty eight, knew that buffalo hunters weren't supposed to be below the Arkansas River. The Treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek, the Indians that insisted the buffalo hunters have to stay north of the Arkansas in Kansas. And yeah, so here these guys were, these buffalo hunters had crossed the deadline and had gone down into the Texas Panhandle where they weren't supposed to be. And so this group of Comanches and Southern Cheyennes felt perfectly justified in attacking this buffalo hunter camp. And so they mounted up a war party, and about have o'clock in the morning, just as as it was starting to get light, they decided to make a raid on this camp and wipe these guys out. And from the side of the story of the buffalo Hunters, some guy gets up at about four thirty or five in the morning, he's got to go outside and take a whizz, and he's as he's taking a whizz, he looks up on the ridge and he sees silhouetted in the coming twilight of the morning, this group of Indians getting ready to ride down on them. That's one version of what happened. Another is that, uh, this was an old fort and uh a vega or one of the roof beams cracked and it woke somebody up and I walked outside and we're looking around to see what had happened, and looked at old adobe, old adobe building, and this roof beam cracked, and so it woke a couple of them up, and they walked outside and they saw anyway, the Indians launched an attack, which they thought was going to be a surprise attack on the sleeping camp, and it turned out some of these guys were already up, and so they repulse the attack, and the Indians, in attempting to explain it later, so we'll see if this is how you remember. The Indians, in attempting to explain it later, used their own cause effect logic to explain why this had happened the way it had. And their logic was not that damn, we were gonna launch a surprise attack, and some of those guys were already up, and they alerted everybody else. Their logic was on the way to the attack. That morning, one of the Cheyen's has shot a skunk, and it was taboo to arrow a skunk, and so that had screwed the medicine for the whole band, and so when they launched that attack, they no longer had the right medicine with them and in their cause and effect explanation, which we would call a supernatural explanation for why it failed. This was the reason a taboo had been broken, the animals had turned against them, and therefore the attack was a failure. It took me ten years to understand what that story means. I resisted it at first. That's not what happened. What happened was but but when you were telling you, you you were making the point of we have our ways of explaining things, and we have these things that are true to us, you know. And I'm like, a decade later, I'm like, you know, I do I Finally I'm old enough now or I've been around enough now, I'm like, he was right. He's right. It's because the god damn s gone. So you worry about that for ten years. I would return to it periodically. Uh yeah, you never said anything. Ran You didn't say much. Concluding thoughts Man Too Million name one of my favorite podcast today. I think, Um, I have a clarifying question. Well, I have a couple of things. Well, I'm wondering if we have enough time, because I think we could if it's all right with you, if you can chat a little bit longer. I would love to hear to talk about just the bit if we could get like the very abridge version of the bison, the bison story story, but his his influential paper here, and then coyotes. It's always kind of this myth that you hear about, like the more you shoot him, the more there's gonna be. So really, what what what what you explain that is to be true? Like there they are going to produce more offspring the more pressure you're putting on them whatever poisoning shooting. Yeah, So one of the ways that we know it's different from what it could be is that we had about seventy years in Yellowstone, for example, of healthy coyote population, nobody hunting them, no wolves there because wolves are eliminated from Yellowstone by about and we don't get wolves there again until we have this period of about seventy years where there's a coyote population that biologists can study that don't get pressured either by people or by gray wolves. And what they did is very interesting. Their population rose to this carrying capacity plateau and it never got any bigger. And so as soon as wolves arrived, what happened was the kyote population dropped by almost half, but then under wolf pressure, it has begun to build back to its original size and large, and they have scattered out of the park. So it's almost like this test case of the theory of whether or not it's pressure that causes them both to colonize and expand their range and also caused their causes their population to rise. And so the guy who's done this study also did UM for his PhD dissertation. He studied UH the Hanford Preserve around Hanford, where the same thing was true. There were no wolves, people weren't shooting, trapping, or poisoning. It's in Washington State, it's the Handford Nuclear site. And what he discovered was the same phenomenon that without pressure, their populations rise to this caring capacity level and then they they don't get any bigger. And the reason they don't is because it's not so much the litter sizes fall. They followed to maybe four or five pups, whereas when they're under pressure sometimes they'll have thirteen or fourteen pups. But the litter size were followed about four or five pups. And because the UH, the population of coyotes was at the carrying capacity of the resources, they would not often be able to get all those pups raised without losing a couple of them or maybe three of them, because there just wasn't weren't enough resources out there to raise the entire litter, and so that seemed to be the the what provided the ceiling um. So, I mean, we actually do have a couple of these sort of test cases where you can observe what happens if they don't have any pressure on them, and Yellowstone is probably the best one. But as I said, there's this this at least one other one too that people have studied. Because he hasn't got he wanted him to explain that, I know, the fog question with the coyote the then does that flip like the whole freederor control thing to like basically, kill more coyotes equals more big bucks. How does that relate to that you're not and just the research that you've done and your yeah, well, I mean there's a so for example, state of Utah um with a Mule Deer Protection Act few years ago, you know, created a bounty on let stay bounty on coyotes. They did that almost two years to the day after a major study came out on coyote effects on mule deer populations in Idaho. It was a result of about a ten year study on coyotes and mule deer, and the conclusion of this study, authored by about fifteen or sixteen biologists, was that coyotes had virtually no effect on mule deer populations. And I mean, this is one of those classic instances, almost like like climate science or something, some major study comes out and next door, the neighboring state completely ignores it and nonetheless goes ahead and puts a bounty on coyotes in order to save mutle here. So the science that's out there indicates I mean, and this science goes back to the nineteen thirties really when the Murray brothers were studying coyote depredations in Yellowstone and in Jackson Hole. Because the biological survey actually they wiped out wolves. They decided, I mean, you know, you can kind of see the transparency of it. It's the government bureau, our major target is gone. We gotta survive some way. So they proclaim the coyote is the arch predator of our time. It turns out, actually most of that predation that was going on that was really coyotes and not wolves. So we need government needs to keep funding us, and we need to continue to to do this predator control thing. And they send the Murray brothers out to study coyote predation on game animals as the arch predator of our time in Yellowstone and Jackson Hole, and both the Murray brothers, o Loss and Adolph both argue that we have no evidence that coyotes are causing the population of sheep, muled ere, prong horns, big horns, elk, any of those animals to go down. I mean, it's true and bad winners. They will sometimes manage to kill a calf, and you can certainly find as the Bureau had as hunters had arguable, we can open their stomachs up after we poise them and it's got elk meat. But the Mury brothers watched them close enough to realize it's scavenged. I mean, these elkers are then bad winners, their animals dying, and for sure the coyotes are going out and scavenging on the dead animals, but they're not out there hauling down elk in packs of little coyotes nipping at their heels. The same conversations happened right now in the East with white tails, where a lot of even though study after study keeps coming out saying, you know, I think that the white tailed decline we've been seeing in the last you know, five six, seven years is contemporaneous with coyotes coming in. UM. It seems that maybe it's not what's really going on here. There could be other factors that play. And there's a great reluctance with people to accept that because it's it's a it's just it's clean. Yeah, we like, we love skapegoats. You know, it's clean. It's clean to think that way. I got friends in Wisconsin, good friends who on one hand, advocate and we need to shoot more white tails. We've got too many white tails. That's we've got unhealth. They heard, there's too much risk of disease transmission. I gotta shoot coyotes because they're going after the deer. So well, they don't want the coyote to get the deer. You know, they want to they want to put their tag on it. But but I do, you know, I do. I had a guy recently telling me that the thing he and he see, he's a very student observer of the natural world in his area in Kentucky, and he was saying, he's he says, I'll tell you one thing that happened when coyotes came in here. He says, fucking groundhogs vanished. No one else is crying for groundhogs. But he's like, that's one thing I do think is exactly attributable, because I think they came in and just hammered the groundho I'm sure they probably did that, you know. And what people in in in New York and Chicago and Denver and l A I'll argue is that you know your pets aren't safe when coyotes are in town. That's the that's that that argument is the least interesting to me. Yeah, well, that's just that's you know, for for a lot of people living in the suburbs. That's the thing that I mean. I just saw online the other day a couple that had invented a coyote vest and you put it on your little dog and it's got these spikes coming out of the vest and some sort of quills that come up off the back of its neck, and it's supposed to repel coyote attacks. And I mean they're advertising on the internet that they've got these coyote vest that you can buy. But I mean, what's actually going on is it's not everybody thinks. What's happening is that coyotes in urban situations, you know, they're scarvenging. They're scavenging garbage from the back of the McDonald's and the burger king, and they're they're eating cats, and they're eating poodles and stuff. I mean, the truth is what they do in urban areas is the same thing they do in rural areas. They basically go after mice and rats. Operation they eat a lot of grassopers, a lot of fruit, and primarily mice and rats. And although they do kill cats and they do kill small dogs, it's not because they're eating them. It's because they regard them as intra guild competitive predators. And they see a cat or a small dog out there, and their response to that is that this is another predator that's invaded my territory, and so they will kill them. But I mean, very rarely will they haul them off and chow down on them. I mean, this is just another one of the urban myths about coyotes that's out there from the perspective of the pet owner, it probably doesn't matter. So it doesn't matter the animal is dead, or it might be better actually if they haul the cat down to the den of pups. And actually the cat gott was made some use of. But yeah, coyote vests, so you can you can acquire one, no doubt soon for your cat as well as your dog. That was your follow up question. You wanted to know about bison though the story, well, the the chapter that I do in American Serengetti on Bison, uh is a it's a new take, and so it's not the it's not a regurgitation of my original story, although I do I do build on that. And what that story argued was that what we've thought about what happened to bison is far too simple. I mean, we've basically always argued that, you know, they they were still sixty million of them at the end of the Civil War, and these buffalo hunters go out in the space of twenty years, they managed to wipe out sixty million animals in the market hunt, and that's what happened to him. And what I argued in that piece back in was that the truth is uh the bison herds. For one thing, we're never that big. They were only about how that size. And secondly, they were dwindling visibly as early as eighteen fifty because of a whole group of causes that kind of came together like a perfect storm in the fourties and eighteen fifties. And UH one of them certainly was the market hunt, although it wasn't the hide the American hide hunters who responsibly primarily was Indians being caught up in the the buffalo robe trade that was sponsored by the fur companies. Hides with hair on right and and tanned by Indian women who were who were the processors, who were the labor force, and the men would go out and and procure the animal, and the women would take the pelt off and then tan the the robe and produced this marketable commodity that was then traded to UH, to the fur trade company. So there was there was blankets and for all kinds of things, primarily primarily as people were sort of competing for the last big buffalo hunting grounds. In many instances, UH, what they were getting in trade were firearms and ammunition and powder. UH, metal goods of all kinds, certainly textile blankets and beads and things, but often firearms and ammunition because there was a there was a competition for these last grounds of of huntable animals. I mean the Lakota people, the Western Lakotas were driving across the Great Plains from east to west during all these times, taking away the buffalo grounds of the Pawnees, the buffalo ultimately the buffalo grounds of the crows Uh in order to to exploit the herds themselves. So it was kind of this capitalist market fueled inner tribal competition for the the last remaining resource. So that was one of the causes, but there were others. One was the spread of horses across the plains, again, which ate the same grass uh drank the water that bison drank, and so, and the horse numbers were becoming high enough that the competition between horses and bison was getting to draw down the size of the buffalo herds. And there was as well the fact that diseases, exotic bovine diseases whose impact we can't really quantify, but things like bovine tuberculosis and anthrax were having an impact by the eight forties because of the immigrant trails that were going across the plains. And then perhaps the one that's uh the easiest to to assess in terms of quantifying is the change in climate that was happening in the eighteen forties and eighteen fifties. And what what was going on was that what we called the Little Ice Age, about a two hundred and fifty year period of much cooler, wetter temperatures in the northern hemisphere, was coming to an end in the eighteen fourties and eighteen fifties, and as it came to an end, it was producing a series of droughts. Uh, there was a a drought on the Great Plans in the eighteen fifties and early eighteen sixties that was probably the most severe drought that we have a record of in the last thousand years. And as it drew down the carrying capacity of the grasslands, what this meant was that buffalo didn't have as much grass to eat, and so the numbers were plummeting as a result of deteriorating environmental conditions for them. And one final thing that I talked about, I talked about all of these causes in this article, which argued for this multiplicity of causes The one other one I talked about was the fact that in the past, when conditions like this had prevailed on the Great Plains, Buffalo had tended to migrate westward into the mountains where there was more grass and lusher conditions, and eastward out into the prairies towards the Mississippi River, where there would be more more grass and more rainfall. But by the eighteen forties, American Indian policy had basically placed something like five thousand Eastern Indians in Kansas and Oklahoma in the Indian Territory as a part of the removal policy, most famous aspect of which is the Cherokee Trail of Tears, where they're taken out of the southeast and put out in Oklahoma. And that puts this body of people right in the way of where Buffalo would formally have spread eastward in order to to sort of relieve the pressure of a drought out on the pla. So they don't have any refuges to expand into anymore, and they're just kind of caught out in a deteriorating Great Plains landscape with all these other effects. And so the argument became that by eighteen fifty, I mean we actually probably only have maybe twelve fourteen million buffalo left on the Great Planes, not sixty million, So by the end of the Civil War, that makes it quite a bit easier for the white hight hunters to arrive and sort of shoot down the remaining animals. So that was the story that I did in and I certainly fold a good bit of that into the chapter on Buffalo. But I try to tell a sort of a bigger story in in this chapter in American Serengetti about Buffalo and and the main thing that I take on is our supposition that we all have. I mean, you can go online and find find t shirts that sort of argue for this that it was a conspiracy between the federal government and the American military that wiped out the Buffalo. People still, yeah, they still talk about it, and the scapegoat of it is Philip Sheridan. And Philip Sheridan you can go online right now and find a T shirt with this quote on the front of it. Philip Sheridan is supposed to have made this speech in Austin, Texas in the early eighteen seventies when the Texas legislature. As the story is told over and over again, was considering a bill to outlaw the hide hunt in the Texas Panhandle, and Sheridan supposedly goes to Austin and stands up in front of Texas legislature and says, you can't do this. What you should be doing, in fact, is making sure that those animals are wiped out in order to be able to put the Indians on reservations and open up the planes to the festive cowboy and the speckled cattle. And he goes on to say, instead of uh detigrating these buffalo hunters, you should give them a medal. They should be recognized as American heroes. And the medal should have a discouraged planes Indian on one side and a dead buffalo on the other side. And so this story gets told, I mean, amazingly enough, no historian had ever looked at the origin of this story. It's told by a buffalo hunter in nineteen oh five, during the conservation period of Teddy Roosevelt, at a time when we were trying to save buffalo and a lot of people thought of these buffalo hunters as having been murderers of all these animals. And this buffalo hunter named John Cook writes a memoir published in nineteen o five called The Border in Buffalo, and he produces this speech which is something like patents speech. At the beginning of that movie. You can almost see the American flag rippling behind Sheridan as he says all this. And historians, journalists, the buffalo field campaign up in Yellowstone have just bought this thing, hook, hook, line and sinker, and nobody has ever bothered to go back and say, first of all, the Texas ever actually trying to pass a law to outlaw the buffalo hunt in the Panhandle. Did Philip Sheridan ever actually go to Austin, Texas and make a speech in front of the Texas legislature. And the answer to both those is, Texas never considered such a law. And in fact, when a law like this came up in the national legislature, it was the Texas component that thought it tooth and nail at the national level. Philip Sheridan, we have no record that he ever went to Austin, Texas and made such a speech. And the source of the story, then you realize, is this buffalo hunter who's writing his memoir at a time when buffalo hunters are being castigated. And when you look closely at the story, he even starts it out with this disclaimer of it is said that the Texas legislature was considering. So he does this kind of removes himself from it. It's not me, it is said, however, And so I tell this story in this chapter in order to try to disabuse people. Dispatch a grand student down the guy who would you remember this because that happened when you were at Montana, Dan Brewsters his name. He is now the director of the Buffalo Field Campaign. Yeah, and is now the director of And he's the grad student who went down to Austin to try to find all this and came back from his spring break in a week of being down there. He was working for the Buffalo Field Campaign then and said, man, I gotta say it's not there. And so a friend of mine who works in the National Archives, knowing that I was working on this, dug up for me the sort of the ultimate sort of reversal of this. I mean, I don't know if this will rescue Philip Sheridan's reputation or not, but Philip Sheridan was in Montana Territory in eighteen seventy eight, and heard about buffalo hunters shooting down buffalo right and left, and wrote a telegram to Washington saying, I want this buffalo hunting stuff stopped right now. We are going to end up with Indians who don't have a bite to eat this summer because these white guys are shooting down all these animals. We've got to stop this bubble. I'm not shooting you. And so I quote Shardan's exact opposite story than what he's been credited as saying in history, this story is everywhere. It's everywhere. When I was kind of immersed in this whole world, it was like, it's just like, oh, I had already know, excepted I've heard about that, and I just like always dismayed about how many people point that out. Yeah, it's everywhere. So one of the things, it's a comfortable, easy thing. Well it's I mean, so think about it. We tried to claim that, you know, in the aftermath of the Civil War, that the Civil War is not about slavery. It's about the Southern way of life. It's about preserving a culture in the South. I have a brother back in in Texas who still argues this, And so I mean That's the reason these kinds of stories are comfortable to us is that it removed the responsibility for the action in history from us to some agency out there, like the federal government that everybody is always quick to take aim at. And so it wasn't we. We didn't do it. The federal government in the military did this, I mean, and the truth is, of course we did it. American citizens did it. The market hunt did it. Unrestrained capitalism did it. I've tried. When I was writing about high Hunters and in my Buffalo book, I don't think. I don't know if I ever, I don't think I actually wrote this. But when I was talking about it, I would say, let's let's it sound like I'm condemning these guys. I want to say, in all honesty, I would have been right out there with them. Yeah, there were a lot of guys who were broke after the How in the world would they have even like you got some guy pushing the plow, he said, the Ohio Valley or coming out of Pennsylvania right next to no education or no education quite possibly illiterate, has never been out there, did It's like that? He's like, I'll go out there and fix them Indians and shop. It's just like, not what he's going out there for. He was going out there for under like money, adventure. You know. It's like the grand picture wasn't there. I would like as much as like I grew up, you know, I saw one. It's earlier today. I grew up shopping for a trap line in Canada. It's like if I was alive at that time, If I was alive at that time, I would have been like, you're ship me, let's go before they're gone. Well, it's hell, you what, I can't say that I wouldn't have been right out there too. Uh, it's impossible to say at the time. But it's like, yeah, it's a simple you know. You take these like kind of like everyday motivations, the kinds of things people still do and still think about, and apply it in that context at that time, and that's yeah, the kinds of things you wind up with. There were some of these buffalo hunters like John Cook, the guy who wrote this memoir who I mean, they defended it all to the end, even when society had turned against it. Um. I mean. There was a guy down in Texas, Jay Wright Moore, who used to lead parades in his buffalo hunter outfit. And he had this book, Buffalo Bone Days, and that's right, Buffalo Bone Days. And his stock speech was that all the buffalo between the Brazis River and the Platte didn't amount to one homesteader family somewhere in Kansas, and so don't go mourning all those buffaloes. That didn't amount to a single thing, one homestead or family in Manita more than that. But there were some of them buffalo Jones, you know, in in Kansas. I mean, you know about this guy, Steve, I know, I mean, he sort of spent the rest of his life stricken with guilt about what he had done. He said, I spent my entire youth trying to wipe these animals out, and now I'm gonna try to atone for that wickedness by attempting to save some of them for America in the twentieth century. Yeah, he'd ride out, try to rope up calves and then put them on cow that's right, put him on cows to get milk. Yeah. And he knew from his hunts where some buffalo, even when everybody thought they were all gone, he knew there's some of them left in the Texas Panhandle where used to hunting those brakes along the automoskado. I guarantee I can go down and find something. He did. He went down and found a group of about sixty And this was seven or eight years after everybody was convinced that there were no more buffalo on the other planes. I mean, but these guys, you know, they knew how to hunt, and they knew guns, and a lot of times that's all they knew how to do. And so here was an opportunity to make some money from it, and they went out and and did it. But when you got twenty thousand of them out there on the planes and doing it, the ultimate result is ultimate result is in our time we only get to read books about this or see movies about it. And one of the things that kind of excites me about the idea of the American Prairie Reserve and recreating the Americans Serengetti, is I want to experience it myself. I don't want to just read a book about what it was like or see go see The Revenant to see what the West was like. I mean, I want to, you know, as thora said, I wanna I want an entire heaven and an entire earth. I don't want to think that some demigo has come along before me and pluck the best of the stars out of the sky. Yeah, so you're rooting for it, the return of the American Serengetti a man. Absolutely, it's a noble cause there's a lot of you know, there's a lot of arguing. A lot of arguing needs to happen in Phillips County, Montana. I think there's a lot of a lot of arguments gonna happen. I certainly agree, Yeah, I certainly agree with the goal. Um, it's gonna be like all worthwhile things, it's gonna it's gonna amount to a fight, you know. Yeah, Well getting Yellowstone was you know, that was that was not a huge fight, but it was something of the fun we all everyone listen, everyone's come to agree. Roosevelt is great man. Everything you do is great. You think at the time when he says, hey, I got an idea, Yeah, people were piss well, they were living about the Grand King. And you know when he when he made it into a national monument. I mean, people were furious about that, especially in Arizona and uh In Arizona Territory. I mean, they were absolutely furious about it. But as Roosevelt said, you know, nothing man is going to be able to do to it is going to improve improve what it is. The ages have been at work on it, and so all we can do is detract from it. The best thing to do is is to preserve it as it is. And I think in this American Serengetti issue, it's not that we have a remnant thing that we can preserve. We're gonna have to recreate that and that's gonna be That's an even that's an even bigger task. Yeah, it's different than setting something Christine aside. Yeah, recreating something is a bigger project. But it's kind to me on the scale of of setting you know, the world's first national park aside in the form of Yellowstone. Uh. And so it's kind of a one of these big vision things for our time, the way Yellowstone was for people in the nineteenth century. Yeah, there's a it's coming up now, like just in in the political environment where people look at chunks of wild land and like the wild land sort of has to justify its existence. It's like, well, it's sitting there doing nothing as though every minute wild places they're supposed to be like to lay out their ledgers improve at any given moment, like what their value is in the moment when I think that the more accurate way of thinking about wild places is it's like money in the bank. What am I doing with it right now? It's setting there, and that ship is getting more and more valuable every minute, and I don't know. I might not cash it, my children might not cash it, my grandparents might not cash it, right or my grandchildren might not cash it. But at the same time, it's just something they're getting exponentially more valuable as time it goes by. And it's like disgusting to me that somehow people look at chunk or ground and it has to justify itself in terms of in terms jobs. All the leopold he had this line where he said that, uh, America, just in case. All the Leopold's are one of the fathers of the modern conservation movement, and Avid Hunter and Fisherman, and he had this line where he said that we've become like hypochondriacs about our economic health, where we're incapable of being healthy, where we view our economic health as like you know, soul full of anxiety about it that we can't realize that we're actually okay, you know, And I think that the way wild lands need to just like in sort of some kind of petty economic way, account for what they're doing in the job cycle, all right, Like who's creating more jobs. It's a thing like in hunting and fishing right now, so many people are starting starting saying like, okay, we gotta do we should do conservation work because look at the economic imprint of hunters and fishermen. You know, we contribute all these billions of dollars to the economy every year. And I went up thinking to myself, okay, so let's say you did that same math and realized that having clean air and clean water and wild places is costing us money. Does that mean we feel differently about it? Like that doesn't change my perspective on it. I'm not like, oh, yeah, you're right, we should have wilderness because we're making money off it. It's just like, you know, I hear that. I'm like, you know, that's great, but it doesn't change my opinion one way or the other. I don't like it less or more. Now that you've justified it's value. To me, that's that's trying to think in about values that are sort of outside economic determinism and trying to insert them into that kind of model. But I mean there's some things that you don't put price tax on. I mean, there are a lot of the It seems to me the finer sentiments in the human spirit are not really things that you add up in ledgers. Um. Yeah, I mean, you know, I still believe in that old, that great old Wallets Stigner line about the geography of Hope. That's kind of to me what wild places represent. So I mean, we we've as our population grows around the globe, I mean, we're gonna be putting more pressure on wild places and shrinking the possibility of biodiversity. Uh. And that's the theme of the modern era. So every opportunity, it seems to me when you can take a stand against that and even reverse it with something like this American prairie reserve idea, I mean, I'm that that makes me want to endorse it and and work on behalf of it, because I think the the primary theme is in the other direction. So yeah, this this American Serengetti, American Prairie Reserve Project is kind of an opportunity to do good in the classic old Aldo Leopold Teddy Roosevelt fashion. And it's probably one of the reasons that, you know, groups like the National Geographic for instance, and the Grosvenor family are really excited about it because it does have a little bit of a whiff of that old time big vision conservation. Uh thinking, did you know, Uh, Leopold's kid is a hydrologist. I believe I've never I don't think i've ever met him. I could be messing up. I think he has a son, Luna. Yeah, I could be. I could messing this up too, but I think it's kind of right. He says, Uh. Rivers are the gutters through which run the ruins of continents. It's a good one. Yeah, that's a good one too. We could toss good clothes for these guys are after a long time. All Right, I don't have any concluding thoughts. That was a fine conclusion. Now, thank you for your time. Former professor, current author Dann Floor. He's going and find your books. You can get him on Amazon, pre order them or order them, order one, pre order one. Yeah, I think that's the way it is. Now you can order American Serengetty and pre order Coyote America and Kaudy America is not very far away, about six weeks or so. Yeah, order now, you get it early, all right, Thanks man, you're bad. Thanks asstsstssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss