00:00:00 Speaker 1: Oh hey, welcome to the Hunting Collective. To me Ben O'Brien here with Phil the Engineer. Hello, and it's another week, episode eighty six, and this one is a great one. It's about the coyote, or the coyote or the coyote, however you choose to say it. And this came up. This topic came up recently. I mean, the coyote is obviously something we're all interested in, but the topic came up recently around hunters and how they feel about predators. Do we feel like they're competing with us for our beautiful and delicious deer and elk and moose and things like that. So this is perfect have Dan Flores in here. We also had Sam Longdern, Anthony Lakata and Spencer new Art who came from different parts of the world completely messed up where they're actually from, but they came from different parts of our country and so I want to have their perspective on what they thought about coyotes, their experiences and all that stuff. And and before we get gone, speaking of what's been happening in my life, I shot a mule deer last week. It's my first ever resident mule deer in Montana. It was a little bit of interesting story. So next episode, I'm gonna tell you that story. Some people have been asking for me to tell the story. It's a story where I I did simultaneously great at hunting and also terrible, And so stick around for that. Maybe next episode or sometime when I get around to uh swallow my pride and telling you all about it. But for now, it's coo and it's episode eighty six. Let's go. I guess I grew up on an older road, a paredal to the meadows. I always did what I've told until I found out that my brand new clothes a game second hand from the rich kids next door. And I grew up fast. I guess I grew up. I mean, they have a thousand things inside of my head I wish I ain't seen. And now I just wounded to a real bad dream of being a lack of coming in a part of the steams. But thank you Jack Daniel. Hey everybody, episode eighty six, with the Hunting Collective coming at you from freezing cold bos in Montana, it's like negative degrees out of everybody, very cold October nine below in Belgrade. When I got up this o, my Lord and Heaven fills upper lip is warmer than most preparing preparing. It's filling in nicely. It's filling it nicely. Anthony Cotta, could you please describe fills mustache as it currently sits um. It's it's really gathered steam over the last couple of days and coming to its home. Are you fertilizing it with something? No, it just knew it was being underestimated and it came out fighting. Gary. Gary's good to me. It looks like mini magnum this morning. Yeah, it's you can see it for more than five ft away. Now that's true. I don't want to. I don't want to like try to wipe it off like I did, or like it's something on your lip, man, let's scrub it real harder'll fall off. Well, it's not about the density either. It's very skin toned. It's like, yeah, that's the main problem. Yeah, we've been talking about that super That's that's where it derives its creepiness from it from its from its color. It's like somebody cloned your eyebrow and then put it on top of your lips like that. Yeah, nic third eyebrow. I'll take it mouth brow. Well. I we're joined by Sam Longer. Hey Sam, Hey Ben. How's it going? Oh it's going pretty pretty good? Pretty good? Looking forward to Halloween. Yeah, what are you gonna be? I could well, I guess this will air later. I'm gonna be Yosemite. Sam, that's gonna be. You're gonna shave down those stash bet your ass. You're an innovator. Oh boy, Spencer new Heart, what are you going to be? I don't know if this is going to resonate with everyone, but I'm gonna be a hooter. Right, he's got he's got the beard. I've got the beard. I've got the suspenders, that got the black pants, have got the hat. You're gonna get a lot of questions. I need to explain. I grew up in a small town in southeastern South Dakota where we had one of the biggest hood right populations like in the nation. There we had five colonies within like ten miles of my hometown, and so when I would dress up like a hood right and go out for Halloween, people just thought I was a hood or right. It wasn't like costume people would be like from Jamesville, Maxwell, which one yeah, so we'll see how that goes over. And yeah, if you go up to as lowest town, people will think the exact same thing because they're everywhere up there. But you got to learn how how a lot of Montana's pronounce it, Who do right? Who the right? Who do right? Where I'm from in Maryland, similar, there's a fair modelm here, though in Montana. There's a lot of them here in Montana. It might hit. Don't accidentally stumble into a colony and just stay. I already have close. I was gonna hang out. This is this will you're not breaking any news or after well, I'm breaking the news to to the staff here, I guess please. Yeah, okay, well we've gone over how Seth and I were gonna be Doc Holiday and wider, like a realistic take. It's gonna be fun. That's gone. He's gonna be gone tomorrow. He's not dead times West. Um, he had a beautiful mustache. I'll take your Instagram follows. He was he was following the weather. He's chasing tornadoes and um. But no, so I'm still going to do a cowboy thing, but I'm going to be Doc Calaladay. It's a white cloth themed cowboy. Yes, that takes it. I've got some construction to do tonight. Um, without giving anything away, it's gonna be it's gonna be fun. Yeah, Okay, I'm speechless. Yeah, I'm speech Thank you, thank you for your service film. I'm your Huckleberry flavor. I'm your black chair. I thought of this. I'm your mango. I'm your natural line, which, of course you don't want to do that. That's a terrible disagree, disagree. I'm a natural line man. Oh yeah, sure, are I'm already Are you gonna be um, you're you're we're the only two Well I was gonna say we're only two fathers fills a father. But yeah, I gotta rethink mine. I gotta think that's something I can wear. Um that will still come through with a lot of outer layers. If it's gonna be this cold, that'll work. Um. Were you planning something that was like pretty skimpy. Yes, I usually do the sexy whatever thing. That's kind of my my thing, Like uh, um no my plan. Um. I have to rethinking, honestly, because I was going to be an angry clown, which is kind of a go to for me. It's kind of my thing, Yes, right in my wheelhouse. Angry, so glad you're rethinking that. But I have to film something tomorrow in the makeup just takes like days, so I got to rethink that. Well. I just I just started laughing when I saw that email from Annie that we're all filming and supposed to supposed to look serious for once in a filming thing. I'm like that, that's immediately before the hell the costume party. I'm gonna have a big ridiculous mustache. I'm gonna have to find a way to put white claws into my costume. Yeah, if you want to. You didn't tell ye? What about you? I'm just gonna be a t Rex. You know, there's a big blow up. T Rex is the fans. It's simple, but I find hilarious because I'm definitely funny. I'm definitely gonna be chasing Dot Claude day around whacky with my tail. We needed you, like those time lapses where people chase each other. Yeah, yeah, has anybody been watching the World Series? Spencer? You probably have like baseball? Sports ball fan your sport? You like sports ball? It was a great game last night. I keep getting emails. I got at least one email that says I look like Adam Eaton m burn. What a loser. It's a burn for him. I don't know who that is. Jacob Holtzford and said, how has been able to both be in Montana bagging Muley Bucks and in Houston banging Dingers. That's not It could be worse. I would love to be on and playing in the World Series right now, playing in the World Series. Um, we're not supposed to talk about sports, right yeahs not here. We're supposed to be Steves listening to this probably got Mike Son at the table. He might he might. Anyway, it is a good World Series. Last night, game tonight, Game seven. Stoked for to Game Seven's always good, It's always good. I'm looking for the Gnats to win. Tell me what happens. Yeah, you're not gonna be into it, all right. We need to record to scenarios one where we predict the Nationals win. Don't predict the Astra tonight. Phil can cut it up, Okay, Phil, Astros are definitely gonna win. I'm thinking probably four to two. Take a quick break here, Nationals definitely gonna win, thinking probably three to one or something like that. So either you like, I'm a big, big Nationals fan. Okay, I'll make that flawless cut that up for me. Thanks man. It's really this is the podcasts become more magical since Phil has joined. There's a lot of things that we can Can you just put any sound effect right here? Boom, yep, I'm huckle better. That was fun, right, that was fun? Yeah, that sounded great, unbelievable. Um. Last week we had Clay Nucome on. You guys all know Clay yep, and Clay uh said a lot of things, but Clay was he came from the camp of we should support all legal hunting. That was that was what Clay was a dream for, right, any legal method of hunting. We should We shouldn't give up anymore the shifting baseline theory, like we shouldn't give up any more of our culture because people don't agree with it. Guard the gate, Guard the gates, what he kept saying. Adam Smith wrote in and just said, um, a lot of things what he said. As for the most recent THHD with Clay nucom, I want to say I agree with the sentiment of everything you guys said, but the one thing I didn't agree with was clay statement about supporting every legal method of hunting, although I can't think of a legal method of take that I have a problem with. I would never ask someone to compromise their moral compass to support something I believe in. So that was most of that conversation. That he goes on to talk about trapping coyotes, which we're gonna talk about. Um, and so I think all all of today's topics are kind of woven into this topic. So, um, Sam, you want to give us your thoughts on compromise and hunting and legality and all that good stuff. Oh man, you told me to just think about coyotes. Yeah, but this is it's all a part of it. Yeah, yeah, I I uh, you know, I like Clay a lot, and I think he gives one of the most impassioned defenses of bear hunting out there and has at least altered my perspective UM and hesitance about hunting bears over bait and with hounds. Um that said, I I don't I don't think you should believe in something or support something simply because it's legal, because uh, laws change, governments change. Like that's as much in Flux as any other you know, any other thing in the world. But like, I think ethics are a little bit more steady. Um and I and so I don't. I don't think that's a good justification. I think things should be should be justified on their own merits, not simply leaning on the grounds of the current laws surrounding them. Yeah, he brings up Adam brings up kyote contests. Has been he has zero problem with prayer control, but he has problem with kyote contests, right, the optics of it, but also the practice of it. Right well, yeah, and and and for by by Clay's own standard there, I mean you could perhaps say that, like, you know, there are states that are trying to currently trying to ban coyote contests. I think New York and New Mexico could be wrong about that. But so if they go ahead and ban those, then they're illegal. Thus should you not support them? So like where where where are we drawing the where are we drawing the line with legal win and legal how? Um? And I think it's incumbent upon hunters too. Like laws, you know, we need to adjust to the changing times in the connected world we now live in and be cognizant of the optics of what we're doing. And um, I think I think everything we do as hunters needs to be defensible in a in a conservation um, in a conservationist light, and and some some things, uh, you know, veer a little bit more towards just kind of blood thirstiness and killing, and it's just it's it's less Uh, it's it's not something that it stands on shaky ground, I think. And so we need to be we need to be highly aware of that if we are to grow our ranks in persist as a culture. Yeah, there's a lot of it. My my feeling is we're always kind of moving and shifting what we do based on like cultural norms. And the thing accept that ideology is we're just it's uncomfortable to admit that. Right, there's things that we don't do that we're being done fifty years ago. I mean, we're not going to like gaff a shark and have like two gaffed sharks on the dock. We're just not gonna do that, Like we're not doing We're not doing that because we were We're snowflakes and we want to change how we think and feel. We're doing that because things are our world has shifted. We have perspectives have changed, experience has changed, like the natural world has changed. So we're not going to just kind of follow along with the same kind of like everything is legal, this is all good. We we've always done it, we should always do it. Yeah, And animal populations are fluctuated as well alongside those laws and and our ethics. And you know, take sharks for example, worldwide, their populations are greatly diminished, and so you know, while shark finning might have been you know, acceptable at one point, maybe it isn't anymore because it's pretty wasteful and there aren't as many of those animals as there once were. And as you'll hear from Dan Flores here in a little bit, he's talking about trying to understand the history of an animal. Right. For us to think that we could remove the coy out from any ecosystem, he feels, and I agree, it's pretty foolish. I mean, it's to remove any to remove predatory you know, canids from any ecosystem was was our was our idea. We came up with it. We said, let's get rid of all these things. We don't want the competition. And so then when they started to move back into places like the East Coast. Then we're throwing our hands up, like what what do we do? We kill them all? What do we do now? His argument, which is pretty is a pretty good one, is like the history the national world was never going to tolerate no predators, and so tis were just a vehicle for the regeneration of something that us humans decided that we didn't want their um for many reasons. And so that's a good start to that conversation. But I wanted to have us all here today because we all come from different places. Sam's from Montana. I'm from from Washington, Washington. Do you live in Montana? Now? Correct? When you grew up in the East coast, Anthony, you get to the west is all one? You don't know what states? We um trying to save myself there, New Jersey. I'm from Pennsylvania. Let me correct, let's let's actually correct that I'm just gonna stay from Montana, Pennsylvania, Maryland, South Dakota. I get one right, I got my own, like the damn it, das. I don't know where anybody's from Washington State, alright, jesus man, I don't know. I don't know where any I was close at least in each of my guesses, you got yourself right, got myself right? I think I have to think about it now. Anyway, we're all we're all from different parts of the country, UM, And growing up, we all hunted. We all, I'm sure have experiences of coyotes either having been on the landscape or moving back into um where we lived and where we hunted growing up. And so it's it's interesting kind of different experiences. And we talked with Dan a little bit about that being a unique experience. Kyotes are now in all the forty eight states. They'll eventually find their way to Hawaii, I'm sure, um. And and so we're not gonna reverse that. We're not gonna go back in time. I don't believe in reverse that things. But we've all lived in a generation where we saw, you know, at some level of matriculation of the kirot aross the country. So I think it's a it's a it's interesting to at least talk about that. So um I we did talk Dan and I talked about my first experience of seeing kayites for the first time when I was a kid, um and my Dad's saying, I haven't seen those around for a while. UM, that'd been interesting to me. So, Anthony, do you have first memories of when kaya started to Yeah? Absolutely, Uh. I grew up in a real world part of Pennsylvania and um always hunted. And when I was growing up in hunting in the late eighties and early nineties, UM, especially the beginning part of that, it was very rare to see a kyote or to hear one. Like if you saw one while you're hunting, you told everybody, you know, hey, guess what I saw kyo? Um, you know, And in the course of ten fifteen years, now I see kyos probably about half the time I'm out hunting. UM. So definitely, they've they've they've come into the landscape, and UM, there was a lot of concern about what they're doing to deer populations, and Pennsylvania has done a really great job doing h fond mortality studies. And you know, what's what's really interesting is what they found they've done these studies a couple of times, is that half of all fonds die from predators. From predator and mortality. And the big three in Pennsylvania are uh, bobcats, coyotes and black bears and black bears kill more fawns than coyotes do. Um. And it's funny because when people talk about the deer population and to cut to the takeaway, it's, um, it's not having a it's not decreasing deer numbers. Um. They feel that, you know, if deer numbers were down, that is not the way to manage it. It's just not very effective. It would be through hunter harvest. But it's funny. Um, you know, people worry about having too many kyotes, what they're doing a deer. Nobody says that about black bears. Everybody wants more bears, and the bears are eating more deer than the coyotes do. Yeah, it's all about what we think about the animal right. And Dan goes into kind of like some of the propaganda at the turn of the century later about you know, what do we do with kyats are to scourge to the west. You know, kayots are vermin, and that like some of that is baked into our psyche, right, so we think about them in certain ways. And it's it was interesting to me similar like we we have we tend to I think in hunting, and I made this mistake before of saying like all hunters are worried about balance. That's probably not true, definitely not true. I'm not a monolith. But when you see there was there's a public piece of ground and I hunted growing up, Well, there was less turkeys one year and more coyotes. We went turkey hut there and called in three kyots with a box. Call right, And so my my first inclinations we like coyotes man eating all the turkeys, killing all the turkeys, killing all the deer. We gotta shoot all the kyots, he used. We talked to a state game manager and he said the winner was terrible, was the worst winner in fifty years in that area. So winter kill was unbelievable for pretty much everything that that that walks up there. And so I was immediately, well, I saw kyots and no turkeys. Here's what's going on. And so I think we just maybe tend to apply that stuff to those situations because it just makes it makes sense. It may not always be true, and certainly in this case it doesn't seem to be. Um Spencer Mark Kenyon wrote an article for our website that got people a little fired up, and it was called should you kill coyotes while deer hunting. Um, there's a lot of reaction to that. Was there not? There was? And when we posted this on social we kind of pose the question that Mark opens the article with, and it's like it's opening morning, You're sitting in the deer blind and a coyote is at fifty yards? Are you going to shoot it? And that got a lot of reaction both ways saying absolutely and absolutely not. And I think that is like a strange question that is like a weird one where you will get passion response from both. Say, you were out deer hunting in the fall, and you also have a turkey tag and a turkey walks by, You're gonna shoot that turkey. But everybody says, yeah, you have a bear tag in. A bear walks about, You're gonna shoot that bear probably, But a kyo walks by. Um, it's like a lot of people on the fence. So that the pro being that or excuse me, the campus says absolutely for them, it's like the deer hunt now becomes a kyote hunt because you kill that coyote. Um, your goal is to have more deer and so you just got rid of something that is going to boost deer populations. It's like that's why people were doing people who didn't want to do it. Uh, the reward just isn't worth the risk that you've buggered up the rest of the morning. Um. You know a lot of people say the only thing worse than the smell of a coyote is the smell of a dead coyote. Um, So why would you do that on opening morning and potentially risk you know, the deer in the air of spooky Yeah, it's um you know. To me, I I've I've I've come across that scenario many many times, and I almost not almost, I don't think I've ever shot the kyote. Well, deer hunting because I'm deer hunting. I have shot coyotes. I have Kyle hunter, I've killed kyots. To me, that's a different kind of hunt. When I'm Kyle hunting, I'm calling him in. I'm It's a different thing that I'm doing, and I'm doing it for different reasons. Um. You know, it's it's a it's a different activity. And so that's why if I shoot one just while I'm deer hunting, I am afraid of messing up my my dear hunt. I don't know if it will or not. But it's also that's not why I'm there. If I want to go, uh hunt kyotes, I'm gonnahunt kyotes, not just you know, take one from a deer stand. Yeah, I mean there's some level of like are you are you opportunistic? But to me, it comes down to what when I read all the comments on social and we talked about this briefly with uh fucking Barry Gilbert keeps coming back, but Barry Gilbert and I just I just said, look, I don't think. I don't think in general, none of the hunters that I know have a hatred for predators, right, whether we're talking grizzlies or um coyotes or wolves or whatever. And his the connotation that he was laying out there was basically that we don't want the competition for the deer. We want to deal to ourselves. We want to kill all the deer. We don't want anything out there that's gonna mess with that balance. Um My, my general point was, I think we're all out there for balance. We went to the right number of cryouts, the right number of dear the right number you know, so we're not But I got hammered by a lot of listeners saying like, you're not right. Just go to the Arizona Face Hunting Facebook page and you're gonna see that there's a bunch of people are like, kill all the cyouds, more coyote contests, more hounds with for kiods, more whatever, whatever to rid this country of the scourage of kyods um. And you'll hear from Dan Floors what he thinks about that. But I'm interested in what everybody else that what you guys think about KOs? Why why is this happening? Well, I think I think something we should address, which I think is the elephant in the room in this discussion, is that the science is relatively clear that hunting for coyotes does absolutely nothing to lower their population, and in certain instance instances, there's there are there are like pure viewed studies that suggest that coyote hunting for for sport, not like for lethal removal, can actually boost pop populations because a lot of times you're gonna be killing the like the the matriarch of the patriarch of the area, which throws the rest of the population into turmoil, and and and we'll actually can actually boost um pop rates um, and and there's all sorts of there's all sorts of studies about that. I've had this conversation a million times with people, and and some hunters you just see their like eyes roll back in their head when you when you say that. And I'm sure that's happening to a lot of people right now, but I encourage you. I wish I looked up the studies beforehand, but I'd be happy, happy to dig that up again. Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure he does. But you know, and some people see it as you know, it's you know, kind of one to one, like you kill a coyote, there's one less coyote, Like how the math couldn't be more simple, idiot. But I've talked to a number of biologists about this and they're like, yeah, guys, it's it's the same with with wild boars, you know, where like a lot of states are banning board hunting because because hunters are bringing them in and hunters have zero effect on populations, because you go out and shoot three coyotes in a day, like there's you know that area hunting probably has fifty. Yeah. Yeah, there's a couple of things to that. We talked about then a little bit about mixed messages that state game agencies are sending, you know, and so you go to say Wyoming, where they'll pay a bounty for you to kill one, right, and there's other states where you still have to have a trapper's license to even hunt them, you know, which were classes going to the library and paying money to take the class. And so we you know, as a country, we kind of have a prescription for unglits and deer. We know kind of what we're gonna do. We're gonna survey a carry capacity, and we're gonna sign tags based based on a number of structures with coyotes. It's like it's a little bit all over the board we have. There is I'm sure within not only the biologist community, but within game manager communities and state game agencies different opinions about this. And it's clear based on what's out there as far as UM regulations, I mean, they're all over the place, and there was there was a time when I think I wanted to get it wrong in North Carolina had a bounty UM not too long ago. So I mean that's to me, as somebody who always has talked about our model conservation this one's kind it's thrown off a little bit because there isn't one way that this is handled. Yeah, absolutely, And and a lot of people in the in the especially in the context of what Mark wrote about, a lot of people want to give themselves a big old pat on the back for killing that coyote. And I know, I know guys who who, like you know, go out in a weekend in February and kill twenty of them and they are just high on life and they're like the saviors of hunt deer hunting in Montana. And and I think that that perspective is you know, is questionable at best, but many game departments are encouraging they are that and you know, and I think I think there are you know, there's also folds to this because some people are are doing it around calving time for ranchers, and ranchers will give you a pad on the back for for going out and hunting coyotes around their their birthing cows. And so there, I mean, there's there's a lot of different contexts we can talk about here. And and problem coyotes, Like if it's an individual you're targeting that's causing problems, then sure, maybe that that is beneficial to you or an agriculture. But you'll hear that later from from Dan Flores. He he feels like there are just like individual humans that are issues that cause issues that are individual or groups of coyotes that become problematic and to target those. He feels is um is proper based on balance and coaptation things like that. But for me, there's two two other points that we should talk about. One, we love it when the gloves come off, like we love it. I'm sorry, but people, humans, we have all these like value systems and structures build around killing stuff. Boy do we love it when somebody says kill them all? Like it is clear? And so I think that is that feeling is disc It is connected to like I'm a hero for killing a kid, right, So there's a connection there that you have to tell yourself you're doing it for this reason, regardless of what information surrounds what you're doing. It's like a mob mentality. Man. It's like when when people say there's no rules, they go smashing grocery store wind. It's the same thing. And then there's the other, like nature is metal idea that like we gotta let people know how terrible it is for a fallon to get ripped out and eating up by a pack of coyotes or whatever. So there's we we also want to like acknowledge predatory instincts and predators, the predators in the wild, and and how harsh that is and not not water that down. So when that engenders the feeling of oh, I shot a shot a coyote. I saved a fawn from this terrible death. Um, I'm there's mercy in that. So all that ship is wrapped up, I'm sure. And the more modern the issue we have with kayads, Yeah, it's like you're old. Okay, your season is only two weeks long, you have to get a tag. You can only do this, You can only do that for most of hunting coyotes all year long, no close seasons, it all night. It makes you think like, oh, yeah, you could do it at night. You could use electronic college, you could do all these things you can't do otherwise. So it just makes you think, um, well, jeez man, you know it must be okay, or you know there must be way way too many of them or something. If that's how the professionals are setting it up. And that's this how it goes back to I saw another hunting celebrities say the same thing the other day, like, if it's legal, we should support it rally around your hunting Brotherren. I'm cool. That's a real simple, real simplistic way to express hunting. Like it's easy to go. Yeah, who yeah, everybody's awesome solidarity And I get it, man, I get that feeling. I have that feeling too, But like you can't escape these issues. You're not gonna walk away from this stuff. But you know, to go back to where we started. It's like, you know, all based on the science and whatnot, there's lots of kai outs. Um they're not going away. They're part of the ecosystem. I don't think they should go away, but um, people want to hunt them. Great, you know that. I and as I said, I do a little bit of kyote hunting. Um, it's not going to have that impact positive and or negative either way. You know, we've done the right way. And I said, and I said this and just being flat honest to Dan, and you'll hear it. I just said, I'm at a point right now with coyotes in my own hunting where I have a question rather than an answer like my question is, yeah, I could shoot him. I've always shot him. I've shot plenty of them. I hunted for him specifically, I've called him in, I've done all these things. Um, I'm just at a point right now where i have a question like, what the hell if all these things that I'm hearing and reading about these period of studies and what Dan has to say are true. I'm just kind of question should I shoot him? And if I do, why, and when it's just more of a question than it is what what I used to think of not too long ago was like if I see one, I'll shoot it. I I'd like to I'd like to introduce a different kind of philosophical track with this. And maybe you covered this with Dan, but you know, in the context of hunting, Um, I'm not I'm not certain that that, you know, saving dear Fonds is like the only possible rationale out there, Like the way I've I've actually never shot a coyote. I've taken shots at them. I've also passed a lot of shots at them. I passed one with my bow that I had dead to rights a couple of weeks ago because I saw that it was nuzzling puppies. Um, so i'd like, you know, stopped, stopped me. But I've shot I've shot foxes, um and bears, and I think, um, I think for is has an inherent value approaching that of meat if you're going to do something useful with it. And I think that has a has a rich history in this country. It was for trappers that first, uh Cal and I the you know the West, and um, I've seen a lot of people do a lot of really cool stuff with coyote for and I think that is some justification. I don't know if it completely or not, um, but I think that is a valid is a valid used for it because because you know, another another thing people will say is like, well you do you eat it? Like okay, so then you know you you lose all rationale if you don't eat it. But I think if you're if you're using using a pelt, then that's that's still a valid use of that animal. And then you can divorce it from like this bullshit of like I'm saving the the the ecosystem by killing this kyo. No, it's like I wanted to kill it and I wanted to do something with it cool with it. Yeah, and it's kind of unique to kyotes. Like somebody doesn't trap beavers and then be like got one and just let it lay there. Walk away from a beaver. You always see dead Kyle's hung up on like a fence post or something. It's like it's like bow fishing, you know, it's kind of the same thing that. Uh, it's more about like the the activity and and the shooting and stuff than it is about the product that you have when you're done. It's kind of unique to like those two things. Yeah, that that, and I think there's you know, if you want to address the polls here, you got the kill them all kind of thing, and then you've got the hunters like I'm not gonna kill one because there's no purpose. I'm not gonna eat it. There isn't you know, there isn't this urge from the ecosystem to have me eliminate them. It's not really doing. And so there's there's those two poles. I'm somewhere in the middle personally, you know, like that's where I just just to be honest, I could raw Ross say. You know, hunting is killings is a tool for for game managers and tool for state agencies and we should continue to do it. I do believe that philosophically, but personally it's hard for me to just to look at a kid and think I better shoot that if I don't have in any tent. I think Sam's you know, point is important one man. I mean, I I hunt coyotes in the winter for um callment in calling calling them in, and man, I've my brother made a terrific quiver for his cedar arrows for his long bow out of one of the hides. Um others we skin out and will sell hide do not make it a lot of money, but like it's used. I mean the expensive Parker that I have that I almost want to put on now in October kyat rough around the Hood, you know, like, um, you know the first pretty magnificent Absolutely, yeah, it could be so beautiful. Yeah, And I think this. You know, these kind of conversations, especially when they're just boiled down and honest, can be kind of used from either camp. Either can't can pull it and say oh you you know you believe what I believe or you don't believe what I believe. But in this case, um, if I went out there and I'm like I want to make X out of fur, and I need to get three coyotes. Man, that's do that all day. UM, And I think trapping is absolutely necessary um and a good thing. And they're extremely hard to trap. Yeah too, I've got I've got a good buddy and uh down by Shardan Wyoming who does a lot of trapping. He gets several foxes a year and he's starting to get all sorts of stuff, getting good at it, and he still can't crack the code on coyotes. Yeah. Yeah, I think there's there's that element, right, there's the that's the value we have for for that, for that UM pursuit. And then the version of you guys, what do you guys think about uh? Dan Floors' version of it, where he feels like there's no reason to kill a coyote unless there's a problem with with it on a predation level, like it's whacking your calves or it's going into town. That's kind of what he I believe the number he uses, but he talking about, UM, what he feels like the proper prescription is for how we interact, you know, with coyotes on a level of when do we kill him in why so he he's saying, when they're a problem, shoot him if they're not leaving b I mean, I think, you know, if if you're gonna shoot kyotes, is how a reason to do it? I just I disagree with him. I hunt other predators, predators, I hunt bears. Um. I enjoy kyle hunting because it is challenging. Uh. I do skin them out and sell a fur. But I'm not gonna just shoot one and let it away while I'm in a deer stand thinking I'm doing some good. That why. I mean, you know, I just don't. I don't want to do that. I'd rather I've let kyotes go. I enjoy watching them, That's that's fine. Um, but I don't agree with that that, you know, there's no reason to hunt them. Spencer talk about you like you're a deer hunter. You're a Midwestern guy, right, you are every man? Yeah, you're from where you from, North Dakota, right, Yeah, Kyle hunting is like very much a part of the culture where I came from, because two big things in rural South Dakota are pheasant hunting and cattle farming. And so like my in laws are cattle farmers. And when it's having season and they hear a pack of coyotes and the shelter bell behind the farm. It's like a bit of dread there. And so to those guys, um, and to the people who enjoy pheasant hunting, whether or not, it's probably the same thing as the deer numbers that you kill a coyote, you're not saving a whole covey of pheasants or whatever. It's probably the same thing, um. But but in their head it's the math, like Sam said that you get rid of a coyote, you are saving a calf, you're saving a fawn, You're saving a brute of pheasants. Um. So it would be hypocritical for me to say that you should in kyot hunt because I've done it a bunch. I enjoy the hell out of it. It's like some of the most exciting van to trick a kayah and like see that then come running in and shoot it. It's uh so damn faun. So I'll do it. But I've like also in the last few years, been like this kind of feels wasteful, um. And it's kind of came to that with some bow fishing as well. I really like bow fishing. I don't feel that bad if I like shoot a carp or something like that. But if I'm just like killing a bunch of guar buffalo to litle bit different because like their native species, they're there, I'm not eating them. Um, So I'm like, man, I'm just like a wasteful person when I'm doing this. And so with coyotes, uh, I'm certainly more selective. I currently have four coyote hams and four kyle backstraps in my freezer. We're going to cook those at some point, and I feel like that's going to kind of turn me somewhere or the other like, oh, you can eat this, This is fine. So then it doesn't feel so bad when I go out and and kill a kyote knowing that I am not like helping mother nature or something. Yeah, I think that's that's a pretty good that's a pretty good analogy for or example of how kind of all we all feel. I mean, I grew up, Yeah, if you saw a kier, you shot one. And then when I got into the hunting industry, I got invited on a lot of kirot hunts, and I went on a lot of cloud hunts and had a great time calling them in, learning, learning their habits, understanding what they do. I mean, that's a pretty damn cool thing in and of itself, Understanding what the coyote is and what they do and why they do what they do. So, um, I think that's a pretty common I would say that's just kind of right where I'm at. I think that has a lot of validity. Yeah, and and and I think part of you know, what doesn't get mentioned in the context of predator control a good deal is that you know, you're you're kind of putting the fear of man in the in the population. And in my mind, that's part of the value of the proposed grizzly hunt, not to veer into even more uh, conflict written territory. That's what that that's actually the name of this podcast could be conflict ridden territory. But just fine. But but you know, like where where I grew up in in western Washington, we we thought that coyote hunting and and hazing was good to perpect people's dogs and cats and in you know, cattle ranching communities, like just ripping shots at them at seven yards I think probably helps those ranchers in some small way if they're doing it consistently to make those coyotes think twice about coming into the paddock to to mess with newly dropped calves. And I mean, I'm sure it doesn't do anything for pheasants, but um, you know they are they are very sneaky and they can be extremely bold. Um And I think in a lot of the you know, the suburban community communities on the West and East coast, um, more hunting and more pressure on them certainly could have a positive and impact for reducing um, you know, conflicts with pets and with people for sure. Yeah, yeah, there's a there's a lot of angles. We're gonna get to Dan Flores. He he brings a lot to the table in regards to this specifically, in my mind, kind of the history of the animal, some of our cultural ideas around the animal um and can give us a little bit better perspective in which to make these decisions. And that's the reason I wanted to have them in here because my personal feeling, much like Spencer saying it, because it's just shifted a bit over the years. It went from one one idea to another idea to now kind of a you know, a more nebulous feeling about the animal, and so it's good to have perspectives from folks like Dan. But first, Phil, first play the work sharp. Not a sharp moment, jingle, please work sharp. Not a sharp moment sharp so you don't have to all right. Number four not a sharp moment. We came last week. We had a breast injury, We had a skunk running, and we had truck stuck. Stuck truck stuck truck. Number four comes from Chad Holder. Chad, there is a lot of things, but I'm gonna kick it right off. He was born in Utah. Of course, he loved hunting and loved the outdoors. His one older brother, one younger brother. He's a middle child. There plenty of times he got picked on by his older brother, and he passes things down. Needs to say, there wasn't too many serious moments. There's plenty of laughs. The story begins in November. This is recent recent, not so sharp. Recently. My older brother had an antler list tag and a unit that I was somewhat familiar with, so I was asked to join on a three day hunt. First evening we saw a few elk, but it was too dark to go after them the next morning, not an elk to be found. That evening, we were driving to go check a new area and came across a herd of elk grazing in a clearing just off a dirt road. My brother jumped out of the truck and made his way to the small group of trees, too close to close the distance and take the shot. He picked out a cow, pull the trigger and missed. Second shot at three or fifty yards, he hit the cow. The herd took off and we made our way up to where she was standing. We found blood. We followed blood for five yards and could hear the elk in the trees. Decided to act out and come back in the morning because we weren't sure where the bullet struck. Devastated, We made our way back to camp and decided to heat up my sister in law's homemade mule deer chile with lapenos. That's where this gets interesting, Phil, I think it just sounds delicious gelapanos. Looking back, this may not have been the best meal choice to consume, knowing we needed to trail and elk the next morning, but as you know, a warm, hearty meal on the cold night seemed great. It still seems great. I don't see any problems with this meal. So far in the so far okay. The next morning we decided to pick up the blood trail, and I noticed the cow left the herd shortly after. We called it a night. Following behind my brother who had a rifle. We were about a half mile on her trail, with the wind blowing or right at us. Just then I got a whiff of something that smelled like something had died, But then it quickly went away. Not much after that, I kept getting a terrible smell. I whispered to my brother to stop. He looked at me as the wafting smell hit my nostrils, and I said, I smell something dead. My brother started to laugh harder than I had ever seen him laugh. I couldn't figure out why it was so funny. Apparently the chili had some kind of reaction in his gut that caused him to have the worst smelling gas known to the human man. What I was what was wafting in my nose was not the smell of a dead elk, but the smell of his rotting insides. It's one thing to have a sibling fart and you smell it. It's another thing when you have when you think you're being an amazing tracker, but all the while smelling something that came from another person's butt hole. Some detail there. Unfortunately, we never found the cow. She picked back up with a small herd of elk, and after trailing her another mile of no blood and just tracks, we decided to call it quits, even with what time left in the season. He punched his tag as to not be tempted to hunt again later. That's pretty cool, needless to say. When in the mountains, my brother likes to ask if I smell something dead. I now know that when I hear that question to not waft the air into my face. It's a good one. Play the jingle sh not so sharp moment so you don't have that was a good one. So chat holder, We're going to send you of work, sharp field sharpener for all your troubles. Send send me some of that chili. Yeah, Phil and I would like to get some of that hallapeno chili. Yes, please have that right here in the podcast studio. We'll eat it on Mike, Eat it on Mike and podcast where We're just wafting aired towards each other's faces. All right, we're gonna get to a great, great interview with a great great man. His name is Dan Flores. He wrote a book called American Coot Coyote on how you say it? Uh and in the West Coast. Kid here it's coyote coyote. Yes, it's not wildly coyotepe. All right, we're gonna go to Dan Flores a great interview. Listen up. I guess I grew up on an alder row. Dan. Welcome, Welcome to meet Eater. Thank you bad. It's a pleasure to be here. Since the first time you've been to I guess not welcome to meet Eater. That would be a improper way to introduce you, because you've been You've known Steven Ronella for quite a while, and you've been a part of the Mediator brand for for years. I mean I first listened to your podcast with Steve couple of years ago, back in you got to know a little bit about your work. But you have an interesting history all around. But I think we should briefly get to your history with Steve so you can come for off on that. Then you have some some story stories of post graduate Steve kind of what it was like to know the man back then. Our listeners will be interested. I'm sure to hear some of those stories. Well, I'm one of the rare people who has known Steve since the day when he was actually a graduate student. Um. I was at the University of Montana, uh, professor in the history department. Steve was graduate student in creative writing. And because I taught environmental history and especially the environmental history of the West, and he was interested in the things that I was doing, he uh took a couple of classes with me. I ended up serving actually on his thesis committee. Uh and uh it's kind of helped him get through graduation. But as I was telling you a little earlier, I mean, I, you know, Steve and I became friends back in those days. So I got to have a few uh sort of small adventures with him, meeting him at various bars in town and and uh listening to tall tales. I mean, we some of our early conversations. I had published a kind of a major article in a academic journal about bison, and he was already interested in a bison story, and so we would sit in bars and uh and drink beer and talk about Buffalo and where I think he was probably brainstorming his Buffalo book of that. But uh, yeah, he was an interesting, uh an unusual, almost eccentric graduate student who would invite you over for dinners to eat squirrel that he had peppered with a pellet gun in his backyard. And uh, you know, there were a lot of interesting people at the University of Mountain in those days, but I don't think anybody quite rose to that level. And I would, like I said, I've I've chosen to join that man in this venture. So it's good to have a little insight to what what he was before I knew him. But there's a lot of your history that we gotta get to. And like I was saying before, we hopefully folks that have either listened to the Joe Rogan podcast that you were on or listen to the Mediator podcasts that you're on, are generally familiar with your book Coyote America kind of your work in that realm. But what I wanted to do, maybe differently in this is just find a little bit about you and how you got to that point one when you met Steve, when you're deeply you know, immersed in the history of this country and like the wild places Florida and fauna, and how you got interested in that and why it became, you know, something that mattered in your life. And so it's all starts. You're telling me some stories about Louisiana. It all starts. And as a boy in Louisiana, where where were you born? Exactly? Well, I was born in a place that most of your listeners will have never heard of, a town called vivian Uh in northwestern Louisiana, which is just up north of Streeports. My family had been in Louisiana really since the founding of Louisiana. My first ancestors had gotten there in seventeen sixteen, so we've actually been there for more than three hundred years um. But we had moved. We had been in the Nakadash area, which is the original European town in Louisiana, so before years older than New Orleans. It's a beautiful area too. Yeah, it's really a pretty area. And so that's where my family was from, from Nackos. But we had moved during the thirties up to the Shreveport area because my granddad had gotten a job of standard oil when the East Texas oil field came in, And so that's where I ended up growing up in northwestern Louisiana, with East Texas about four or five miles away and Arkansas about about the same distance way, and it was kind of as a kid, I was always somewhat proud to be in Louisiana with its interesting colonial history rather than those other two places. Yeah, and it's got a rich is not only rich history, but a rich culture, you know that. Yeah, that we all understand kind of in the lexicon of of American culture as a whole. We understand like these these micro points that are very interesting. Texas has a very interesting culture, but I think Louisiana maybe at the top of the list. There's a reason that every reality show the Discovery Channel is dudes in Louisiana doing something. Oh yeah, those dudes are pretty far out for one thing. Yeah, it's got an interesting history. I mean it starts as a French colony. Uh, It's Louisiana is owned by Spain for about forty years. I mean a lot of people don't know that, but um, I mean when the United States requires Louisiana from France from Napoleon in eighteen oh three. Um, in order for Napoleon to sell Louisiana to the United States, he had to get it back from Spain two years earlier, because Spain had had it up until eighteen hundred. So it's got a very interesting mix. New Orleans was a kind of a cause of fault in place that attracted folks like San Francisco from all over the world. I mean there's an Irish quarter in New Orleans, and there's an Italian quarter, and so it's a it's always been a kind of an interesting mix of people and uh, with a lot of different languages spoken. I mean, Um, I didn't grow up speaking French, but two or three generations back in my family they still spoke French. They were Catholics. I mean it was the you know, the classic kind of Louisiana colonial world that my family came through. Yeah, and your your first kind of introduction to the outside world in Louisiana. I'm sure there's a lot of past you could take, But what do you remember your first kind of as a child, you know, insights into going outside doing things in Louisiana. Well, I remember, um, I remember having to in order to see out of the thickness of the forest. Uh. Finding a hill which I located when I was probably about seven eight years old riding my bicycle, I found one of the highest hills in the Red River Valley, on the edge of the Red River Valley, and I would go ride my bicycle to this hill, climb up to the top of it, and then climbed to the top of the highest tree on that hill so I could get above the vegetation and see out across the landscape, I mean, And that became kind of a uh, kind of a touchstone for me for many, many years, even when I was in college and graduate school. Almost every time I would go back to Louisiana to see my folks, I would go to that particular hill and climb up in that tree just so I could get a view of the country. Because I think what I was hungry for was what I ultimately found by moving to the west, which was a way to get to see the countryside spread out for miles and miles distant. And uh, I mean, there's there's kind of an explanation really in my own experiences as a kid for why that happened. When I was four years old, and I didn't find this out until I was about thirty eight. Going back to Louisiana to a family reunion, I mentioned to an aunt of mine that, you know, I'd just been fast and with the West and it dreamed about the West since I was four or five or six years old. And she said, well, I wonder if that had anything to do with the fact that we took you out to West Texas in New Mexico when you were four I and all of a sudden it began to come back to me. They were my earliest memories as a kid of being at the foot of big, towering red cliffs with a cobalt blue sky and these white cotton ball clouds in the sky, and I had I knew that landscape wasn't in Louisiana, and suddenly I realized it was because when I was four years old, my family had taken me to the West and that had given me a fascination I never really let go of. Yeah, that's interesting when you think of why, you know, why is you do these things? And what what about a singular visit when you were four years old? Of all the things in the four year old psyche that could attach itself to like your future motivations. Why is it that that that picture you just so well painted is exactly, you know, kind of what led you later in life, much later in life, becomes kind of a motive to go west. And I think probably, you know, as I've looked back on it and thought about it and tried to pull those memories up from my deep subconscious I think it probably had to do with the fact that that landscape was so dramatically different in the West than this green, verdant, densely vegetated world that I had grown up. Uh and in Louisiana. Yeah, And that's one thing that's it's interesting. I mean, you end up as a history of America, of the American West, professor of all these things coming from that talk about in Louisiana, your experiences outside, Like who drove those things for you? Was it? Was it your parents? Was it friends? Like? What what was the core of your of your going outside and being interested in the outside world when you're coming up. Well, part of it was growing up in a small town where the margins of the forest were within a couple of hundred yards of my parents home, and so as soon as they began as my parents began to let me, you know, venture out a little bit on a bicycle are walking. I mean, I immediately was drawn to the streams and the woods and the bayous that were just very easily accessible to a kid just walking fifteen or twenty minutes away from home. Um. It wasn't that my parents are grandparents were particularly outdoorsy. I mean my dad was. He was way into sports and uh and I mean and I played uh football, basketball and baseball in high school. And so I did all the things you know, that he was interested in, and that I was certainly interested in too. I had an older brother who was also, um, probably more interested in nature and the wilds than mom and dad were, and he provided a little bit of a kind of a an incentive to follow in his footsteps. But I mean he for example, when he was fourteen fifteen years old, he and his friends built a cabin out in the woods on my granddad's land a couple of miles away. And I mean I did the same thing when I was about that age. Buddies of mine and I were always roaming through the woods looking for a place to build a cabin. Uh. And we did that uh and we burned it up the very first night we stayed in it. But uh so, I think in a way, my brother probably played some role in in uh luring me out, But a lot of it was just the accessibility of it, you know. And I was in a town that was small enough that we couldn't even feel one baseball team in the summer a little too to play one another, And so you had to enter attain yourself pretty much. And I basically entertained myself by going out in nature and reading. I mean, I read a lot of books as a kid. I sort of I roamed the larger world through the pages of literature. I mean, we had a local library. Uh my dad became the librarian after he retired, and uh so I would read twenty or thirty or forty books every summer and and uh and mornings and evenings, and when it was a little easier to be outside and a humid, hot place like Louisiana, I would go out into the woods Louisia. I spent a lot of time in Louisiana. You setting my ass off. Do you you feel like we had a herpetologist last episode, Harry Green, we're talking about him a little bit at launch today. He talked about when I was asking him these same types of questions a little bit, exploring the genesis of his like wondering about nature, and he talked about picking up a box turtle and saying, mom, why doesn't have ears? And like that. It seemed to me that he was interested in the micro, the micro details of being outside. And maybe correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like you were more interested in the vastness, like the perspective that it gave, rather than maybe the intricate details. Is that true? I think that's probably true. Um, I mean I was. I was interested in the in the small details for sure. I mean because I I paid attention to two birds I found uh and very closely looked at the feather patterns and arrangements on flickers and meadow larks, and so I I was. I was certainly focused on my new details. But I think in terms of landscape, what I was endlessly trying to do in a place that was so enclosed was get a larger look at some of the patterns of the topography. And Louisiana was so dense with vegetation that it was hard to get that. I mean, you sometimes couldn't see more than a hundred feet through the woods, and it was you You didn't know you were climbing on a hill, for example, until you were halfway up it, and then you you began to realize, just as a result of the ascent, that the topography had changed. So for some reason, and I'm not quite sure exactly why I was intrigued by topography and views big views. I mean, I've sort of speculated in a couple of my books that it has something to do with, you know, genetic memories. I mean, I think people all over the world, because we evolved in on the African savannah, what we find really compelling everywhere in the world are open landscapes where you have herds of animals and predators and that sort of thing. And I think, without understanding why I wanted to do that, I always had this need to be able to see. Yeah, and when you do you know, a weekly podcast like I do you all we often repeat things, so I apologize the listeners, but it's the same as we We've taught. Had some conversations around human evolutionary biology, where like, why does a little kid pick up a rock? And why does it? Why is his first thought before he even thought about what he's gonna do with that rocky, it's hurling it through the air. Why is he doing that? Well? Because that's what on the African Savannah, that's how we first understood that we could affect things that weren't directly in front of us much the same way. So I think it's important to explore those thoughts that we've had when we were you know, you've you've written so much an impact that so many people, so many people this audience and others, about American history and about some some species, like the Code and in their history. It's important to understanding those things like why why you bent that way when you did? And I always managed somewhere in my books to get some paragraphs or pages have that ilk in because I think it's important to understand who we are as a species, because it helps us get a handle on our motives on why we do some of the things we do. One of your favorite from Coyote America your books was published one of the favorite passages, and you're talking about being in as a boy, being in suburban Louisiana reading the newspaper and you had you had an encounter with a couple of coyotes. Tell people about that one. Well, I was, I was, I think about thirteen years old. UM and so uh and this is probably this is this probably planted the seed of ultimately writing a book about these animals. UM. I had seen the year before Walt Disney. Um. It was called Walt Disney Presents. At the time, it hadn't quite yet become the Wonderful World of Color. But Walt Disney did the first to what became six of his coyote films in the sixties and seventies, and it was called The Coyotes Lament. And I had sat and watched it. It's this kind of hour long animated cartoon where Walt Disney's the size it. He's going to tell the coyote side of the story of American settlement. And so it's kind of a remarkable film. You can, by the way, Google it's on YouTube. You can watch it. Um. And so I had watched that. I was fascinated by what I had seen. I was fascinated with the animals. But of course the film portrays these animals as animals of the West. And you know, since I had been four or five years old. I've been intrigued by the West, and I had had the experience UH some time along then of UH driving with my folks down Highway one and UH south of Shreveport or north of Shreveport, I think, and we had seen a cane had run over on the road, and I could tell as we went by it wasn't a dog, And so I made my folks stopped car, I got out and went out and looked, and it was a gray fox. And I've been really intrigued by looking at this animal. In fact, I think I made Mom and Dad open the trunk and let me take it home, and I scanned it and made a rug out of it, and I was really intrigued by it. And so I mentioned to a local hardware store owner a few days later that you know, I'd love to see a fox out in the woods, and he said, well, you know, we just got this thing in It's only a couple of bucks. Why don't you buy it. It's a it's a call that sounds like a dying rabbit, and you could take it out in the woods and you might be able to call up a fox and see one. So I paid two dollars for this thing, and a few days later rode my bicycle out climbed up in this OTLD deer stand that I knew about, blew about three or four times on this call, not of course knowing exactly what a dying rabbit sounded like. But you didn't have to be too accurate with it turned out, because within about thirty seconds this animal comes trotting out of the woods about seventy five yards from me, headed straight for the tree I was sitting in, and I mean it was coming with a purpose. Its ears were up. I still remember these vivid sort of orange yellow eyes. Uh. It crossed through a clearing where the sun was shining, and I could see this kind of chestnut fur rippling on it, and I was absolutely thunderstruck by the side of it. And it got within about probably twenty ft of the tree, and I think some sort of down draft maybe took my scent to it, and all of a sudden, just as purposefully as it was coming towards me, it whirled and took off, loping back the direction it had come, and was in characteristic while cane and fashion, looking back over its shoulder, trying to discern where the danger was coming from that it had smelled, And so I watched this thing lope out of sight and sat there shake like a leaf for about three or four minutes, and then I climbed down from the tree and went home and wrote a letter to louising In Parks and Wildlife and said, I think I saw a wolf in Cattle Parish today. And I got a letter back about about two weeks later where someone in that department said, well, you might have seen a wolf. I mean, we think there might still be some red wolves up in that part of the state, but it's much more likely that what you saw was a coyote, because those animals are now colonizing Louisianna. And I thought, I mean, so I'm thirteen years old. I thought that was the most remarkable thing I've ever heard. These are animals from the desert. I already knew what are they doing in my home state and in the bayous and swamps around me. And so what that became was, as I began to understand the coyote story, what I realized was I had been I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time to witness this expansion of coyotes out of the West across the eastern United States, so that over the next you know, as I ride in Coyote America, they colonized their forty nine state and that leaves Hawaii out. They'll make it. They're they're figuring it out right now, I promise you know. They're probably stowing away on a ship and if they do, those those nine ays or not ever going to survive. But uh, they colonize their forty nine state in twenty which was Delaware in it's and that's what interests me so much about this. There's like an intersection in your life, my life, my father's life. It's just like this generate, this very unique generational story, and that I'm thirty three, you know, my generation is kind of coming up in the air where those states have been colonized. Your generation prior has kind of seen the colonization. But there's this interesting intersection between I would say our two generations where we've been able to witness the change in this landscape, the immense change of this landscape that's come from the introduction of the coyote in many places east of the Mississippi, you know, and I remember I have a story of a very small piece of steak ground in Maryland that we watched it be takeover by taken over by coyotes. We watched it over years, over decades, not realizing what was happening, but coming to later understand the impact that it had had, not really knowing it. And so that's why I think coyotes they are part of our psyche for a lot of reasons. But there. But I think those of us that are hunters or even just outdoorsmen that have seen this matriculation over these decades, or the less than less than that in some cases. Ah, it's an amazing story of the natural world and in our generational theme. Yeah, well, it's um their version of manifest destiny, except they went from west to east, and you know, and the reasons they did it are are numerous. But I mean, one of the fascinating parts of the story is that their range now not only encompasses all the provinces of Canada, Alaska, all the states of the Lower forty eight all forty nine UM or forty eight in the Lord Lord forty eight, but they have become the first mammal we think since the Pleistocene to cross the Isthmus of Panama and began to colonize South America. So their range now is more than seven thousand miles north and south. And when Europeans got here five hundred years ago, this was an animal that was confined to basically about from Mexico City northward into the prairie of Alberta and Saskatchewan, but probably not as far north as Calgary is. And so that that expansion has all happened since we've been here. Yeah, and you called the cody how like the original anthem of North America. Well, one million years that's exactly right. Yeah, and it and again it always just strikes me as excited to me about this conversation and about thinking about coyotes, how much has changed over the last decades. Well, it's uh, you know, what I tried to do with Coyote America was basically to tell the biography of this animal because I came to know over the years as I you know, my fascination obviously went back to the time I was thirteen years old and began to see them and understand that they were expanding their range. But over time, as I and I became educated, began to read intensively about the animals of North America, especially animals in the West Um. I began to realize that of all the creatures in North America, there's really not another one aside from us, aside from we human beings, that has a biography that can match this animals. And I mean it's more than five million years old. The candid family evolved five point three million years ago as a North American family. I mean, some of the great animal uh families of the world basically evolved in North America after the chickslob impact, the impact that destroyed the dinosaurs nearly completely fried life in North America because of the angle of the hit um. And out of that recreation of life in North America came the camel family, the horse family, the canted family, among many others, and so cana. It's all the canons of the world come out of North America, origins from five point three million years ago, and many of them leave North America go around the world. They go to Africa, they go to the Middle East, they go to Asia, they go to Europe. The coyote, however, is one of these North American canads that never leaves North America. So it is about as American an animal as it is possible to be. And as I began kind of brainstorming the idea for this book and and realizing some of these things, what I realized would make a book about coyotes and hopefully an important book for for modern people in the twenty first century, is that hardly any of us, whether we live in the west, the East, the south, the northeast, hardly any of us knows anything about coyotes. I mean, we know that Indians told stories about them, we know that they how we know that one used to fall off cliffs repeatedly on Saturday morning cartoons, and that's kind of about all anybody knew about those animals. And so I realized, as these animals are spreading across the continent into one new place after another, and people are seeing them for the first time, it might be an important thing not just for people who are seeing them for the first time, but even for Westerners who have been around them and haven't paid much attention to them, to actually know something about their story. And so that's kind of what I tried to do with that now, and it's done brilliantly, and they think there's so many things that are overlaid in the book, and then just in the subject of the kyo, it's natural history is one thing that I think you highlight that really doesn't that really isn't apparent to most of us. It wasn't to me at the time reading your book and being introduced to your work. I've spent my life outside and had experienced kais for the first time and at the same about the same age you did, and in kind of the same way, you know, like, what is this thing? Why is it chasing turkeys around that I'm trying to hunt? Why is it chasing the geese out of the field? Why is it? Why is this thing that doesn't look like it belongs here here? And then it leads you to learn other things, But the deep knowledge of the naturalistry of the cop just isn't there, for I think for most most hunters are most outdoors men. So there's that piece of it, But then there's you overlay on top of that the cultural significance with natives and then with our own weird popular culture and how it's kind of twisted and done all these things to the kyot. And if you start to overlay those and in your book does as well. You start to overlay all that kind of unpack it on. It's an it's an astounding account of the animal. It just really is. And I think it runs up against something that we briefly talked about. But the modern in the modern sense, the hunting audience. I don't know if you could break it up into certain camps, but there's certain individuals who see a coy out and think there's hatred, there's negativity, there's a lot of things emotions that are swept up because we hunt unglets, white tailed deer, moose, caribou, elk these are the things that we know intimately. We tellt our model of conservation as having recovered these things. And then so I think, very naturally, here comes this idea that here's this marauding kina that doesn't belong here, that wasn't here before, that's coming into compete with us on many levels, both you know, tangibly and sometimes intangibly, and so that's I think where we currently are, and so I think maybe we can work backwards to that. But we we had a lot of people right into a recent article we posted on the mediator dot com and it asked a pretty simple question for a hunter, which is should you shoot coyotes while deer hunting? And to me it's like, oh, that's a pretty simple question, but it evoked some pretty interesting responses in people. Um, A lot of them negative. And so do you have any feeling on you know, not you don't even have to dress the modern hunter, but like, what are the origins of these negative feelings and why might they be there? Based only you're not well? I mean, I think I can at least shed a little bit of, you know, a little bit of context on it. Um. So in the biography, I was mentioning before Europeans arrive with flocks of sheep and herds of cattle and hogs and chickens, in other words, before people with domestic animals come to North America, we have ten thousand years of native people in North America. And you have to remember at that time that the coyote is is west of the Mississippi River. It we have ten thousand years of native people everywhere that coyotes range, not looking at it as a competitor predator, but as a sacred animal that serves as a kind of an avatar, a stand in for humans in the world. So I mean one of the In fact, it's the first chapter in Coyote America, which is called Old Man America. Old Man America is the coyote. It's the the lead subject, the lead literary figure in the oldest literature, the oldest stories from this continent, the oldest stories we have from North America, which I think probably go back to the end of the Plaza st ten thousand years ago, are of a coyote deity who serves as a stand in for humans. And so thousands of these stories, by about a hundred and twenty years ago are preserved through oral tradition by native people, and hundred and twenty years ago start getting collected by anthropologists and ethnographers and become the basis of this coyote literature that we have. And in none of those stories do native people seem to resent that the coyote occasionally kills a fawn or certainly, I mean most of the rock art that you see of coyote with prey, it's usually small prey. It's usually rabbits or something like that. But I mean Indians are clearly aware that coyotes kill fawns and they'll kill big horn sheep, lambs, and it's difficult for coyotes, even in pacts to kill large animals. I mean they're not these are not very big animals. Uh. Coyotes are you know, thirty thirty five pounds at least in the West at the most. But there's not a sense of that among native people. When Europeans come over though, with domesticated animals, I mean, Europeans arrived without any preconceived notions about coyotes because there aren't any in Europe. But Europeans know about wolves, and we arrive with this many centuries deep antagonism towards wolves, and as soon as we land on the Atlantic shore or in the desert Southwest or California in the case of the Spaniards, everybody kind of begins to make war on the wolf population. But we kind of don't know exactly what to what to think about coyotes for a while. But to me, the the negative attitudes that I think a lot of people sort of have inherited without thinking about the origins of them, with respect to both wolves and particularly coyotes, I mean, the wolf negativity. They go back centuries from European origins handed down from you know, from family to family over time. But with coyotes, I think the negativity actually goes back to the Bureau of Biological Survey and its public relations campaigns in the twenties and thirties when wolves have been taken care of, and the Biological Survey, which is the federal agency that's going to quote solve the predator problem for for people who are raising stock, decide that the coyote is actually the arch predator, and so they put out just one canned newspaper article and one pamphlet after another arguing that coyotes are vermin and actually convince Congress to pass an act in that gives the Biological Survey ten million dollars to try to eradicate coyotes in North America. And so I think a lot of people today, I mean a hundred years later, have kind of absorbed that public relations campaign from the nineteen twenties, thirties and forties where a government agency was trying to convince the American population that this is an animal that deserves to be eradicated. Now you know people who So I did a talk in South Carolina a year or two ago, and everyone there was really concerned about coyotes being recent arrivals in South Carolina and killing fauns and making it more difficult for hunters to to get their deer during the deer season. I will say that they're in most of the Eastern States. In the Southern States, the argument is the coyotes a brand new animal on the scene. Uh, it's an invasive and intrusive animal and it's screwing everything up, and so I have an additional reason to be piste off at coyotes. I'll also point out that in the West, hunters don't regard coyotes as an invasive, brand new animal, but they often I was gonna say, there's there's so many things that are paradoxical about the way we see coyotes, and I think you've just laid it out well right there. The totem of the coyote is the jokester, the trickster, like the sly creature. But then there's also the and the paradox is it's also this evil, marauding, go anywhere, adaptable predator. And as you say, there is a bounties There has been in the past bounties on the coyotes set by state fishing game and Wyoming, but also in North Carolina, for example, and in Utah. And so as a hunter, when you're going around traveling around, you certainly see, you know, an aggressive stance taken by our state game officials on these animals. And so within the way that we think about hunting, that's we kind of would follow that, you know, and all sense in all senses of the world follow the idea that, well, if they're paying us a bounty to kill him in Wyoming, we better kill everyone that we see well, because we're doing good for for the state, and the state bologists are telling us this is right. So I mean, there's there certainly has been a paradoxical expression within the hunting community, but the culture at large is it's amazing. Well, the culture at large, I think, um and I think the hunting community falls into this category, has not been keeping up with the scientific literature about these animals. And that's part of it. So you know, I'm not going to say that, Okay, a hunter who sees a coyote trot by when he's in a deer stand and shoots it is engaging in a wrong headed act because I think relying on the knowledge that we've handed down over the last several decades, that would be the logical thing to do. I mean, I I argue in Coyote America that, how however, if you keep up with the modern literature on this animal, what you quickly realize, uh, and you don't have to read a lot of it. But what I'll just offer one example to the Utah example. But what you quickly realize is that the supposition that coyotes are making it more difficult for you to get your deer in the fall is likely unfounded, and shooting one that's trotting by under your dear stand basically is um, it's an act that really is not warranted by the science. Is there something there, an analogy that you would use to to give people to understand like how this is actually going down? Because I think we're talking about this earlier. I think as these ideas that you're speaking of are introduced, like here, hey, here's a study that says this about kids, shoot more, get more. That the kind of pushback that you would expect from you know, the core belief systems around KYO is there. It's like, WHOA, don't try to tell me, well, yeah, and so I mean as I said in Utah, Utah five years ago passed a mule Deer Protection Act, And so Utah is giving hunters, uh people, anybody who shoots at coyote. You don't have to be a hunter with a license. Anybody who shots a coyote gets a fifty dollar bounty if they present it to a state office under the Mule Deer Protection Act. The irony of the passage of this mule Deer Protection Act, and so far the last figures I saw are about a year old. But but a year ago, four years into the passage of that act, Utah had bountied thirty eight thousand coyotes under the Mule Deer Protection Act. The irony of the passage of that act by the Utah legislature was that it came within a year of the publication of a major study that had been done in nearby southeastern Idaho, the bordering state, that argued over a ten year study that coyotes actually play little, are virtually no role in mule deer demographics. That coyotes, to be sure, may end up killing a few lambs as a result of severe winners that weakens the herd and weakens lambs and makes them easier to catch, but that coyotes don't really have any effect usually if there's not a severe winner on mule deer populations. That study was published in a major journal a year before the Utah legislature passed this act, and either they weren't aware of it are they just decided, which, of course is something that we tend to do a little bit these days. I don't like that science, now I don't. I'm not gonna believe that science, and so I'm gonna go ahead and do what I wanted. Yeah, we've driven ourselves into like this weird skepticism culture, where well, that's that scientific journal must have had a they must have had a reason. Sure they had a bias of some kinds. And when they're like, when they're doing that, are they talking? Fawn recruitment is the major factor in all those things? I mean, because that's that's the picture of the kite that we normally get. They're they're killing fawns as soon as they hit the dirt. They're praying upon fawns when at crucial times in the season, crucial times and their maturation. Is that really where this comes down to like is fawn recruitment that like damaged that much by kyo wellulation. According to this study and some of the first studies that were done on coyote predation on game animals by the Murray brothers in the nineteen thirties in Jackson Hole and in Yellowstone Park, the Mury brothers argued and the the people who did this study in Idaho followed the same line of reasoning. The truth is, we've got a myopic view of the history of North America. We from European backgrounds have only been here for five hundred years. Somehow, coyotes and mule deer coyotes and bighorn sheep coyotes and white tailed deer coyotes and prom horns have affected a symbiotic balance between predation and pray that has lasted. Coyotes evolved into their present species a million years ago, so it's lasted for a million years. We've only been here five hundred years, and we've sort of arrived with the idea that, Okay, we're gonna fix everything that's wrong with North America, and one of the things we're gonna do is to get rid of the predators. When we're actually we actually introduced ourselves into a system that was a million years old. I mean, I'll give you an example with prong horns. How prom horns deal with coyote predation. Prom warns, of course, as adults have no no predators because all their predators died out in the Pleistocene. Prong horns can run sixty five hour and coyotes and wolves can only run forty three miles an hour, So adult pronghorns can get away from anything that chases them. But what coyotes do do is prey on funds, so prom horns long ago developed the ability to survive that predation. They have twins with the idea that the coyotes are probably going to get one and I'm going to get one up to replace me in the genetic streame. Uh As. I've written a couple of times about this. It's the prong horns strategy as an air and a spare, and the spare is probably the one that the coyotes are going to get. So what I think, in a way is happening with the hunting community and this lingering animosity, which is obviously old, because what hunting is is it's actually being a predator. And if you're a predator, you resent other predators getting involved in the game. But what I think has made it particularly pronounced in North America is that by a hundred years or so ago, we had eliminated all the predators, and when we created our modern game laws and bag limits, it was based on the idea that human predators would replace the natural ones, that humans would replace cougars and gray wolves and coyotes and whatever else you have out there. And so we sort of went from the early twentieth century until just the last couple of decades in this completely artificial situation where the natural predators of North America were so beaten back that we had no competition. And now that the predators are coming back and we're getting back to what is actually a more natural condition, everybody is screaming and bitching about so the wolves are going to get my elk. But what we've been used to for the last tunder of years is something that's not natural. It's been artificial. So how do you you know? Because I think there's so much fervor around this and both on all I think on all sides here, and what I like about American coyoty and what I like about the way that you approach it is here's the history of it, here's where we are, here's where we're going. I think that I think that makes it strikes a chord with me, and I hope strikes chord with anyone who has read it or will go on to read it. But like in creating a balance, because what I we had a gentleman on the podcast a couple episodes ago that was was charging, what we're talking about for hunters, Hey, all hunters hate predators. And my my response was like, I know a lot of hunters and I don't know any of them that hate predators, and and that is true. And I got criticized by a lot of people that said, hey, listen, you're not addressing what's out there, this reality that there are groups of hunters that do feel this way. So I said, okay, that's a fair comparison. So I'm glad we're having this conversation. My point is, as a hunter in the modern sense, wherever in my time that I have to be a hunter, I feel that balance is something that I'm trying to achieve in all of my activities. And I would hope that those that are setting game regulations, are thinking of those same things. I know that they are in most cases, and so thinking of like starting with the core belief of balancing these things because we have to balance them. They're ever changing, right as you said, they're changing all the time. Our generation will deal with coyotes and the prior generation did not have to. And so how do you what's the balance there? Because I don't I don't know that I've ever heard you or read anything where you said like, let's quit hunting predators, or let's quit hunting coyotes, or let's let's not touch him, like there's some version of balance here that kind of sets us in a course for the future. Yeah, well you've never read that, because I've never written that, never said anything like that. Um, I'm not any hunting in any way, including uh, including predators, particularly because of the simple fact that one of the things biology is teaching us about animals like wolves and coyotes, and coyotes are a particular example of this is they're they're extremely individualistic. And the studies that I used in writing Coyote America pretty much indicated that about ninety of the coyote population they're very good citizens. I mean they most of what coyotes do, the great majority of what katies do in the world is beneficially humans in the broad sense, and most of them are very good citizens of the natural world. But there are four or five, uh, sort of about the same percentage of humans that tend to get into trouble, about that percentage of coyotes. Uh. Individual sick as they are, will develop bad habits, they'll get into trouble. Sometimes they'll you know, a coyote will decide that it's going to kill every housecat that it can find. Sometimes a coyote will specialize in killing fononts. And so my thinking about that, and I think this is the way most of the coyote management programs that have been set up in most urban areas where coyotes, of course have become a prominent feature in the last few decades, is based on this principle that what you do is you leave the good citizen animals alone. If there is a problem one, you take care of it. You you remove it from the population in some way, and that's usually by shooting it, by taking it out. But the majority of the animals are not going to get into trouble, and so the you know, I've heard people say, I've had people say to me, Okay, so a coyote. I think a coyote. In fact, I tell a story about a Novajo guy that I met when I was floating down the Grand King and a few years ago, and he told me this coyote story about he lived and lives in Bluff, Utah, and uh, a coyote was getting into town and it was chasing dogs and it was killing sheep, and so the local Novajo chapter leadership told him to ask Marcus if he would take care of this animal, he would take it out. And he puts his rifle in the gun rack in his truck and he's driving around the dirt roads around Bluff one day, and son of a gun, this coyote comes trotting out right in front of his truck, and so he slams on the brakes, and when the dust settles from the truck stopping, the coyote is still standing there right in front of his truck, twenty feet away, looking right at him, and so he's reaching up to get his rifle down. I mean, and I won't go through the whole story that I tell it's a uh and I tell it in the words that he he described it to me as we were floating down the river. Um. But he ultimately ends up not shooting that animal because of two things. First of all, he thought, I'm not sure this is the right one, you know. I mean Indians suffered in their history in America. Some Indian got into trouble. The cavalry goes out, and the nearest Indian village they can find, they right into and shoot everybody in sight, even if they weren't involved in the depredation of the crime. And so Marcus's idea was, I'm not sure this is the right coyote. It may not be, and I don't want to shoot an animal that's that's not the one that's causing trouble. And the other thing he realizes as he's looking at it is that, man, this thing is gorgeous. Look at it. It is completely confident. At one point, it turns towards him and yawns at him and in just sort of nonchalantly walks off the road. And his take on it was, I'm getting to witness something really beautiful and really wonderful in the natural world. And who am I to erase it and take it away. Why not just enjoy the delight of getting to see something really beautiful happening in nature, rather than killing it and draining all the romance out of the world in some single act that, as he said, I may end up regretting if I do. Yeah, And I think that's I. This is only I only speak for me personally. Like I said, there's plenty people out there to have a more hardened view in the cull ups of hunters than I do. I think if I would, if I were to assess my current state of being when it comes to coyotes, it is more of a question than it is a statement. It's like, what is my role right as a hunter? I? Oh, I trust our model. I trust that my role within hunting an elk or hunting a deer, it it's a model that's worked. It's an equation that has an answer, and I kind of know where it's going. So just for me personally, I think right now, my question be like, where do I fit in as a hunter? I have the ability to take out every kio it was within range? What do I do you know? I've I've certainly been on plenty of ranches in Texas or like in Georgia one time where it was like, if you see the lantern when you sit down on the trees, and I said, listen, if you want to hunt deer here, you must shoot every kid you see no questions. I asked. If I find out you didn't, we're gonna have trouble. And so I've been through those kind of situations. I don't feel bad in shooting a kioude if I if i've I've thought it through, just like I've thought anything through when I kill it. And so, but when I think about your book and kind of what you posit, I want to what's my role? And that's like I said, that's just me personally. I think there's plenty of other people that can say, well, yeah, I appreciate you saying that, Ben, And so, I mean, I guess what I would say is that, uh, it's everyone's personal decision. Um. If it's me sitting in the deer stand and a coyote walks by, I'm putting my rifle down and marveling at the animal. Um unless somebody tells me this is a coyote. That's you know, it's somehow developed, you know, a need to kill every ranch dog within twenty miles and it's got a particular marking that you can recognize, then I might, you know, maybe I would do, uh, do the deed and take it out. But um, personally, I'm not going to do anything like that. But I think it's a decision that everybody has to make. I guess what I'm saying is, know something about these animals other than what you've just absorbed by sort of you know, information handed down or sort of street legends or something urban legends. And don't fool yourself that you're doing something that scientifically and ecologically viable by taking out every coyote that you see, I mean, in a place like Georgia, the reason those coyotes are there is because we got rid of all the red wolves. I mean, in the original natural situation in Georgia seventy five or a hundred years ago was that if you went out and hunted whitetail deer, you were hunting deer in a place where there were also wolves that were taking out deer. And that's how nature is supposed to work, when it an entire heaven and an entire earth, is throw said, But when you extract the predator from it and then get used to they're not being a predatory. Point. Yeah, it's hard to kind of bitch about the fact that, well, the predators from the west are going to fill that niche if they have the opportunity. And so when people tell me, well, you know, everywhere in the South, I'm going to kill every coyote, I c uh, it always makes me think, well, you know, a hundred years ago, you'd have had wolves here, and so that's why there wouldn't have been coyotes in the woods. And I think, like, like we said earlier, there was a moment in time which I was kind of a part of where it's like, they're coming in, they're here, Like, what do we do that they're here? Now you know they weren't here before they're here, Now what do we do kill them all if if they're going to have a negative effect, because what are they coming here to do? Not coming here to play sports and go to the library, coming here to kill and pray upon the things that we've worked hard to kind of balance and and grow. So there was that moment. I think it's probably an honest moment to be they're here, we got to figure something out. But now, but now they're everywhere, so that we're past that moment. It I mean, you're right, that was a moment, but that was a moment of a specific couple of generations, because a generation or two back from there, what you would have been seeing was well, fewer and fewer wolves all the time, fewer and fewer wolves. There should be wolves still here. And then finally we reach a period of two or three generations where while there are no wolves at all, and we got used to that, but that's not the natural world of North America. It's just not natural for us to have no predators on the continent. That's what we managed to create for a while, and everybody got pretty used to it, to be sure. And so now having to confront the fact that predators are back, you know, we're kind of that's super interesting, man, to think about it that way, because then in that scenario, the coyote come becomes the symbol of what of like taking it back. It's the rewilding of the East and the South. I never really thought about that way, but it's like it's there's there was always predators. There was always going to be predators. We did a nice job within our manifest destiny time of kind of of changing the way that everything works. But nature has its way of like, hey we have this animal, Oh we know, we know who can do that job. Coyotes go on. It's that line from Jurassic Park. No, that's that's if you're looking at it with an open mind. You have to see that. You have to and and go at it if you if you're approaching it from that angle, then you're approaching it with an open mind like, hey, look, this was always going to happen. What we got used to is not. It's it's natural for us. But we choose like periods of time as native even natural. We're just choosing periods of time here. But when you look at a million years, that's that's the full boat as far as well we can really you know what the context provides. Well, that's exactly right. And I mean that's how I try to when I write about animals in in Coyote America or in the other book that I published a couple of years ago, American Serengetti, which is about you know, these big animals that we had on the American Great Plains that we lost and we don't even have a historical memory in the United States of only a hundred and twenty five years ago we had a beast sheary in the central part of the United States that was comparable to that of Africa, and we don't even remember that it was there. But that was the largest destruction of animal life anywhere in world history that I was able to discover when I was writing that book. I mean, we took out thirty million bison and fifteen million prong horns. I mean it just it's five to six million wild horses, even in order eradicate this beast area from the American Great Plains. But if you understand, you know, being a hunter or being somewhat observing the natural world in the context of a bigger history than just the immediate time frame that you're in, then suddenly all this starts making a kind of a sense that you've you've never thought of, and we tend to think about hunters is being okay, this is a timeless tradition that we've always engaged in. I mean, we came out of Africa as hunters, we spread around the world as hunters. This is something we've always done. Well, we need to think about the animals in the same way. Not just Okay, I'm a hunter. I come from two million years of evolution out of Africa. But all I can think of is this five year or ten year period that I happen to be hunting deering. Yeah, and you'll find our will find ourselves as hunters tradition. I think talking on both sides of her mouth when that's concerned, you know, in defending hunting, it's like, well, we've always done this. This is our blood, it's in our blood, it's in genetics to do this. And at the same time we're like, well, you know we want I want big bucks. Well here's what I gotta do to get that, And so you end up kind of wanting to use the pro side of hunting being really what made us and a lot of sense has made us who we are and what we are in the sense of human evolution. But we can't then just address wildlife in the natural world and conservation in the context of only the time in which we live. That's yeah, that's that's certainly my point. Yeah, I think that's I think it's worth repeating just because it's it should there should be some profundity in it for anybody who really cares about in the ecosystem, past, present, future or whatever, you know, because it's it's a relationship that we all have that's important. Which it was just another part of, you know, of hunting being in nature. Uh what we always think, what we argue when when you defend hunting, one of the things you say is that, Okay, much sch of it is about being outdoors, being engaged with with nature, being engaged with animals, and so it's bigger, a bigger thing. I think it should be a bigger thing than just Okay, I shot an eight point white tail last week. It should be about seeing Jupiter in the sky before the sun came up, and hearing woodpeckers banging on hardwood trees, uh in that twilight, and hearing squirrels chattering, and watching a red tail hawk come over and swoop down on something that you can't quite tell what it is, and and seeing a coyote trot by. And I mean that's all a part of the the whole of being out there. It's not just the act of pulling the trigger and dropping the animals. Ay man, Yeah, I think there was a tern that that's been used around me a bunch lately, and we've been working on what I was telling you about the back forty project we were working on of Michigan. And there's a term we heard from a bunch of people kind of in a confluence ecosystem services, And I used that in the last episode we're talking about snakes. But for whatever reason, that term and the idea around it helps me understand different species. And it's like each thing has a service to the ecosystem and to erase any one of those things is to eliminate that service, you know. And so can we take people through kind of what that is for kyles, Like what do they bring to these ecosystems? Well, are they occupy the niche of the mid size predator, which is present all over the world. Um jackals occupy that niche in Africa, in the Middle East and increasingly Europe because jackals, which are fairly closely related to coyotes, only split from them a little more than a million years ago, especially the golden jackals, And I've seen like golden is very similar, very similar. They look very much like coyotes, and they are expanding through Europe. Uh tasma An and devils in Tasmania occupy the niche of the excuse me, the mid sized predator. Everywhere in the world. Every ecology has developed, uh, a large predator for for large prey, a mid sized predator, and smaller predators like minks for example, and weasels and things like that. But there's always a mid sized predator everywhere that nature has evolved to fill all the normal niches. And so those midsized predators, uh, they keep a balance, for example, in terms of the numbers of skunks and weasels and raccoons remain lower when the mid sized predator niche is filled. Uh. Every place that we've come close to eliminating coyotes, and and the truth is, of course, as people who read my book will understand, it's essentially impossible, as a result of the peculiar evolution of coyotes alongside wolves, to rem move coyotes, which is another part of the shooting them. You may think you're doing good, you're actually even in that sort of practical sense, you're not doing so. But the niche of the mid sized predator is critical in nature, and so uh, as I said, there's kind of nowhere around the world you can find a place where there's not an animal that occupies that niche that the coyote does here. Now, that's a great way to look at it. And what do you think about trophic cascade? Is that something that like I've heard it use and I've heard it decried. I've I've kind of seen that term bounce around. You have a perspective on that, well, I mean one of the ways to to watch it, uh and see it in action. We should explain, I'm sorry, explain what that is first. The trophic cascade is what happens in nature when a species is removed from its niche. And the one that most of us are familiar with these days, because you can, of course go on YouTube and see examples of it, uh, is the removal of the gray wolf in the West and particularly in Yellowstone National Park. So gray wolves the last gray wolves are killed in Yellowstone in nine so there are no wolves in Yellowstone from when we reintroduced them, uh, period of seventy years. It's that's a very useful period, by the way, and I devote some time to it for coyotes in Yellowstone because coyote evolution alongside wolves is what has given them coyotes their wariness, their intelligence, and their ability to survive almost anything that wolves are humans can throw at them to try to diminish their numbers. They evolved a number of adaptations that allowed them to survive wolf harassment that when we started harassing them, they began to employ against our efforts too. But that period of seventy years where there are no wolves in Yellowstone but the coyote population is there, one of the things we realize is that when coyotes are not harassed and not persecuted, their population doesn't just keep growing and growing and growing so that they spill out of Yellowstone and and just run amuck all over the whole West. Coyotes, like most animals, rise to the level of the carrying capacity of the landscape, and their numbers don't really grow beyond that. So one of the things that biologists who were studying coyotes and Yellowstone during this interval when wolves weren't there realized is that, wow, the normal litter size for coyotes is about five to six pups. But in this situation where coyote numbers have risen to the level of the carrying capacity, they're only able to get they may have four or five pups, but they're only able to raise a couple because there's just not the space on the landscape for any more of them. But the trophic realization, the trophic cascade realization comes when we reintroduce wolves back into the park. And when wolves gray wolves get back into Yellowstone, the population of coyotes, and this is sort of the way trophic cascades work all the way down the line. While coyotes were there and wolves were not, we think the numbers of raccoons, skunks, and weasels probably went down, and even foxes probably went down because of the effect of coyotes rising to the level of the carrying capacity. When wolves come in, the number of coyotes drops by nearly fifty in Yellowstone. That allows the number of weasels, minks, skunks, and raccoons to rise. And of course the other effect it has because prey animals, their instinct about predators is unless they have been culturally trained to flee, they don't really flee predators. And we had several generations of elk in Yellowstone National Park that had not learned what to do when wolves come back on the landscape and elk basically stood around and let wolves just run them down and kill them one after another. But when wolves finally did start scaring the crap out of the elk population in Yellowstone and of course lowering their numbers as a result of predation, that began to produce an effect on the plant community, so that suddenly you've got cotton woods and aspens able to grow again when elk herbivory had basically kept those species almost cropped down to the point where they couldn't replace themselves. So the Yellowstone with the wolf recovery has provided this kind of remarkable look at a landscape that when it's complete it looks like this, but when you take one animal out or another animal out, it changes the whole landscape, even down to the plant communities. Yeah, that's so compelling, And and the coyotes like where it sits and all. This whole story kind of to me is painted well both in that but in also like we went through at the turn of the century and on into what we'll call, I guess we could just call like the conservation and recovery period of our hunting history if we can market somehow. It's like we we've we wiped out a lot of things. We established some principles and practices and ideologies that would help us bring those things back more in certain landscapes than others. Right, We've picked yellow stone in other places to kind of have these havens, and now we're kind of there, like in a lot of ways with unclos were in the best of times. You know, there's more white tail deer here than wind. Columbus put a boat down, didn't know where he was. We're so we we've have to kind of I think I've been thinking this lately. We kind of have to start to adjust the way that we we look at things were no longer our model of conservation is no longer helping to recover many of these things. It's looking at like, how do we manage what's here, keep it where it is, provide balance, and then allow some of these things that we've we've extrapated to come back and find a way to be and hopefully, hopefully hunting can can help facilitate that in a way that makes sense. And that's where we get to some of the arguments that we have and we've had over grizzly bears and gray wolves and things like that. So I think if you can maybe come into it with like maybe an honest I don't know if you agree with that kind of characterization of where we are, but like, if we can come to it with sort of an honest look at kind of the current state of being, that maybe we could address it better. Because there certainly is a lot of fervor and a lot of anger around predators and what we do with them and in the roles of of us. Yeah, there is. I think we're getting there though, and I have I have great, great hopes for coming generations because I think the coming generations if they if they read uh, and if they pay attention to good science, uh and read science, and because what science basically is, it's for people who are outdoors. It's woodcraft, it's mountain craft, it's river craft. It's I mean, as I was telling you earlier today we were having lunch. You know, one of the experiences I've I've been getting to enjoy and doing talks around the country about both the Coyote Book and American Serengetti is having uh people who are wilderness guides uh come to these reading events that I've been doing and basically saying man, I've been absorbing the stuff from your books. I heard about you. I learned about you from Joe Rogan podcasts or Stephen Ronella podcasts a Mediator podcast, and I got your books, and I've been absorbing that information because it's giving me additional woodcraft and mountain craft. And so, I mean, that's really kind of what science does. If you absorb it and incorporated, it makes your experience of the world out there that much richer that you suddenly began to understand how it works, how it's worked in the past, how we changed it without I mean, we didn't know what the hell we were doing when we were getting rid of all those predators. We just were employing the European standard of you know, you wipe out the wolves. That's what they did in Europe even years ago. So we just came to North America and did the same thing without really understanding what the consequences were going to be. And now we're getting an opportunity to, you know, to experience the whole enchilata, the entire heaven and entire earth work like yours is. Like it provides some some level of empowerment to someone that's looking to make these informed choices. You know, we've I've had folk on the podcast. Had a friend of mine due Shawn's Mentana on the podcast that was grew up in Czechoslovakia, and he talked about this idea of hunters being this this great source of knowledge because they were the selectors. They were the ones going out into the wilderness and decide like they had to take stock of everything that was in the woods because they had to understand what the selective was not the select and they had this great responsibility within not only like the smaller communities about it, in the greater culture. It's in. We have some of that still, but it's it's it's messy, it's it's it's involved in all the other things we did. Like you said that, we didn't know what we were doing at the time, and so we had a lot of looking back at our you know, our predestined move across this country. Like we fixed a lot of it, but we're not all the way there now, we're not all way there. But you know that's kind of what the big context, the big history is for, is uh, wrapping your head around the long term patterns and trying to understand where along the line of the trajectory we are and how you correct the errors that we've made in the past, and how you try to set up a future that's going to be more equitable for for not just us. It's not all about us, of course, it's about all the rest of the natural world that's out there. And so uh, as I said, I'm I'm I'm optimistic, especially for the you know, the coming generations. I think I think that the generations that are here now and are are you know, on the eve of emerging, uh in sort of manning the tiller of the direction of the country. Uh, They're going to be less influenced by the kind of propagand and like the Bureau of Biological Survey was putting out about predators in the twenties, thirties and forties, Yeah, what what is there to kind of put a bowl on that? What what is there that people can go out and grab? And we've we've covered cloudy America. But when we're looking for data and looking for like what what are the things the key in on is like, hey, this is valuable, this has value. Is there anything that you've in your putting the book together you had to I'm sure calmed through lots and lots of resources. Is there something that you use the tool to maybe to seek out legitimacy. Well, I'm I'm kind of a big advocate of understanding what was here, uh five hundred years ago, a thousand years ago. I mean, you go back twelve thousand years ago. Of course we had obsary that really was an analog of of Africa with mammoths and camels and ground slots and say were tooth cats and and you know, we humans, probably again without knowing what the hell we were doing, uh, probably played a major role in the simplification of that. And be Sherry ten thousand years ago to the eternal regret of all of the rest of us down the timeline. I mean, I'd love to be able to walk outside, uh you know, into the hills around Bozeman and see a herd of mammoths go by, and those things would have been here ten thousand years ago. I mean, we know there are mammoth sites within fifty miles of here. Um, so I I kind of uh, you know, I'm I'm an advocate of the big history thing. Um. You know, I won't say I'm necessarily a mammoth of really our advocate of rewilding with mammoths. Um. But I do think that North America is not too urbanized, not too developed for us to have a good semblance of the wild America that we managed to acquire when uh, when Europeans and native people met one another five hundred years ago. Indian people had managed over the ten thousand years since the plies to saying to keep things. I mean, they did pretty damn well for ten thousand years. And that's kind of the world i'd like to I'd like to see. And uh, it means that animals like coyotes and gray wolves deserve a place there. They're a functioning part of the ecology of this continent for millions of years. And who the hell were we to think that we were gonna walk in here and overnight just take them out without any thought. I think that's I find that in all of and there's very many contentious points, and for whatever reason, I like to run right out of it to do it that way. But I think in general that's a good place, Like that last statement you made is a good place to get into the middle where we can have a conversation, like if we all can agree that this is not only valuable in the present tense, in the past tense, and it's inevitable for the future tense. How when we all value these animals, and then what do we do? We might I think people that are folks we've had in here that are anti hunting on the on the predator side of things, might say, well, we just don't touch them. We let them play their service for the ecosystem. We don't touch them, We allow them to do whatever they want to do. Hunters might say that, but what if we just we just trim around the edges, like we there can be a service that hunters can then provide to Um, there's a conversation we had right there. We can certainly look at the data and look at what you've learned about the history of what might happen and make some sort of sensical like just like have some some pragmatism and go forward. Um will we do that? I don't know, but we can certainly do that in pockets. And I think conversations like this one can help move it. Well, I hope so. I mean one of the things, uh, I kind of realized, uh a few years ago the Cowboy poets and Nevada asked me to do a keynote address for uh there annual meeting. That's something to put on your resume. Yeah, for a cowboy. Everybody wants to be a cowboy Poe at least. And there was a There was a crowd of about eight or nine hundred people, many of whom you know. As a I realized that as a former university professor, I probably didn't necessarily share uh some of the same values with some of the people in the audience. But I realized before I did that talk, and this is kind of the way I pitched it, that the one thing we all had in common that I had in common with them and they had in common with me. And this is how I tried to try to sort of to aim the talk that I did was that we all were in love with the Old West. They love the Old West. I love the Old West. They might have liked the Old West because of horses and cow attle. I like the Old West because of the world Lewis and Clark saw. But we were all in love with that common vision of what the American West once was. And I think in a larger sense, we kind of probably are all kind of in love with what America once was, all of the country, and if we can somehow just start there and use that as a commonality, then maybe we can as we get into all these separate issues and the nuances of it all, we can all keep remembering this is the one thing we all want to see. It almost always comes back to value systems, right, I mean, it always comes back to the thing of the lucky thing we're having all this conversation is that we all value these things like they wouldn't be here if we didn't all agree that they have value. Let's let's all agree. And I think maybe with coyotes, that's the one thing you can just kind of spin back to. Can we just all agree they have value. They wouldn't be here, they wouldn't be so damn adaptable, they wouldn't be what they are if they didn't have value. They just it's impossible to say those things and and have any monica the truth. I mean, they just are. So it's it's nice to through your work and conversations they just just to freaking see it for a minute, stop and see it and think about it, and then go back to the debate about what we want to do with them, you know, when they're eating the fawns and whacking lambs and and bothering our cattle and eating the chickens in downtown l a of the of the of the foe, aristocratic uh you know, tech guy or the or in the case of like Joe Rogan is the famous podcaster whose chickens are getting He's living in Ventura in Hollywood Hills and getting his chickens whacked by coyotes. You know, So it's like there's some some weird do you feel like there's some weird irony and in the current state of like urban coyotes, like they just don't give a shit, Like well they The truth is they've been living among us for you know, ever since we got here fifteen thousand years ago, and uh so they're they're used to being around us. That's one of the reasons. For example, in the nineteen twenties, we were able to pretty effectively get rid of wolves, but we were never able to get rid of coyotes or even come close to it. And one of the reasons is because they have been living amongs and knowing how to interact with us for so very long. And I mean, you know, without going into too much biological detail, they have a particular adaptation called fish and fusion that's very similar to something we do in our evolutionary lives. It's one of the many things that coyotes have in common with humans. Uh learning how to survive through your wits as another one. But this fish and fusion adaptation means that coyotes when they're pressured, they don't exist as packs and in groups in a fusion mode in in our sense as communities, but when they're pressured and harassed and persecuted, they tend to split into singles and pairs and scatter across the landscape. I mean, that's one of the ways we survived great disease epidemics and our our evolutionary history as we did the same thing, and coyotes have that ability. So I mean their ability to survive through their ecological adaptations that are very similar to the ones that we used to survive, and their survival by our by wits, which is of course how we humans have come to be a dominant species on the planet. That's to me one of the reasons we ought, as Indian people did we ought to really appreciate coyotes, because in effect, they're emulating in the world the same success that we've had. I mean, if you look at them that way, other than just you know, there there's the little vermin that's breathing up good air and uh, I should shoot it on site, you start appreciating the natural world and America, North America in a way that maybe you haven't before. I think, and I think we've said this before in this past. Maybe maybe an unpopular thing, but I think true is that we have seen this in the hunting community. And I think maybe in general, I don't know, but certainly in the hunting community were it's almost as if we enjoy when the gloves come off when someone says, hey, listen, ferrell hogs don't care how you kill them, like when we and we very much enjoy when the ethical gloves are removed, like there's a we we there's we revel in it a little bit like oh wow, we can just we can hate these ones, or like we can just that that happens. And it's not I'm not saying that. I'm saying that from experience, like personal experience, like when somebody says, like, oh, there's a group of there's a group of pigs or a group of coyotes, and we don't have to value them like we do the other ones. And here's uh, you know, I our laser night vision goggles and a machine gun and we might eat him. We I know, we don't know, go for it though, like it becomes it's analogous to a video game or something you know, I've seen that I've seen with and see what pigs or other things. And so Yeah, the biologists refer to that as the henhouse syndrome. It's the it's the same thing that I mean, most predators do it, and they tend to do it with prey that's either naive, are not valued and uh. And what it results in is the fox that gets into a henhouse uh and kills fifty or sixty chickens in a night, bites the introls out of four or five as it's leaving, but basically just slaughters the prey and leaves them lying. And predators all over the world have an inclination to occasionally do that surplus killing things like that. Yeah, and human predators do the same thing and sometimes sort of like being freed to able to do it. Yeah, there's like this weird like wow, man, it was stressful trying to pick out the right one of those and make sure there's more of them. And if you just tell me that, I can just oh man, we gotta get rid of all the ease, then perfect. It's the easier situation. Let's cumbersome. We should probably end up here on like some you got some really good, like wit examples of what kyos do that might make us chuckle or make us appreciate. Well, I mean, they're all kinds. I figured that the list is endless. The list is endless. I mean we think that urban life, for example, is probably selecting for uber intelligent coyotes. I mean, the whole you know, literature behind urban coyotes is kind of fascinating because, for one thing, when coyotes get into cities and start living among people, they live a lot longer than they do out in the country because out in the country people are shooting them, poisoning them, trying to run over them with cars. And when they get into in the average lifespan of coyote and the countryside is about three years. When they get into cities, they're living to ten, twelve, thirteen years old, and the result of living that long and sort of learning how you work life in cities means that coyotes are doing things like learning how to cross interstate highways during the rush hour, and they do it by crossing four lanes of traffic and then sitting in the median. Sometimes. A biologists in Chicago is watch coyotes sit in a median sometimes for three minutes, waiting for traffic to clear in the other four lanes before then dashing across. In California, California Highway one has become are not Highway one, but one oh one has of course, carries so much traffic that coyotes are becoming loath to cross it. And one of the things that seems to be happening is that on either side of Highway one oh one, we are starting to get the beginnings of subspecies differentiation between the coyote populations east of one oh one and west of one oh one. Toys and crips were in different bandanas. Absolutely, they're wearing different bandanas and are becoming slightly different from one another because they're not crossing enough to actually exchange genes anymore. I mean, so highways and modern human life are kind of shaping these animals. I'll give you another one, a couple of examples from when I've visited the predator research facility outside Logan, Utah, and talked to the scientists at Wildlife Services of course, who are designing all sorts of ways to control coyotes, both using uh non mortal uh non lethal means and lethal means. They describe for me their studies of coyote individuality, where they would set up a an enclosure with a pot of goodies at one end and would in between the coyote population. They put twenty coyote twenty coyotes in this particular enclosure. They had a whole uh suite of goodies at the far end, maybe a hundred and fifty feet away, and they tried all kinds of various um basically obstacles to the coyotes getting to the goodies. One of the things they discovered was that within a single day, two or three of the coyotes out of the twenty, walked past every blowing suren flashing light, flattery, everything that they put up and got the goodies. They let this experiment go on for a month and out of those any coyotes. Fourteen of them never went to the other end, never once managed to go down and get the lure from the far end of the enclosure. And so what some of the urban biologists are arguing is that it's those bold coyotes that are willing to wade through whatever obstacles you put up in order to realize their goal and survive that are populating most of the cities. Yeah. And you see how you see how an animal evalls and and our effect on it. So that's right, we're shaping the evolution of these animals. Uh, you know, as we're sitting here, it's amazing. Well, thanks for coming all the way to Bozeman. Man. Look and you told me that you're you're looking forward to another appearance on Rogan's podcast. That's pretty exciting. Don't want to break any of that news. Yeah, I will say we're still negotiating it, but yeah, it might might happen here in a few weeks. I look forward to it. The more and the more we can get you out there talking about this stuff, the better in my opinion. And this is it's enlightening and it's damn important subject. Of all the things we touched on just just value. What do we value? What are we into? Why do we think the way we think? Man? I love it. It's been fun to be here. Be I appreciate it, all right, Thanks Dan. Okay, I guess I grew up. That's it. That's all th HC Episode eighty six in the Books. Just want to say a big thank you Phil. What man, that's why, that's what I say. Sorry, sorry, Look what the hell? Man? I didn't know you were here. I thought I get out of the podcast studio. Jesus Christ. Phil's leaving. He's trying to take my outro. Anyway, Yeah, come back, come back. I miss you. Uh anyway, Thanks to Dan Flores and my our Meteator crew for talking about kites with us. It was great. Now I have something that I didn't tell Phil about that I want to surprise him with. Oh yeah, I love this. This has been happening a lot lately. Yeah, this is a good Okay, I want to give well, you know, we do a lot of segments here on the show, right yeah, a lot of different segments. I want to do one called Dr Phil you know, and I'm offering it to you officially right now. Would you like to accept and and I will give you no, there are no parameters. You can do whatever you want. This is dangerous with Dr Phil. I will accept all right, perfect, okay, but before we talked about how it was contingent on whether or not I kept my mustache after Halloween. Yeah, I'd still like you to keep it. But I'll give you this segment either way. Give you a segmentad right now. Okay, you're gonna regret this, well, yeah, well I will. We'll get to exactly what Dr Phil means. But if you want to write into t a C that the meter dot com and suggest what Dr Phil the new th HC segment should be about or should cover, just write it right in, write an email and I'll for that over to Phil. And Um, he's gonna get a little piece of glory, a little piece of podcast, hosting glory the first time in his life. And you never know that this might go. You might get your own podcast. I can't wait. I'm excited. You're excited. Yeah, I'm already racking my brain. It's palpable. So join us next time for Dr Phil Medicine woman there it is just talk about medicine. Today's episode a seat of mening. I like it. Dr Phil Medicine and maybe we'll stick with that. Anyways, we'll see you then bye bye, because I can't go a week without doing right with R. Drinking in. Don't sit in at the bas foold, stop to throw roots. I'm feeling like in all on our barras shoes. All tell me what is it that a shoe

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