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May 28, 1998 - Art Bell

02:40:13

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Dangerous Animals - Don Zaidle

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44:46

don zaidle

01:12:15

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Speaker	Time	Text
unidentified		To talk with Art Bell in the Kingdom of Nye from East of the Rockies, dial 1, 800-825-5033, 1-800-825-5033, West of the Rockies, including Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico, 1-800-618-8255, 1-800-618-8255.
unidentified		Now again, here's Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The more I think about it, the more I know I'm going to get a rocket.
		A big one, too.
		We talked about that last hour.
		Earlier today, I was actually talking to Bob Crane.
		We're talking about selling rockets on the air.
		Not your little rockets.
		Big rockets.
		And I've got a catalog of big rockets, and there is one like it shows, I've got a picture on the studio camera right now, and it shows this rocket, and it's like three, it shows a very nice-looking young lady, and it's like three, two and a half times at least as large as she is.
		So we're talking a serious rocket here.
		And it'd be a blast to launch.
		But of course, it'd be just as much fun to just take and put in the front yard.
		As I said to my earlier audience, it would give you respect in your neighborhood.
		Lawns would be cut, trees would be trimmed.
		And to top it off, I'd put a name.
		Every rocket's got to have a name, right?
		And we'd call it Neighborhood Watch.
		All right, look, coming up in a moment, Don Zadel.
		And I'll tell you about Don.
		He is really something else.
		Actually, he looks the part.
		I mean, we're talking Mr. Outdoors here.
		I'm going to have to get a photograph of Don Zadel up.
		He really looks the part.
		It's about animal attacks, folks, and it's called American Man Killers, and it's coming up in a moment.
		Don Zadel, American Man Killers.
		Animal attacks are way up.
unidentified		Animal attacks are way up.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, now comes Don Zadel, who was born in Fort Worth, Texas.
		From the time he was knee-high to a grasshopper, his interest in wildlife was intense.
		When he wasn't being dragged off kicking and screaming to the schoolhouse, he spent every waking moment prowling the woods and creeks of his family's ranch, observing and studying wild animals.
		His earliest memories involved tents, campfires, hunting, and fishing, so it was natural that Mr. Zadel would evolve into a hunter and fisherman.
		Despite a patchwork career that includes stints as get this, folks, a private investigator, attack dog trainer, soldier, oilfield roughneck, radio talk show host, and electronics engineer, ha ha, his passion has always remained with the outdoors.
		His pursuits have carried him to all the wild places of North America, you know, here where we live, in search of adventure.
		A decade or so ago, he parlayed his passion into a profession and became an outdoor writer.
		As a writer and naturalist, Mr. Zadel developed over the years a keen interest in what he calls the macabre and esoteric nature of nature.
		My kind of guy.
		It came, therefore, as no surprise that his first major work of nonfiction, American Mankillers, would be the result of his interest in the macabre and would continue his years of observation and his lifelong interests, as well as two years of intensive research.
		He has been called many things, it says here on the back of his book, many of which we would not be suitable for air.
		And I hope I've got his name right.
		Is it Don Zeitl?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		That's close enough.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		I say it's Zeitel.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Zeidel?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, that's all right.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		I answer to most things as long as it's not obscene.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Zeitel is fine by me.
		I'll just get used to it.
		Don Zeitl.
		All right, Don.
		We have had a whole array of guests, like a parade of guests, who have been saying much the same thing.
		And the most recent of which was Robert Ghostwolf.
		And this is what got me interested in the whole concept of animal attacks.
		Ghostwolf said, things are rapidly changing, and animals will begin attacking people.
		And as an example, he cited recent incidences in which mountain lions, instead of being stalked by hunters, were stalking hunters.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's a pretty regular thing.
		Hunters, of course, they're kind of out in the woods being stealthy and sneaking around anyway, which in mountain lion country is a bad thing to do.
		You want to present a large, formidable-looking target to a mountain lion that tends to discourage them.
		But if you're all hunkered over sneaking around, it sure makes you more attractive as a meal to a mountain lion.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I know, for example, I have house cats, and one pretty wild one at that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But if you get down on the floor and you stalk a cat the way a stalk, you know, a cat would stalk another cat, they recognize that behavior and they go into that mode.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		All animals are astute observers of body language.
		And there are certain postures, certain gestures, and so on and so forth that have very definite meanings to animals, depending on whether that animal is a prey animal or whether that animal is a predator.
		There are certain postures in body language that imply predatory intent, and so therefore a prey animal is going to be frightened by it.
		There are other body languages that make you look like Prey, and they're going to make you attractive to a predator.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
		In other words, you could be eaten.
		While we think we are at the top of the food chain, it doesn't always actually work out that way in practice.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Just because we're at the top of the food chain does not exempt us from active participation in the lower links.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Listen, it says here there's been an explosive increase in animal attacks and resultant human deaths.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		When you say explosive increase, what do you mean period of time and how much of an increase?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		I would say that that time span would be in the last 12 to 15 years.
		The increase is a proportional increase relative to prior decades, prior years.
		But I'll say this, there have been more recorded predator attacks in the past 10 years, in some areas at least, than had been recorded in the preceding 100 years combined.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, my.
		Now, that would tend to validate, particularly the time span you're talking about, the last decade.
		A lot of people think a lot of things got underway in the last decade, and so this, I guess, is no different.
		What kind of attacks...
		Yes.
		They're on melk cartons and all the rest of it, and generally it's assumed that one parent took them or they were kidnapped and killed or, you know, who knows?
		They end up on melt cartons.
		It is your view, isn't it, that some of them end up as meals.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		Let me give you one example.
		There was a little three-year-old boy playing in the front yard of his family's cabin in the San Bernardino Mountains, California.
		He disappeared.
		A search party followed his tennis shoe tracks on the dirt path that led away from the cabin and up to the top of this little ridge about 100 yards distant.
		At the top of that ridge, his tracks converged with the tracks of a mountain lion.
		Only the mountain lion's tracks led away.
		you tell me what happened to him in nineteen ninety four right i don't know if you wrote the amount of money In 1994, a woman named Lucy Gomez Dunton disappeared while out, I believe, birdwatching nurses, jogging, something.
		Anyway, she was in one of the state parks.
		She disappeared and was missing for about two weeks.
		Just through happenstance, some hikers found her mutilated, mostly gone body there in the brush of the state park.
		The body was in fact found in what's called a killbed, which is what a mountain lion does with his leftovers.
		After he makes a kill, he eats his filth.
		He drags the remains into some brush and scratches forest debris, leaves, twigs, and a little dirt over it to save it for a smack later.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A snack.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		And so what was left of her were found in a mountain lion killbed.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		The question is, had she never been found, into what statistical category would she have been placed?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		She'd still be listed as a missing person.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Unsolved case, right?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, unsolved missing persons case.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I wonder how many of those we have in the U.S. that could possibly be what they were.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, trying to quantify anything related to this is next to impossible.
		I'll tell you why.
		There is no centralized record-keeping of any kind as it pertains to animal attacks.
		One would think the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would keep centralized records on all this stuff.
		No, they do not.
		Very, very few states do keep records on very specific animals, but most of them only began keeping those records in the past 10 to 20 years.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Let me tell you a little story, and maybe you can tell me what I saw, if what I saw was true, and I'm sure it was.
		I used to commute between Little Perump, Nevada, where I am now in Las Vegas every day.
		That's like about 120 miles around trip, long commute.
		And you go up a 5,500-foot mountain between here and Las Vegas, down the other side, into Las Vegas.
		And one night I was making that commute, coming down the other side, just come off the peak, going down the other side toward Las Vegas.
		Oh, man, I was doing like 70 or so.
		And all of a sudden, in my headlights, here's this incredible thing.
		It's a mountain lion, of course, and it's just crossing the road, and I had to slam on my brakes to miss it.
		But when I tell you, this cat covered both lanes as it was crossing.
		This was the longest, biggest animal I ever saw in my whole life.
		My God, it was a giant.
		I mean, it was just gigantic.
		Do they get that big?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, mountain lions tend to look bigger than what they actually are.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They're long.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		It is an optical illusion caused by the tail.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		The tail is at least as long and perhaps on some specimens longer than the body is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		And so this yields an optical illusion that, my God, that thing was 22 and a half feet long.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's what it looks like.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Six feet tall.
		Stood on my car slobbered on the windshield.
		They look enormous, especially seen in the wild like that.
		Once you get up close to one, they kind of tend to suffer what hunters call ground shrinkage.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I wouldn't get close to one.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, I don't either unless he's dead.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Oh, yeah.
		If they're dead, that'd be all right.
		If they're dead.
		But otherwise, they really are capable of eating a human being.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
		Absolutely.
		I have dozens of cases here in my files of exactly that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, here's a question for you, and this applies to mountain lions and bears and everything else we're going to talk about.
		Once they have eaten man or a woman, mankind, then they are likely to be man-killers.
		In other words, to regard us as a future and consistent food source?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, yes.
		First of all, the reason that any of these animals might...
		In the case of a mountain lion, a mountain lion regards as prey anything within its habitat that can be caught and killed with reasonable safety.
		And when I say safety, I'm talking about safety to the mountain lion that it will not be injured in the process of killing its prey.
		When these animals become so accustomed to human presence and suffer no harmful effect, there is no negative encounter, they learn very quickly that man is nothing more than another source of protein.
		It just happens to be bipedal.
		A cougar considers anything within its habitat that can be caught and killed with a reasonable expectancy of success as just food, and whether it's upholstered in fur, feather, or polyester is not a consideration.
		Now, that's first and foremost.
		But to further illustrate your point, yes, once they have made that leap, so to speak, and made a human kill, succeeding human kills would come much easier to them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I thought so.
		I've thought of a lot of ways that I might go.
		We all consider our own mortality.
		And somewhere toward the very end of the list has got to be being eaten.
		Now, there's nothing particularly merciful about the way they do this, is there?
		In other words, they don't necessarily make sure to cut your juggler and that you're dead before they begin munching.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		A cougar kills, the basic way in which a cougar kills most of its prey is by crushing the back of the skull or breaking the neck.
		And if you're lucky and you've got a lion that's big enough and he's been around long enough that he knows what he's doing, chances are you may get a quick, merciful, relatively painless death out of the deal.
		If, on the other hand, if he's having a bad day, if you happen to flinch at just the wrong moment as he's leaping on you from the back, and Cougar's always attacked from behind, by the way.
		And so chances are you'll never know what hit you.
		But if he's having a bad day, his aim's off a little bit, you flinch at the wrong time, or you've got a young, inexperienced cat after you, he may not make that single crushing bite.
		And so therefore you may get to want yourself bleed to death.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		As he munches.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, or while he hangs on.
		So he's going to ride your back.
		He's going to ride you to the ground with his claws dug into your back.
		He's got this wet steel vice grip around your neck.
		And you may bleed to death or you may be suffocated.
		Or you may drown in your own blood, some combination of the above.
		But the point is, you're going to get to hang around for a while and know that something bad is happening to you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What about bear?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Now, bears are even less astute at killing any kind of prey than the cougars are.
		Bears basically, if a bear attacks, again, as I cited earlier, bears may attack for any one of a number of reasons.
		But if it is a predatory attack, it can take a very, very long time to die because the bear just simply is not that accomplished a killer.
		He would be the, I guess you could call him the axe murderer.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So it's like he kind of pulls you apart in edible chunks.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, basically he just starts randomly biting whatever's handy until he lucks onto something vital and or you stop struggling.
		And so they're rather, one wildlife biologist describes them as very brutish killers.
		You can, in some cases, think of it as even as being beaten to death.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, we tend to think that this kind of stuff doesn't happen.
		I mean, I suppose in the back of some minds it occurs to people that animals can be dangerous.
		But for the most part, we think we're king of the hill, and when we walk around in the woods, we're safe as can be.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, see, that's one of the greatest myths that has been forced off by the PBS type people, which, by the way, you do know what PBS stands for, don't you?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Public broadcasting?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Professional bull, something you'd rather not step in.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I understand now.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		At any rate, be that as it may.
		One of the great myths is that animals have this natural fear of man or some sort of reverence or that man has some sort of a mystical quality that makes animals respect or fear him.
		That's bull cookies.
		Really?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, our years and years of having guns and shooting animals has not taught them anything about that.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		No, no, no, no, no, no.
		No, you've got it right.
		See, during the time when we did do that on a more or less regular basis, that's where the fear of man, the predator, developed among animals.
		But in our don't shoot him mystery, he is a sheepdog, run, you know, run bambi, it's man world these days that we view through these rose-colored glasses, where, you know, keeping animal populations under control through selective culling and so on and so forth is now officially discouraged and even labeled as cruel in some quarters.
		Animals are losing that fear that we worked so hard and so long to instill in them.
		And so now they are not only encroaching into human-populated areas and surely Bambi is not going to attack us.
		You want to bet?
unidentified		No.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Killed you in a heartbeat.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Bambi would kill me.
		Hold on where you are.
		We're at the bottom of the hour.
		I think he said Bambi would kill you in a heartbeat.
unidentified		That's what I think he said.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That can't be true.
		Disney said it.
		So it just, it can't be true.
		Don't title is, my guest, his book, American Man Killers.
		We'll be right back.
unidentified		Unbelievable, unforgettable.
		How may it know you?
		Then your wife seems to think you're losing your sanity.
		Oh, the vanity.
		Oh, is there no way?
		From the Kingdom of Nine, this is posted first a.m. with our bell.
		First time callers may reach our bed area vote 702-727-1222.
		702-727-1222.
		Now, here again is Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Once again, here I am.
		Don's idol is my guest.
		His book is American Man Killers and he's very, very serious about what he's saying.
		A lot of people who have disappeared, children particularly, may well not have disappeared in whatever way you might imagine.
		They may now simply be part of the food chain, actually.
		It's horrible to contemplate, but it is what happens in nature, you know.
		It really is.
		So many of us have been ensconced in concrete and buildings for so long that we've kind of lost touch with nature.
		Well, in some cases, it hasn't lost touch with us.
		We'll get back to it in a moment.
unidentified		We'll get back to it in a moment.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Here's Don's Idol.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Don, did you by any chance see a movie called The Edge with Anthony Hopkins?
unidentified		Yes, I did see that.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		It was a bit what wildlife people call anthropomorphic, which is assigning human motivations and characteristics to animals.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		The bear was a little bit too calculating to be believable.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, a bear would not stalk in that continued way.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		No.
		Well, I mean, that's one of the things about nature, you know, never say never.
		But the likelihood is so far remote as just to be almost nil.
		No, if the bear wanted to come for them, he would lumber right into camp, take care of business, pick his teeth with one of your ribs, and lumber off and sleep off his.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Pick his teeth with one of your ribs?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm being facetious, of course.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but isn't that what they use bones for to clean their teeth?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, no.
		Bears aren't terribly interested in personal hygiene, which is why most of them stink to high heavens.
		They tend to sleep on top of their food cachets, which after a day or two become carry-on.
		If it wasn't carry-on when they found it in the first place.
		And by the way, if you happen to be hiking in bear country and you smell putrefacted meat, go the other way.
		Because chances are excellent that that's a bear cachet, whether he personally killed it or procured it by other means.
		There could be a bear lying up on it or near it.
		And if you get close to it, guess what?
		You're going to become the next Andre.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		The bears are very possessive about their food.
		Stay away from dead animals out in the wild, especially in bear countries.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Protective of their food, yeah, and you don't want to be the next meal, I guess.
		No.
		You hear about all kinds of things in the media.
		The popular media, I mean, people being eaten by alligators and all kinds of horrible things have been in the press from time to time.
		So that does happen.
		But I imagine 99.9% of it never hears it.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		You never hear about.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You never hear about, right?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		You never hear about it at the best.
		You'll hear about it on a local level.
		But very little of it gets national attention.
		The reason for this is, number one, it is not politically correct to report on this kind of stuff.
		Unless, of course, you take great pains to say, oh, but the animal was just being true to its nature and yada, yada, yada, yada, which is true.
		But this type of explanation is always couched in a defensive tone of the animals and saying, well, it's all man's fault and yada, yada, yada.
		The second reason is officials tend to want to downplay and gloss over and obfuscate and even in some cases deny that these sort of things happen.
		And, you know, there's a lot of reasons, but the two simplest ones are, one, it's difficult to attract tourists with the enticement to come vacation amongst our scenic vistas and kill their wildlife.
		And secondly, when you've got a financial axe to grind with regard to the animals in your particular state or bailiwick, whatever it is, it's difficult to generate support if the animal you're trying to generate the support for is known to kill and eat its supporters.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's true.
		Let's talk for a second about Bambi.
		We mentioned Bambi.
		And you said Bambi would kill you in the flash of an eye.
		Now, there have been several times where I've seen deer along the street.
		Now, bear in mind, Don, I'm not a hunter.
		You're talking to a non-hunter here.
		I have a lot of guns, but I don't hunt with them.
		Anyway, I pull the car off to the side of the road, and I'll get out of the car and go and start talking nice deer, good deer, you know, trying to get them to sort of interact with me in some way.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		You know what you're courting there, Art?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		You're courting, acquiring for yourself an impressive set of new optional navels.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Optional navels?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
unidentified		Artificially created ones?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What are you talking about?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		give you an example.
		In fall of 1990, police in central Texas were dispatched to investigate the report of a pickup that had been parked beside the road for two days with the driver's side door open.
		And on arrival, the police saw a large white-tailed buck deer standing in the brush about 10 yards from the vehicle, thrashing a sapling with its antlers.
		It charged the officers when they tried to approach the vehicle.
		It backed off when they did, but it would come for them again each time they moved near that truck.
		At some point in the festivities, they figured out it wasn't the pickup the buck was guarding, but the body lying in the ditch near the open driver's side door.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		They finally killed the buck after it repeatedly fought off their attempts to reach the body of 61-year-old Buddy Coleman.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		The official cause of death was a crushed skull, but he'd have probably bled to death anyway from the more than 100 puncture wounds inflicted to his back, stomach, and face by the deer's hooves and antlers.
unidentified		What?
unidentified		Why?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now, that's behavior that I've never heard of in a deer.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		It happens all the time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I never heard of that in my whole life.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		I tell you what, when you get a chance, read the deer chapter in American Man Killers.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		you'll read a lot of that kind of stuff well isn't No.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		The deer is regarding you as either an interloper on its territory and or a rival, whether it be a rival for his territory, a rival for the attentions of the ladies' fair among the does during rudding season.
		Most attacks do occur during the rudding season, by the way, but by no means all of them.
		In a nearly identical case in June of 1995, excuse me, 1994, it's the same year it was four years after Buddy Coleman was killed, and it was just a couple hundred miles away.
		A woman was nearly killed in her own driveway.
		She lives in a, lives, or lived rather, in a community not too far from me, around Possum Kingdom Lake.
		And a lot of deer that people have in their backyards, they come and eat handouts in the backyard and all this kind of thing.
		Anyway, she was walking down her driveway to collect her mail out of her mailbox when a velvet antlered deer, which is one that's still growing if it's antlers.
		They're not fully developed.
		They still have the velvet sheathing on them and all this.
		And as I said, this was in June of the year, which is a long ways from redding season.
		And anyway, this deer came boiling out of the brush and nailed her.
		A passerby saw her laying unconscious in her driveway just a few moments after the attack.
		She called authorities.
		This buck too, now see, this is the really strange part of this behavior.
		The attacking part is fully understandable, easy to explain.
		But this buck too stood guard over the victim.
		It took up station beneath the mesquite tree about 30 yards away from where the woman was laying in the driveway, unconscious.
		And it charged a Brasses River Authority ranger named Mike Cox when he arrived on the scene and tried to approach the woman.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well now what behavior would have it guarding something it had already knocked out?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		I have absolutely no idea and neither do any of the other dozens of wildlife biologists I've asked about it.
		It is an area of herbivore behavior that is unexplored.
		No one has a clue why a herbivore would guard a body at all, let alone two days after the fact.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That doesn't make sense.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		No, it doesn't make sense, but it happens.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There are a lot of things these days, Don, that don't exactly make sense.
		Animal behaviors that don't seem to make sense.
		And even our domestic animals, even our animals, you know, little Fluffy and our favorite little dog, whatever it may be.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Who will most happily eat you, by the way?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Who will most happily eat you?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I wasn't going there.
		But you are?
		Your own pet would eat you?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		in a heartbeat home now i i've never heard I take it back.
		I heard of a lady who died who owned a bunch of cats.
		And now they took after her a day or so after she passed on.
		But other than that, I have never heard of any domestic animal eating its owner.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Let me give you another example.
		Well, okay, here's another example of what you just said.
		I'll just give you the headline on this one.
		The lead paragraph.
		Man dies in New York City apartment eaten by pet dogs.
		Seven dogs ate the body of their mentally ill owner who died in his apartment over the 4th of July weekend.
		Here's another headline.
		Dead baby found in dog's mouth, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
		Now, here is a real cute one.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Dead baby.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Found in a dog's mouth.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, the dog killed the baby.
		Happens all the time, by the way.
		Dog gnaws off foot of comatose woman.
		A dog slid through a pet door and chewed off the foot of a woman who had been in a coma for several years, prompting police to search for the animal amid concern over rabies.
		Doctors amputated what was left of the woman's right foot Monday as police hunted for the large black dog, possibly a rock wilder.
		The woman's mother chased it away, send her moaning after seeing it gnawing on her daughter.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		She was comatose?
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		oh content and and and so that that's nothing more than Do we have an animal eating?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Dogs, our people have lost sight of one very simple fact.
		Dogs are predators, period.
		The behavior that we see most often in our dogs is a facade.
		It is that dog's response to a yoke of domesticity that we have imposed on them.
		The behavior that we generally see in dogs is not its natural behavior.
		A dog's natural behavior is to hunt, kill, and roll in the putrefying remains of its prey.
		And every once in a while the dog goes on vacation.
		He slips off his yoke.
		He lives true to his predatory lineage.
		And he kills.
		He eats.
		And then he comes back off vacation and he's the same cheerful, bouncy bundle of good intentions that we profess to love.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I saw Cujo, but that was rabies.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, rabid behavior is you can't...
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		What you're talking about here is a totally normal behavior.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A normal domestic pet that suddenly goes on vacation.
unidentified		Yes.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Dogs in the United States alone, by the way, dogs are the most dangerous large animal in the world.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They are?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		They kill more people on an annual basis than any other animal.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		In the United States alone, in any given year, there will be anywhere from 2 to 5 million people injured by dogs.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		2 to 5 million?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Of that number, anywhere from 3 quarters of a million to a million will be serious enough to require emergency room medical care.
		Of those, probably, I don't have the exact statistics in front of me, but if I remember correctly, anywhere from 25 to 100,000 of those will be in a category that would be called a concerted attack as opposed to just a bite.
		In other words, we're talking about a persistent, multiple bite, attempting to kill type of attack.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		An animal can, what can bring this on, Don?
		What do you imagine can bring this on?
		I mean, one minute your dog is domestic.
		The next minute, it's like it's totally out of touch.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		It can be anything from the dog simply losing a grip on its normal control mechanisms.
		It may be a deliberate bid, especially in the case of a male dog, it may be a deliberate bid to usurp the pack leadership position from you.
		It may be if the dog attacks, particularly when the dog attacks young children, elderly people, or people who have an unusual gait, such as walking on a cane or they limp badly, or perhaps even locomotion in a wheelchair, or even on a bicycle or roller skates.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now, is that because the animal somehow instinctually understands you are weaker than others and it's like culling out the herd?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yes, it elicits a predatory response to chase, kill, and eat.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And now, now, dogs are meat eaters, right?
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No doubt about that.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Unless you happen to be one of these really wacky people who have the idea that their dogs and cats would be better off on a vegetarian diet because they themselves are vegetarians, there are people who actually do that.
		They attempt to feed their dogs and cats a vegetarian diet.
		But at any rate, be that as it may, the point is, yes, dogs, cats, predators are, by very definition, carnivores.
		They are meat eaters.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What happens when you turn a dog into a vegetarian?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		When you force it to avoid the diet, the dog is going to become, it's going to get into ill health.
		It's going to have a poor coat.
		It may suffer some sort of mental dysfunction.
		I've never studied them that closely, but the few dogs I have seen that were on a vegetarian diet did not look well at all.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, let me tell you something.
		This gets me in all kinds of trouble, and I really just don't give a damn anymore.
		The vegetarians that I've seen, humans, have the same problem.
		They get a poor coat.
		Their hair looks like hair.
		No, it's true.
		And then I also noticed that they look sickly, and they generally are skinny and just really pathetic looking.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah, because, see, man is also a predator carnivore.
		Actually, he is an omnivore, but we actually eat more meat, I think, than we do vegetable matter, or at least an equal amount of it.
		At least those among us who are normal do.
		And so, therefore, I think it's pretty safe to classify a man as a carnivore.
		There are those who try to make the army, oh, no, man's a primate, and primates are vegetarians.
		Well, that's a croc, too.
		No less an authority than Dr. Jane Goodall, who is also quite anthropomorphic much of the time, has acknowledged and documented that chimpanzees are, they engage in organized hunts for meat.
		They eat other chimpanzees.
		They eat smaller monkeys.
		They eat bush pigs, small bushbuck.
unidentified		Would dogs.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		And they eat human babies.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, human babies.
		Would dogs revert to that behavior hunting?
		They're like wolves, aren't they?
		They would hunt in the wild.
		They'd hunt in packs, wouldn't they?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		They hunt on city streets in packs.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		City streets?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		There are a number of cases.
		Well, right now as we speak, I'm trying to remember.
		It seems like it was Detroit, if I remember correctly.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's the city.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		We have a big problem right now with roaming packs of feral dogs on the streets.
		In one case, this was not in Detroit, I don't remember the city right offhand, but a woman was killed and partially eaten by a pack of feral dogs in her own front yard.
		The largest of these dogs, which was the pack leader, by the way, was a beagle.
unidentified		A beagle?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		A beagle.
		The point being size is irrelevant in the man-killing business.
		If you have any doubts, look in the 1982 Journal of Pediatrics and read there the Read the case history of the child-killing Yorkshire Terrier.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Berkshire Terrier.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Read about the seven-month-old I think it was like a 13-month-old toddler killed by the family Stocksund.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		My God.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		So size doesn't make any difference.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Just on that note, Are you aware of how popular ferrets are as pets?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I've heard they make great pets.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah, and you know what?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		They'll kill your child in its crib and eat its face off.
unidentified		What?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		I have case upon case upon case.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Here are my files.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Parrots are real cute.
		They're little things.
		They're cuddly.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		And they're predators.
		And they will eat your baby in its crib, I'm telling you.
		There was a case just recently, in fact, where that happened.
		And upon investigation, authorities opted to charge the parents with reckless endangerment.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Just for having the ferret?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Just for leaving the child alone unsupervised.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		This happened in Cleveland, Ohio in February of this year.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now, why don't these stories hit the press?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I didn't hear about it.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		And let's see, a five-week-old girl in stable condition after being bitten at least 50 times by the pet ferret.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Police charged your parents with felony of child endangering.
unidentified		Wow.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Darn, hold on.
		We're at the top of the hour.
		You've got a good long break here.
		Well, I was going to get a ferret.
		I wanted to get a ferret.
		Ramona didn't want a ferret.
		I wanted one.
		I thought they were cute.
		So they'd actually eat your child's face off.
		American Mankillers is the book Don Zadel the Guest.
		Zeidel.
unidentified		There you go.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Be right back.
unidentified		Be right back.
		Call Art Bell in the Kingdom of Nigh on the Wildcard Line at Area Code 702-727-1295.
		That's Area Code 702-727-1295.
		This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It is.
		My guest is Don Zeitel.
		He's an animal expert, has been all his life.
		He just wrote a book called American Man Killers.
		And boy, he means what he's saying.
		Children missing, eaten by animals.
		Adults eaten by animals, even their own domestic pets.
		Somebody just sent this to me from the Electronic Telegraph.
		It's entitled, Wild Animals Get Taste for Humanity.
		How to Serve Man.
		My God, it's a cookbook.
		Seriously, from the Electronic Telegraph, experts believe that mountain lions or cougars are shedding their old terror of the humans who were once their most dangerous predator.
		The mountain lions have been living for generations now within close proximity to people.
		And, said the head of Colorado's Division of Wildlife, they are losing their fear.
		After being pushed to the brink of extinction by years of hunting and the destruction of their natural habitat, America's wildlife seems to be biting back.
		Record numbers of attacks by mountain lions, alligators, coyotes, and bears are being recorded as Americans discover the dangers lurking in their own backyard.
		In Florida, where a three-year-old boy was snatched by an 11-foot alligator while playing in a lake last March, state authorities are about to launch a campaign warning away visitors because of the dangers lurking beneath the surface of the popular holiday destination.
		Get this.
		Florida's estimated 1 million alligators have been showing a much greater willingness to attack humans.
		Though there have been only nine fatal alligator attacks since 1948, verifying what my guest says, listen to this, five of these have been in the last ten years.
		Once again, Don Zeitel.
		Don, I want to tell you about a call I got from a cop a couple of weeks ago.
		It was an intriguing call.
		He said, this is a true story.
		It doesn't matter whether you believe me or not.
		But it was up in Wisconsin or someplace where it snows a lot.
		I forget.
		And he said, I was on patrol out in a rural area, and I came upon a car with its door open, and the owner of the car was outside.
		And what had happened is this guy had hit a deer, a 10-point buck, and the guy got out to see how the deer was, and somehow the deer got into his car and got into the front seat and was laying in his front seat and wouldn't get out.
		And it was warm in there, I guess.
		I don't know.
		The deer wanted to be in there anyway.
		So the cop helped the guy.
		They opened the passenger side, and they both got and pushed on this deer's butt until it finally got out of the car.
		And the guy drove off, and he was happy.
		And the cop thought, well, I really just helped somebody out.
		And the cop went back to his patrol car, and here's the deer in the front seat of the patrol car.
		And now the cop's alone, right?
		And so he went around, opened the passenger's side of the door, and pushed and pushed and pushed on this thing, and it wouldn't budge.
		And so finally, exhausting all other possibilities, he drew his service revolver and went around to the driver's side and fired a shot.
		And oh yeah, the deer took off all right.
		It took the whole headliner of the car with it and just totally wrecked his patrol car.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		and he spent like hours filing a report that nobody believed is that is that behavior of the of a that It's possible that the deer, you know, here he was, he was on a white field out there that was Bright due to whatever illumination was available.
		The deer was injured.
		He was frightened.
		He was looking for a place of refuge.
		And the nearest place of refuge he saw was this nice dark tunnel represented by the interior of the car.
		So, yeah, I think that's a credible story.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, I got one more for you, and then we'll take some calls and do some other stuff.
		But one more story for you.
		I'm a cat person.
		I have cats.
		I have three cats, all right?
		And oh, it was now two years ago.
		There was a cat suddenly under my house, and I can't handle that, you know, having a cat live under my house.
		So I said, I've got to have a hard trap, and I set the trap for the cat.
		About 3.30 in the morning, boom.
		Here's this orange little fuzzball, right?
unidentified		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And so we stored it in the bathroom on newspaper overnight in the cage, took it to the vet the next day, and had it declawed, de-testicled.
		We had it washed.
		And they put it to sleep to do all this.
		They gave it anesthetic.
		This is a wild cat, feral cat, okay?
		I mean, really feral cat.
		And they did all of the things they were going to do and charged me the appropriate hundreds of dollars.
		And I bring this thing home and we put it in a fluffy little cat bed.
		It was still asleep, you know, from the anesthetic.
		And we put it in a nice little fluffy cat bed.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		I can see this one coming.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, this is the truth now.
		This is the utter truth.
		And we both sort of laid down on the floor by the cat bed and watched him until he woke up.
		And he woke up and he blinked three times and looked at us.
		And I tell you, this cat went five and a half feet straight up in the air.
		I mean, straight up in the air.
		Began running around the room in a crazed manner.
		This was really, we're talking to cats still under the influence of the anesthetic.
		It ran into walls until it bloodied itself.
		I picked it up.
		I pick it up.
		And sure enough, it purred.
		And it didn't get me.
		And I thought, this is cool.
		And so it's going to be okay.
		It purred.
		But then I found out later, not then, that cats purr sometimes not because they're happy, but because they're scared.
		Anyway, I put the cat in the bathroom and we let him sleep it off and left him alone for a long time.
		Next day I went back into the bathroom.
		I picked up the cat.
		By now the anesthetic's gone, right?
		This cat turned around and nailed me.
unidentified		Bit the hell out of you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Bit the hell out of me.
		And like an idiot, I dropped the cat, of course, natural reaction.
		But I picked it right back up again.
		I didn't like it.
		Oh, man.
		This time it went down to the bone.
		All right, now this, it's been two years.
		When I say this cat was feral, I mean this cat really was feral.
		It must never have come in contact with a human being.
		And, of course, now he's like halfway domesticated, and I mean halfway.
		He trusts me, and we've kind of bonded, but it's been two years.
		And this cat will never, in my opinion, be a normal cat.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, normal, and by normal, you mean he'll never be 100% domesticated.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's correct.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		And you are correct in that assessment.
		Trying to tame an animal that has gone feral, like a normally domesticated animal or usually domesticated animal that has gone feral is no different from trying to tame one from true wild socks.
		You just simply cannot do it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's foolish to attempt, I guess.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it is.
		It's foolish to attempt to do so.
		Do you have any children in your household?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Not small children.
unidentified		Okay.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Well, then you're probably okay.
		Yeah, that's textbook stuff.
		Wild animals attempting to panel, make pets, or whatever, especially after their adult stage or even sub-adult stage.
		It's an exercise in futility for the most part.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, so it really is as you say then, and as this story that I read at the beginning of the hour, I mean, they're saying, too, animal attacks all over the place are increasing.
		Are we violating their world?
		Is that why?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		No.
		See, that's the politically correct explanation.
		There are three basic reasons for these increases in animal attacks.
		The first reason is there are more animals, period, of all kinds.
		All across this country, there are dozens upon dozens upon dozens of urban and suburban communities having problems with white-tailed deer, you know, decimating yards, wandering around in playgrounds, yada, yada, yada.
		They're overpopulated in the extreme.
		There is also a reciprocal increase in predatory species, everything from raccoons to coyotes to bears to you name it.
		And I'm going to tell you a coyote story or two here in just a moment.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I am in coyote country.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, you're pretty close to Lake Tahoe, so I've got a real good story for you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Actually, I'm closer to Death Valley.
		I'm about 20 miles from Death Valley.
		We're in the Sirius Desert here, and I can't.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, because relative to where I am, you're close to Lake Tahoe.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I can go out to take my night vision outside at night, and there are coyotes everywhere.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		You're going to love the story, coyote stories I want to tell you here in a minute.
		Anyway, the other reason for the increase is there are now more people afield.
		Even though we live in the glass and concrete jungles, there is a growing interest or movement or whatever to so-called get back to nature, and people like to go out and hike on the nature trails and Uanah and nature's wonders, which is fine and wonderful.
		But the point is there are more people afield.
		And then the third reason is one that we've already touched on, and that is that because of this increasing rate of human and animal commingling, The animals are habituated to human presence.
		They have no reason to view them as anything other than another animal and a harmless other animal at that.
		And so therefore, their willingness to approach them, attack them, and or eat them is increased.
		And so, you know, there are very sound, relatively simple explanations for these increases in animal attacks.
		As for the coyotes, the coyote numbers have exploded from one end of this country to the other.
		And the results, of course, are predictable.
		Let me tell you, by the way, before I get too much farther into the coyote thing, an interesting trend that I noted in my research, anytime there has been either an extremely fantastic incident which resulted in death and or consumption of a victim,
		or in which there was just a large number of attacks that did not necessarily result in death, almost invariably in the preceding months and years to those incidents, there had been a very sharp increase and I've been after the increase a sustained level of predation on family pets.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes, and we don't let cats out here.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Cats are eaten by coyotes.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Precisely.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, believe me.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's just a break.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Precisely.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		One nice meal.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Let me give you a two.
		Let's start with something very, very recent here.
		17 February 1997.
		Three-year-old Lauren Bridges was playing outside her family's rented vacation condominium at Lake Tahoe.
		From inside the house, her father, Steve, heard her shouting, get away, get away, and thought she was in some sort of dispute with a sibling or something.
		Then the shouts changed to a primal scream of terror.
		Steve bolted outside, saw his daughter on the ground being, quote, shaken like a doll, end of, quote, by the neck in the jaws of a coyote.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, my God.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Steve ran up, pulled the coyote off, threw it several feet, but it was up and coming again, determined not to be cheated out of its prey.
unidentified		Whoa.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Steve continued to battle the predator while his wife called 911.
		Police arrived and shot the coyote when it charged them.
		Lauren survived with over 30 puncture wounds and cuts to her head, face, and neck.
		Two of the wounds came within a whisker of her carotid artery and eye.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		My God.
		See, now, I don't know if I wanted to hear this.
		I have so many coyotes out here, and what I've noticed mostly, Don, honestly, is that coyotes kind of skulk around and they don't want to be anywhere near you, and they generally take off when they see you.
		But on the other hand, there have been some nights I do my broadcast from home, I'm sitting right here at home right now.
		Some nights, there are so many of them out there, Don, they're going, you know that noise they make?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		I heard them outside my window here just a short while ago.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And I've had to actually shut my window because the noise was getting on the air.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		In August 1995, Coyote grabbed a 16-month-old boy from the front yard of his Los Alamos, New Mexico home.
		This was in a proper suburban-type neighborhood.
		Started dragging him off.
		The boy's mother, fortunately, heard him screaming, and she ran outside and drove the animal off, beating it with a broom.
		In June of that same year, a three-year-old girl had the exact same thing happen to her in the exact same neighborhood.
		Now, get this one.
		In July 1995, a coyote stalked and attacked a 15-month-old girl named Erica Galvin while she was playing in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, California.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Los Angeles.
unidentified		Yeah.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		The girl's mother, Dana, told the Los Angeles Daily News that her body was flip-flopping on the ground.
		He was trying to eat her.
		He was trying to kill her.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What do they do?
		I mean, Los Angeles, come on.
		Do they come down from the mountains?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		They live in Griffith Park.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They live there.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		There have been 13 known or acknowledged attacks in Los Angeles County since 1975.
		Six of those occurred in that park.
		In 1991, a coyote killed a two-year-old girl near Glendale, California.
		Now, here's an interesting thing.
		In the wake of that Lake Tahoe attack, now all of these incidents I've been citing for you occurred, well, all but a few of them occurred in California.
		There have been dozens of coyote attacks in California.
		Quoting from the official press reports about that Lake Tahoe attack in June of this year, I mean February of this year.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Quoting from that, wildlife officials said Monday that an attack by a coyote on humans is extremely unusual and could recall no previous incidents in California.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now, was that some sort of politically correct statement they made?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		I have no idea who made it.
		It just says wildlife officials, and the popular press tends to call anybody from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals to the local dog catcher a wildlife official.
		So who knows?
		Could have been anybody.
		But the point is, coyotes are everywhere, and whenever you have them where there are a lot of people around, you stand to have problems.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What is your view of PETA?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		My view of PETA, I think they are among the most despicable people on the face of the earth, and I'll tell you why.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now, no mince words.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Anybody who makes statements such as meat is murder are insulting every murder victim and that murder victim's family.
		They are denigrating the entire human race by equating the death of an animal with the murder of a human being.
		And in my opinion, are somewhere below the Nazis of World War II Germany on a moral plane.
		To equate humans with animals in that context is reprehensible.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, when PETA is presented with an animal which has killed a human being story, how do they handle that?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		They say, oh, well, we have usurped their territory.
		We have treated them so badly and yada, yada, yada, they are, of course, defensive of it.
		They, of course, have to be because, see, that's where their money comes from, is these cute, wonderful, furry animals.
		And so they have to defend the animal.
		They have to uphold their poster child's reputation.
		Else, the money doesn't flow into the coffers.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Have you ever debated anybody from PETA?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yes, several times.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Live on the air.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		And I kick their butt.
unidentified		You do?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If anybody from PETA would like to fax me, 702-727-8499, we could apparently arrange that, couldn't we?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes, we could arrange that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We could, okay.
		Somebody here wants me to ask you about, we are going to take a call, ask you about these children's petting zoos.
		You know, goats, lambs, calves, pot-bellied pigs, blah, blah, blah.
		Good idea, bad idea?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		I think it's a good idea in the sense that it acclimates children to animals, gets them familiar with them.
		On the other hand, I think it's a bit of a problem in the sense that it perhaps instills in the children an unrealistic idea about the approachability and domesticity of animals.
		So the same child that walked up and stroke the goat or the llama or whatever it was in the petting zoo, he might try to do the same thing with the white-tailed deer that shows up in his backyard.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I certainly would.
		I would try to pet a deer.
		I have tried to pet a deer, naturally.
		Well, I know.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		You're going to wind up in one of my books if you keep stuff up.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Art Bell gets rung by deer.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's possible.
		It's true.
		We're stupid about not you.
		The majority of us are stupid about that sort of thing.
		I mean, we have been raised with Disney, of which I'm part of, I might add, to think of deer as extremely gentle, frail, beautiful creatures.
		And the last thing you'd want to do is shoot them.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		It's hard to know where to start addressing something like that.
		The point is simply this.
		Well, there are several points.
		One, Mother Nature, contrary to what you saw last week on the Discovery Channel, is a cruel, calculating old bitch who will kill you given half the chance.
		The nature we all love is a mistress of the finest black-witted tradition.
		She'll draw you close with her charms, then kill you if she can.
		And if she can't suffocate you under Mount St. Helen ash, crush you in an earthquake, drown, burn, poison, infect, or electrocute you with other weapons of mass destruction, she may just send one of her minions to quietly eat you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I would much rather go in one of the aforementioned ways than to be eaten.
		To be eaten, believe me, it is nearly last on my list of ways that I would want to go.
		I don't want to be eaten.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Are you familiar with the there was an incident that happened a number of years ago in Glacier Park, Montana?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Let's hold that one until after we're at a break, all right?
unidentified		Okay, partner.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right, take care.
		I don't want to be eaten.
		If you were to make a list of ways that you could go, some of which would be quick and satisfactory, being eaten would be way, way, way down at the bottom of the list.
		On my list, anyway.
		Don Zeitel is my guest.
		American Man Killers.
		Oh, well, I'll tell you how to get that book.
		American Man Killers is his book.
		We'll be right back.
		This, of course, is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified		Hey, PETA, are you out there?
		From the Kingdom of Nye, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
		From East of the Rockies, call ART at 1-800-825-5033.
		West of the Rockies, including Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico at 1-800-618-8255.
		First-time callers may reach ART at Area Code 702-727-1222.
		And you may fax ART at Area Code 702-727-8499.
		Please limit your faxes to one or two pages.
		This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
		Now again, here's ART.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And especially, especially, if you're from PETA, should you fax me?
		You want a debate?
		Oh, we've obviously got one here for you.
		Anybody have the cojones?
		My fax number is area code 702-727-8499.
		The guest is Don Zeitl.
		The book is American Man Killers.
unidentified		The book is American Man Killers.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Back now to Don Zeitl, who tends not to mince words about anything.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Don, welcome back.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Thank you, Ark.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Listen, I mentioned a horror of being eaten.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's a horror, and we'll get right back to that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Just before we do, though, I want to tell people how to get your book.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Ah, very well.
		There's any number of ways you can get it.
		The way that I would like for you to get it is from me.
		And if you get it directly from me, I'll even autograph it for you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You will?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		You betcha.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wait a minute.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't have an autographed copy.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah, but art, you know, autographs are for really special people.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, so they can get an autograph.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Depending on how well you treat me, I'll think about it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, how do they get an autographed copy?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Credit card orders can telephone.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Area code 940-748-2048.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where are you, by the way?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		I am in a loghouse in the woods of Texas.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Texas?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, do I have this right?
		Area code 940-748-2048?
		Yes.
		And you can, like, that's.
		Is that your number?
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You answer that?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, somebody will answer it.
		I may answer it if somebody, if everybody else is busy.
		But I may answer it, yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is that a 24-hour number?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, it is tonight.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Let's put it that way.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, it is now.
		Oh, that's all I need to know.
		So they can call that number now.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, I would rather wait till after the show, because I'm the only one in the office now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I see.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		You have to remember it's about 2 a.m. here.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, is that phone going to make a ringing sound?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, probably.
unidentified		I see.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, you may have to disable the ring right now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Because now that we've got that number out, people are going to start calling it 940-748-2048.
unidentified		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is the number, and you can get an autographed copy.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's a pretty good-sized book, actually, isn't it?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's about 240 pages.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hardback.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		It is the first book of its kind, by the way.
		And it is the most complete, even though it is far from complete.
		I mean, you know, it would have to be a 12-volume set to be anywhere near complete.
		Daddy Ammit, can you stand by just a second, Art?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I knew we were going for that.
		All right, yes, we'll stand by.
		And it is a beautiful book.
		And in a while here, I will hold it up so that you can see it on the studio cam, folks, while he's getting rid of the ringer on that thing.
		You may have to actually unplug it from the wall, Don.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Are you there?
		Yeah, I just got a call from some kind of nutcase telling me I need to be on Prozac that I'm insane.
		At any rate.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I get faxes like that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How long were you?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		You know, it's great being a person people love to hate.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		God, I hope someone from PETA calls.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Oh, really?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, let's go to the phones.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		First time caller line, you're on the air with Don Zeitle.
unidentified		Hi.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hey, how are you?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm okay.
unidentified		Good.
unidentified		I enjoy your show.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
unidentified		And don't have any real problems with anything the author has said, except one thing about vegetarians.
		I've been a vegetarian since 1973.
		I'm not real skinny.
		I'm about 250, six foot tall.
		Very athletic.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You weigh 250 pounds?
unidentified		Sure do.
		How do you get to weigh 250 eating vegetables?
		Well, I do eat dairy products and occasionally have eggs, but I eat no meat or fish.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		You mean you eat those unborn chickens?
unidentified		Yes, I do.
unidentified		I don't have a problem with it.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Oh, God.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		That's abortion.
unidentified		Well, they didn't have any faces and they didn't walk around, so that kind of meets my criteria.
		And I do agree with most everything you said.
		I don't hunt.
		My father was a hunter.
		I am an NRA member.
		I just wanted to say there's stereotypes about vegetarians that aren't necessarily true.
		We're not all nut cases that think animals are equal to humans.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Let me ask you a question real quick.
		Are you a vegetarian because you feel like it's a healthier diet?
		Or are you a vegetarian because you just don't want to eat animals?
unidentified		It started out as an idealistic college student who didn't want to eat animals, and it's grown into a health consideration with still some of that same feeling existing.
		It just, I don't sell it.
		I'm not a member of any group.
		I raised two teenage boys about to graduate high school.
		They've never had meat or fish their entire life.
		They both work out in gyms, and they're not like scrawny, pale-faced people like you described earlier.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm the one who said that.
unidentified		Okay.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		So you are content to follow vegetarianism as a personal conviction and not try to force it off on the rest of us then, right?
unidentified		No, in fact, I don't even bring it up unless I'm really in an awkward situation.
unidentified		You know, someone's taking me to the steak restaurant and they're wondering why I'm ordering a salad.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		In that case, partner, you're a fine fellow in that respect.
unidentified		I feel to each his own.
		I'm sure I could, you know, ascribe to some philosophies that may, from a social point of view, there's some advantages if we ate a little less meat for health and cholesterol and medical reasons and all sorts of things, but it's not an issue for me.
		It's more of a personal choice.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, we can respect that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And you're a cop, too, huh?
unidentified		Yeah, I am.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Thank you very much.
		I don't have any problem with that.
		What I have a problem with is people who don't eat meat because they don't want to eat animals.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		What I have a problem with is people who don't eat meat and they want to force the rest of us not eat meat.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I know.
		They're very, very, very activist about it.
		I don't know why that is.
		They're like anti-smokers.
		Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Don's Idol.
unidentified		Hi.
unidentified		Hi, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi, where are you?
unidentified		I'm in Montana.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, welcome.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Where is Lika?
unidentified		Don, you seem to have a real bad attitude towards animals.
		You say that they're just nothing but blind, raging instinct.
		I have an elk hunting story for you.
		I'm not a hunter myself, but I like to go on the trips.
		There was just a huge bull elk, and I don't know if it was a 30-30 or a 30-odd 6.
		It was a big gun, but right in the head, and that took two steps back and shook its head, and her husband jumped up and shot it through the neck.
		This thing was just bleeding all over the place.
		And it ran up over this little hill here, and there's a little bit of snow on the ground yet.
		And there's some bushes in there, and we tracked it, and all of a sudden the tracks just stopped.
		And I thought, oh, where's Art Bell?
		An alien got him.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, what's the end of this story?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, where the hell was it?
unidentified		Okay, well, it turns out that this elk had backtracked, had actually stepped one foot at a time in its tracks, backtracking, and went around this little embankment and was laying there.
		Ooh.
		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't know if I can, is that believable, Don?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, I don't want to cast any disparagement on anybody, but I have a little bit of a hard time with that one.
		And Second, I have a little bit of a hard time with the idea of the thing being shot both in the head and in the neck with a large-caliber rifle with properly constructed bullets and then walking off like that.
		Are you sure it wasn't a small rifle, like maybe a .270 or a .243?
unidentified		No, it was either a 3030 or a 30-odd 6, and his whole head was nothing but it just crunched.
unidentified		All the bones were broken up in the head, and that thing went quite a ways.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		There's a lot of real odd things about this that don't make any sense.
		I'm not saying you're lying.
		That's not what I'm saying.
		I'm just saying there's some really odd twists here.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Because that implies a reasoning intelligence to backtrack precisely.
unidentified		That's what I'm talking about.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Animals, contrary to what, you know, when people tend to project their own emotions or their own ideas or whatever onto animals, when you look at them objectively, what you find is that animals are nothing more than biological machines operating under a program that we call instinct.
unidentified		What about a black bear shot in the shoulder that rolls in the mud and patches its own wound?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		The bear rolled in the mud because the mud was soothing to it.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		It wasn't because it said, okay, I'm going to go roll in the mud and this will pack my wound and I'll get healed.
unidentified		No.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		The animal was reacting, it was responding reflexively, instinctively, if you will, and doing something that basically felt good.
unidentified		Or maybe there is more to it than instinct.
unidentified		Maybe it has the ability to learn and just want to survive.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		No, instinct can adapt.
		And over time, if enough animals of a given species encounter the same set of circumstances enough times, their response to that set of circumstances becomes imprinted on the species.
		It's called a genetic drift.
		And in other words, a new element is added to the instinctive program.
		And of course, you know, you do get the same type of thing in individual animals.
		We have a name for it.
		It's called habituation.
		The fox becomes habituated to eating the chickens out of the chicken house.
		The bear becomes habituated to eating weenies out of a camper's ice chest or whatever.
		And they will repeat that behavior.
		But as far as them logically reasoning that out, oh, there's an ice chest, and I bet there's food in it because that's where you keep foods in the ice chest.
		No, that doesn't happen.
unidentified		Tell it to that elk.
unidentified		He sure was good eating, though.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		I bet he was.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		I love elk steak.
unidentified		You've got a great website, Art, and usually I'm listening to you on the internet, but I'm out of time, so I'm out in my car tonight.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's real devotion to go out to your home.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Thanks for the story.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Don's Idol.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
unidentified		Hey there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hey there.
unidentified		I've got a question for Don concerning wolf hybrids.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, where are you?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Oh, my God.
unidentified		I am in Nashville.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Nashville.
		Wolf hybrids.
		Yeah, that's really an interesting topic.
		Go ahead.
unidentified		Well, from what I understand, I don't know where I read it, but I've heard it several places that basically all house pet dogs are direct descendants from wolves.
		And I'm sure that there's some genetic variation in behavior and stuff.
		But I've heard of people having wolf hybrids as pets, and some of them acting virtually like a regular house pet, and others I've heard of getting extremely aggressive.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		I was just going to ask Don what he knew about wolf hybrids and if there's any myths or I know I wish I didn't know as much about wolf hybrids as I do because one of the things I know is how easily they can take your arm off because I very nearly lost mine to a wolf hybrid.
unidentified		Wow.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Wolf hybrids are, in my experience with them, one of the most adaptable predators I've ever had an experience with.
unidentified		Adaptable.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What do you mean adaptable?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Adaptable in the sense that they can quickly adapt their behavior to different and changing circumstances, very quickly, very effectively, adapt their behavior.
		People might want to characterize it as intellect or learning ability or whatever, but professionals don't like to use those terms.
		At any rate, the point is they are very adaptable animals.
		They are also the most unpredictable.
		Very unpredictable.
		They have a very, very high propensity to act what is actually normal for them, and that is to be predators.
		And what that means in many cases is usurping the pack leadership position from their owners by killing them, by preying on the neighbor's children, etc., so on, ad nauseum.
unidentified		So they're trying to be top dog all the time?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah.
		That is normal, natural pack predator behavior.
		You know, everybody wants to be the leader, you know.
		And the only reason that they are not the leader is because some stronger animal dominates them.
		In the pack hierarchy, in the wild, of course, that's going to be the, you know, the alpha male.
		He's the biggest, the baddest, the strongest, or whatever.
		He is capable of keeping that leadership position.
		In the case of a domesticated animal or a tempted domesticated animal, the pack leader is you.
		And so when he decides to make a bid for the pack leadership position.
		You're in the way.
		Yeah, you are the pack leader.
		And so guess who he's going to challenge?
unidentified		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Interesting.
		Interesting.
		I once had, I tend to have big cats.
		I tend to have cats that go over 20 pounds.
		And I once had a cat whose name was Yetu.
		And this is a true story, Don.
		Yetu and I got into a fight.
		You know, we would rough half a cat.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		I wouldn't believe that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We got into a fight.
		But when I tell you that I got into a fight with this cat, I mean this cat was going for me big time.
		It was going to harm me the best way it could.
		It was attacking and jumping at me.
		I took a coat and I wrapped it around my arm because I was going to get chewed to bits otherwise.
		And I ended up giving Yesu a boot in the can finally and booted him out the door.
		And this was an inside cat normally.
		And this cat went away for like several hours.
		And when he came back, he was all of a sudden himself again.
		And it was like he was sorry about what he did.
		He was cuddling up to me.
		He was purring.
		He was back to Mr. I love you.
		I love you.
		I'm sorry for what I did.
		It was almost like that.
		Now, it may have been some kind of challenge.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, with cats, it's not going to be a pack leadership type of move there.
		Cats ordinarily are solitary in a natural environment.
		They're going to be solitary.
		They do, however, have territories which they are highly defensive of.
		And so it may be that your cat's instinct to possess and protect a territory was elicited by the rough house playing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There was a breaking point.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		At one point it was play, and then it passed a certain point and it got real serious, yeah.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah, exactly.
		Well, see, you know, the rough house play basically simulates a real fight, whether it be fight over a female, whether it be fight over a territory, whatever the case may be.
		And it simulates that.
		Well, it's not that great a leap to go from simulation or play, as we are wont to call it, to the real thing.
		And so, you know, it's kind of like, you know, I mean, hell, when I was a kid, we would, you know, rustle, rassle, and tussle and rough house, but by golly, sometimes you'd reach a point where that same instinct that humans possess, it would kick in, and by golly, you were trying to reduce the other guy to nothing but hair, eyes, and teeth.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I did say earlier, and then I stopped you, yeah, I have way at the bottom of my list in ways to go is to be eaten.
		I wouldn't want to be eaten.
		And you were starting to make some sort of response to that, and I stopped you.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		One of the most infamous cases of grizzly predation against humans has spawned, it spawned a book by the title of Night of the Grizzlies.
		I think there was also a movie, the same title, based on the same two incidents.
		They both occurred on the same night, 13 August, 1967.
		One of them involved a group of friends and co-workers who were seasonal employees of Glacier Park Incorporated, a contract concessionaire.
		These people were camped out at Trout Lake in Montana's Glacier National Park, earlier callers from Montana.
		Around 2 a.m., the group was awakened by something sniffing around their sleeping bags.
		It was a monster grizzly.
		It looked like a bromo bull in a fur coat, looking like looking for a late-night snack.
		The bear took a tentative bite out of Paul Dunn's bedroll, tore the back off of his sweatshirt in the process.
		Now, Dunn had been trying to follow procedure and play dead, but that was just a bit much.
		He exploded out of the nylon shroud and scurried up a tree in about 500 milliseconds flat, and he was followed in the shore order by the rest of the campers, scattering into the blackness and up trees.
		All but one of them, that is.
		Whether 19-year-old Michelle Coons was too frightened to get out of her sleeping bag or unable because of the stuffed zipper remains a point of disagreement to this day.
		One report said that Dunn yelled for her to unzip her bag and get out, and she yelled back that she couldn't because the bear had the zipper in its mouth.
		But whether this was the cause or an effect of her inability to escape is pretty academic.
		In a scene right out of a cheap horror movie, the bear picked the woman up in its jaws, sleeping bag and all, and carried her screaming into the dark woods.
		Flickering orange illumination of the campfire lending a surreal stop-motion effect to the proceedings.
		And then it started eating her.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It started eating her.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Alive.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Alive.
		Yes.
		This is not a myth, is it?
		It's not a deal story.
		This is real.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		This is the real deal.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Dunn and the others listened terrified as she screamed out the details of her own death.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, my God.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Punctuated by the soggy sounds of cracking bones and ripping flesh as the grizzly literally tore her apart.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		And most of her agonized wails were unintelligible, but my arm is gone, was one utterance all agreed on.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, my God.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Everyone was relieved when her suffering ended, and her final sobbed words were, oh God, I'm dead, echoing faintly off the granite bluffs.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, Don, hold it right there.
		We're headed toward the top of the hour.
		I'm dead.
		Well, that's it.
		For this hour, we'll be back.
unidentified		This is Coast to Coast A.M. To
		talk with ourselves in the Kingdom of Night.
		From east of the Rockies, dial 1-800-825-5033.
		West of the Rockies, including Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico.
		1-800-618-8255.
		First time callers may retard at area code 702-727-1222.
		And you may call it on the wildcard line at area code 702-727-1295.
		To retard from outside the U.S. First, dial your access number to the USA.
		10-800-893-0903.
		This is Coast and Coast Again.
		From the Kingdom of Night.
		With Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Alright, my guest book is American Man Killers.
		It's non-vital.
		You can get an autographed copy.
		I don't have one.
		By calling area 940-748-2048.
		Now, don't call.
		Don't call now, because he's on the air.
		940-748-2048.
		later um I've got a fax here, Don.
		I'll read to you.
		It's from Joe in Las Vegas, who calls himself the birdman of Las Vegas, who says, I'm not a PETA representative, but I am a professional animal trainer in Las Vegas who's worked with my birds, condors, eagles, falcons, and such.
		Also has trained many animals, including big cats.
		I'm the bird trainer for Siegfried and Roy, Lance Burton, Spellbound, have appeared on Letterman, Leno, Discovery Channel, and much more.
		I performed the bird shows at the Tropicana and Excalibur Hotels over the last nine years.
		I worked to breed and release condors and hunt falcons and other prey.
		I find both your guest point of view and Peter's point of view to be extreme.
		At best, his opinions are exaggerated and miss the point.
		Well, I don't know.
		If I can get Joe on the phone, and I can't get an outgoing line because all my incoming lines are jammed, but if I can get Joe on the phone, we'll bring Joe up sometime here in this hour and let you talk to him.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Very well.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Don Zeitl.
unidentified		Hi.
		Hi, Art.
		This is Robert in Springfield, Oregon.
		Yes, Robert.
		And your guest is obviously a very well-researched individual, although I don't agree with him on all points.
		I found from my experience that most animal attacks by domesticated animals are due to neglect and abuse.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You want to take that one on, Don?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		That is...
		Let me ask you this.
		Do you work with one of the animal welfare groups such as the Humane Society or something like that?
unidentified		Oh, absolutely not.
unidentified		No.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, you said in your experience, I was wondering what you base the experience on.
unidentified		Just observation things I've seen.
		I know a lot of police officers.
		I've known a couple people in animal control, things like that.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		I have thousands of case histories here in my files, and I've never gone through and tabulated them, tabulated them, but just off the top of my head, having read them and examined them and talked to people involved in some of these cases and so on and so forth, I would have to say that 10% or less involved the circumstances you describe.
unidentified		Yeah, but you know, people aren't going to admit to abusing their animals.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, what do you call abuse?
unidentified		Slapping them around, pulling their tails, pulling their ears, doing things like that.
unidentified		I mean, you know, an animal demands respect just like a human being.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, okay, that right there tells me that your view of animals is anthropomorphic, therefore it is unrealistic.
unidentified		Oh, I don't know.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yes, the fact of the matter is anything will fight back when you attack it.
		I mean, hell, even a grapefruit will scorch you in the eye for all it's worth when you attack it with a stun.
		But to say that the majority of domestic animal attacks are a defensive response to some sort of attack on the part of the owner, I'm sorry, that is just simply not the case.
		It's not anybody's fault per se, except in the sense that people have an unrealistic, rose-colored view of animals as they have been indoctrinated with it.
		And so it's not really their fault.
		They've been indoctrinated with it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Like me.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		People have been indoctrinated with the idea that animals talk to each other and say, yeah, hey, man, let's shake it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, not like that.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		No, I mean, come on.
		People go watch The Lion King, and people go watch Bambi or any of the other Disney pap, and that stuff becomes imprinted in their mind, even if at a subconscious level.
		And so that has an impact in their view, in their thinking, when they interact with animals.
		And they, like I said, even if subconsciously, they expect animals to react and respond in the same way that they have been imprinted with.
		All right.
		From watching this.
unidentified		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, all right.
		Here is, I got him.
		Here is the fellow who trained for Siegfried and Roy.
		I think most people know of them from Las Vegas.
		He's called the Birdman of Las Vegas.
		Joe, welcome to the program.
		You're on there with Don's Idol.
unidentified		Thank you.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Hi, Joe.
		Okay, you say I'm missing the point.
		What is the point?
unidentified		Well, the point you were just making, talking about people being indoctrinated with an opinion of animals from shows like Bambi or Discovery Channel where animals are all cute and kind and innocent.
		But there's a whole nother set of people out there, and I honestly believe that you are part of this group, that is creating specials like was recently a few network specials called When Animals Attack or When Animals Are Loose or When Pets Turn On You or a number of different titles,
		where Now imprinted in people's mind is not the million coyotes in the United States who walk past you in the middle of the night and never even make a noise, you don't even know that they're there, but like in your own words, the dozens or so that do come in contact with people and somebody can catch it on film and next thing you know, it's right there on 8 o'clock prime time.
		And now you have people who may have never had an opinion about a coyote before or a cougar or a bear or what have you.
		And now suddenly it's, oh my God, this big, vicious, attacking monster.
		And I saw it on TV and I heard this guy talk about it on the radio late at night.
		And if this bear comes near me, it's going to kill me.
		Not that incident where it killed the girl at the campsite, which was probably in the peak of tourist season, when everybody's fishing the streams and camping all over the place.
		And the frustrated bear probably finally got pissed off, figured it's his survival or nothing, and picked the first thing that was warm meat.
		And yes, it's unfortunate it was a girl.
		And I'm sure everybody is sorry about that.
		But like you said, the bear is programmed for survival.
		That's what it figured was its chance at survival that night.
		Fine, I'm sure that bear got blown away.
		But that doesn't account for the other 100,000 bears that were in Yellowstone or whatever that park was.
		And now suddenly these people who had no opinion about bears before, who could watch a film and listen to descriptions and your own words, flesh-eating, bone-crunching monsters, now the person who had no opinion is going to be a shotgun-wielding bear killer when they really had no reason to probably be concerned in the first place because the number of incidences and the number of attacks and the number of deaths compared
		to what they could be for how many bears and how many people there are walking through the parks of our world is actually very, very improportion is probably all I could really say.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Joe, is it?
unidentified		Joe, yes.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Joe, let me ask you this.
		If two parents had lived in a neighborhood all their life and tens of thousands of cars had passed on the street without one of them ever hitting their child and injuring them, would it be safe for them then to neglect to teach their child that, look, cars are dangerous.
		There's certain things that you don't do, and one of the things you don't do is step out in front of a moving car in the street or chase ball in the street.
		Wouldn't that be highly irresponsible of them?
		Yes, I'm the same.
unidentified		Hold on, Joe.
unidentified		That cars are going to come off the street and come craning through the front window and into that child's bed at night.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		And yet, that could finally happen somewhere.
unidentified		That has happened.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yes, that has happened, but it has also happened that children walk out in front of cars.
		And the point is, people in the past 50 to 60 years have been indoctrinated with the idea that animals are just slightly demented people in fur coats who just need a big warm hug.
		I am trying to reinstill the realities that animals are animals.
		They are biological machines operating under a program called instinct.
		And sometimes that instinct leads them to do very unsociable things to people.
		Therefore, you don't try to walk up and pet the animals.
		You don't feed the animals.
		You don't assume the animal is going to act like the animals do on TV.
		You must assume that that animal can and will hurt you if you violate its space, if you invade its territory without taking the appropriate precautions, etc., etc., etc.
		I'm trying to introduce a dose of reality.
		And the hell of it is, Joe, like in most things, reality sucks.
		We want to have these warm, fuzzy, feel-good things about animals, but the sad fact of the matter is, whenever we do that and develop those attitudes, that's when these tragedies occur.
		So you can eliminate much of the shotgun, toting, bear-killing maniacs that you alluded to by the simple act of education.
		Educate people about what can happen if they have the wrong idea about animal behavior and they will be less likely to insert themselves into situations where the tragedy can occur.
		The tragedies will not occur.
		Therefore, the desire to go out and start killing the animals will diminish.
unidentified		I can agree with you on that point.
		I simply think that most of these people, and I will hang myself by using my own quotes, are apartment-bred Discovery Channel-watching people who don't have a connection to wildlife or nature.
		And as a society, I believe we have lost this.
		We too, at one point, was an animal on this planet that I'm sure had our own specific place and our own specific balance.
		We didn't farm more than we needed.
		We didn't drink more than we needed.
		And we didn't dump garbage where we didn't need to.
		And as that, I'm trying to think what you called it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Joe, may I ask you a question?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You train big cats?
unidentified		I have owned big cats in the past.
unidentified		Yes, I'm not currently owned.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And you've trained birds for Ziegfried Morris and stuff?
unidentified		Uh-huh.
		And myself, I have condors here and eagles here.
		I have 200-plus birds here.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is there any way that you ascribe to animals anything more than instinctual intelligence?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Joe?
unidentified		Anything more than instinctual intelligence?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Anything beyond pure instinctual reaction?
unidentified		See, I have become such a behaviorist in 22 years of animal training that when I see an animal react to a given whatever it is, I see it as a summation of the entire history of that animal.
		This includes history of exposure to what it's reacting to, whether it be a signal or A human being or another animal.
		It doesn't matter.
		It's going to react according to its history.
		It's going to react according to its perception of the event.
		And it's going to react according to its amount of fear of that event.
		I don't think a lot of animals are picking on people.
		A human is a six-foot-tall animal, and no other animal for survival is going to take on a bigger beast that's going to kick its butt in battle.
		I mean, no animal, and I say no one, and I'm sorry, and I mean living creatures, no animal with this survival instinct is going to go into a suicidal fight.
		And that's why, you know, 99.9% of the time, that coyote that's no bigger than a cuck or spaniel is going to trot off into the distance.
		He might hoop and holler and put on a good display, but, you know, I even find it hard to believe that a coyote has picked up a 25 or a 30-pound child and shook it like a doll.
		I mean, I have a hard time with that story.
		I think somebody's exaggerating something there.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		No, nobody's exaggerating anything.
		I have talked with the father of the child.
		I've talked with the people who investigated it.
		I've talked to other witnesses.
		I've also talked to the witnesses and read the reports from dozens and dozens of other incidents.
		And as someone who has observed coyotes firsthand all of my life, I can tell you they are quite capable of doing that.
unidentified		Of shaking something that's almost the same size as itself?
		Yes.
		I find that strictly hard to believe.
		I have here, not within reach, but fairly close, was one of the tabloids, had a big two-page spread of an eagle that carried off a child.
		And it made the headlines, and it was on the front page, and then it was in the middle of the day.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		That must have been in the World Weekly Globe or something.
unidentified		Yeah, it was one of those.
		And I studied these pictures, and I looked at these pictures, and I read the story, and I called down there.
		It was actually a story from southern Mexico.
		And I called down there, I spoke Spanish, I spoke to the father of this child, and from my personal investigation, the entire thing was fabricated.
		The only thing that was real was the picture of the eagle sitting on the back of this guy's child.
		And if he was willing to scratch up this kid's back for a photo to make $1,500 for a news story, then he has a sicker instinct of survival than that bird ever had.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		First of all, Joe, I do not rely on the tabloids as the sources for my information.
		That's first and foremost.
		Secondly, as far as the eagle attacking the child, are you familiar with one of the early archaeological finds that's been labeled the Tong Baby?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Joe, I'll tell you what.
		Joe, I really thank you for coming on the program.
		We're going to have to break it off.
		We're here at the bottom of the hour, and we'll continue with that story after the break.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Joe, thank you very much.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you, Joe.
unidentified		All right, thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Take care.
		We're going to break here at the bottom of the hour, and my guest is Don Zeitl.
		His book is American Mankillers.
		Now, I have on my studio cam put up a picture of his book.
		I'm holding his book up.
		You can see it there.
		If you would like.
		He will provide you with an autographed copy of his book if you want one.
		You can get it by calling area code 940-748-2048.
		940-748-2048.
		Back in a moment.
		This is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified		Coast to Coast AM.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Don Zeitl is my guest.
		I stopped you in mid-sentence with the bottom of the hour.
		Don, you want to finish up what you were saying?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Sure, but real quickly, for the benefit of listeners who might want to copy the book but aren't necessarily interested in having my scrawl on the page, I'd like to give an 800 number as an alternative for them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, sure.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		1-800-451.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		4788.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How much is your book, by the way?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		$24.95 plus shipping.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		$2495 plus shipping.
		All right.
		And that applies same price if they buy it from you?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		So they can get it one or two ways, but if they call your number, they get an autographed copy.
		I'm not going to read it.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, exactly.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Calling the other number, they get just the book without chicken scratching it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Not likely.
		Most of them are going to want an autographed copy.
		940 is the area code, 940-748-2048.
		All right.
		This is a tough question.
		You can choose not to answer this if you like.
		It comes from Greg in British Columbia.
		And he says, asked Don if he believes animals have souls.
unidentified		No.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And if he is for the Darwinian way of evolution.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		I do believe in evolution.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		I do not necessarily subscribe to all of the elements as portrayed by some researchers.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Isn't that like being a little pregnant?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, no.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, either we came from the animal world or we didn't.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, no, no, no, no, no, hang on.
		I don't think there is any denying that man at one time did live in a primal state.
		There is no denying that.
		There is a prehistory of human habitation on the earth.
		Man, as well as any other animal, and man is, for all intents and purposes, he is an animal.
		He is a mammal.
		Man has adapted.
		He has changed over the years.
		He's changed his behavior.
		He's changed his appearance in various degrees and so on and so forth.
		All of these as functions of his environment.
		What is called evolution is in Many cases, nothing more than adaptation.
		And of course, there are some who would argue: well, adaptation is evolution.
		And so, you know, that's which came first, the chicken or the egg kind of question there.
		But the point is, we, as well as any other animal, we adapt to changes in our environment.
		And if that adaptation is sustained and long-term, you wind up with a genetic drift and therefore a permanent change.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Were we once Harry Apes?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		I do not, I'm ambivalent on that question at this point.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		All right.
		West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Don's Idol.
		Hi.
unidentified		Hello.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Hello.
unidentified		You can hear me, Art.
unidentified		I hear you fine.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where are you?
unidentified		I'm Ben, and I'm in Sacramento, California.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
unidentified		I love your show.
unidentified		And the lady who couldn't reach you for two years wasn't trying hard enough because I got you tonight.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There you are.
unidentified		Okay.
		I love your guest, Don.
		Don is his name?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		Don is your name.
		I think you're great.
		If anybody has any controversy about you, I think they better read the book first because listening to what you have to say probably isn't enough to get all angry about it.
		And I'll tell that to everybody who's listening.
		Okay, I got a little story, and you tell me how it ends.
		We got these little whitetails up here on the coast, and it was a little two-pointer, so they couldn't shoot it.
		So a couple guys said they just tried, they had a trapped in a little ravine area, and they wanted to see if they could wrestle it.
		You tell me how it ended.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		I have a feeling like you wound up with a couple of bloody hunters and a little whitetail exiting a frolic heels over the ridge.
unidentified		Oh, yeah.
		Really?
		Yeah.
		They just thought they could wrestle it down the ground and have some fun with it.
		And I've got to tell you something, you know, I've hunted a little bit, and I've seen those hoofs, and they are razor sharp.
		You know, running around the rocks and stuff like that.
		They leave blunt edges on your feet, you know.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Oh, absolutely.
unidentified		And that thing just tore him to shreds quicker than they could.
		And all his friends were laughing and everything.
		And I had about 16 stitches.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		I say in the book that a white-tailed doe is capable of a most convincing Lizzie Borden impersonation, giving you a lot more than 40 whacks with those axe-edge twos as well.
unidentified		And that's only with the front two.
		Yeah, exactly.
		He didn't even use his horns or nothing.
		That was just his feet.
		I wonder if you ever heard this is kind of on a different edge in the sense that they aren't predators, but because we feed them, they get too used to it.
		But over in San Francisco, I think it was about five years ago, at the zoo, of course, which I don't really like the idea of zoos.
		And on that same subject, the last caller, the animal trainer, he seems to have some kind of problem with what you're saying and everything.
		Sounds like you're just making factual accounts of things that are happening.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		I don't make this stuff up.
unidentified		Yeah, no, exactly.
unidentified		And so why is anybody going to get angry about that?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Thank you very much, Color.
		I understand where he was coming from.
		He was saying, yeah, maybe these things happen, but they're one in a gazillion.
		They're not common.
		They're very uncommon.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, they're becoming more common, number one.
		Number two, you know, to say that, oh, well, yeah, you're more likely to get struck by lightning, yada, yada, yada.
		That's not an accurate comparison, and I'll tell you why.
		Everybody in the United States will be at some time in his life exposed to potential lightning strike.
		That's 250 million chances every time out of every year.
		However, the at-risk group for an animal attack or a wild animal attack is much, much smaller because it's only the people who are exposed to it.
		It's sort of like comparing the difference between the chances of an NFL quarterback and a CPA getting their neck broken on Super Bowl Sunday.
		You see?
		And as I said to Joe earlier, one of the reasons that many of these attacks occur is just because of ignorance on the victim's part.
		Do away with the ignorance, and you will certainly curtail, I don't know that you'd ever eliminate, because there are some of these things that happen that there's absolutely nothing you could have done about it.
		But you will certainly curtail the number of incidents of this type by simple education.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		By the way, did you know in Las Vegas you can make bets on stuff like that that the quarterback will get his neck broken on Super Bowl Sunday of a certain team?
		You can make bets.
		In a certain quarter, in fact.
		In a given quarter.
		First time caller line, you're on there with Don's Idol.
unidentified		Hi.
		Hi, gentlemen.
		How are you doing tonight?
		All right.
		How's your back?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Art?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's all right.
unidentified		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Come on.
unidentified		Hey, we're picking you up here on Oklahoma City's Talk Radio at 9.30 a.m.
unidentified		WKY.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now, that is the way you do a promo.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		Yes, sir.
		Say, Don, it's a pleasure to hear a guy of your caliber on radio.
		Say, I had something I needed to let you in on.
		Back when I was a teenager, when I was living with my dad, we were briefly over in the country of Iran between 1974 and 1977.
		During my brief stay there, during that time frame, I became familiar with what the local people of the Iranians called their desert wild dogs.
		And these were canines that were there as a result, foreigners who would briefly live in their country, and they would bring their dogs with them.
		Sometimes these dogs would run off into the desert.
		And as a result, the Iranians said that these dogs became more social.
		And something that I actually witnessed that I'm telling you, gentlemen, it scared the hell out of me.
		And I'll never look at a dog the same again, was back in 1975, we lived in a three-story apartment complex over there.
		And roughly about 800 yards from us, there was a 10-acre compound, which was kind of like a summer camp for privileged people of the area.
		They would send their kids off to, and it was like maybe a two-month time frame that they would be there.
		And this compound was walled in by a brick wall that was roughly three feet thick and about 12 feet tall.
		And they had street lamps all around this area.
		And one night I heard a lot of barking, and it woke me up, and I looked out The balcony, and I actually counted roughly 36 wild dogs, and they were actually attempting a siege on this compound.
		And one thing that I noticed is that there were a lot of the bigger dogs were the ones that would try to jump on the gates.
		And the camp manager inside, he had roughly about 20 adult males, and they weren't allowed to use firearms within the compound out of fear of ricocheting off the walls and maybe hitting one of the kids.
		And so they were reduced to having using weapons like spears and basically big sticks and rocks.
		And it lasted for about like, I'd say about an hour and a half until the dogs finally just gave up and ran off.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're talking about a whole assault?
unidentified		Yes, sir.
		And believe me, when I first saw it, I ran into my dad's room and I said, Dad, you've got to get up.
		You've got to see this.
		And what he did is he looked out and he said, oh, my God.
		He said, get on the roof.
		Get on the roof.
		And we both ran up there on the roof.
		And we looked down and you could get a clear view from the street lamps that were up at night because this siege was like about 2.30 in the morning.
		And the thing that my dad noticed, he says, they are attempting a siege.
		He says they got two iron gates.
		And the front iron gate, which was the main one, was only eight feet tall.
		And we noticed four dogs that were, they looked like, they were about the size of great Danes.
		But most of them were like short-haired dogs.
		And these four dogs that were at the main gate would attempt to jump and leap up and get their hooves hooked on to the gate.
		And you could hear the scratching of their back paws as they were trying to get up there.
		It was like jumping on the door.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It was freaky.
unidentified		And yeah, but something that I, from that experience, I needed to ask Don, hypothetically speaking, what conditions do you think in this country would have to be met before a situation like this that I witnessed in Iran would happen here where we would see unwanted dogs going out into remote areas, forming packs, a social life.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And going after people.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
		I've got sad news for you.
		That's happening right now.
		That is happening right now.
		I have no record, nor have I observed an incident of the magnitude that you have described.
		But in the book, I described one particular case of a boy who was, it seemed like he was about 11, 12 years old, something like that.
		And he was fishing in a creek at some relatives' farm that they were visiting.
		And a pack of, I think consisting of five feral dogs attacked him.
		And he, in a maneuver that he had learned in a hunter safety course that he had taken the year prior, knew he couldn't fight, he knew he couldn't run, so he just rolled up in a fetal position, wrapped his arms around his head and neck and pulled his knees up to protect his stomach and chest, and just kind of tufted out and started screaming for help.
		Fortunately, someone from the house heard it, come running down with a gun, shot a couple of the dogs, ran the others off, and he survived with medical treatment.
		But that scenario has played out time and time again, not only in rural settings, as this one was, but even in urban settings.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, well, that brings me back to his question, and really it was a good one.
		Can you imagine conditions?
		I mean, frequently we talk of scenarios, Mad Max-like scenarios, where society deteriorates, something goes tragically wrong.
		There's a Mad Max kind of thing going on.
		Animals are left on their own.
		Animals that were fed by humans suddenly aren't.
		They get together.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Would there be any conditions under which you would imagine that a mass attack like that could occur on a large-scale natural disaster such as earthquake, for example?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, there you go.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Whatever.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Civil insurrection, et cetera, et cetera.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		I can't not ask you about this.
		It may be myth.
		But for some time now, and believe me, you will not get laughed in Mexico when you talk about this.
		There is some creature called the Chupacara, which translates apparently to goatsucker.
		And I'll tell you something.
		I've got Linda Moulton Howe, who's a very careful investigator, who's made a lot of trips to Puerto Rico and Central and South America and Mexico.
		And there have been hundreds of animals that have been killed by this possibly mythical creature.
		Anyway, their bodies have been found without blood in them.
		Now, obviously, you said chupacabra, so you're familiar with the myth or the reality or whatever it is.
		Any comments?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		I suspect a combination of things are at work there.
		One, I do believe that some of the victims may have, in fact, fallen under the fangs and claws of some form of natural predator.
		Whether it be, you know, down in Mexico, you have jaguars that come up from Central, I say come up from Central America.
		They're native to Mexico.
		You have jaguars, which they're not real prolific man-killers, although they're certainly capable.
		You also have the puma or cougar down in that region, which could be responsible in some cases.
		There's even the Mexican black bear, which could be responsible in some cases.
		Feral dogs, any number of predators that could be responsible for some of them.
		But what I think may be happening in many of these cases, especially the ones where there's no obvious trauma, physical trauma to the body other than just the loss of the blood.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Neck bites.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		What I think you're seeing there is the very same thing that you see very, very frequently in Africa, and it is an occult ritual slaying that is carried out either as a means of extortion or to, at least in the mind of the practitioner, to impart some kind of power to themselves.
		You remember the case a few years ago in Matamoros, Mexico, where these college students that would go over across the border, they were being lured away with promises of sex, and then they were being killed in ritual slings by these shamans that worked for these drug lords.
		And the purpose of this was to bring protection on these drug lords from the police and what have you.
		I think that what you may be seeing is something like that.
		It's black magic, so to speak.
		The blood draining is being carried out by human actors for an occult purpose.
		But I think that the legend of the chubacabra may be born from a combination of the two things.
		You've got some wild predator victims here.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		And then you've also got some human victims, and it all kind of melds together to create the chubacabra legend.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Wildcard, no, West of the Rockies.
		You're on there with Don Zeitle.
unidentified		Hi.
		Good morning, Dark.
		Good morning, Don.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Morning.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where are you, sir?
unidentified		I'm calling from Como Country up in Seattle.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
unidentified		I'd just like to relate a quick story that I experienced down in San Francisco.
		I was in Golden Gate Park one day at the Arboretum, which is a nice place of flowers and everything, nice springtime.
		And there was a lady who was about a three-year-old by the pond.
		Okay, a couple of geese there.
		And granted, their wings were clipped and everything.
		But she says to her little son, we'll go up and test a nice bird.
		Well, this bird just lowered its head and charged at this person, at this little kid.
		Luckily, it didn't bite the kid in the face.
		It bit him in the rear end.
		Now, it's just basically that dandy factor where the people think that they see this thing on TV or whatever.
		And they're wild.
		Granted, it was in an urban area.
		But people just do not realize that animals are animals.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
		That is my basic point.
		Animals are animals.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now, we have a civilization.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If our civilization broke down, would the animals' civilization break down at the same time?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		No, not at all.
		In fact, I think you would probably see a proliferation in the sense that if our civilization broke down, the care that is being given to domestic animals would cease.
		Therefore, these domestic animals would be left to their own devices.
		They would therefore revert to their instinctual behaviors.
		And yeah, we'd have animals running all over the place, eating everything inside, eating each other, eating us.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you wouldn't say that their civilization broke down, ours did.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And because we're not giving them what they need anymore, they would take what they need.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, exactly.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Simple as that.
unidentified		Simple survival.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, listen.
		Here's the story.
		I've got one more hour of my program.
		You're welcome to it if you want to stick around or you can go to sleep, your choice.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Art, that's entirely up to you.
		You're skinning this kid.
		I'm just told him the tale.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't skin cats.
		But I will certainly keep you on for another hour, Don.
		So stay right where you are, all right?
		Don's idol is my guest.
		His book is American Man Killers.
		And if you want to check out my studio cam, you'll see a copy of it there.
		You can get an autographed copy by calling 940-748-2048.
		We'll be right back.
unidentified		Words of love, so soft and tender won't win a girl's heart anymore.
		If you love her, then you must send her somewhere where she's never been before.
		From the Kingdom of Nineveh, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
		From East of the Rockies, call Art at 1-800-825-5033.
		West of the Rockies, including Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico.
		At 1-800-618-8255.
		First time callers may reach ART at Area Code 702-727-1222.
		And you may fax ART at Area Code 702-727-8499.
		Please limit your faxes to one or two pages.
		This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
		Now again, here's Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Once again, words of love.
		With animals, soft words of love seem to work.
		I have a feeling Don may argue with that book.
		We'll talk about it.
		Good morning, everybody.
		Don's idol is my guest.
		American Mankillers, his book.
		and we'll get back to him in a moment uh From time to time, I have Native Americans on the program, and they have a different attitude about animals.
		And Don, here's what somebody writes.
		Elizabeth writes the following.
		Art, under what rock did you find this guy?
		Did your talk with the ghost children, representatives of the great elders, fall on deaf ears?
		Aren't you just a bit too polite?
		Mother Earth will be served well when some beautiful creature, who has every right to be here, finally sinks its teeth into this poor soul's red neck.
		Otherwise, it was a favorable fact.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Elizabeth, you're a very nice lady.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		First of all, when she says rights, animals do not have rights, period.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, they have what we give to them.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's true.
		But what people fail to understand is this.
		They talk about wanting to give animals rights.
		You cannot have rights without responsibility.
		And animals have no sense of responsibility.
		Therefore, you cannot give Them rights.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I mean, you can do anything you want to do.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You can give them rights if you want to.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, it depends on who you is.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Let's put it this way: animals are not afforded rights either by fiat or by God.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Don's Idol.
		Hi.
		Hi, Don.
unidentified		This is Doran calling from Hiato, Maryland.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Hello, Anna.
		How are you doing, partner?
		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Question.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Pack of dogs.
unidentified		It does not constitute more than five.
		Actually, I was attacked by two.
		And I was able to send them off.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, you were fortunate.
unidentified		I know I was.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, I had options.
unidentified		I had a tree, but I also had an umbrella, and they were about 100 yards off.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Trees and umbrellas are good.
unidentified		Well, I was shaking the umbrella and just scared the hell out of the dog.
		Dogs.
		It was a, well, they weren't feral either.
		It was a Labrador and a German Shepherd.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They just decided they didn't like your face.
unidentified		Yes, I guess.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		By the way, just for what it's worth, I have been bitten by dogs over my lifetime, more times than I can remember.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		And one of the most aggressive breeds that are not traditionally viewed as aggressive have been Labradors.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I was only bitten once in my whole life by a dog, and it was a stupid little ankle biter.
		But that was the only time I...
		Now, maybe they sense that maybe they sense like Elizabeth here.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, now people ask me, you must be really mean and rotten to dogs.
		No, it's not that at all.
		Because of the way I have lived all of my life, I've had more exposure to more types of dogs in more varied circumstances than most people ever encounter.
		Therefore, the circumstances under which a person might be bitten, I have found myself in them far more often than the average person does.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, that's a good answer.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		West of the Rockies, you're on there with Don Zeidel.
unidentified		Hi.
		Hi.
		This is Judy and Merced.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, Judy, you're going to have to kind of yell at us a little bit.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Go ahead.
unidentified		Oh, I'm going to have to yell outside then.
		What I was wanting to ask him is I'll give you a real kind of brief synopsis of what happened, and then maybe you can kind of tell me whether I was hallucinating.
		We lived in Missouri, and I had a horse, and it was a nice spring day.
		The birds were out, the flowers were too, everything was going in good, and me and my horse felt like running.
		So we just took off down this dirt road and having a good old time.
		Nobody around, didn't hear nothing, come flying around this corner, she slams on the brakes, and the next thing I know, there's a heifer down, and I'm not talking like a little 200-pound heifer, I'm talking like a 600-pound heifer here.
		And she's still steaming, the blood is just gushing out of her neck, and there's like eight dogs around her, and the leader dog, the head of the pack, or whatever you want to call him there, was standing right there at her head.
		And me and my horse is about maybe eight, ten feet from him.
		And from what I had been told as a child, I knew better than to turn around and run, even though they had just brought down a kill because they were all on guard.
		So we kind of sidestepped by him.
		But I swear to God, and you can think I'm crazy if you want, this dog, he had gold eyes and he had the most intelligent look.
		It's like he was weighing the situation out.
		And he was, I swear he was taking a sizing me up, figuring out whether it was worth the effort or not.
		They already had a kill.
		I didn't appear to be a threat, and he basically turned around and let me go.
		Is that normal?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's pretty much standard packed predator behavior.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		If you're not getting too close to their kill, or if there's no kill around, if you're not presenting a plausible predation opportunity, then yeah, that sounds like pretty well normal behavior.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I've got something I want you to listen to.
		I'm not going to make comment on it beyond that.
		I'm just going to have you listen and see if you can tell me what this is, all right?
		See if you recognize this.
unidentified		Mario sounds
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Any idea what that might be?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, there's some sounds in there that sound a little bit like a swine.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		And then there's other sounds in there that make me want to think it's a chakma baboon.
unidentified		Uh-huh.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Whatever it is, I don't want to meet it.
		All right, first time caller.
		By the way, it's supposed to be Bigfoot.
		First time caller line, you're on there with Don Zadel.
unidentified		Hi, this is Chris in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
		Hey, Chris.
		Two things.
		The first one is just a weird story.
		We used to have this cat.
		It wasn't a very big cat.
		He probably weighed about 15 pounds or so.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Medium.
unidentified		But he, when he was, I wouldn't say he was even a year old yet, he started bringing rattlesnakes up onto the front porch.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Cats will prey on snakes.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Some of them are more deft at it than others are, but yeah, cats will prey on snakes.
unidentified		But I saw this cat kill snakes that had a hard time dragging.
		It was really weird.
		But the main thing I wanted to talk to you about is I've been working in dog training for a long time.
		And it's strange to me how over time I keep having weird experiences with wild animals.
		I don't know if it's a matter of learning body language or learning how to position myself.
		People like to go to the zoo with me because I can make the lion roar every time I go.
		By looking at him right.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Okay, yeah, exactly.
		See, I experienced the same thing.
		Because I have observed animals and striven to learn not necessarily how to communicate with them, but how they communicate with each other.
		I have learned to pick up on their body language and to understand what their next move is probably going to be based on their body language.
		And by the same token, I have also learned how to...
		Well, because most of the times that I've been bitten, it was either A, when I wasn't paying attention and wasn't expecting to be bitten, didn't know there was a dog around, for example, or B, it was in a situation where it was a matter of either, you know, get bitten or try to outrun the dog, you know.
unidentified		I've been bitten six times, and it was usually a result of ignorance while learning.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah.
		In the early stages, yes, I went through that.
		I trained dogs, by the way, for a while.
		I was an attack dog trainer.
unidentified		I train in Shitzen.
		So I'll go through some of that.
		Yeah.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Well, at any rate, as far as the, yeah, you're right.
		You know, I swear, at the local zoo here, there is this one orangutan that would marry me in a heartbeat.
		She comes up to that.
		Every time I walk in, she comes up to that glass enclosure and she makes little kissy faces at me, and she tries to reach out and then caress me and all this other stuff.
		She's either in love with me or she thinks that I'm her long-lost uncle.
		But the point is, I can, through my body language, I can signal a predatory intent.
		I can signal a challenge.
		I can signal submissiveness.
		I can signal benign behavior or whatever.
		And the animals pick up on that, and they respond to it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's true.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		i mean like with a dog for example you can get down on all fours put your butt up in the air and start wiggling and that they will uh...
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah.
		But by the same token, I don't know if you've ever tried this experiment or not, and I do not recommend you do it unless you A, know what you're doing, and B, have a relatively small dog involved.
		Just stare the dog in the eye.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I know.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		You know, you'll get one of three responses.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Same with a cat.
		You know what a cat will do?
		A cat will spit at you.
unidentified		Yeah.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		The dog will either cower and try to go away and hide.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		He will come cringing to your feet in a submission display, or he will adopt an openly aggressive posture in response to your challenge.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't recommend that, folks.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Don't try that at home.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah, don't try that at home.
		But the point is, that is just one of the more simple and obvious elements of nonverbal communication, if you want to characterize it as that, that you can elicit a response in an animal.
		But see, some people, they have learned unconsciously to use this body language and to even read body language without even realizing they're doing it.
		And they interpret this as an exchange of emotion between themselves and the animal.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now, here's one.
		Tell me if this is true.
		Again, I'm a cat person, so I can, with my feral cat, when I'm in his presence, I can look at him right in the eye and blink my eyes, and he relaxes.
		That relaxes him.
		When I start blinking my eyes, that relaxes him.
		It's sending some kind of signal to him that, you know, it's not a stare-down or something.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		It's not sustained eye contact.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I guess that's it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wildcard line, you're on the air with Don Zadel.
unidentified		Hi.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Zeidel.
unidentified		Hello.
unidentified		Hello.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Hello?
unidentified		Am I on?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, you are.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're on.
unidentified		Oh.
		Yes.
		Don.
		Yes.
		You're telling a tale that really needs to be told.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, thank you, partner.
unidentified		It's unfortunate that most of the people that ought to be hearing it are not listening.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, they're asleep.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Either literally or figuratively.
unidentified		Right.
		Where's the echo come from?
		Oh.
		The reason I called was to earlier in the program, you had talked about the nature of the human animal.
		Yes.
		The human, we as human animals, we are naturally frugivores.
		We're not, and this explains why Art was stating that vegetarians that he had met look so sickly and anemic or whatever.
		Because we're not herbivores.
		Somebody who is on simply vegetables, you know, green leafy or whatever, simply are not getting their nutritional needs met.
		We, like the higher apes, and chimpanzees are a poor example of this.
		They are not one of the higher apes.
		We can talk about gorillas and orangutans who are fruit eaters, just like we naturally are.
		And we are in no respect whatsoever carnivores.
		As a matter of fact, the eating of meat is the cause of a great deal of the problems and diseases of humans.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, Pardon, I'm going to have to strongly disagree with you on that point because if we were not supposed to be eating meat, our digestive system could not and would not process the meat.
unidentified		Well, our digestive systems do not process it very well.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, mind you, I'll tell you what.
		I can eat a nice big half-raw steak, and I feel like Godzilla.
		I eat a salad, and I feel like Bambi.
unidentified		Every scientific study that's been made, anthropologically or physiologically, of the human animal has come up with the same conclusion that we are frugivores.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, not everyone.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Maybe you are.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		There have been a few, and I question the methods that they used in some of them.
unidentified		Well, I'll give you the reasons for this.
		If you look at a carnivore, a carnivore has a very short digestive tract.
		A carnivore produces a highly potent hydrochloric acid in order to digest the meat, to break it down.
		We, being frugivores, we produce a very weak hydrochloric acid.
		Our digestive system is long and convoluted.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I am not a frugivore.
unidentified		You are naturally a frugivore.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I am not.
unidentified		Now, you may not be a fruit eater, but we are naturally frugivores.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I am a fruit eater.
		Fruit's fine.
		And it's great right after your hamburger.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		We are, in fact, omnivores.
unidentified		We're not omnivores.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I am.
unidentified		You may eat a wide variety of things, but that doesn't make you anything different than what you naturally are, which is a frugivore.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I am not.
unidentified		We're not arbivores.
unidentified		We're not carnivores.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Look, if you take a true carnivore, probably one of the closest things to a true carnivore on the planet, other than some of the ocean-going mammals and fish, of course, is the polar bear.
		A polar bear would starve to death chained to a salad bar for the simple reason that his metabolism cannot turn vegetable matter into the resources his body needs.
		Biology precludes eating outside of your food service classification that your body needs.
		It's just that simple.
		You can turn a cow loose in a meat market and it will starve to death.
		Even if it chose to eat the meat, its digestive system is not set up to process it.
		Our digestive system, whether by design or accident, is set up to process damn near anything.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, they'll tell little horror stories about people when they're cut open after death, you know, they'll find five pounds of undigested something or another in there.
		Oh, God.
		But, you know, but look, he's just, I'm no fruitivore.
		Fruit's fine.
		Let's have a little piece of it after we've had our steak.
		East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Don's Idol.
		Hi.
unidentified		Hi.
unidentified		Thanks for having me on.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
unidentified		My name's Anna.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi, Anna.
unidentified		I'm in Texas.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Don't have a lot of time, Anna.
unidentified		Okay.
		I would like to submit that animals, while their value systems aren't the same as ours, they do feel a sense of responsibility.
		Case in point being my cats bringing me their kills, MP and police dogs that have continuously thrown themselves into the line of fire, bomb-sniffing dogs who could just as easily be out in a field of grass playing, but they're...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So hold on during the break, okay?
unidentified		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, we're talking about training here.
		we're talking about kills that are brought to owners I I don't think that's exactly Take a look at this.
		Do you want to play with it?
		I don't think that's a sign of intelligence.
		We'll be right back.
unidentified		We'll be right back.
		If you have a fax for Art Bell in the Kingdom of Nive, send it to him at area code 702-727-8499.
		702-727-8499.
		Please limit your faxes to one or two pages.
		This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, everybody.
		My guest is Don Veidle.
		His book is American Man Killers, and he will be right back.
unidentified		We may still have time, we might still get by.
		Every time I think about it, I won't cry.
		The bombs and the bill, the kids keep coming.
		The way they're really easy, no time to be at the loss.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Bombs of the Desert.
		Prophetic music, huh?
		First India now Pakistan.
		All right, well, we'll get back to the wonderful, wacky world of animals that attack and kill people in a moment.
		All right, here we go.
		Don Zeitel back on the air again.
		Don, welcome back.
		Thank you, partner.
		You bet.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		To say that animals engaging in the activities that the early caller before the break was describing is representative of a value system is like saying that birds preen their feathers because they want to look nice.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		First of all, secondly, to illustrate that animal behavior is a genetic imprint, wouldn't most people who view animals with the anthropomorphic view say that their care and nurturing of their young is a value?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Don, you know what?
		I forgot where I put this listener.
		They're still here somewhere.
		It might be this line.
		Were you on earlier?
unidentified		Hello?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, hi.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Were you on before the break?
unidentified		That was me.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That was you.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Okay, good.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Would you say that mothering and nurturing behavior in animals is evidence of a value system?
unidentified		Not particularly.
unidentified		I've seen human beings who don't take very good care of their young.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		But I'm saying if they do take good care, that they nurture and care for and so on and so forth, is that indicative of a value system?
unidentified		No, that's a survival instinct.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		You think it's survival instinct?
		Well, you are right.
		But animals do not have a value system, period.
		They have survival instincts, period.
		And that's it.
		They are biological machines.
unidentified		So you're saying the NT dog that gets its self-blown away for its handler is just following training?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's it.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		And it is going to be a pablotian response to a stimulus.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I start to have a hard time with that one.
		There are dogs that have done things that are completely indecipherable.
		I mean, they can only be a conscious decision to help out.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		You can see that same behavior in any wild canine predator when it comes to defending pack territory, pack possessions, or the pack itself.
		Then explain how a hyena, the matriarch of a hyena troop, will attempt to face down a 400-pound African lion that is attacking the hyena pack.
		But she's not doing it out of any sense of loyalty or anything like that.
		It is an instinctive protection.
unidentified		All right, the pack, it's sports territory.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, young lady, you said explain what now?
unidentified		Explain why cats have been known to defend their masters.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, I haven't heard about that one.
unidentified		Well, let me explain something to you.
		My mother related this to me.
		She said when I was a baby, she was shaving her legs with an electric razor, and I was on the floor on a blanket near her.
		And the cat that we owned at the time actually launched herself at that electric razor, and she was afraid of it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, they don't like noises like that, though.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's a, I mean, that cat would have launched itself at a squeaking ball or anything else making a buzzing noise like that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Vacuum cleaners, too.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		That's just instinctive.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, vacuum cleaners, too.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But there really are stories of particularly dogs that have done things that go far beyond, or seem to go far beyond instinctual, to protect their owners, to save their owners, that kind of thing.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, without observing the incident, it's difficult to pigeonhole it into a specific behavior category, but you can generalize it very safely by saying that when dogs do things that we call courageous or noble or whatever, they are following an instinctive urge.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And when we do them?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		When we do them, because we have the ability to rationalize and to reason, not always, but in most cases, we are following some sort of a value system.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Not always, but most of the time we are.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A lot of mothers, unless they're held back, will rush into a flaming house to save their child.
unidentified		Certainly.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Instinctually.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You agree that's instinct in many cases?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		I think that in many cases it is instinctive, yes.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		But in other cases, I think it's a case of a conscious decision and a willingness to sacrifice self, knowing, not knowing that it's possible, but knowing absolutely that their own life or limb will be lost in the endeavor they have a conscious decision to do it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, we're beginning to get to a very fine line, though.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A very fine line.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		i mean if you look at what a mother does when when in a less five firemen holder back she's going back in there whether she'll burn up or not it's very difficult People can do amazing things under the influence of adrenaline.
unidentified		Yep.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		You know, amazing things.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, there was a little cat recently that went into a burning house and brought out five kittens.
		This cat was just, I mean, totally burned up.
		They saved its life somehow, but it went in, got those five kittens, and brought them out one at a time.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Again, I would cite instinctive behavior.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah, but how would you delineate the difference between what that cat did and what a mother would do for a child?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, without the ability to be inside the head of the human mother and knowing what her thought processes were, I cannot say that.
		Of course, I'm not a psychologist either.
		We're getting into an area that another concept.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We are, but I guess I'm trying to say both seem very instinctual, basic and instinctual.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah.
		Mothering behavior is instinctive to a very great degree.
		What form it takes is consistent and constant throughout the rest of the animal kingdom, but that is not true among humans.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Don's Idol.
		Hi.
unidentified		Hi, this is Catherine, Portland, Oregon.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hello, Catherine.
unidentified		Hi.
		Oh, Don, you're the man.
		I've always loved you.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Bless your heart.
unidentified		Thank you.
		I don't agree with everything you said, but I like your stories.
		Well, I have two quick domestic animal attack stories.
		One just happened last week.
		I was walking down late in the evening a neighborhood street, and I was walking down the middle in case of human predators.
		And all I heard behind me was a guttural grunt and the clicking of this dog's nails on the concrete.
		I was being rushed from behind.
		My instincts kicked in, and I turned sideways, and my backpack, I dropped it down to hold it between me and the dog, and dropped my head and my eyes and just stood sideways to the dog, and he screeched to a halt and turned and walked away.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that was a good defensive response on your part.
unidentified		Yeah, non-threatening, but not running either.
unidentified		Luckily for him, because I also pulled out my 120,000-volt gun gun.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		I like the way you think of it.
unidentified		Thank you.
		Yeah.
		I had a cat attack.
		We have seven feral cats here.
		And when we first started bringing them in from the field behind our house, I had a domestic male cat who thought he was the king of the house.
		And I brought in a female with her kittens.
		And he sat in the house staring at me the whole day.
		I went out to the garden and he followed me out to the garden and sat there staring at me.
		And he thought about this before he did it.
		He just attacked my leg.
		I had to kick him to get him off.
		And he ran away from home.
		He was very angry.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, he was sizing you up.
		You know, predatory animals are very astute at sizing up rivals to decide if they can take them.
		He was sizing you up, and he made the decision.
		He decided to do it.
		And by the way, for whatever reason, animals so disposed seem to just automatically recognize the females of our species as being more susceptible to attack than the males.
unidentified		I had the sense that he thought I was his female, that he was in charge around here.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Can I ask you a very personal question without offending you?
unidentified		No, I wouldn't be offended.
unidentified		Go ahead.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Were you, was it that time of the month by any chance?
unidentified		Yes, actually.
		I had thought of that.
		Yes, that's right.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		That's probably what precipitated that.
unidentified		The attack, really?
		It was awfully close to having brought in another female cat.
		And he left.
		He never came back.
		He just was not happy with me.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Well, we appreciate the call.
		Thank you.
		And, you know, I understand exactly what you're saying.
		I'm sure that's basic and instinctual as well.
		First time caller line, you're on the air with Don Zeidel.
unidentified		Hi.
		Hi.
		Morning.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where are you?
unidentified		I'm in Helena, Montana.
		Okay.
		Great show, Art.
		Don, I don't know if you heard about the incident up here last spring, but I've never, I'm 40 and I've never heard of it my whole life, and I've been hunting and fishing forever, and my great uncle's never heard of it, but a grizzly bear this past spring dug up a black bear and ate him out of his den.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's not that unusual.
unidentified		Yeah, I just never heard of that type of behavior between bears before, and nobody up here ever heard of it before.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, grizzlies will predate on black bears given the opportunity to do so.
		They generally can't do it very successfully because the blacks are so astute at climbing trees, whereas grizzlies are not.
		And so they don't prey on them that often.
		But grizzlies being the opportunists that they are, any kind of carry-on is top-flight stuff as far as they're concerned.
unidentified		Oh, yeah, that gives them a lot of flat content.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		You know, just to give you another perspective on that same thing, I've got, I don't even remember how many cases on file here of black bears digging up murder victims that had been their bodies taken out, buried in a shallow grave, you know, the kind of thing like you hear on the news all the time.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Black bears digging them up and eating them.
unidentified		Well, another thing I've, you know, after hunting bears and learning about their behavior, I disagree with the analogy that you just lay down and cover up when it comes to a black bear.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		No, you never want to play dead in a black bear attack.
unidentified		No, because you'll be lunch.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah, absolutely.
		Black bears are far less inclined to attack for any reason other than predation than grizzlies are.
		Grizzlies may attack just because they don't like the way you part your hair.
		Whereas a black bear, if a black bear attacks in a concerted, determined attack, it is with one purpose in mind.
		He wants to eat you.
		So your best defense against a black bear attack is to fight that son of a biscuit eater like there's no tomorrow.
		Because if you don't, there won't be.
unidentified		You bet, and I agree with that.
		But I've heard a lot of people, you know, say, oh, just lay down, cover up, curl up in a ball.
		A black bear, you don't want to do that.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Playing dead and a black bear attack will get you that way for real.
unidentified		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You know what my problem would be?
		I wouldn't be able to recognize the difference between the two bears, and of course I'd die.
		I'm curious.
		Let's see what this does to you, Don.
		There's a hunter out in the woods.
		He's tracking a 10-point buck or something.
		And there's an animal rights kind of person yelling, Run, Bambi, run, run, run.
		You ever run into those people?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes.
unidentified		Yeah?
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		I try to suppress my instincts and let my reason rule in those circumstances.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		And I don't do what my instincts tell me to do.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		Well, that's good.
		Wildcard line, you're on here with Dawn's idle.
		Hello.
unidentified		Hi, this is Dagney calling from Chicago at WLS, which is the ABC radio station.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now, that's how to do it.
		That's the way to do it.
		Promo.
		Good.
unidentified		As good as WLS.
		I just noticed you kind of get happy about that.
		Well, good morning, Mr. Barrel.
		Guest, I want to hold you co-responsible for keeping me up away past my bed for about a year now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
		And I. All right, would you turn your radio off for us?
		That's important.
		Turn your radio off.
unidentified		The radio is off.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, it is.
unidentified		That is, it's the television, and that's way too loud.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I see.
unidentified		I yell louder.
		It's two cases where I would like to give an opinion on how nuts the media is or how nuts I am.
		We had a case in Chicago, heavily reported, about a year ago, a child and a dog in the alley at their home, Charles.
		Child is four-ish, no more than five.
		Speeding car comes down the alley.
		The kid is breaking in the path.
		The dog is reported to him.
		Jumped up, kids run to park, pushed the child out of the way, then got hit himself, the dog, by the car and killed.
		When all the local media went, the child says, he pushed me away.
		The parent says, that dog saved my child's life.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Here is a scenario as I envision it.
		The child is in the path of the car.
		He sees the car.
		He screams or makes some other sort of vocalization.
		The dog hears this and either thinking, you know, one of my other pack members is in trouble or thinking, okay, the other pack member wants me to come over and play, whichever the case may be, the dog runs over, he jumps up and puts his paws on the child, as dogs do.
		Dogs jump up and put their feet on you.
		And the child, being small, he goes off balance, falls out of the way.
		The dog has no idea the car is coming, and a car hits him.
		Now, that's how I envisioned that scenario.
		Of course, not being there, that's strictly a hypothetical.
		But based on what I know, that's one possible scenario as to what could have happened.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Don, we are out of time.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		I've enjoyed it tremendously.
unidentified		Thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's been a real pleasure.
		Again, I want to give out the number where people can get American Mankillers, the book.
		Let's give out the one.
		Most people are going to go for the autographed version, same cost.
		So let's give out that number.
don zaidle ▲ ● ▼		Autographed version you can order from area code 940 748 2048 preferably call 9 to 5 for non-autographed versions you can call 1-800-451-4788 got it what a pleasure Don we'll have you back all right thank you so much you take care all right folks that's uh Don Zeitl.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And it was indeed a pleasure and a different path to go down this morning.
		As you well know, I don't agree with all he had to say, but as always, I allow my guests to say what they would like to say.
		And he was a dog-on, interesting guy, and a lot of what he said was certainly right on the money.
		Now, a couple of things I want to get in.
		Tomorrow night, Whitley Streeber will be here, along with Jaime Masson from Mexico and a Mexican volcanologist.
		This is a program you're not going to want to miss.
		Another item I wanted to get on before we close out.
		ART, the space weather outlook.
		We expect periods of active to minor storm conditions on 30 and 31 May in response to the long-duration C7 X-ray event on the 27th at 1335 Zulu.
		A CME occurred, that's coronal mass ejection.
		A CME occurred with this event, and the ejecta appears earthbound.
		so I wanted to get that one in in addition I want to say again we are looking into I think this is so cool How many of you think that would be a good idea?
		I had somebody who sent me a really neat facts about that.
		I have no idea what I've done with it.
		I'll find it.
		And I'll read it to you tomorrow morning, but it really was funny.
		And one last item, and that is last night.
		I wonder how many of you recall that last night, in the first hour of the program, I believe it was, we were speculating about the Antichrist.
		Remember, somebody said, actually a number of somebodes have said, the Antichrist is alive now.
		To which I responded, well, what do you think the Antichrist is doing right now?
		And I've had many answers to that.
		And now tonight, with the facts from Seattle, how can I not do it?
		Sometime next week, we will be opening the Antichrist line.
		That's right.
		The Antichrist line.
		It's a natural.
		That's it for tonight, folks.
unidentified		Ah, the Antichrist line.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		He's out there somewhere.
		Do you suppose he would call?
		Maybe it's not even he.
		In which case, I don't know what we'd call the line.

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