Don Zaidle, a Texas-born expert in animal attacks, reveals his book American Man Killers documents a surge in predatory incidents—1994’s California mountain lion case, 1997’s Lake Tahoe coyote attack, and Griffith Park’s "unusual" wildlife threats—blaming overpopulation, habitat encroachment, and anti-culling policies like PETA’s. He debunks myths of animal fear or reasoning, citing wolf hybrids’ deadly adaptability and black bears’ predatory efficiency, while dismissing media sensationalism as misguided. Studies on human digestion and Chupacabra theories collide with his hardline stance: animals act purely on instinct, not morality, and rising attacks expose humanity’s shrinking dominance over nature. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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.
Well, I know, for example, I have house cats, and one pretty wild one at that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They finally killed the buck after it repeatedly fought off their attempts to reach the body of 61-year-old Buddy Coleman.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
All the bones were broken up in the head, and that thing went quite a ways.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That cars are going to come off the street and come craning through the front window and into that child's bed at night.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Okay, Judy, you're going to have to kind of yell at us a little bit.
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.
Yeah, that's pretty much standard packed predator behavior.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I think that in many cases it is instinctive, yes.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.