Diane K. Boyd, a wolf biologist, debunks myths like "super wolves" in Yellowstone and critiques forced reintroductions—e.g., 10 wolves with livestock-killing histories released in Colorado by 2023—while citing natural dispersal cases, such as a lone Glacier Park wolf mating in Idaho after four years. She highlights wolves’ territorial aggression but rare human attacks unless provoked, contrasting them with coyotes thriving post-wolf suppression and Russian fox domestication studies. Boyd’s memoir A Woman Among Wolves begins with her finding a wolf in her truck, underscoring her 40-year career balancing ecology, hunting ethics, and public perception amid viral controversies like Wyoming’s snowmobile-injured wolf kept in a bar. Their discussion reveals conservation’s ideological tensions, from "biology by vote" (BC grizzly delisting) to wolves’ complex, often misunderstood role in ecosystems. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, I grew up in Minnesota and probably tell from the Fargo accent, but I grew up in Minnesota and back in the 60s and 70s when I was thinking about a career...
Minnesota was the only state in the lower 48 that had wolves, with the exception of a few, like 25 maybe in Iowa, a couple here or there in Wisconsin.
And so I was interested from the beginning with that.
And then when I went to the University of Minnesota, Dave Meech, who was like the god of the wolf world, his office was on my campus.
And I'm so interested in the whole history of them in this country, how they were sort of eradicated from most of the Western states and the reintroduction of them.
So you were there for all of it, right?
So when you first started, they had pretty much been wiped out, except, as you said, in Minnesota.
No, Isle Royale, which is an island in Lake Superior.
It's actually technically part of Michigan.
They walked over on the frozen Lake Superior ice in the late, like, 1949, 50s, early, and they stayed, and they got seated there, and they had endless amount of moose to kill and eat.
Yes, and the populations of wolves and moose go up and down because, you know, in nature, nothing is here.
We always want it to be here, but it's always doing this.
And, yeah, they're doing there.
And then, interestingly, when they arrived, they migrated on their own power.
There was very little immigration.
There was a couple of wolves documented showing up here and there, but apparently, genetically, there was no influx of new genes.
So the wolves that came and went didn't breed...
And eventually they became so inbred, they started having physical anomalies.
And eventually, just a few years ago, four or five years ago, they got down to just a father-daughter team and only two wolves left and it was over.
And so they wouldn't breed because they don't breed close relatives generally.
So they just did a reintroduction to Iowa oil, too.
That's been relatively new, just a handful of years.
So they had to reboost the population if they wanted to keep going or wait for the lake to freeze again, which may or may not happen in our lifetimes, you know.
If they hadn't shot it, we would never have known what happened to her.
But if she would have gone south instead of north, she'd have been about 100 miles south of Yellowstone Park.
So clearly, they have the ability to disperse that far.
The other interesting thing about that wolf Is when she went north, they got the reintroduced wolves from two areas, from Hinton in Alberta and Fort St. John's in British Columbia.
And she dispersed past the Hinton population and ended up almost at where the Fort St. John's wolves were.
So this little wolf, 80-pound wolf, showed us that it's one continuous population from Yellowstone almost to the Yukon.
It's connected, because it's a walkabout for a wolf.
It's not a big deal.
We just didn't, back then we didn't have the tools to document kind of those long dispersals.
But I just read this week that a wolf that showed up in Colorado that was shot this year, they just did the DNA on it apparently pretty recently, and it was from the Midwest.
So now that we have satellite callers, we've been using those for years, we can track them without having to stay in touch physically with them.
In the old days, we just had VHF callers and you had to physically be there within range, like from an airplane or track them.
But now that we got...
Satellite collars.
I mean, my gosh, we've got wolves going from Washington to Montana, and one of the wolves from Wyoming went all the way down to Arizona to just north of the Grand Canyon.
Well, sadly, for the VHF callers, the wolves generally die before the callers do, because wolves don't live very long.
An average VHF caller lasts about four years.
An average satellite caller, one to two years, and I don't understand why the technology is not...
Better to prolong some kind of a new battery.
Because once you put all the trauma of going through the wolf with a helicopter and catching it or whatever, you'd think they could get some kind of a super battery that would last a long time.
I always, when I do have a talk, I ask the audience, how long do you think the average wolf lives?
So if you guess from the time they're visible from the den emergence, like you start to see them at four weeks, and a few die before that, until they die.
Yeah, there's a few in Yellowstone that I got that old.
We had one of mine that dispersed to Idaho, and he, kind of interesting, I caught him in 1990, and he dispersed about a year later on his own, went to Idaho in the middle of the Frank Church River of non-return wilderness.
There were no other wolves at that time, and he just hung around.
We'd see him once in a while for an airplane.
By himself.
By himself.
He was a big male.
When I got him, he was 111 pounds.
But this animal had to survive by killing animals alone.
He went to where there weren't any wolves, interestingly.
But he had a success story because he just waited it out.
And when they reintroduced those wolves into Idaho in 95 and 96, a little black female wolf pops out of her crate and just...
Hits the road as fast as she can go and she bumps into this wolf and they set up a territory in Kelly Creek and they became a breeding mating pair for years and years until he died of old age.
Was there any understanding of what he was basically, because they usually hunt in packs, so it was probably very difficult for him to take down anything larger than a fawn or a deer.
I would guess he was killing elk calves, deer fawns, some deer.
And if he got lucky, if he had a really deep snow winter, it's the advantage of the wolves because they got big snowshoe feet and elk, you know, punch through.
They got little shark wolves.
But he did well.
Whatever he did, we don't know.
We didn't follow him that long.
We didn't pick up scats.
It's just speculation.
But that, I mean, they can kill a big elk, but they risk being killed every time they have to take a meal like that.
What a friend said to me, so I want to run this by you to find out if this is true.
He said that mountain lions are killing more elk because of wolves, because what happens is the mountain lion will kill the elk, but then the wolf will scare the mountain lion off and steal it from them.
And so the mountain lion then goes and finds a mule deer, finds another deer, and so the mountain lions are killing more animals because in the areas where mountain lions and wolves cohabitate, the wolves are really good at chasing mountain lions off of kills.
So for years I've lived without, and I haul water from the spring, and in the winter I melt the snow because we get a lot of snow.
But three summers ago now, I was there alone, and I fell down the stairs, all the wooden stairs, and I broke the top of my foot.
And I said, you know, this isn't going to be very fun for a while, because I've got to close up the cabin, and I have a propane fridge and stove, and I've got to undo the propane and empty the fridge, and I've got a lot shorter, because I'm not going to be back.
I've got a broken foot.
So I'm hobbling around, and I said, okay.
Now, I'm going to get Starlink.
That was my motivator, because if I had a phone, I could have called somebody for help.
But I didn't, and I couldn't.
So after that, then I got on the Starlink.
They were still in the beta development, I think.
Anyway, I got on.
So I have Starlink available to me at my cabin.
But only when I choose to turn it on.
Like if you were to email me or call me up there, you wouldn't get me.
And when I choose to turn it on, I'd get the messages.
Well, I bet you if you live in the woods a long time, you get a little bit of superstition, a little bit of intuition, a little bit of you feel the woods a little bit differently than you could measure on a scale.
I can think of twice only in my life, before I built my little cabin, I lived up this very, even more remote outpost called Moose City, loosely Moose City, because it was not a city at all.
It was an old homestead with a lot of empty cabins.
Twice up there, I got this feeling that there was something dangerous outside.
Twice.
And something just said to me, don't go outside.
And I'm not afraid of anything.
I mean, I spent my life dealing with wolves and grizzly bears and angry humans.
But I listened to those feelings because I don't know any different.
Why not?
Why not listen to it?
Like, I think we have some primordial part of our brains.
Yeah, and I think that's because we're all raised in an urban environment, more or less, nowadays, and so having lots of people around is normal, but to have one person in a pretty remote area, we don't experience that very often anymore.
If you're alone in the woods, there is this weird, like, if you're some crazy serial killer guys out there, like, and you, you know, you're backpacking, you're like, uh-oh, like, now I'm at the mercy of this person if they're crazy.
I have a chapter in my book, early in the book, where I describe an event that I've basically been a real private person all my life until this book came out.
And once I wrote this book, I had to bring up stories that are very personal to me.
And I had an event one night that was terrifying.
Probably the most terrifying thing that's ever happened in my life.
I was only about 25, living alone, studying wolves.
And at the time, there were other people coming and going, studying wolves.
But at that winter, I was alone.
And I had been working—it's a long story— I was working behind the customs station right on the Canadian border and they were hauling logs down out of Canada, bringing in the customs station.
They would have to transfer the logs to an American truck and then the Canadian trucks would go back.
And I temporarily took a job as the knot bumper at the log deck landing, which means my job was to run a chainsaw, trim off the branches.
Trim the length of the log to exactly fit the log bed.
Anyway, so I was around, so these loggers knew who I was, and I was cordial enough.
Back when I was younger, I was a bit of a misanthrope and I liked being alone.
Being alone is different than being lonely.
It just is.
Now as an older person, I feel different about people.
I'm more engaged with people.
I enjoy people.
So yeah, I get lonely now, but I didn't back then.
I mean, how could you be lonely?
You're living in the majestic mountains and wilderness of Glacier National Park, and everything is new, and there's tracks to find, and on and on and on.
Well, that's why you're really good at what you do, because you're a social person, you like to engage in conversation, but I didn't used to be that way.
You wouldn't have wanted to have interviewed me 30 years ago, let's put it that way.
I mean, it's just I would have been fascinated by who you were then because I'd be fascinated by a person who doesn't want to talk to people.
If I could just peel back the layers of the onions to find out what that's like.
Because I would imagine there's a very different relationship with nature when it's just you and nature alone by yourself for prolonged periods of time.
It's very different than taking a jaunt, taking a weekend excursion, hiking, even camping for a week.
There's a big difference between that and living there for years.
I just was 31 days on the road, and I just got home three days ago, and now I'm here.
And I was out bird hunting with friends, and I said, I told them, I said, so when I'm hunting with my pointers, I got a graffon and a wire hair.
I said, don't talk.
Don't call the dog's name.
Don't holler about...
Just watch and enjoy and smell and feel what goes on and trust the dogs.
If you see them getting birdie, get ready.
Because so many times you hunt with people and they're hacking their dog, they're calling, they're hollering, they're talking to you about something going on over here and, hey, did you watch the Vikings game?
Well, nobody watches the Vikings game.
Anyway, did you watch this or that?
It's like, we're out there seeking a smart bird that has ears.
Watch the dogs.
So I feel that way when I'm out living in the wild, too, out hiking.
I'm not going to see elk or bears or even fox if you're yammering away.
I went to Yellowstone a few years back with my family and I felt like it was very weird.
I felt like I'm enjoying...
My daughters were really young at the time.
I'm enjoying that they're seeing bears and they're seeing...
Well, we didn't see bears.
We did see...
There is this place in Montana that has this grizzly bear preserve.
It's like a place where they take care of bears so they would feed them frozen watermelons, which is...
Crazy to watch a bear chew through a frozen watermelon like it's a grape.
They just go right through it.
It's a frozen watermelon.
And they just like it's nothing.
But we did see a lot of elk and a bunch of bison.
And the elk was strange because, I'm sure you know this, but for the people at home, elk understand that wolves don't come to these community centers, these areas where There's vending machines and buildings.
And so they just like in the rut, they're walking down the street and there's like 30, 40 elk and they stop traffic and they're sitting on people's lawns and it's wild.
The same things happen to the wolves in Yellowstone because they were taken from Canada where they don't see people and they had never exposure to livestock.
They're very wild at first.
And then they can't get away from humans.
So after a while, they just start disregarding people.
And like if they have to cross the road, there's a wolf jam and everybody's crowding with their cars and they're trying to bring their pups across the road to a better spot.
And they can't even get through because of everybody.
So they get kind of laissez-faire about it and they get used to people conditioned or habituated.
And that's passed on to the next generation next.
And then when they leave the park and they go outside the park and they walk down some open public land spot where there's a hunter with a rifle, they don't think anything about it.
And the unfortunate thing is, a couple of years ago, there were 25 Yellowstone wolves killed just outside of the park because they're used to people and they wander around.
Anyway, that's like out of 100, so it's about a quarter of the population.
And there were a couple of particular individual wolves that were very well recognized and loved by the wolf masses and photographed and they got killed.
And this just went viral and this huge hatred for these people who shot these wolves because they were so special.
And I make the point when I give talks and stuff, I said, you know, if you really feel that strongly, you should really be concerned because every year there's about 300 wolves shot that way in Montana, but you don't know them.
They're not famous.
They have just as important of lives.
They live, die, eat, breathe, get injured, heal up.
The same as these movie star wolves in Yellowstone.
And you should feel that way about, oh, wolves, in my mind.
But like when we were first monitoring the wolves in Glacier, there was just a handful and we would catch them.
And we would give them names because it's easier.
Like Phyllis was wolf 8550 and Mojave was wolf 8963. They had both names and numbers.
And so when we did our scientific papers and reports, we used a number.
Because we were told by the officials that we don't want you to name the animals because what happens when Phyllis kills a cow?
If that happens, then you can't.
Manage Phyllis.
So we went along with it, but we used the names and we did the scientific stuff with numbers.
But then when you go into the park, people would want to know what's going on and you talk about these different wolf numbers, 8654, and they say, well, who is that?
And I know the wolves in Yellowstone, they don't have names, they have numbers, but they're so identifiable by 907 or whatever that it becomes like a name.
It's been interesting to me because for my career, I've done everything.
My first year, my first job, I worked up in northern Minnesota in a little tiny 300-person farming community, and I was hired, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, to go in and help.
Prevent livestock depredation and when wolves killed cattle or sheep to go in and remove, which meant trap and hollowly and they were euthanized.
And when there weren't depredations, to go out and research trap and put collars on the other wolves.
And it was, I mean, this was big stuff for a girl from Minneapolis, starry-eyed and pretty naive to go up and save the folks of Northholm from the wolves, you know?
So I had to bring them to the main office in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, where they were euthanized.
So prior to that, in 1978, you couldn't euthanize wolves.
They changed the status from endangered to threatened.
And so when they were threatened...
Then under Endangered Species Act, you could actually euthanize them.
And they didn't translocate them.
This is a really good question because they found over the years with studies in Minnesota and eventually in Montana, too, that when you translocate or move a wolf who's causing a problem...
That wolf very, very rarely survives to reproduce because it gets killed by other wolves.
It comes back to depredate again.
It moves on to another farm or ranch and does it again.
They don't generally survive, and so it was determined that it makes officials feel good to move them, and it's a good facade for the public to believe in, but sometimes it results in a pretty prolonged and inhumane existence for a few months or a year until they die anyway.
I mean, if it was me out there walking around and I had a choice between a deer that's going to kick me in the teeth or taking the cow, I'd pick the slow, dumb groceries every time.
It's not natural to not have those predators there, and you're going to get an overpopulation of elk, and that's going to lead to starvation and disease.
Yes, and so kind of the die was cast when those wolves were removed, and basically by the 1930s, there really weren't viable populations in the West anymore.
There were wolves here and there and a pack here and there, but there weren't thousands.
And they went inside the national parks.
They have a picture in many books of rangers with cute little wolf pups that are like seven, eight weeks old.
And they took the pictures.
This was in 1926. And then they killed them all.
So they even removed all the predators within national parks.
So people, historic memory, you know, we have really short memories.
Historic memory of, say for example, the northern range, northern herd range of elk out of Gardner.
It was about 20,000 before the wolves were introduced.
Way over carrying capacity.
Elk were starving.
The browse lines as high up as they could reach.
They ate everything they could eat.
They were paying people.
People were being paid to come in and kill deer and elk.
And then they started the late honey seasons out of Gardner, which I went in because my boyfriend at the time had a tag.
And they just have a shooting line in February and kill all these elk because they aren't going to make it anyway.
Yeah, that is the problem with people that don't have a nuanced perspective on what's happening because they have a vested interest in it being a problem that the wolves are keeping them from being able to be successful on an elk hunt.
I would say, to best my knowledge as a biologist, that winter die-off is the limiting factor for ungulate herds.
It's not lions and bears and wolves and humans and cars.
Every so often, every 20 years or whatever, you get a massive winter die-off.
And it takes quite a while for those populations to build back up.
Predators can keep that at a lower rate.
They cannot affect it.
You know, I have to think back to what people say about wolves killing all the deer and elk.
I think if you look to statistics in Montana and Wyoming, which both have had a lot of wolves for a couple decades, they're giving away more elk permits.
I just was reading they proposed unlimited elk permits in Wyoming, and Montana's got basically in most of its management units more elk than ever.
I just say there's more going on than wolves.
And to point your finger at wolves all the time, you need to look at habitat.
You need to look at access issues.
You know, there's a lot of places where hunters want to go shoot these elk, but they're on large private ranches and you can't get on them.
And so there's all this talk of, for people that don't know...
One of the things that happens is a thing called corner crossing.
So there might be a piece of public land that you're allowed to hike into, and then there's a small area.
It could be a very small area just a few yards even of Private land that you are going to have to cross in order to get into the next piece of public land But people block access to that because these people that have these ranches Right.
and a bunch of wealthy people, they're terrified that someone's going to go through that and then go into their private land.
They don't want to give people the access at all to their private land.
So they stop these corner crossings.
And it's a giant disaster because then you have these areas that are public land that should be available to all of us and no one can get in there.
I mean, if the viewers can think of imagining a checkerboard and you're trying to get from one black square to the next black square, but you have to step over a tiny piece of white square to get there, right?
But I know he was going to let us because some other friends of mine had hunted there.
But he had all these heartburns over things that had happened to him.
Hunters gave him a really bad taste in their mouth.
Right.
I, as a single individual person, can't do a lot about it, and I'd like to see, you know, hunting organizations, many really good ones, help promote better hunter behavior and better hunter-landowner relationships.
You would be very generous to do that, but most people will not give an easement.
Well, I would understand that if you've been burned a few times and people have poached on your land and there's this attitude that people who don't have anything and they see someone who has so much and they're like, screw this guy.
I'm just going to go on his property.
Look, the elk are right there over the ridge, 400 yards away.
And then this guy's like, God damn it, they're poaching on my land.
And then he hates hunters.
Hunters are like everybody else.
There's people that are amazing plumbers and they're real honest and they work hard and they're sweethearts and you're happy to hire them and call them.
And there's people that are just liars and they're crooks.
Everything goes on instantly and everything is ideologically connected.
You know, there's people that just don't want any animals ever killed, ever.
And there's people that want no predators and the easiest hunts possible.
And they don't have a nuanced perspective of the ecosystem, of what biology is and what these animals...
There's a...
The whole world that they live in.
And this world is like interdependent.
There's so many things going on.
And so people like, I remember there was a documentary that came out, how wolves changed rivers in Yellowstone.
And they made this incredibly rosy picture of wolves coming in and it brought in beavers and they changed the rivers and the lakes and everything was better.
And it's like, no, not really.
No, there's a lot going on all the time.
And to single out this one aspect of this ecosystem and say, this is the cause of this.
And it's been shown since that video came out, the movie, that that might be true in a short time period in small places, but it's not the global picture for Yellowstone Park.
I think wolves are not a problem when you deal with civilization, when you deal with agriculture and people have guns and people have land and they have property.
But I think at one point in time it was a much bigger deal when there were larger populations of them and they would hunt people.
So the story, I don't remember where I heard it from, but the story was, you know, the thing about war, especially trench warfare, the horrific nature of it is that you don't necessarily always kill people.
You shoot them and hurt them and wound them.
And these wolves were aware that these people were living in these trenches and that they were wounded.
And so they smelled blood and they came in and there was so many instances of people getting dragged out of the trenches by packs of wolves.
And there were so many instances of parties going out, like two or three men, and then they just find a boot with a foot in it, and they realize, like, oh boy, an animal's gotten them.
And so they decided to have a ceasefire between the Russians and the Germans to just get together and kill the wolves before they go back to killing each other.
Multiple newspapers in 1917 report this story, including the El Paso Herald, Oklahoma City Times, New York Times.
Since then, it's become a favorite bit of barroom banter among amateur historians.
Oh, like me, Joe Rogan.
It says it there.
February 1917, a dispatch from Berlin noted large packs of wolves moving into populated areas of the German Empire in the forests of Lithuania and, I don't know how to say that word, Volhynia?
seeking out new hunting grounds, the hungry wolves infiltrated rural villages attacking calves, sheep, goats, and in two cases, children.
They also showed up on the front lines, feeding on the fallen and sometimes taking advantage of incapacitated fighters.
Parties of Russians and German scouts met recently and were hotly engaged in a skirmish when a large pack of wolves dashed on the scene and attacked the wounded, reported a 1917 Oklahoma City Times article.
Hostilities were at once suspended, and Germans and Russians instinctively attacked the pack, killing about 50 wolves.
So one of the things that happens in Russia is you get these super packs.
I'm sure you've heard about those, where they've had problems with them descending on, whether it's a cattle ranch or horses.
They've taken out horses.
Poison, rifle fire, hand grenades, and even machine guns were successfully tried in attempts to eradicate the nuisance, according to a 1917 New York Times article.
But all to no avail.
The wolves, nowhere to be found quite so large and powerful as in Russia, were desperate in their hunger and regardless of danger.
It says, though seemingly far-fetched, it turns out these claims are mostly accurate.
Historians estimate that soldiers killed hundreds of wolves during the war and that the surviving wolves fled to escape a carnage the like of which they had never encountered.
Within a few years ago, there was a problem with these super packs where they, I don't remember what the theory was as to why they had formed such large packs.
But there was large packs of up to 100 wolves that were going into farms.
One of the remotest inhabited areas of the Northern Hemisphere, more than 30 horses were killed in just four days.
And I remember reading about this in 2010. It said, according to local officials, teams of hunters were established to patrol neighborhoods and shoot the wolves on site.
Animal experts suspicious of the claim say that wolves usually form packs of no more than 10 to 15 animals.
Although the particularly harsh winters may have killed off the wolves' usual prey, forcing them to attack larger animals.
This was multiple sources had this story, and I remember it about a decade or so ago.
Well, I'd love to look up more detail, but I can't tell you about the news source, and I'm not familiar with that, and I don't read that kind of stuff usually.
If it's true, it's true.
I don't happen to believe it's true.
But what I can tell you about the truth about wolf biology is wolves live in packs that are generally a family group.
They have a genetic investment in their pack members.
There's oftentimes one or two that aren't related.
And they defend that territory to the death, whether there's five of them or 25 of them.
And that would be a large pack.
The largest pack I've ever heard of was in Yellowstone.
And could you imagine a scenario where resources were so diminished that wolves recognized that killing each other had no benefit and that moving together as a group, they could do something to these farms.
It's like if you are a pack of 400 wolves and you choose to attack horses, that seems to me a lot more success than three wolves or five wolves trying to do that.
But my thought is that in perhaps unusual circumstances like Siberia, where it's so incredibly harsh, That if you do find a population that had been surviving because there was a sufficient amount of wildlife for them to kill, and then all of a sudden there wasn't, but there was farms, they all might kind of like descend on these farms and perhaps not even fight for resources because they realized there was no benefit in that.
I have only observed probably 15, but that's not Yellowstone.
That's in my history.
And I know in Yellowstone, like I said, I know one year they get up to 34, and I think that probably the largest I've ever heard of being recorded that I know is factual.
Do you think the large number in Yellowstone was because of the unusual circumstances of the reintroduction and a bunch of animals that weren't used to having wolves around?
So there's recruiting right there, 18, 20 pups, right there.
In addition to the adults that were there, they had a good year, they had lots of prey, and so all those pups presumably made it to their first year.
So for one winter...
They were a huge pack and then mortality happens.
Wolves are not designed to live in packs of 34. Packs in the Midwest where the prey is smaller and the wolves are smaller, they live in smaller packs.
In Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Average pack might be somewhere between 10 and 15. And every year, you've got to remember, every year they have six to seven pups, and by the next spring, they're back down.
That's six or seven through mortality or dispersal or whatever happens, hunting.
Another thing, I've heard lots of people, well, I've heard several people, and people I know quite well, tell me stories about they encountered a wolf, or they encountered a wolf pack, and they were really frightened because they had their dog with them, and the wolves were interested in the dog, like little Carl there or something, and the wolves were circling around, and these people were terrified.
And when they told me this story, two people, they told me this story, and they said, yeah, they could have killed me.
But way back when, if you think about people that were living in a time where there was no guns, or at the very least muskets, and you're dealing with people that are completely isolated, and you're dealing with harsh climates.
I don't mean to be offensive, but a better base of information, with all the opportunity in the world for all those things you just set up, remote living, no protection, harsh winters like the winner of Charlie Russell paintings where all the cattle were starving...
You didn't have packs of 400 wolves coming in and killing everyone.
I thought about that when I was thinking about you living alone by yourself.
Like, that's how those people did.
They would go out there, and they would just go with a dog, and they would go live by themselves in these cabins that they had fortified for the entire winter.
I'm trying to remember the name of the book I read.
It might just be called Tiger.
I'm trying to remember the name, but it's a story of a predatory tiger and these guys, a story of the tiger's life and how they go to finally try and kill it.
Just as they're scared if they survive a situation.
The second story of Vladimir Markov, a poacher who met a grizzly in the winter of 1997 after he shot and wounded a tiger and then stole a part of the tiger's kill.
The injured tiger hunted Markov down in a way that appears to be chillingly premeditated.
The tiger stalked out Markov's cabin, systematically destroyed anything that had Markov's scent on it, and then waited by the front door for Markov to come home.
It's interesting because wouldn't you think that food is scarce and that meat is precious and that if they did kill the mountain lion, they'd realize, why don't we eat this thing?
This is the reason why most people think, when they think of grizzly bears, grizzly bears have a very similar size, but then you get to coastal brown bears.
They're so content because they have endless food resources.
That's why you can have tourists go out and sit and watch grizzly bears feeding within 100 yards of you sometimes, eating salmon and you're under no danger.
Why would they bother you when they have thousands of pounds of salmon in the river?
I don't know if you've ever seen it, but there's a photographer and he's got like a little lawn chair set up and he's photographing all these enormous brown bears that are feeding off salmon.
And this one walks up and gets as close to him as where Jamie is to us.
I kind of had a similar experience, McNeil, not that close, but close enough that I was uncomfortable.
I live with bears because I'm used to bears that have skinny resources, and they're voracious, and they're pretty aggressive in the fall, they can be, because they're getting into hyperphagia where they got a good enough calories to hibernate.
And if you keep them from getting their calories, It's you or the huckleberry badge, maybe, or you or the...
The elk that you just hung in the woods the night before and you went back to get.
That happens.
People hang their game in the woods and then go back the next day and a grizzly bear's found it.
And one guy, our friend Dirtmouth, was actually on his back.
The bear plowed through the camp and through the people and just, I don't think it recognized how many people were there, so it didn't know exactly what to do.
So he wound up literally on the back of a bear for like 10 to 15 yards.
Imagine a head that big, that close, and you hit it with trekking poles.
And it just ran past them, probably not knowing which one to target or what to do.
And then they got their guns out, and then I don't know exactly how they eventually got to a point where they felt confident enough that they could walk and then walk with meat on their back.
Right?
So they went there to pack out and they have all these guys so they can make the pack out a little bit easier.
Every year, at least one person is killed by a bear or many can be injured.
And the thing that's common is they say the bear charged them and, you know, before that it was woofing.
And a lot of times they do what's called a bluff charge, but people don't want to wait until a bear is 15 feet away to figure out if it's a bluff charge or not, so they shoot them.
And bear spray is very, very effective because you can do a longer distance, and it's accurate, but I personally don't...
The science shows, and many of your listeners won't believe this, the science shows that average hunter is better off with a bear spray than a firearm.
But...
In a moment of panic, you can't say what you would do.
Actually, it was tear gas, now that I'm remembering.
So what we did, we put these people in this cement structure, and it was like, how long can you tolerate it?
I forget exactly what the stunt was, but the wind took a lot of it and blew it through the crew, and we were all running away, and it was in your eyes.
And I'm sure tear gas is probably pretty similar to the effects that you get from pepper spray.
But I'm just saying, and people can argue this, and it all depends on the situation, but in general...
Bear spray is a more effective tool because you can spray it three times past where you're sitting and the bear hits that spray and they run away.
And I guess I've heard the bear biologists say to me, try shooting a rolling tire at 40 miles an hour and see how accurate your shots are because that's what you're shooting at if a bear is charging you.
I think if you had infrared vision for the heat detector and you could see what's out in the woods, you'd never go outside to take a leak when you're at your cabin.
But as you were with the wolf thing, I'm super skeptical that a deer or an elk is not going to smell you if you spray some junk that you bought from Cabela's on you.
And when I've been burying these traps after being so careful with everything and...
It's kind of voodoo and science mix.
It's art and science, and you bury everything.
You bury the trap, the hook, the grapple cable.
I mean, just everything.
And then you cover it up, and it's been in the ground two weeks.
Nothing's disturbed.
And then one day, you see where a wolf has come by, taken its paw, and dug at the backside of the trap and lifted it out by the spring and pulled it up onto the trail.
So they maybe done that just to make a viral video, but it's still pretty extraordinary that this rat figures out it can take a stick and it moves it and puts the stick on the rat trap.
The rat trap springs.
And then it goes over to...
And by the way, it doesn't even flinch when the rat trap springs.
Well, you know, there's as close to as many rats as there are people in New York City.
By weird estimations, which I'm sure they don't have a good, accurate account of how many rats there are, but there's so many of them.
And there's an amazing documentary called Rats that's on Netflix, and it's really good.
And it shows you how intelligent they are.
And one of the things they do is they take the young, brash rats, and they let them go try the food out first, see if it's poison, because they've been poisoned so many times.
So they look at this young dummy.
He's like, I'll eat it.
Send Sam.
Sam's a dumbass.
So Sam the rat runs over and eats the poison and gets sick.
And they're like, let's get out of here.
And they take off.
But they have some very bizarre survival instincts that's highly tuned to this recognition that they're being at least tried, not preyed upon necessarily, but sometimes trying to kill them.
I'm sure you're aware of this, but there's a very bizarre study that they've done Where there's a thing, there's a concept called morphic resonance, and the idea is that once one animal learns this, the other animals will learn it easier.
And that this is scientifically proven, and that the idea is that there's some sort of a sharing of information that is not local.
And that we don't totally understand.
So the concept is, the way it's been proven is that rats on one side of the country, if they go through a maze, the rats on the other side of the country will go through the maze quicker.
The exact same maze.
See if you can find that.
So they don't know what this is.
Like, you know, I think we have a very naive belief that the senses that we have recognized, all of them, whether they're sight, sound, touch, taste, whatever they are, this is it.
This is all that's available.
And that the concept might...
The idea is that there might be something that we're missing or something that we really...
We're dumb, blind human beings in terms of our ability to see things.
We don't have the ability to tune in to what these animals can tune into.
So, according to the hypothesis, formative causation, there's no difference in kind between innate and learned behavior.
Both depend on motor fields given by morphic resonance.
The hypothesis, therefore, admits a possible transmission of learned behavior from one animal to another and leads to testable predictions which differ not only from those of the orthodox theory of inheritance, but also from those of the Lamarck So,
animals of an inbred strain are placed under conditions in which they learn to respond to a given stimulus in a characteristic way.
They are then made to repeat this pattern of behavior many times.
X-Hypothesis, the new behavioral field which will be reinforced by morphic resonance, Will not only cause the behavior of the trained animals to become increasingly habitual, but will also affect, though less specifically, any similar animal exposed to a similar stimulus.
The larger the number of animals in the past that have learned the task, the easier it should be for the subsequent similar animals to learn it.
Therefore, in an experiment of this type, it should be possible to observe a progressive increase in the rate of learning not only in the animals descended from trained ancestors, but also in genetically similar animals descended from untrained ancestors.
They know how to funnel them into like pinch points.
They do it on purpose.
And they seem to be aware of what they're doing through whether it's gestures or pheromones or something that we're just guessing on.
but they're accomplished at it.
It's not like a singular individual event that you could point to.
Like, maybe that was just dumb luck.
They ran the deer through this area and the other wolves just happened to be there.
No.
No, they have specific tasks where they have wolves that will get on the top of the ridges and let themselves be known so they get these animals running.
Yellowstone's been a great place to observe hunting.
I mean, when I was working up northwest Montana, it's heavily forested.
We never...
Almost never got to watch wolves chasing prey unless we were in the airplane.
But in the Lamar, you got scopes and everybody's watching it.
And I've seen some pretty incredible chases.
And there's certain, in some packs, certain individuals are the chasers, the younger animals.
And some of the individuals are the coup de grace.
They go in for the kill after the animal's been tired.
And I guess there was some older animals that are too valuable potentially to risk being injured early on.
But they join in the chase and they know how to kill an animal.
So one thing I've always wondered, I don't know if this is with the morphic resonance, but that's something different maybe, but I've always wondered when wolves were first walking down from Canada and dispersing from Glacier before wolves were reintroduced and there was a very thin population of wolves out there, How do they know where to go?
For example, there is a wolf pack in the Nine Mile, it's a river drainage, outside of Missoula, and this pair of wolves had formed a mating system and they had a litter of pups.
The female was poached on Memorial Day, which is, those pups are born in middle April, so they were pretty young.
They were five, six weeks old.
They were still dependent on mom.
And the concern was that the dad wouldn't be able to raise those pups because he's got to go out and hunt and maybe they're just being weaned and blah, blah, blah.
Well, two weeks, two weeks after the female was dead, my colleague, Mike, who was working down there, says, hey, Diane, are you missing any collared wolves from Glacier?
I said, yeah, I'm missing several that I don't know where they went.
He says, because...
I just had a collared wolf show up here and join the Nine Mile Mail.
I said, really?
I said, well, here's my list of frequencies of the missing wolves that had been missing.
And he ran through the receiver and listened.
And one of those wolves was one that I'd caught in Glacier and disappeared six, seven months earlier.
So she wandered around and...
Not cyberspace, but mountain space, trying to look for a place to fit in, and all of a sudden, when this female gets shot, boom!
She's there to fill in the slot.
How does that happen?
And that happens in Yellowstone, too, where one of the breeding animals will be killed, and very soon after, a wolf of unknown, well, there they know a lot of the wolves, but a wolf will just show up, the right gender, the right age, and potentially bond and start a new pack.
How do they know?
And I guess all I can say is with that there's scent, the wolf smelling the urine and the scat can detect all kinds of things hormonally and the dominance of an animal.
If the female went missing, all of a sudden they won't smell it anymore and maybe it's a female coming in and she knows it.
But geographically, how do they know to migrate?
200 miles and show up exactly when the other wolf disappears.
So, have you ever heard of the book called World on the Wing by Paul, I think the last name is Whedon or something?
It's about the world of migration.
It is mind-boggling.
If you like to read nature stuff and science, it's written so anybody can enjoy it.
You don't have to be a scientist.
But it's fascinating and full of facts about the world of bird migration and how they get places and like a particular important flat in China that was critical habitat for a group of birds suddenly gets developed and it's like the wintering ground for half a million of these birds or whatever it was and certainly where do they go?
I would hope the day would come with wolves and other large carnivores where people learn about the science and they get just as excited as this instead of the wolves have killed all the deer now.
I think the narrative is, first of all, they were killed.
Yes.
A long time ago by poison, by ranchers, and by settlers.
And because of that, we grew up with this narrative that they had to kill off the wolves.
So then these damn hippies come and vote, and I wanted to ask you about that too, what your feeling is on biology that's done by vote, which is how informed are these people that are casting this vote, how emotional is this, and how much of these decisions that people are making.
One of them being that I think was particularly egregious was the delisting of grizzly bears in BC. Because I have a good friend who lives up there and he's like, there's a lot of grizzly bears up there.
They still allow black bear hunting, but they're not controlling the grizzly bear population because of the people in Vancouver.
That's the large population.
They have the most votes.
They decided we've got to outlaw what they call trophy hunting.
And so biology by vote.
By people that probably don't know anything about what's going on.
They don't have to other than have this emotional response.
But I think going back to what we're talking about is that we have this narrative that the wolves are bad.
The wolves are killed off for a good reason.
We don't want wolves.
Oh my God, people are bringing back wolves.
What are they doing?
We want to kill those damn wolves.
And so there's a good percentage of the population that lacks this nuanced perspective of the complexity of the ecosystem.
First of all, how amazing it is to be able to see wolves.
I've never seen them in the wild.
I saw one once in Alberta, but it was so brief.
It was dusk.
It was actually after Last Light, so it was running across this dirt road.
I was like, is that a wolf?
Is that a wolf?
There's a lot of wolves up there.
Plenty of camera trap photos of these wolves.
So that's most likely what it was.
And they give out wolf tags.
You can get as many wolf tags as you want up there.
But good luck finding one.
They're a lot smarter than you or a lot better at living in the woods than you are.
But we have these ideas that are ingrained in us that the wolves were killed off for a good reason and they're only being brought back because of morons.
Kind of in the middle, but obviously I'm passionate about wolves.
And I lean towards whatever we need to do to ensure that they continue as a species.
I'm not saying they're going to live in Iowa and Texas.
I'm just saying there's places that they can live where they more likely belong.
I'm just going to put it that way.
But I am not in favor of reintroductions, and I was not in favor of the Yellowstone and the Central Idaho reintroductions, which usually surprises people because I promote wolf conservation.
But I felt that wolves were coming down on their own from Canada, and before those wolves were ever reintroduced, by 1995, we had like eight packs of wolves in the state of Montana, 70, 75 wolves.
And you can Google that with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service early reports.
They were making it, And I feel like some of these places where reintroductions are happening because of ballot box initiatives like Colorado, wolves are already starting to get to Colorado and the people who are wolf proponents say we want them reintroduced because they'll never make the great desert across Wyoming.
They'll all be killed.
They can't make it.
Well, a few of them have and they even made pups in 19...
I think it was 2020 or 2021. And then this wolf was, did I say about the wolf from Michigan?
Yeah, the wolf that was killed, trapped in Colorado this year that came from the Great Lakes.
My God, how did it get there?
But it did.
So I feel sort of that Colorado is on the cusp of natural recovery.
If it's going to be one year or 10 years or 50 years, it's a time issue.
And I think the same was true for Yellowstone in central Idaho.
They were already getting to those places.
Wolves had already been seen, two of them confirmed, in and around Yellowstone Park in 1991 or two before they were reintroduced, and my wolves going to Idaho.
It's just a slower wave, and people want to jumpstart this with reintroducing wolves.
Well, in my humble opinion, I'm not a psychologist, but I think that Social tolerance of humans for anything is better when it isn't forced on them.
I don't like having things forced on me.
Of course.
Yeah.
So when you force wolves on somebody, it's going to meet with human resistance.
If they walk on their own, I believe...
They will get there.
Our science has shown that they do.
It just takes longer.
The other thing of interest about the reintroductions is that people think the wolf-loving hippies pushed to have the wolves reintroduced into Yellowstone and Idaho.
I'll just say Yellowstone, but it's the same.
To some point it is that faction, but the reason it happened was because two conservative senators, one from Idaho, McClure, one from Wyoming, Simpson, very conservative ranching supporting base, promoted to Congress to pass laws to get those wolves reintroduced.
Because they could see the writing on the wall that the wolves are coming anyway.
And if they walk down there on their own, they're going to be fully endangered.
Well, if we introduce them, they get a different classification called non-essential experimental population.
Meaning because humans put them there, you can manipulate them and kill them if they're taking livestock.
It's just more flexible management.
So the senators thought we were getting there anyway.
So yeah, that's a little bit of the interesting background that people aren't aware of with the reintroductions, that it was really people way on the right and way on the left coming towards a common goal for different reasons.
Yeah, and he was speculating that perhaps this wolf was brought there by someone.
Damn, it might be on my other phone.
Did I send it to you, Jamie?
I know I saved it.
I can find it, but this might be a little bit of a pain in the ass.
Maybe it's here.
So this wolf was very cool looking like this very big black wolf and he's like wandering around these cows and then someone comes and shoes him away and he runs off.
Well, that to me is so fascinating how animals change their behavior based on the amount of resources that are available and whether or not they're safe.
Like the Yellowstone elk that are habitualized, that are just around people hanging out with them.
Well, weren't you telling a story on Steve Rinella's podcast about a very nice neighborhood of like these nice homes and these wolves had decided to set up shop?
But it was just so interesting to me how adaptable wolves are.
You know, when I first started this business, I come from Minnesota, and the wolves lived only in the northern third or quarter of the state where it was boundary water canoe area and really wild because any place else, they got killed off.
So I always thought these wolves were denizens of the wilderness and they would only live where it was incredibly wild.
And they've come to show us that's not true.
They will live wherever we'll tolerate them.
And that could be...
I mean, there were wolves in Texas not that long ago.
Red wolves.
So they were here, but, you know, they're just not tolerated.
So what their speculation is, you know, he works on a ranch.
Their speculation is that someone released that and they think these rogue wildlife lovers are releasing wolves to try to force some sort of a reintroduction into central California.
And there's lots of conflict because they can't, I'm pretty darn sure, they cannot kill the wolves that are killing livestock.
So it's set up for a conflict, kind of like in California.
They're having some management flexibility in California, I mean in Colorado.
But so far, I mean they just now, so a pair of wolves that they reintroduced, Found each other and made a pack and they had the only litter of pups known to be in Colorado this year.
I believe both of those wolves came from Oregon and they both had livestock killing experience before they chose them to release, which is really unfortunate.
So the dilemma was, okay, they did okay until people started calving.
And now there's little calves on the ground and now the wolves are coming in and they're starting to kill calves and then they might kill a heifer or something.
And anyway, they're killing livestock.
So what do you do?
You got a male and a female and a litter of pups and they have started a history of killing livestock.
What do you do with them when the slight majority of people in Colorado, the ballot box initiative stuff, Want to see all the workers protected and a slight minority, it's like 49 and a half to 50 and a half or something, want them removed.
And the people in the middle are trying to figure out what to do.
So they went and captured them and put them in a holding facility for a while.
I was watching a documentary about this guy who lived with wolves, like lived with wolves in some contained environment and he would like set up a fake kill where he would eat the liver so he could be like the dominant male and he would growl at them.
It was really stupid.
Yeah, you're right.
I'm with you.
Anyway, this gentleman who was a wolf expert was then recruited to try to help a sheepherder with wolves that had moved in to take over his flock.
And one of the strategies they used is giant speakers.
So they took speakers and they played sounds of wolves to scare off these other wolves.
And so then he goes back to the pack and tries to be the alpha again and they corner him and snarl at him and he had a whimper and It's a very weird documentary because this is some sort of a strange fenced-in environment that they've created where these wolves are living.
What I'll say is captive wolf facilities, and I'm going to have many people who love their captive wolves, but captive animal behavior and wild wolf behavior have some parallels, but they're not the same.
And that guy doing this thing would never happen with wild wolves.
And many people, I did part of my career earlier helping to try and keep wolves out of livestock.
And we put out sirens and we put out blinking lights and bought raw cowhide patches and raw hamburger and laced it with lithium chloride.
Which is a toxin that makes you violently ill right away.
It's not going to kill you.
The idea being that these wolves would eat this bait wrapped with string and taste all this wonderful beef burger and taste the hide and then associate that bad experience of vomiting your guts out for 24 hours or whatever to the animal on the hoof out there.
That's a great idea for how your human brain works.
They just ate every bait we put out and there's piles of puke everywhere.
And one guy rancher I was working with, we were putting out the baits, whatever.
I did the sirens and I did what's called fladry.
And flattery is – they used it in Europe in places like Poland to hunt wolves where you hang streamers down from fences.
And you start out with a really wide funnel in the woods.
And the hunters used to drive the wolves through the forest with people at the end with guns.
And they would see the flattery and it would be quite a ways apart, like a mile or two or something.
And they wouldn't cross the flattery because it scared them.
And they get to the end and it's like shooting pheasants at the end of a cornfield.
So people have taken that idea to try and keep wolves out of like calving pens in specific areas where the livestock are confined.
It doesn't work well when they're out in free range.
And it works pretty well.
So I was out working with this pasture guy in northern Minnesota and he had a long skinny pasture and I had out, got highway blinking lights that came on at night and the fladry and he was so kind.
He let me, this is a lot of years ago, it's just this young story I think.
So I stopped in to visit him and I said, Well, I know you had a loss.
You got a calf.
I said, the wolf's been back.
And he looked at me and he says, well, no, hon, they haven't been back.
I said, do you think the blinking lights are working on your pasture?
He says, well, I don't know, but I damn near had a plane land here last night.
Well, that sounds ridiculous, but it is kind of crazy to me that if you wanted a wolf reintroduction to be successful, why would you take animals that have a history of predation on cattle and livestock and use those as the reintroduction wolves?
I think that kind of mindset or that ignorance, whether it's willful ignorance or whether it's on purpose, whether it's a fuck you to the ranchers, whatever it is, that is why people have this negative perception I think you're alluding to, right?
But what I'm saying is they had a pretty limited time.
They spent a lot of time trying to prep people and doing committees and working with people to get them prepared.
And by the time they were able to get everything in place, they were running against a wall.
They introduced these wolves very late in the year.
I think it was December.
And the only place they could get source wolves, they got them from Oregon.
At that point, Oregon gave them 10 wolves.
Half of them, roughly half of them, happened to have some livestock experience.
So this time, right now, they're already gearing up for the next reintroduction, this winter probably.
They're working with British Columbia, I believe, and they're going to take wolves, presumably that have not had livestock experience, and let them go, like they did with the original introductions into Yellowstone and Idaho.
And I really believe because of the political pressure to squeeze this into a short timeline...
That the people who were really pro-wolf, it was forced that they had to take the wolves that they got.
That's what I believe.
I don't think it was an FU. I think it was unintentional.
But it's like, these are the wolves you're going to get.
See, all this stuff has to do with the time frame, the mistakes and the rewards.
So the most positive pros of reintroductions is you speed up the time frame.
So like if we had let wolves slowly wander down from Canada and eventually get to Yellowstone, It may have taken 10 years.
It may have taken 50. I mean, it happened in Montana pretty quickly once they hit critical mass, but it took them a few years to get there, and then they just started, you know, the curve.
But people didn't want the time window, and we had a presidential administration that was in favor of it.
We had conservative congressmen that were in favor of it.
You had the Wolf Groupies in favor of it, and it It's just like all came together in the timeframe and the window of opportunity opened about four inches and they shoved them through.
And Colorado, mandated by citizens' ballot initiatives, which is not a really great way to, I don't think, to do business on any bill.
I mean, we have bills in Montana coming up now for voting.
But the timeline was short.
And I think if they had more options, they would have taken wolves.
They would have taken wolves from Wyoming or Montana for sure because they're more wild, whatever.
We do have depredating wolves.
But they kind of got down to the wire and everybody denied them except for Oregon.
There's an amazing painting that I'm pretty sure Ronello told me about.
He might even have a copy of it.
Or was it Remy?
It might have been Remy.
No, it was Remy.
Because Remy actually, he reproduced this on his television show.
He had a show called Apex Predator.
And the show Apex Predator was all examining the behavior characteristics of Apex Predators and seeing what they did.
And one of the things that some of the Native American tribes used to do, they would take a wolf skin And they would wear it, put it on their head, and they would crawl on four legs, hands and knees, up into bison.
And yeah, and this traditional ranch, they have this incredible way of taking care of it because they've never had electricity in this area.
It's like this long history of hundreds of years of hunting in the Suiza.
So they do all these different things to dry out the meat.
And they make these thin cuts of meat and hang them from sticks and dry them in the sun and smoke them and do all kinds of different things to the meat.
Really interesting.
This was one of the last, when they were all wiped out from, or almost wiped out from North America, a few of them survived in Mexico.
So here, Remy's Bison on the Sonora Desert in Mexico.
It's Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy, the Southern Plains from 1800 to 1850. So his theory, which I think is a very valid one, and it should be researched, it should be at least considered, that the reason why the early European settlers did not see enormous herds of bison Is because the bison were in enormous herds back then.
Because bisons have a long gestation period.
They're fairly easy to hunt because they're very large animals.
And they're not afraid.
Yeah.
And if you have horseback, you can get pretty close to them, shoot them with arrows.
And they were very effective at hunting them.
And particularly the Comanche lived entirely off of bison.
And they were right here.
So right here in this area, they're just nothing but bison, eating bison constantly.
And so they probably did a really good job of keeping the population in check.
Then along come Europeans and their dirty diseases.
And, you know, this is what the primary theory is what wiped out the Maya, wiped out the Aztec, wiped out the people that lived in the Amazon jungle.
It's all European settlers and their dirty diseases.
And so that when that happened, then you have what's similar to no wolves in Montana and you have 20,000 elk in a place that really has a carrying capacity for like, what, six?
What do you think was like the correct number when there was 20,000 elk there?
What's the correct number of What would be like a healthy population that the food sources could support?
I would say right now there's about 6,500, I think, elk in the northern herd.
We're not talking all of Yellowstone.
It's just this herd that's been studied where the wolves are.
That's where it's at now.
It's stabilized.
There's lions and people outside the park and wolves and bears, all these things, and that's where it's at.
And that's with everything, and it hasn't changed because the number of wolves, too, went from, you know, zero to 35, 31. To 160, 165. In the last 10 years, it's been right about 100 wolves every year because they contain themselves by killing each other and defending the resource.
One of the things that Dan Flores talks about in Coyote America is the expansion of coyotes, and that the reason this took place is that coyotes were targeted by gray wolves.
So they had developed this ability to recognize when one of the pack had been killed, they would expand their territory, and the females would have more pups.
This is why there's coyotes in literally every state and every city in North America now, where there wasn't 100 years ago, is that because they have this history of being persecuted by the wolves, because they don't breed with wolves, but they do breed with red wolves.
So where you get your coy wolf is a coyote and a red wolf on the East Coast, right?
Well, up in the Great Lakes, if you look at those wolves, that's where we started doing wolf stuff, they look a little bit like coyote, and the mitochondrial DNA shows some traces of coyote, but it's very uncommon.
It's interesting because that's one of the theories about why it was originally one of the theories why coyotes kill dogs and coyotes kill cats is that they're competitors but then they started eating them.
So I think maybe originally that was the case because again the expansion to urban areas is fairly recent.
Yeah, and it's really interesting to me how amazingly versatile coyotes are, because I am starting to see wolves being the same, that they're much more generous than I would have thought, and that they can adapt to situations pretty easily, like that wolf pack raising its pups in the subdivision.
One of the most interesting books I've ever read, but this is true.
I'm not saying that the 400 wolves is not true, but I doubt it.
But this is true science, supported by photos, that in the 50s or so, this Russian scientist was starting a study of foxes, and he wanted to select simply for tameness.
And by selecting the tamest male and female from these different fur farms, these are captive fox to start with, That he would see if their morphology or their physical appearance changed.
So he went to fur farms and he was picking just for tameness.
And eventually, after many years, he'd go to the fur farm and this fox would lunge at him and snarl.
He'd leave it.
And they'd say, oh, this one over here in the corner.
She rubs against the fence when you go to feed her.
He'd take that one.
But over years, they have photographs of these foxes, and they start changing.
They were silver fox, a lot of them, instead of red.
And they're black and white.
They kind of look like border collies.
And they start to have, you know, tipped over ears.
And they got pictures of the guys in the pens.
One person's bent over, and there's a fox standing on their back while they're putting out the food bowl.
I'm glad you read it because I suggested it to their friends because I'm passionate about all canids.
Well, all things wild.
And it was one of the most amazing pieces I've read.
Because if you think about humans domesticating animals, we took some kind of a primitive form of a horse and a cow and a sheep, and we got our breeds now.
For years, they had bears in captivity, brown bears in Europe forever, living in King's Castles and riding the bicycles in the circus and whatever.
But in terms of North America, of course, anywhere in the world, nobody's domesticated the African wild hunting dog.
Nobody's domesticated European lynx.
Nobody has successfully taken a wild predator and bred it long enough with heavy artificial pressure by our selection, like shooting them in the head if they aren't friendly, and turned it into a different animal with the exception of wolves.
But there seems to be some sort of a strange history of comfort where this animal that's a 10-pound animal is comfortable around a 150-pound man for no real reason.
Like, he's not giving it anything.
Like, just him being around.
And it would lie down in front of him and sun itself and play around him.
There was a weird relationship that humans have had with foxes.
I have a fox that visits my yard because I have chickens, and we have to shoo him out every time he comes into the yard, but they make the craziest noise.
It's kind of interesting to think about the early relation of people with wolves.
I talk about that in A Woman Among Wolves, my book.
There was a couple of paleontologists or sociologists that speculated, and I can't say if their theory is correct or not, but they speculated that When people were still living in caves and having spears and atlatls, that they would watch.
So people were living in a family group, in a pack.
The wolves were living in a family group or a pack.
They would watch the wolves chasing through a herd of whatever animal they were at that time, depending on where they lived.
Getting one tired enough, or maybe it was a cripple, had a bad language, they would surround it and eventually kill it.
And then they speculate that the humans would learn that, you know what, we can go up to that killed oryx or whatever they had just killed, the primitive horse.
And let's drive those wolves away.
We got tools.
We can kill the wolves if we have to.
So then it changed to where maybe those wolves had come around when the animal was cornered, but not dead.
And the humans would come in and do the final blows and drive the wolves away and take what meat they wanted and then leave.
And the wolves could then come in and get the spoils of all the work that they had done that the humans had taken.
And this is their theory, that there was this relationship Just because it's a brutal world, not synergy and not altruistic and not, oh, aren't this cute?
It's just like, hey, people, look at those wolves got an animal, a camel cornered over there.
Let's go kill it.
Take what we need.
Wolves would come in.
And that sort of began potentially the process of wolves and people beginning to interact.
I hate to hesitate to use the word collaborate, but...
Yeah, and then people would grab one of those wolves or let them hang around and then, you know, they would clean up the offal around the camp and whatever.
There's many ideas.
Of course, nobody knows.
But what is kind of known is the dates from DNA and carbon dating.
The dates at which humans were able to domesticate livestock and the dates at which humans were able to domesticate Dogs from wolves.
And domesticating dogs preceded livestock.
Livestock was like 11,000 years ago, roughly, of all species, swine, horses, cows, whatever, sheep.
So was it possible that the initial domestication of wolves into dogs took place in a very game-rich environment where they didn't have fight over resources?
So there would be more opportunity, potentially, for these animals Again, I'm not saying it was to help each other so much, but they took advantage of each other's strengths and weaknesses.
The wolf's strength was being able to run something down.
It's also tired that people didn't do that.
And then people say, oh yeah, that thing's crippled over there.
Let's go kill it and we'll get our meat and the wolves can have the rest or whatever.
No, because it happened significantly before we began domesticating livestock.
So what I'm saying is there wasn't a conflict base.
Resources were abundant.
There wasn't protection of our livestock.
There wasn't this and that.
And eventually people took, when livestock became a thing, then eventually people would take a wolf-like canine, a dog that we domesticated, and then I find it interesting to train it to keep the wolves, their wild cousins, away from the livestock.
Humans are so creative with what they can do and dogs are so plastic.
I mean you take a wolf and you put a lot of pressure on it and eventually you come up with a golden retriever and a griffon and a poodle because they have a lot of domestic, they have a lot of plasticity genetically, morphologically, behaviorally that I don't think a lot of the other species have or would show up when we try to domesticate them.
So he wrote it in, I think, 2017. It's an older book, maybe 2012. And he wrote, it's a spillover from wild animals, this Q-U-A-M-M-N, wild animals to human populations.
And it starts with a horse disease in Australia that becomes some extremely viral, terrible disease in humans.
And he actually traces back the origins of HIV. And all this happened before COVID. Wow.
And it just was so set up because COVID is the same kind of a deal.
But it's a fascinating book.
And because you've got an inquisitive mind, I think you'd really enjoy it.
They're 99% sure now at this point that it was all gain-of-function research that was done.
There's the obscuring of the data was done purposely to try to absolve guilt from the people that funded the project because the project was funded and canceled during the Obama administration.
And then when Trump came along, there was a lot of chaos apparently, and they reignited it, and they did it through another ecosystem.
It was very sneaky about it, and when grilled, Fauci lied about whether or not it was gain-of-function research they were doing in the first place.
There's emails back and forth, but that's beside the point.
Well, it'll be really interesting with the resources of the Yellowstone researchers who do amazing stuff to see what the long-range outcome is from this realization that, you know, there are 46 more times, likely more times to be a leader of the pack.
Not only that, there's a disproportionate amount of people that have toxoplasmosis or in countries that have toxoplasmosis that have successful soccer teams.
A lot of poor people, that's the best way out, become really good at soccer.
Soccer is really common because everybody plays it.
You know, they don't know.
But it might be that it makes you more aggressive.
It makes you more interested in taking risks and a little reckless.
And if you're a soccer player, I can probably help you to be like, just go for it and get crazy.
The whole interface between humans and wildlife is becoming a more and more popular feel.
And if I was young and could do my career over, I wouldn't go into that because it's really crazy.
The CWD, the...
So when wolves first encountered parvovirus and distemper, it came from people and dogs going into parks and camping and dogs pooping, and the disease came into being in the 80s.
But we started documenting it in Glacier.
And the first year that I was catching wolves and we took blood samples, they're off the chart in their immune response, the antibodies, to that particular disease.
And people don't think about, yeah, I got my little dachshund up at, you know, McDonald Lake and he pooped and you don't pick it up and the wolves get it.
But the same thing happened in Yellowstone and they have certain years where they have horrible pup survival.
It's called recruitment and they don't make it into the fall.
But the other thing of interest, so they've been learning by studying coat colors of wolves in Yellowstone, that genetically the ones who carry the gene for the black coat color, they have a different disease resistance to those diseases than the gray wolves.
At certain times when the disease prevalence is higher, the wolves will select a mate of a certain color because their genetics prove to be an asset to the survival of those pups.
So when I first came to Montana, many of the wolves were black, and now it's probably 50-50 or less.
in Minnesota, the original Midwestern wolves were gray And now they've got black color genes.
And there are changes with the population density.
But what I learned, to my best knowledge, it's a K-locust gene.
And they think that when people domesticated dogs from wolves, and we took the wolves into captivity, and we mutated the mutations that we helped survive, that gene for black color coat was from dogs.
And then dogs got bred a little bit into the wolves occasionally.
I was just getting to, like, if you're thinking about a place like the Pacific Northwest, for example, where you have dense rainforest, it would probably be a benefit to be darker.
One of the earliest written references to black wolves occurs in the Babylonian epic, oh, it's in Gilgamesh.
So that's 6,000 years ago.
The titular character rejects the sexual advances of the goddess Ishtar, reminding her that she had transformed a previous lover, a shepherd, into a wolf, thus turning him into the very animal that his flocks must be protected against.
And I suspect from people living in northern latitudes, the Inuits and the Native Americans throughout Russia and across the north, you know, they kept dogs too and they bred them to wolves and made better sled dogs.
But an early reference told me that the dog native to North America was brought over here.
The Native Americans didn't have dogs here thousands and thousands of years ago.
But they're one of the very few of those weird animals, like the North American lion, like all these different, like there was a North American lion that is way bigger than the African lion.
So when I signed my contract, this is my debut book, A Woman Among Wolves.
I have not written a book.
I've published scores of scientific articles, but not a book.
I signed the contract.
I love working with Greystone.
They're a fantastic publisher.
It's just a standard contract.
I signed away the rights for movie, audio, etc., etc., but I get a share of the royalties and stuff.
So when somebody bought the bid on and bought the media rights for audiobooks months before it was produced, and I didn't hear about it for a while, and by the time I'd heard about it, they had just started producing it.
And I said, well, I'd like to read for it.
I sent off an audio tape of my voice.
And it looks like they would need to do a bunch of polishing, and it was almost September, and I would be recording for weeks.