00:00:08
Speaker 1: This is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear. Listening past, you can’t predict anything brought to you by first Light. When I’m hunting, I need gear that won’t quit. First Light builds, no compromise, gear that keeps me in the field longer, no shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at first light dot com. That’s f I R S T L I T E dot com. When’s the play start bill?
00:00:46
Speaker 2: Second week in December?
00:00:47
Speaker 1: I think no, No, I got we got tickets. We’re doing date night. You know, it just came up in here. It came up in here, and we followed through. Turn the machine on.
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Speaker 2: Phil, Sheine’s on Steve. It always is.
00:01:02
Speaker 1: It’s the Crash Report. Here we go again, the report filled the engineer. II feeling Phil, I’m feeling great.
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Speaker 3: By the time this airs, where we’re a week or two away from opening, I’m excited. I’ve got like seventy five percent of my lines down. I know that that’s an important stat for you.
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Speaker 1: Hit me, hit me with just give me a line, Give me a line. I saw your script was open on your desk.
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Speaker 2: The yelling for a five thing. Yeah, it screwge.
00:01:32
Speaker 3: He seems unaffected by the season, so even on Christmas Eve, Well, that’s.
00:01:36
Speaker 1: Your British accent. Hit me with it again.
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Speaker 2: Oh no, this is a bad time for you to be doing this.
00:01:41
Speaker 1: To hit me with it again.
00:01:43
Speaker 3: He sits by the fire after uh, after working, goes over the Femmes accounts.
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Speaker 1: Hum, right a little bit, Okay, I’m not buying work on it.
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Speaker 2: You’re not buying it because because it doesn’t sound like fit.
00:01:56
Speaker 1: Yeah. He wants you to sound like a cab driver site, bring it man, He to be a from.
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Speaker 2: Braveheart more Harry Potter, More, Harry Potter one night?
00:02:11
Speaker 1: Are we going to be there? Randall?
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Speaker 4: Uh, it’s it’s the Sunday performance, I believe the thirteenth.
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Speaker 1: So on the third, I don’t care what you’re doing. I’m not there on the third, greinh I want you to just come in hard.
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Speaker 3: Okay, so scratch your previous notes about about all American accents American currency.
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Speaker 2: You don’t want that you want.
00:02:29
Speaker 1: Full I did, but change my mind. I want you to bring it now, and I want you to sound like what I expect. A old timey English guy is unwell Cockney Man. Yeah, yeah, joy today. Bye. The author James Campbell, who’s got a ton of books Man books that would be a very of high interest to listeners. James Campbell, he’s a magazine writer for a long time, but he wrote The Final Frontiersman, which if you haven’t read it, you’ve seen it around. I’m sure. He wrote The Ghost Mountain Boys, which I just finished nights ago. Here’s the problem I run, and I always I’m always honest with guests. Yeah, I didn’t get to the Jaguar book yet because I got sidetracked by Ghost Mountain Boys.
00:03:11
Speaker 5: I’m not sure what I should think of that, but thank you, I’m getting there.
00:03:15
Speaker 1: It’s like the stack, the stack. See, I got onto it, and Randall’s been on one too. I got out into a whiskey whiskey to book kit. Kid. They spent a lot of time in the Pacific. Well, it’s a two books. So I read The Battle of the Battle for Manila, The Battle of Manila like an academic title that just came out, and that got me all fired up about World War two. And it’s just about the Pacific theater mile Man was European theater was so I know that. Well, yeah, but then I got to then I I just it just kind of opened up this whole world of suffering. Yeah, just like it’s like World War two with malaria, you know what I mean. Yeah, it’s just like the disease. Just stuff. I wasn’t like I was familiar with all his stories, you know, like people freezing their toes off and everything. And then and of course I was aware. You know, my my my wife’s grandfather was a marine on Ewo Jima, Right, I was aware. But anyways, I got into the Battle of Manila, then I got into this, and I never got to the damn Jaguar. We’re gonna talk about. I’m like super interested in jaguars.
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Speaker 4: Sure, but it hasn’t dissuaded you from continuing on to the Jaguar book.
00:04:23
Speaker 1: No, no, no, Yeah. But The Ghost Mountain The Ghost Mountain Boys, what you did? This one come out two thousand and eight. The Ghost Mountain Boys tells the tale of the campaign and Papua New Guinea.
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Speaker 5: Yeah, and a lot of them were from your country, from southern Michigan. Yeah, lots of the guys Company G Company, Yeah.
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Speaker 1: Comes them from the county I came from. And the thing that uh, there’s a couple of things that are like about it that really stuck me. One just the disease factor, Like most your casualties are tropical diseases.
00:04:59
Speaker 5: Which MacArthur never took into consideration when he sent those guys over the mountains. You know, they had they had dysentery, they had jungle rot, they had trench foot, they had malaria, hookworm, hookworm, and they he never considered.
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Speaker 1: That that would happen.
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Speaker 5: Yeah, how could he not after having been in the Philippines.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, Oh, it’s just And then in the end you realize they’re taking these guys and I don’t know if listeners, I’m sure you’ve been on malaria medication. Yeah, Like malaria medication leads to like its own little form of psychosis. Like there’s people that can’t take it. Yeah, that’s right. I mean it gives you like wild dreams, It can send you into balts of depression, especially the stuff they used to use. They take these guys and like there’s this one guy that you follow through the book. He’s writing all these loving letters with his wife, he’s got kids waiting at home. Yeah. Then they go to treat them for malaria and they dose them so heavy with this drug. They didn’t understand the psychological effects. They start dosing them with this drug and shoots himself.
00:05:59
Speaker 5: In the adaburin psychosis it was called. So he was the division surgeon, a guy named Major Simon Warmanhoven, and he was an amazing guy. So I’d finished the book completely ready to turn it into my publisher, and Simon warm Warmenhoven’s two daughters happened to find my number and they called me up and they said, I want to send you the love letters that my dad sent to my mom from Papua New Guinea. Would you be willing to look at him? And I said, yeah, I’d love to see him. So I read all one hundred love letters and then I called my publisher and I said, stop the press.
00:06:41
Speaker 1: These are two beautiful lts.
00:06:42
Speaker 5: I have to completely rewrite the book and write in this character and write in his love letters because they’re just so heart wrenching. And my publisher gave me an extra two months to their credit.
00:06:57
Speaker 1: But that’s not much. I wrote hurriedly.
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Speaker 5: But can you imagine that the first of all the courage of his daughters, because obviously, you know you there’s a stigma attached.
00:07:09
Speaker 1: To the you know, to to shooting yourself.
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Speaker 5: But it was adebrit psychosis and they had a lot of that.
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Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean I didn’t know him, but like you look at the transition and even say his last letter home and he’s on the treatment, his last letter home is like I try not to let it happen. Yeah, but I have the blues. That’s why I haven’t been writing.
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Speaker 5: Yeah, and he had to.
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Speaker 1: He had.
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Speaker 5: He was in Brisbane at the end, just outside of Brisbane at the at the thirty second Division Hospital, and he was caring for all these men, you know, who’d been wounded in battle and who had various diseases and tropical diseases, and I mean he was just overwhelmed in addition to taking Adebrant and having Adebritan psychosis.
00:07:51
Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s just a just a horrible story. You know, nothing that came out reading this and reading that book about the Battle for Manila and also just documentaries I’ve been seeing and stuff. Is it seems like but we’re kind of running out of them now. It seems like as a lot of veterans from World War Two got to a certain age, they became more ready to discuss. I don’t want to call them like what would what would be regarded as war crimes, but I don’t even want to condemn it. But it became like later in life, like I watched this, watch this series, and they’re now is watching these old guys being like they’re talking about the the concentration camps, and they’re like anyone that worked at a concentration camp, we just lined them up, shot them. And guys in here they’re like guys that are talking about stuff later or whatever. It just seems like for a long time, a lot of that stuff was just not mentioned. They don’t get their day in court. Yeah, And now it seems like more people are like, no, man, I mean we didn’t we didn’t deal with prisoners, or we don’t like to deal with prison Yeah.
00:09:00
Speaker 5: I mean you’re talking about the wounded Japanese. They would just stick them with their bayonets. And of course they didn’t talk about that till a lot later. But a lot of those guys I contacted, ultimately contacted about eighty guys that fought on the island in New Guinea, and I interviewed a lot of them, and a lot of them I drove over to Michigan, you know, to interview these guys and typical story. You know, they never told their stories about World War Two. I think James Bradley in Flags of Our Father said, they came home and they got on with living. You know, they didn’t want to remember, so they, you know, they deliberately just repressed this stuff.
00:09:37
Speaker 1: And I started talking to.
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Speaker 5: Them, and initially they’d tell funny stories, you know, and I’d go to their Old Timers Division meeting and they’d tell jokes and listen to bad poke music, you know, and play cards all night. But slowly they started to like reveal stuff, and then it was like it was like this.
00:09:55
Speaker 1: Gusher of emotion.
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Speaker 5: You can imagine after you know, fifty years, is trapped inside and you know, they never talked about it. And sometimes their wives would call me up and say, you know so and so, you gotta you can’t interview him anymore. He’s he has nightmares, you kid, and it’s haunting him. And I said, okay, that’s the last thing in the world I want to do, you know, is put him through this again. But then they would call back and they would say, no, man, I gotta talk about this is the first time I’ve ever talked about this in my life. My kids don’t even know these stories. I have to keep talking. So it was Yeah, it was pretty it was pretty emotional.
00:10:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was. You know. I don’t like you know, I usually I don’t like any well, not any I think the only Yeah. But I’m a Bob Service fan.
00:10:51
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, yeah, sure, I love Bob.
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Speaker 1: He’s a poet, is a poet. Yeah, and Cladie Bayley Cladi Bailey used to dude wrote, Yeah, that’s the first time we had read a poem possibly quite possibly Bob Hartman. Yeah, Bob Hartman, Right, this is a veteran grand rapid. Did he write this much after the war? Yeah he did, he did. Okay. I laid him down by the bend in the stream and he erected it across at his head. His funeral song was a cockatoo’s scream, as if they knew my buddy was dead. I’ve even the score, yes, a do a dozen times over, but no matter, the distance between my mind wanders yet, and I’ll never forget his grave by the bend in the stream. Yeah, it’s poignant, it’s got a Bob Service.
00:11:46
Speaker 5: It does have a Bober These poets.
00:11:48
Speaker 1: That don’t even bother Ryman. It’s just that.
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Speaker 5: Bob, Bob Hartman is the same guy that said if I owned New Guinea and I owned Hell, I would live in Hell brant out New Guinea.
00:12:02
Speaker 1: But you just got back from New Guinea. I just got back here. So what we’re gonna get don’t worry about this. We’re gonna get to this jaguar. We’re gonna get to the jaguar situation. I love talking about New Guinea. But what were you doing there? Now?
00:12:13
Speaker 5: So two things?
00:12:15
Speaker 1: You help me understand something?
00:12:16
Speaker 5: Sure?
00:12:17
Speaker 1: Why do What is the difference between saying Papa New Guinea and saying New Guinea.
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Speaker 5: So the entire island is called New Guinea. Papa New Guinea is a separate is a separate nation on the eastern half, formerly an Australian colony German colony. Once upon it it was called Kaiser Willielm’s Land way back when. And the other side is owned by is part of Indonesia, and that’s called West Papua. So the whole island is called New Guinea.
00:12:45
Speaker 1: Okay, no idea, Yeah, okay.
00:12:47
Speaker 5: So I’ve been going there since nineteen eighty nine. My brother and I first went there on a you know, you know, young men’s adventure or misadventure.
00:12:58
Speaker 1: But somewhere in that took my wife there for our honeymoon. By the way, she got malaria. How romantic.
00:13:09
Speaker 5: Her parents wanted her to ditch me so fast, so fortunately she did in three daughters later. But I discovered for the first time I didn’t even know the story. Okay, I didn’t even know the story of the war.
00:13:27
Speaker 1: In Papua New Guinea.
00:13:28
Speaker 5: But anyway, So in two thousand and six, I repreat repeated the track that the Ghost Mountain Boys did for the first time since World War Two, and I became interested in the villages and just the World War two history. So on the most recent trip, we brought in people there in the villages, isolated villages, they die, skin infections, you know, they’re dying and malarious. We brought in four thousand dollars worth of medicines that the one health clinic can you know, can give out to the people. You know, they have a little cut. You know that they eventually lose their leg or lose their life, so you know, it doesn’t have to be dramatic stuff, but medicines to help them and that the Ghost Mountain Trail used to be called the Kapa Kapa Trail because there was a village called Gaba Gaba. The soldiers couldn’t pronounce it. It became Kappa Kapa. It was called the Kappa Kapa Trail, and we want that to be a national historic trail like the Kokota Trail.
00:14:29
Speaker 1: I don’t know if you guys have ever heard of it.
00:14:31
Speaker 5: That’s where the Australians fought the Japanese on the island in New Guinea, on the Kokota Trail. And now five thousand trekkers come every summer to Papua New Guinea to trek the Kokoda Trail where they’re you know, grandfathers or great grandfathers or great uncles fought the Japanese.
00:14:51
Speaker 1: So it’s a big deal.
00:14:52
Speaker 5: So we want to try to bring Americans over to Papua New Guinea to walk this trail. It’s twenty one days, it’s over the own Stanley Mountains.
00:15:00
Speaker 1: It’s tough. Yeah, you’ll run that song the bitch what’s that? Yeah? Yeah, you run it?
00:15:03
Speaker 2: How many miles is that?
00:15:05
Speaker 1: One hundred and thirty miles?
00:15:06
Speaker 5: But it is straight up and straight down, straight up.
00:15:10
Speaker 1: You know you go up to nine?
00:15:13
Speaker 4: Are you a runner a little bit by a little bit, like one hundred miles at a time.
00:15:19
Speaker 2: Oh, how what’s the elevation when you say up and down?
00:15:24
Speaker 5: Well, the plane we tried to find on this trip was at about ten thousand feet, but don’t Stanley’s get up to about twelve thousand. But you’re going through solid jungle, I mean absolute solid jungle. I remember, I don’t want to go straight here. But I was reporting in two thousand and six for National Public Radio and I was doing I was calling them and doing interviews with them from the jungle, and my first interview.
00:15:51
Speaker 1: I was late for.
00:15:53
Speaker 5: So I grabbed the SAT phone and I wandered out into the jungle and I did my interview, and then I thought, I don’t know where the hell I am.
00:16:04
Speaker 1: I have no idea where I am. You lost? Yeah, I lost my direction that fast.
00:16:10
Speaker 5: I was probably like forty feet.
00:16:13
Speaker 1: You’re not being deliberate, no.
00:16:15
Speaker 6: Not being delivered at all, And so I’m screaming, you know, my lungs. And fortunately one of the villagers, one or one of the carriers that was with us happened to find me.
00:16:26
Speaker 1: Otherwise, who knows is there.
00:16:29
Speaker 7: When you say trail. Yeah, I can have a lot of different definitions. So at this point, what is it like just a regular old hiker follow.
00:16:37
Speaker 5: No, it’s like when you want to like a deer trail or a rabbit trail through the woods. And the people of New Guinea are the most like physically fit people you’ve ever seen. It’s like the people of the Andes or something. They they they live in the mountains, so they’re accustomed to it. They just walk straight up and straight down. No National Park switchbacks. So yeah, I mean it’s tough, but if you ever want to come in.
00:17:04
Speaker 1: You big, you can’t run it, so you need to organize like one of them races. Yeah, it was.
00:17:16
Speaker 7: I’m sure with the recent explosion and participation in these endurance races, you could very easily get that’s for people to go and fast hike, run you’re that track.
00:17:29
Speaker 1: Hadn’t even considered it.
00:17:31
Speaker 5: But just to finish the story, we were my part my co partner in Australia found a plane called the Flying Dutchman, you know, the ode to the michigan Ers at ten thousand feet. He found it last year and it hadn’t.
00:17:47
Speaker 1: Been seen since. I think like nineteen sixty seven.
00:17:50
Speaker 5: So we were taking a small group up into the mountains to identify the plane, see the plane, touch the plane, and retell.
00:17:59
Speaker 1: The story for the remains in there. Still no, they’re gone. They’ve been taken. They were taken out.
00:18:03
Speaker 5: I think in night. I can’t remember the date, but the plane. Plane has this really poignant story about it crashed and I think six of the guys were killed. Eight fifteen of the guys were too injured to get out, but two parties tried to make it out. One party march to the north coast. That took him about thirty days to get through the jungle, and another party marched a guy from named Ed Holloman from just outside of Grand Rapids, Michigan, found safety after about thirty days. And they tried to court martial him for leaving the plane and he did, I mean, he saved these guys’ lives.
00:18:46
Speaker 1: And it was well, what happened to the guys went of the other direction.
00:18:49
Speaker 5: The other guy they they actually two of the guys drowned. They tried to they tried to ride logs on the river to the north coast, and two of the guys drowned. The other two of the guys. The other two guys made it to safety, tried to get a rescue party to come back to save the guys on the plane. The rescue party stopped one day short because they ran out of food, and ultimately all the guys on the plane died. So in fact, the chaplain died in the arms of the villagers who found the plane on January seventh, nineteen forty three. So it’s yeah, it’s really it’s a terrible story.
00:19:29
Speaker 1: So what was the plane, what was it? What were they doing at the time.
00:19:32
Speaker 5: So you read about the Ghost Mountain boys who walked over the mountains. They were trying they’d found usable airfields on the north coast of Popping the Guinea near the battlefield of Buna, and they were trying to fly the guys over instead of having them walk. And they were probably trying to punch holes in the clouds because they hadn’t they hadn’t really flown over the own stanleys very much. They called it the hump like in Burma. They called it the Hump, and the you know that plane crashed up there at ten thousand feet, so, but they were the intention was to fly him over to the battlefield.
00:20:08
Speaker 1: Wow, okay, but we have a transition into Jaguars. That’s why you’re here, right, Yeah, sure, but I love talking about Papa the Guinea and the Ghost Mountain Boys. Uh, it’s gonna be a gradual transition because’s two things so so so. James’s books are are for reading. Ours of cooking. We got just letting people know here. So we took our two cookbooks, our Meat Eater, Fish and Game Cookbook and our Outdoor Cookbook and made like a gift box. You can get both of them right here. This two for one great gift item we signed. We signed a whole mountain of.
00:20:40
Speaker 8: The only place you can get to sign ones is on the mediater website.
00:20:46
Speaker 1: Not true, where else you get in the stores retail stores. Yeah, we just signed a whole mountain of them. And then uh yeah, it’s a very it’s a very economical way of getting both our books for someone for Christmas. I’m not even going to get into ff old trucks. But look at this. Can that make you want to get a calendar? The hell of a calendar? Now get into that. The other plug is this. Well. While back on the show, we ran an episode of something called blood Trails. It was about that dude who was turkey hunting and got shot in the back while he’s turkey hunting, and they’ve like interviewed all these guys. They’ve definitely interviewed whoever did it, but they have yet to how many years has been, like seventeen years, eighteen years, something like that. So we got a whole series out now called Blood Trails, a podcast, and it’s about hunting and fishing related like murders, cold cases, mysteries. It’s really good. Jordan Sillers has been doing a phenomenal job on it, So check out and subscribe to the Blood Trails podcast feed. It turned out. I’m very proud of it. It turned out very very good. It’s well worth to listen. He did a phenomenal job. And rather like a lot of that kind of stuff. It’s like some dude will go read like a Wikipedia entry or read somebody else’s book and then they’ll make like a podcast where they basically like regurgitate some stuff they just read. It. It’s like interviews. It’s interviews with it’s interviews with investigators, it’s interviews with victims, families. It’s it’s very well done, like a ton of original reporting in it. It’s a great series, all right. Jaguars Jaguars? Is this stuff good? Here? Phil? Yep? How many jaguars are floating around in the world right now?
00:22:35
Speaker 5: Well, there’s a big discrepancy between the numbers. One number is sixty three thousand, the other number is seven one hundred and seventy three thousands. Most jaguar biologists think the lower number is the more accurate number. But about eighty percent of those jaguars, let’s say sixty three thousand, let’s say one hundred thousand are in the Amazon or the Pontinal of Brazil. Outside that, so in the IUCN, the jaguar is considered threatened or near threatened. But if you eliminate the Amazon and the Pontinal, they’re considered endangered or critically endangered.
00:23:20
Speaker 1: Which would be true of a lot of wildlife species. I mean, if you eliminate their core range. Yeah, good point. Then it looks grim. It looks grim. Yeah.
00:23:31
Speaker 5: However, you know, with the corridor, there’s a reinvestment of time and effort into the corridor. There’s something called the twenty thirty Roadmap that a lot of the environmental organizations have signed onto including Panthera WCS, lots of other IUCN, and by twenty thirty they want to they want to solidify thirty jaguar conservation unit and connect thirty more potential jaguar units. So there’s a big across Latin America and South America. There’s kind of this new appreciation of what the jaguar represents.
00:24:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, explain their historic range a little bit. And while you’re doing that, can you touch on do you believe Coronado ran into jaguars, like way up in Kansas?
00:24:24
Speaker 5: First of all, Yeah, I do believe Coronado ran into jaguars.
00:24:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that.
00:24:29
Speaker 5: When was Coronado what was the date, late fifteen hundreds, definitely, Yeah, I think jaguars were pretty much spread across much of the United.
00:24:38
Speaker 1: Because he talks about he talks about leopards and he talks about lions. Yeah, and you’re like the lions, mountain lions. But then people are like, what in the hell is he talking about when he mentioned seeing leopards.
00:24:52
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, so yeah, I do think up until up until probably nineteen hundred, they were in you know, Colorado, in California and West Texas, Alabama, Louisiana. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you think that.
00:25:11
Speaker 1: Alabama and Louisiana you think legit.
00:25:14
Speaker 5: I think it’s legit. I mean you look at their head, look at the habitat. I mean that’s the that’s the ideal habitat for a jaguar until what year, up until maybe nineteen hundred, maybe maybe mid eighteen hundreds. But their range, their range is now five thousand latitude and a miles from southern Arizona. Right now, there’s one jaguar roaming the mountains of southern Arizona.
00:25:41
Speaker 1: The US is usually good for like y know, you wanted to write.
00:25:44
Speaker 5: His name is co Chiese and he was discovered in I think late twenty twenty three. But so all the way down to the Eberra in northern Argentina. But of course once how you say that word?
00:25:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, the eber Era, No, I’ve been there. Oh have you thought of Iberra fish down there? Oh? Really no, the Ibera wetlands.
00:26:05
Speaker 5: Well maybe it is, I’ve called it Iberra. Well, well we’ll ask a Spanish expert, I suppose. But so in where they’re actually doing a reintroduction of jaguars now, but.
00:26:17
Speaker 1: That’s like near the that’s where like that that deadly Triangle Paraguay, Uruguay. Yes, exactly, it all come together. It’s like kind of a little bit of a lawless.
00:26:27
Speaker 5: What kind of fishing were you doing down there, Golden Dradoan. Yeah, so once upon a time, yeah, they I mean, they migrated obviously over the Burying land Bridge like a million years ago, and then they saw a bunch of ice in front of them, so they they they stayed for many generations in kind of the Yukon and Yukon territories. And then as that as that ice began to began to melt during the place the scene warm ups, I mean, what whether like twenty or something like that, the jaguars started moving south, moved into Canada, then into Montana and uh, you know the grasslands of North and South Dakota and Kansas, and then continue to move down to you know, almost the tip of South America.
00:27:08
Speaker 8: So they didn’t evolve as like a warm weather tropical species.
00:27:13
Speaker 5: No, they’re they’re they’re complete generalists. You know, they can they can live anywhere in it like a mountain lion, like a mountain lion. Or so I was down in southern Bolivia in the Grand Chaco the Grand Chaco is like parched country, brittle parched country, and the the the jaguars thrive there, really, Yeah, yeah, it’s amazing. They thrive in the Sierra Madres of Mexico, they thrive in the in the Madraan Sky Islands of of Arizona. They’re they’re really they’re remarkable creatures.
00:27:50
Speaker 1: Yeah. I know there’s a picture. I have this book called Candid Critters, and it’s like it’s like influential trail cam photos. Yeah, and there’s I think at the time was maybe the only known photo taking an Arizona of a jaguar standing in the snow in the Wachuka Mountains. I think, Okay, yeah, you’re saying that that’s not a problem for the jaguar. Well, I don’t.
00:28:14
Speaker 5: I don’t know about snow. Snow might be pushing it. But he was obviously not she but likely he was obviously in the Wachuka Mountains. You know, you get snow there and you know, in late April. So but I’m familiar with that photo.
00:28:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ve seen a bunch of tracks, Jaguar tracks, not in the US. One time we weren’t remember we were we were It was in Guyana, and we were there’s this big sand bar where the turtles were, oh yeah, nesting. So we went there with native people to dig turtle eggs and you could see where the jaguars were digging the turtle eggs out and probably also hunting the turtles when they come out of the water. Yeah. Right, We go back to our camp and then a couple of guys went back to the sandbar to take a bath and there’s tracks all over. I was dying to see one. I was dying to see one. Yeah, there’s tracks all over. They turn around and go right back to take a bath, and they’re like, as soon as we got there’s jaguars standing on the grave bar. Missed I’m not kidding. I missed it by twenty minutes, just because you didn’t want to take a bath. Yeah, yeah, whatever. But no, no, I’ve never let eyes on one. Man, I would.
00:29:34
Speaker 5: Yeah, they’re incredible.
00:29:35
Speaker 1: You’ve no doubt laid eyes on Yeah. What was the first time you saw one in the Pontinal.
00:29:40
Speaker 5: So the Pontinal is kind of like Kruger National Park of Brazil, So the jaguars there have become habituated to people. And this was during this was during COVID, so there were almost no other tourists, but we were.
00:29:55
Speaker 1: We were on the Quiaba.
00:29:57
Speaker 5: River in motoring, motoring down the river into one of the tributaries, and all you know, we’re all looking at the banks of the river, and all of a sudden I spotted I spotted one, you know, kind of lounging in the sand underneath the tree. And just then the guide, you know, the boat captain and guide also also saw that jaguar. And I’ll never forget he was like barely whispered, he said, Onsa And you know, Panthera on is is you know the name for the jaguar.
00:30:32
Speaker 1: What’s that? What is that word?
00:30:33
Speaker 5: So Panthera is the genus and then Osa, I mean, Onsa is the is it?
00:30:42
Speaker 1: Would it be the family name? I’m not sure, but man, what does that word mean? Jaguar?
00:30:49
Speaker 5: So he just said, he just said jaguar, and all he had to do was whisper it.
00:30:54
Speaker 1: And man, my whole body was and this hue.
00:30:58
Speaker 5: We we we anchored the boat just outside, just outside the bank, the river bank, and all of a sudden, this jaguar rose, just this absolutely enormous jaguar, absolutely beautiful and came to the river to drink, and he was just unperturbed. You know, it wasn’t it wasn’t like he he moved quickly in I think in the book I describe its something like music. I mean, like every part of his body just operated so beautifully. And he stood there drinking and then he looked up at us, and then he walked kind of broadside to us down the river, and it was just I mean, it was magnificent.
00:31:42
Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s just like a like having not seen one, I’m just fascinated by him. And it is just a different crater man.
00:31:50
Speaker 5: Even people who’s just a how do they compare it to a mountain lion?
00:31:54
Speaker 7: Yeah, as are the sizes a burlier.
00:31:58
Speaker 5: Right, So I think the biggest there I was with this this Brazilian trapper he traps in you know, collars jaguars. The biggest one he’s I think trapped in collars one hundred. His name is Joe rs May and he’s famous and he’s trapped about three hundred you know, maybe one hundred and twenty jaguars. The biggest one he’s ever trapped.
00:32:22
Speaker 1: Was three hundred pounds.
00:32:23
Speaker 5: Wow, you know, like a you know like a lioness in Africa, but in the in the Pontinal they grown big. In the Amazon they grow them big. But you know, if you get one in northern Mexico or say one in Arizona, they’re going to be maybe one hundred and thirty or one hundred and forty.
00:32:43
Speaker 1: Paums like a lion.
00:32:44
Speaker 5: Yeah, like, yeah, exactly like a lion. So they’re much much smaller, same species, but just much much smaller. And I don’t know if it has to do with habitat or food. I mean, jaguars eat like eighty five different species, everything from frog to skunks, you know, to have a line’s but I think Teddy Roosevelt he he hunted jaguars and the Pontinal with his with his son Kermit, And I think there’s one account he said, uh, Kermit shot a jaguar with a four h five Winchester and it was as big as a small male, you know, African lion. So I imagine that was three hundred pounds or maybe even more.
00:33:27
Speaker 8: Do they have like uh, leopards and tigers in India? Say, do they have a reputation for attacking people or not?
00:33:36
Speaker 1: Really?
00:33:37
Speaker 5: That’s that’s the thing, just almost no accounts of unprovoked attacks. And Alan Rabinowitz, the guy I wrote about, called them the reluctant warrior. He said they were much much more comfortable kind of eluding man. And there’s a biologist down in Brazil who said and was never part of their prey template for one thing.
00:34:03
Speaker 1: And also there’s something.
00:34:05
Speaker 5: Called the t Griyadas, which was the jaguar craze which Jackie o’ nassas set off when she stepped out of a limousine in a knee length, double breasted Somali leopard coat and she started this this fashion craze for spotted cat accessories.
00:34:29
Speaker 1: So you make me like Kennedy.
00:34:31
Speaker 5: Yeah. So so what happened during the Tigriyadas maybe is like what happened during to Grizzly. What is the word, it’s t I g t gre yadas.
00:34:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, the jigger craze. Yeah, And and that set off a market hunting campaign huge in the sixties.
00:34:54
Speaker 5: In in the sixties to nineteen seventy five when Sighte’s finally stepped in and to eliminate the trafficking. But from nineteen sixty two to nineteen seventy five, one hundred and eighty thousand jaguars were killed in Brazil alone for the fashion maybe not all for the fashion industry, but for far part of the fashion industry. More jaguars than we have now were in total during what years.
00:35:22
Speaker 1: Nineteen sixty three to nineteen seventy five, during the day they were not running a quota program.
00:35:27
Speaker 5: They were not running no, everybody was out trying to kill jaguars. Alan Rabinowitz said they had the dollar sign on the back right next to the bullseye.
00:35:38
Speaker 1: What was at that time? What kind of money was a jaguar hide like? It must have been extraordinary to drive that level of commitment, because it’s not like they’re like hanging out now Falcon.
00:35:47
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, right, maybe two hundred dollars, but two hundred dollars for you know, I hate to say lowly, but two hundred dollars for someone living in a village in Bolivia or jag Or or Brazil is a lot of money. And they killed them like snakes, that’s.
00:36:05
Speaker 1: What George Schaller said. They just killed them like snakes, even though but mostly all black market.
00:36:11
Speaker 5: All black market. Yeah, they until side stepped in in nineteen seventy five to try to shut down the traffic, which they did to a certain extent. Yeah, there was a there was a lively black market in Jaguar Pelts.
00:36:27
Speaker 1: If you look over your left shoulder, you see that that’s a bobcat right there. Okay, right now, here’s an interesting thing about side’s and spotted cats. So that’s from Texas. Uh okay, yeah, in Texas there’s no close season on bobcats. Bobcats are non game, no close season on bobcats, no bag limit on bobcats. Wow. Part of it is because texts those south like Texas bobcats aren’t valuable. Okay, Like a bobcat up here, oh yeah, I mean mean about cat up here could be like five six, seven hundred bucks, sure right about cat from certain areas like high Desert country could be one thousand dollars. But those cats are effectively valueless. So there’s not like a huge push on it. But what’s interesting is you haven’t you haven’t in Texas. Here’s an animal. It’s non game, no close season, no bag limit. But you can’t move that cat out of Texas without a site’s tag. And you’d be like, well, why the state doesn’t even manage them? And it’s because it’s because.
00:37:26
Speaker 5: Like spotted cats in general.
00:37:29
Speaker 1: Yeah, so any spotted cat is going to have regulatory pressure on it because it’s so easy to be like, oh no, that’s not that. Do you follow what I’m saying. So it’s like like they’re trying to regulate the movement of spotted cats because there’s so many imperiled spotted cats. They just want to be that if it’s a spotted cat, it’s a painted even if it’s worthless. Yeah, if it’s got spots, we just don’t know what it is. Is it like is it that or is it a snow leopard? Yeah, you know or whatever?
00:38:02
Speaker 5: Right, Yeah, Well you’ve had Dan Floris on you know that, and you know his book American Serengetti. He talks about, you know, what they did to predators, you know in Colonial America, and jaguars were one of the things they just you know, they just shot.
00:38:19
Speaker 1: Would they would they poison jaguars too? Yeah?
00:38:22
Speaker 5: I think they poison all predators. You know, wolves, bear, coyotes in in Brazil, in you know, South America. Sure, they used to poison them, poison them all the time.
00:38:34
Speaker 8: You mentioned Colonial America, are are do you think black jaguars and colonial America are responsible for the continued sightings of black like claim sightings of black panthers wherever in.
00:38:49
Speaker 5: Southern the southern United that’s interesting there, there’s the black jaguars only come from one place?
00:38:56
Speaker 2: Is that right?
00:38:57
Speaker 1: To one place? Like the colonists would not have Taylor Sledge in Clay’s dead or listening in the entire state of Mississippi. I was listening right now. I don’t let you know, but they have on their hands right now. Black jaguar. Who does he’s just roaming or it’s a cat, it’s a house cat. There was just a picture that our buddy in Mississippi sent us, and he’s like, he’s like the whole state’s panties are on fire. And you kind of look and you’re like, maybe it’s like a house cat. It’s like a guy has a picture of a cat standing on the side of the road. But it’s also people.
00:39:32
Speaker 5: Like black mountain lions.
00:39:33
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, but everybody knows there’s no such now that now that words out, there is no never has been. There’s no such thing as a black panther. A black panther is a wet panther. So then the black Panther. Crowd hit on the thing that there is melanism in jaguars, so Taylor’s sledge was staying. He even had a veterinarian tell him it’s got to be a melanistic jaguar in Mississippi terrorizing Mississippi, as.
00:40:04
Speaker 5: We well, maybe that’s the second jaguar we got coaches in Arizona and whatever. The black jaguar is named the Mississippi. But there’s a place in Brazil called the Sahavo. It’s it’s c E r R A d oh, but they pronounced the double r like ha though, in the Sahavo, and that’s the only place that black jaguars there.
00:40:25
Speaker 1: So there’s like a melanistic est jaguars. Is he like black? Or is he got like dark spots? No, I have a.
00:40:32
Speaker 5: Pulled off a picture, Oh, pull up of your friends.
00:40:39
Speaker 2: I can read picture. I’ll put it up there like they show fill.
00:40:44
Speaker 1: More serious theater, you know. Quit. Yeah, I’m gonna get a guy that’s just pummeling pictures on that screen.
00:40:51
Speaker 8: Stop like jet black ones, but also like spots really barely like yeah.
00:41:01
Speaker 4: So it’s like, uh, it’s it’s like those black bears, you know, like the the spirit bears.
00:41:07
Speaker 1: Or whatever in Canada.
00:41:08
Speaker 4: It’s it’s like a very localized expression of some sort of gene.
00:41:14
Speaker 1: Yeah that must be. Yeah, I don’t that. I expect that’s what it is.
00:41:18
Speaker 5: Yeah, you can see that.
00:41:20
Speaker 1: Take that back. I don’t think you should do that, okay, because some places I’ve been on they do it, and it gets a little anoying. Like every damn thing you talk about up on the screen.
00:41:29
Speaker 2: I’m glad you’ve had a complete one eight in the last.
00:41:32
Speaker 4: Your original instincts for correct feeling.
00:41:35
Speaker 1: Don’t put it up. What was the what was the give me some of the like of the and let’s say let’s take meso America, okay, familiar like like Mane culture, different meso American cultures, pre Contacts or pre Columbian cultures. What was there? Is there a way to generalize about, like what was their understanding of the animal, like like the Amerindian indigenous understanding of the animal? Was it like a prize thing to get? Was it like what you know, if you had to sort of typify the relationship.
00:42:14
Speaker 5: They worshiped it, I mean metaphysically, there was like no more important animal, but it was it represented to those people. What say the grizzly bear represented to you know, northern Native American tribes. It was part of their religion, part of their art, part of their architecture, part of their iconography. They absolutely worshiped it. The Mayans believed that the jaguar escorted the sun from day tonight and back today. The Olmecs would would would mutilate their heads so they resembled jaguar heads. And but at the same time they did kill jaguars because they value their pelts, they valued their teeth, you know, et cetera. But they had I mean it was you know, it was their totem. It was something you know that was important to every aspect of their lives.
00:43:11
Speaker 1: But they didn’t regard it as like as one of their predators. You mean it has something to be feared. Yeah, Like when you went out, you know, like, let’s you talk about the northern plains, right, and the northern plains you knew people, everyone would have known people that were killed by grizzlies, yeah, right, and so but there wasn’t like an element of that, like a thing that was you were afraid of.
00:43:39
Speaker 5: No no I I from all the reading I’ve done, and you know the traveling I did, I never got I never got that impression.
00:43:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it was you know, they they were worshiped. Mm hm. So what what At what point did you go from being like kind of interested in jaguars to being that you’re gonna do a whole book like that little transition?
00:44:01
Speaker 5: Yeah, right right, Well, let’s see. I read I was living just above Boulder, Colorado, on a little mining town called Jamestown, and I was going to grad school at CU and I read Jaguar for the first time in like nineteen ninety It came out in nineteen eighty six or something like that, and I.
00:44:24
Speaker 1: Was bold, over, what is that book? I’m not faking.
00:44:26
Speaker 5: That’s Alan Rabinowitz’s first book.
00:44:29
Speaker 1: He wrote Jaguar. It was about his.
00:44:30
Speaker 5: Experience in Belize when he was there for a year and a half and he radio collared the first jaguar in the rainforest. But he dedicated himself to this Coxhoam Basin in Belize. He dedicated himself to the jaguars of Belize. And I read that book and I was like, man, this guy’s my hero. He’s incredible. He’s like fierce and fearless. He’ll go anywhere. He’ll do anything. And he brought his weights. He was like he was a he was a martial artist and he was a weightlifter. Brought his weights to this little, tiny, little Mayan village down in Belize and he would do his weights and he had green eyes and a hairy chest. And the people of the Maya people didn’t know they were they feared him. Initially they thought he had the eyes of a jaguar. But anyway, I would go around and you know, I would I would hike around the mountains, fish or hunt or backpack, and I would pretend like I was looking for jaguar tracks. And then like fast forward to two thousand, I don’t know one or two I didn’t. I did an interview with Alan Rabinowitz for I think it was Outside magazine, and I talked to him at length, what.
00:45:51
Speaker 1: Year like two thousand one or two there? Then, oh you were I started writing there in two thousand. Oh well then I’m sure I read it.
00:46:00
Speaker 5: Were you in Santa Fe?
00:46:01
Speaker 1: At the time? I was just like what they call it a time contributing editor contributing Oh yeah, yeah, so I was never under contract? Why did like cover stories and yeah.
00:46:13
Speaker 5: Sad what’s become of outside.
00:46:15
Speaker 1: Was different now, but not sending you over to the Philippines for now.
00:46:19
Speaker 5: They got no budgets now. So anyway, I I interviewed him at length, and I proposed writing a biography at at that time of him, and he kind of entertained the notion. And about six months later, after we had long, long conversations about his life, he’d just been diagnosed with chronic lymphatic leukemia, which the doctors told him would eventually kill him. And they told him not to get like amoebic.
00:46:49
Speaker 1: Dysentery or malaria or whatever.
00:46:52
Speaker 5: It would, you know, it would it would set him back. But of course he didn’t, you know, he didn’t listen to it.
00:46:56
Speaker 1: And where was this guy from? He was from He was from New York.
00:46:59
Speaker 5: He grew up in Queens, New York. But there was nowhere he wouldn’t go and nothing he wouldn’t do. He I mean, he studied tigers in Burma and Thailand. He studied clouded leopards on the island and for most of.
00:47:12
Speaker 1: A big cat guy, oh, big big cat.
00:47:15
Speaker 5: The most you know. They called him the Indiana Jones of wildlife ecology. He was super fit he’s super courageous, would do anything.
00:47:24
Speaker 1: But anyway, I gotta tell you something, this nuts man that I feel like lines up with this. Yeah. So then it would have been around ninety or ninety one, No, like ninety one or ninety two. I went to a National Trappers Association convention, Okay, might have been in Iowa, and I go to a lecture by a prominent trapper. His last name was Brown. I’m trying. I feel like his name is Jerry Brown. But that’s like the old government. There’s probably million Jerry Brown’s. He’s a he’s a predator trapper, like a kyo trapper, cat trapper. Yeah, he was giving a lecture. I’m not shooting you. He’s giving acture. He had been contracted and had been down in South America with researchers trying to figure out how to get collars on jaguars using foot snares and other things. And because he’s like, he’s like a big cat trapper and he was like talking about his experiences like that dude had to have somehow been lined up with the guy you’re talking about, because.
00:48:25
Speaker 5: I’m sure he was. Was his name Darren Simpson? Not definitely, not that definitely not that okay, And he was like he.
00:48:31
Speaker 1: Was just a consultant and a guy that knew his way around cat trapping, and he was taking I remember him talking about they were developing because he’s trying to hook him and he just gave this lecture about I remember at that time even thinking like that was bad ass because those professional trappers are I was trying to find ways to round out their income, and that was what he was doing. And I wonder if he, like.
00:48:54
Speaker 5: They first started trapping jaguars and the pontinal in in the early like late in the seventies or early eighties, but then but it wasn’t prominent. It wasn’t a you know, common practice. They will cable snares on the foot, on the foot, yeah, like a loaded snare, like a loaded snare, right, No, no bait, no bait, blind sets, blind sets. Yeah, yeah, that’s the way you got to You got to be really good. So this Joe rs May, he’s a veterinarian and a big cat trapper that I spent you know, considerable amount of time with in Brazil. The guy’s amazing. He’s like my cousin Himo trapping wolverines. You know up in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I mean he’s he traps osclity, traps mained wolves, he traps jaguars over one hundred and it’s really pretty simple. But the trail sets trade yeah yeah, and he and it’s it’s it’s amazing.
00:49:52
Speaker 1: I don’t know how he goes about, like what is he doing?
00:49:55
Speaker 5: So you have the so he sets the he sets a piece of you know, the base plate. He uses rebar and he anchors it like two feet down. Then he has then he has swivels in springs and then he attaches that to the thrower. And then there’s the cable snare so and then there’s the pressure plate just outside.
00:50:21
Speaker 1: You know the cable snare.
00:50:22
Speaker 5: Which is just a sponge with with.
00:50:24
Speaker 1: Dirt on top.
00:50:26
Speaker 5: And and then he makes this little lane.
00:50:29
Speaker 1: And that’s the trigger. Is the weight on the pressure.
00:50:31
Speaker 5: Exactly, that’s the that’s the trigger, that’s the weight is the weight on that. And then he makes this little trail.
00:50:37
Speaker 1: It’s amaze.
00:50:38
Speaker 5: I don’t know how.
00:50:40
Speaker 1: And they don’t worry about about scent human scent, which you know, they don’t give it. They don’t care. That’s kind of true. Like cat trapping in general. Oh is it? Yeah, they’re not like.
00:50:50
Speaker 5: They’re not like I don’t watching my my cousin Jimo trapped wolves.
00:50:54
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, cats like bare hands, you know, you don’t even a lot of guys don’t cover the pan.
00:51:00
Speaker 5: Yeah, exactly. So so then he made this kind of trail of leaves to the to the snare, and then he got out all the all the stuff in the middle of the trail. Because jaguars like to walk side, jaguars like to walk silently.
00:51:19
Speaker 1: They can’t even be a leaf there, can’t offer him a quiet place to put exactly, offer him a quiet place to put his foot.
00:51:26
Speaker 5: And then and then they have a little like fishing line attached to the cable snare which runs up a pole which attaches to a magnet in a transmitter. So when the cat trips that, you know you have a receiver. You know that that that kid that yeah, you know that that trap has been tripped and it’s.
00:51:51
Speaker 1: And you got like a tape here or a white lipa you don’t know what’s in there.
00:51:56
Speaker 5: Sometimes you got a taper, right.
00:51:58
Speaker 8: Is there some urgency to get there so they don’t hurt them?
00:52:01
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, they they they have a cat in the catch circle, you clear everything out of the catch circle. Otherwise they will tear the thing up like a wolverine or.
00:52:11
Speaker 1: Something, hurt himself and hurt himself. Yeah.
00:52:13
Speaker 5: In fact, in the book Alan Rabinowitz, one of the the first jaguar he traps is i Puk, which is the Mayan god of death, tears tears off his tears off his canine in one of the in one of the traps.
00:52:30
Speaker 1: So yeah, so it does. It does happen?
00:52:33
Speaker 8: Is he using trail cameras to zero in on specific jaguars or just to like keep Yeah, they use.
00:52:42
Speaker 5: They use lots of lots of trail cams to zero in on jaguars.
00:52:46
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:52:47
Speaker 5: Yeah, and then you know, they they start establishing the big cat’s routine and then they’ll put you know, then they’ll.
00:52:52
Speaker 1: Put bea ah. So they’re like targeting a cat.
00:52:55
Speaker 5: They’re targeting a cat. Yeah, they’re targeting a specific cat.
00:52:59
Speaker 1: How many countries you been to you in your life? Oh, my god, in my life? Yeah, like a hundred? No, probably not, no, I don’t know.
00:53:09
Speaker 5: I for the for the book, I traveled, you know, all over South America, Central America. You know, my my friend’s lab. My friends joke that I only write books when I so I could travel to those places. Oh yeah, so I guess there was an element of truth.
00:53:24
Speaker 1: To that, but.
00:53:26
Speaker 5: Yeah, i’d have to get I have to think about it. You know, been to Africa, been to you know, all over Southeast Asia, now South American, Central America.
00:53:36
Speaker 1: Probably not as many places as you, not a bit more. Yeah, I don’t know. I’ve repeatedly gone back to New Guinea. So you keep burning up opportunities, right, yeah. So, uh, when we got off on a couple not tangents because they’re very relevant, you were warming up to you were warming up to your subject. Yeah, and he got sick.
00:53:56
Speaker 5: Oh sorry, yeah, sorry, yeah, so he got he got sick. But ultimately he said, you know what, this has been great. We remain friends, but I’m going to write my own books. By that time, he’d already written Jaguar Chasing the Dragon’s tale about trying to find the foremost and the mythical formos in clouded Leopard, which he never found.
00:54:21
Speaker 1: Well, I don’t know what that is.
00:54:22
Speaker 5: A clouded leopard is a little is a little, you know, small little leopard out of very elusive Thailand formosa, you know, and it’s not an actual thing or it is, no, it is, it is, but they I say mythical because they thought it existed.
00:54:39
Speaker 1: But you know, he probably died one hundred years before. Oh, like he thought it was like a Lazarus species. Yeah, right, right.
00:54:46
Speaker 5: And then he wrote a book about two books about Burma, one called Life in the Valley of Death and one called Beyond the Last Village. So he’s a great writer. And I mind all his books, you know, and did lots of interviews with friends and his wife to write the book. But ultimately he decided, you know, he didn’t need me to write a book. But we remain friends. We remained friends for a long time. And then, you know, as some of these friendships do, you know, we we just we stopped talking for no other reason than we just got busy. And in twenty eighteen, I went to New Guinea and we’d been in touch and I talking again about doing a documentary about him or a book about him, and we’ve been talking and you know, in back in touch, and I was elated, because you know, he’s an amazing guy. I got back from I got back from New Guinea and one of the people at panther The communications director called me and told me he died. So so, you know, he died way before his time, you know, of actually leukemia together with with a skin cancer.
00:55:57
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:55:58
Speaker 5: So you know that was in twenty eighteen. I think he was sixty sixty three at the time. But you know, he was just he was fearsome and you know, fearless.
00:56:08
Speaker 1: He was someone to be admired. Yeah, so eventually you decided to I mean, obviously I’m looking at it right now. Yeah, he picked up the project.
00:56:16
Speaker 5: Yeah, so I picked up the project and you know, got in touch with Panthera, the organization he kind of helped establish.
00:56:25
Speaker 1: And there was this other guy named.
00:56:26
Speaker 5: Howard Quigley who was a famous jaguar biologist and also tiger biologist. He was one of the first people to collar amyer tigers in Siberia.
00:56:38
Speaker 1: Amazing guy too.
00:56:39
Speaker 5: So he helped me, you know, kind of find places along the Jaguar Corridor, you know, along that five thousand miles to visit you know, people people that wanted to talk, people that were doing amazing things, and also people places where I might have a chance of seeing jaguars.
00:56:57
Speaker 1: Yeah, along that corridor. Imagine the Darien Gaps got be a real bit huh, Like that’s got to be like the problem, right, that that is the yeah exactly.
00:57:06
Speaker 4: I feel like the Darien Gap only gets brought up in the context of it being a problem, yeah, for various reasons.
00:57:11
Speaker 1: Well. And then and then at the height, like at the height of the Biden administration, when there was so much illegal immigration, it like brought in tons of people into the into the Darien Gap, and then the Darien Gap kind of became like almost like a conflict zone. Yeah exactly.
00:57:27
Speaker 5: I mean, wasn’t there a New York Times reporter who went down there and walked the Darien Gap with the people? I mean, can you imagine like four year old children going through the Darien Gap.
00:57:38
Speaker 1: And people in there preying on them? Oh oh yeah yeah. And it like this this very isolated place became also like a very visited place, yeah, right, and a lot of a lot of violence out of.
00:57:50
Speaker 5: A lot of violence, yeah, a lot of trafficking.
00:57:53
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:57:53
Speaker 5: But for yeah, for the Jaguar that that’s like a pinch point. And when they were first establishing the Jaguar cort Or, that was something they really worried about is the Darien getta.
00:58:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I guess, I guess through that context, let’s talk about this corridor. Like the objective presumably is to get jaguars back into their northern range, right back in the meso America.
00:58:16
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, that’s part of it.
00:58:18
Speaker 1: But the.
00:58:21
Speaker 5: Major point is that because jaguars are the only wide ranging predators without a subspecies, that’s to preserve that’s to preserve the DNA. You know, there are no taxonomic differences between jaguars. You know, when that was discovered in nineteen ninety nine, Alan Rabinowitz was elated. He’s like, you know, we can treat jaguars as a single ecological unit, as one species. So that was the idea, you know, is the genetic flow, genetic freedom, make sure that jaguars could move throughout the corridor, you know, in spread their genes.
00:59:02
Speaker 1: What is the what are the the corridor, what are the what’s the northern terminus in the southern terminus? Like, like, what is the corridor?
00:59:10
Speaker 5: So the corridor is this kind of loosely connected they call them jaguar conservation units. The the kind of the the avenues or the trails or whatever you want to call them the passageways by which they connect the jaguar conservation units, which are just areas that produce a lot of jaguars that are just you know, good habitat for jaguars. But it goes from again the Ebera or Ibera all the way up to essentially the Sierra Madres of of of Mexico or to southern Arizona. Essentially everything below Highway ten in southern Arizona. In Arizona, that’s the corridor. So it’s a huge quarridor it’s one of the biggest corridors of any animal on earth, except the leopards may be a little bit bigger.
01:00:04
Speaker 4: Just for like, as far as there their range like of an individual animal and their social lives, is it fair like what would expect, like males rome and they’re fairly solitary creatures. I mean, is there anything unique in terms of jaguars and how they move around the landscape and relate to one another.
01:00:25
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, I mean they’re first of all, they’re they’re solitary. You know, they get together to mate and that’s pretty much yet. But jim, oh yeah, sorry, And the the females they have what they call range fidelity, so they don’t move that far. But the males, particularly a male in what they call natal dispersal, a male that has not mate it like like co cheese or like this this famous jaguar el Hefe. You know, they’ll come out of they’ll come out of the Sierra Madres of northern Mexico, the Northern Jaguar Reserve, which is like one hundred and twenty five miles south of the border, and they’ll they’ll roam all the way into you know, the Santa Rita Mountains of southern Arizona. So they have huge ranges.
01:01:19
Speaker 1: So that’s that’s where those Arizona cats are coming from. Yeah, I didn’t know that that was that close to the border.
01:01:25
Speaker 5: Yeah, one hundred and twenty five miles south of the border. And that’s you know, kind of like the a Waning Well, I wouldn’t say waning, but the last population, the farthest north breeding population of jaguars.
01:01:39
Speaker 1: And are we talking like ten are we talking hundreds? Now you’re probably talking like thirty or forty in the Sierra Madra in the Sierra Madres. Yeah, eating Cou’s deer, eating cou’s deer.
01:01:52
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, I know, you’ve had Jim Jim Hefflefinger. I know you’ve had Jim Heffelfinger on it. He I talked with him at length. He’s a great guy. We’ve discovered that we grew up like ten ten miles from there.
01:02:03
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, so I was just I wasn’t gonna bring up Halfelfinger by name. But let’s talk a little bit about wildlife politics and Arizona. Yeah, sure, Well you can’t avoid it, all right. So the like there’s a sort of I don’t know, man, there’s a sort of battle. Okay, there’s a there’s a management battle where in Arizona there are there are forces, there are powers that be that want to just kind of wash their hands of this whole jaguar thing, and they want to say, sure, like maybe now and then a male would wander up into Arizona. But you can’t call this core habitat because once someone says, no, bro, this is core habitat, then they’re gonna be like, it’d be like the same thing like Colorado them saying, you know what, we have a mandate. We’re gonna we’re gonna reintroduce wolves in Colorado. The fear is that someone down the road says, and this is not my fear. I think it’s a great idea. The fear is that someone down the road, someone says, Hey, this is historic jaguar range, this is core habitat for jaguars. We have a legal responsibility to restore jaguars in Arizona, which I think is a phenomenal idea. I’d like it even more if I live there.
01:03:24
Speaker 5: That’s a cool I want to see because you didn’t see it.
01:03:26
Speaker 1: I just like all that. I like I like all that, Like I like looking over my shoulder, you know, And even though they’re passive and all that, I just like the whole thing about them. And you’re never gonna have it’s not gonna have like enough jaguars where you’re having, Like, it’s not gonna have like a it’s not gonna be that all of a sudden predation goes up because what it’s gonna come. It’s gonna come at the expensive mountain lions. Yeah, do you know what I mean? So I think it’s a phenomenal idea. I’m just throwing that out there. But that’s like the wildlife politics end. And so these guys came up with this great map. Yeah, it’s every known and so it’s in the U in the United States of America. It’s this map of like every known instance, and they track down stuff even like photos and bars. Yeah, like some old photo a barers, like a dude with a dead jaguar.
01:04:18
Speaker 9: Like what is that all about? They’re like, oh, yeah, my grandpa he shot it. Yeah, does anyone No, No, it’s just like a picture in the bar. But then they get to interview people.
01:04:30
Speaker 1: Are like, legitimately at some point in time, like it seems like this dude’s grandpa, no joke, shot a jaguar, and so on the map and people argue about the map, and on the map is also jaguars that dudes trucked up there to turn loose for jaguar hunts, right, And so the map is like a contentious map where they’re there. There’s people going like not legit, not legit, not legit, and other people are going like, no, these are all legit sightings. And it boils down to is someone someday gonna say we’re gonna do a release of jaguars. Well you seem to not like this subject.
01:05:12
Speaker 5: Well, I’m telling you you called it controversial, man, that’s it. In the nail on the head and it’s been going on for a long time since pretty much nineteen ninety six when two ranch when one rancher Warner Glenn guy straight out.
01:05:28
Speaker 1: I’m gonna ask you if you ran he caught that one.
01:05:31
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, straight out of Central casting. You know, saw someone in nineteen ninety six and this other guy named he and his wife Jack Childs, and he was a he was a you know, he ran lions with his with his daughters.
01:05:46
Speaker 1: And yeah, we’ve we’ve had like our colleague Clay has done a lot with him.
01:05:51
Speaker 5: Oh oh Jack video Warner with Warner, Yeah, well with Warner. Yeah, yeah, well they’re both They’re amazing, amazing guys and probably pretty middle of the middle of the road guys as far as jaguars are concerned.
01:06:06
Speaker 1: If you go into like even in those years like back then a little bit later that know, it’s much in two thousands. Yeah. Uh, there’s a guy that knew those guys that that me and Yanni are friends with Floyd Green and you went into his optic shop and there’s a picture of that jaguar. Yeah, and I was like, what’s up with that jaguar. It’s like the Warner Glenn jaguar, oh Marazona.
01:06:26
Speaker 5: Yeah, he talked about the shiny green, shining green eyes.
01:06:29
Speaker 1: You’re thinking Leopold, Yeah, that’s exactly what I was thinking. In Leopold.
01:06:35
Speaker 5: Leopold loved, ultimately loved jaguars. He wrote a lot about jaguars. But I won’t we won’t go that far straight.
01:06:41
Speaker 1: But so, I mean, this is.
01:06:44
Speaker 5: Really really complicated, and I won’t give you too much history, but there is. There was an effort called CANDRA, the Central Arizona, New Mexico Recovery Area, and this group that this group that you’re called you were talking about, wanted to set aside twenty million acres from the Elder Leopold Elder Leopold Wilderness and the Hila all the way up to the southern rim of the Grand Canyon along the Muggy and Rim as jaguar historically, historically it was probably jaguar habitat. So they wanted to do a reintroduction of jaguars ninety to one hundred and twenty jaguars in that area, which was shot down by fishing. US Fish and Wildlife Service and the Secretary of the Interior.
01:07:32
Speaker 1: Did you want to talk about people’s panties getting on fire.
01:07:35
Speaker 5: I’m sure you can imagine the Cattleman’s Association, et cetera. But you know, and the hunters too. I mean, I hunt, so you know it’s a tough thing.
01:07:44
Speaker 1: But jaguars and I wasn’t like, here’s the deal. Yeah, I feel and I’m not a cat expert. Yeah, I feel this is just my me ballpark or like crystal ball in it. I don’t think you’d see because this is all mountain lion country. Yeah, I don’t think you’d probably see an increase in predation.
01:08:07
Speaker 5: I think you’d see it shift from what to what.
01:08:12
Speaker 1: I think the mountain lions would would pay the price.
01:08:15
Speaker 4: Oh like if you if you species, you don’t all of a sudden double your big cat population.
01:08:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, like when you put so if you put wolves into the mountain lions, you get like additive predation has been very demonstrated. I just have a hard time picture and it throwing another cat in the mix. Maybe I’m wrong, throwing another cat in the mix. I still think you’re going to see X number a dead deer killed by cats.
01:08:39
Speaker 5: Yeah, not not double or trip now, I don’t think.
01:08:42
Speaker 1: Yeah, well what do I know?
01:08:44
Speaker 4: I don’t know, yeah, makes sense though I can see it both ways.
01:08:48
Speaker 1: It makes complete sense.
01:08:50
Speaker 5: Well, first of all, jaguars living really low low densities. Second of all, they eat eighty five species. You know, they’re not They’re not going to just eat cous deer and elk. They’re going to eat frogs, They’re going to eat skunks, They’re gonna eat turtles. They like turtles, Yeah, they love turtles.
01:09:09
Speaker 1: No turtles and airs.
01:09:10
Speaker 5: Yeah, but yeah, I mean they’re real generalists, you know, so they’re not going to concentrate, you know, on the deer or on the yelk. And I think Jim Heffelfinger has said that, you know, I don’t think that predation would be increased that much, right, I.
01:09:30
Speaker 1: Don’t want to drag him into this. Matter of fact, I can’t remember what his take on this whole thing is.
01:09:35
Speaker 5: Well, I think he I think his take on I think his take on critical habitat and reintroduction is very is negative. I mean, he’s like, it’s a it’s a powder keg. And also why waste in endangered species money on a cat that may or may not want to live because because they got the jowel muscles?
01:10:00
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean you see one of these cats.
01:10:02
Speaker 5: I mean they are so magnificent.
01:10:04
Speaker 1: I mean their heads are like that. Oh, and they’re so powerful.
01:10:09
Speaker 5: I mean they and they live in trees. They swim, you know, they swim rivers with caman in their mouths for a mile. I mean they are like they are like the most they are like the most athletic cat there is athletic beast there.
01:10:23
Speaker 1: When I get attacked by a lion or grizzly, I can pull their upper and lower jawpart so they can’t clamp down on me. Like I don’t know what the jag man one hundred and fifty pounce, I don’t know.
01:10:36
Speaker 5: Pounds of pressure per square it.
01:10:38
Speaker 1: I’m gonna start working out so I can hold them.
01:10:41
Speaker 7: They said, yeah, I’ve never seen a jaguar, but I think it was at a Denver zoo. They had some sort of tigers, and I don’t know if they were the bangle tiger what tiger. But I remember having that that this sense of awe that you’re describing, and it was only, you know, there’s a pane of glass between me and this giant cat, but when you look at it, it’s.
01:11:04
Speaker 1: Just, Yeah, it gives you a weird feeling.
01:11:07
Speaker 4: Well, this is what you said earlier, is like when they move, every part of their body is activated. They’re not like my lab where they’re kind of walking and there’s like legs like like there’s shaking and jiggling like when a cat moves. It’s like it’s almost like a snake. It’s like the whole thing is Yeah, like a.
01:11:26
Speaker 1: Runway model, dude, We’re like just the whole thing. There’s not a muscle out of place.
01:11:30
Speaker 5: Yeah, that’s exactly That’s exactly right. You see one of those things. It’s something to behold.
01:11:36
Speaker 1: People.
01:11:37
Speaker 5: Jaguar biologists who’ve seen like, you know, dozens in their lives still.
01:11:42
Speaker 1: Think it’s like a dream to see a jaguar. And yeah, they are. They are just incredibly beautiful, and there’s such magnificent athletes.
01:11:51
Speaker 5: You know, they’re just you know, I mean, you know, they jump twenty feet you know, standing jump into a tree, and then they can live in trees in certain parts of the Amazon. When it floods, they live in trees for months. It’s crazy.
01:12:06
Speaker 1: Huh, So what the what the sciet these protections? YEA, with more awareness with the quarters are we like has the decline and jaguars been reversed or is it Are they still a species in decline and is there is their territory still shrinking.
01:12:25
Speaker 5: Yeah, that’s that’s a good question. I think jaguar biologists have hope.
01:12:33
Speaker 1: You know, they have to have hope.
01:12:34
Speaker 5: You know, it’s kind of in kind in the you know, conservation you know, hope can be hard to come by. But yeah, I think that I think that people are hopeful that the jaguar will persist, that they can kind of lock down these jaguar conservation areas and they can defend the corridor. So I think they’re Yeah, I think I don’t know what’s happening to the population in general, but I do think that they have hoped that the jaguars will continue to persist, if not, if not thrive.
01:13:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you didn’t have, like in your book, you didn’t have a through all that reporting, you didn’t come up with like a strong personal opinion about what’s going to happen with the animal. It just seems like it’s like a legitimate question.
01:13:24
Speaker 5: Well, yeah, I’m it’s it’s it’s tough. I mean, it’s tough.
01:13:31
Speaker 1: I hate to be you know.
01:13:32
Speaker 5: I there were times when I was pessimistic, and there were times when.
01:13:34
Speaker 1: I was optimistic. Yeah.
01:13:36
Speaker 5: Well you go to the Pontinal and you’re filled with optimism because you see, you see a lot of jaguars and they’re you know there, there are a lot of jaguars there. But the Amazon, you know, the the the Amazon is imperiled, you know, and that’s where the bulk of jaguars, maybe seventy to eighty percent of jaguars live, and the Amazon, I could you know, when I was in Brazil, when when when I don’t mean to be political, but when Donald Trump slapped tariffs son Chinese goods, Chinese you know, reciprocated or retaliated slapped tear of son soybeans. So you know, our soybean farmers couldn’t send soybeans to China.
01:14:20
Speaker 1: So what did they Chinese do. They went to Bolivia and they went to the They went to they went to Brazil and to invest in soybeans.
01:14:28
Speaker 5: Yeah, and they just raised forests for you know, thirty forty miles you see nothing but bean fields and that’s where they that’s where they got their beans. So and jaguars cannot live, you know, in a bean field.
01:14:40
Speaker 1: But you don’t need to apologize for being political, because what’s not political? Yeah, particularly these you know what I mean like like, well, no, I mean like wildlife is political. Yeah, it is. It’s like you can’t. There’s no world in which you could talk about wildlife and have it not intersect with politics. It’s just it’s like it is political. Yeah.
01:14:57
Speaker 5: And Alan Rabinowitz worked in Burma shortly after the generals crushed the pro democracy movement, and he worked there and he was criticized. He was criticized by fellow biologists. He was criticized in the newspaper newspapers. He said, you know, since when do you know tigers get a vote? He said, I’m going to go save tigers.
01:15:16
Speaker 1: And well, they expected him to withdraw from Burma.
01:15:18
Speaker 5: Yeah, they expected him to withdraw from Burma and he wouldn’t. And you know, in some cases he was dealing with generals you know, who were you know, pretty unscrupulous people. But his commitment was to you know, was to the jaguar or they’re the tigers, I mean to the tiger.
01:15:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, thanks, Yeah. Do you focus mostly on his work with jaguars or do you get into his work with other cats?
01:15:42
Speaker 5: I get into his work a little bit with tigers in Burma, but mostly I focus, you know, on the jaguar, just because it was so kind of, you know, revolutionary, the notion of the jaguar corridor. You know, that swath of land, you know, five five thousand, five thousand miles just hadn’t been attempted before for one species.
01:16:06
Speaker 1: And then how much did he live through by the time he died, Was it clear that his vision was going to carry was going to be effective.
01:16:16
Speaker 5: Yeah, definitely he inspired. I mean, the jaguar Corridor was essentially his idea in the jaguar Corridor lives on today, and I mean they’re countless biologists and countless environmental organizations who are dedicated to it.
01:16:37
Speaker 1: So yeah, it lives on.
01:16:39
Speaker 5: And I think that he was aware before he died, you know, that that there was a commitment to maintaining the jaguar Corridor.
01:16:48
Speaker 1: Do you think he’s looking down and he’s pissed that you want to write the book after all? After that be thankful? Well, he’s like son of I asked ten times his.
01:17:00
Speaker 5: His wife was really really helpful, and it was I think it was still a painful experience for her because she still hadn’t taken all his journals out of his closet. George, he was a he was a protege of George Shaller, and George Shaller said, your job is at the end of every first of all, take field notes, and at the end of the day revisit those notes and write about the sights and sounds and smells, you know, he said. I think his quote was the the the pen is your is the weapon against oblivion. So Alan Rabinowitz followed that, and he was a He was a he was a very careful and dedicated note taker. So his his wife, you know, it was pretty brave to allow me to to you know, to do Yeah, exactly, Karin.
01:17:53
Speaker 1: When we were in Africa, wasn’t it wasn’t those guys from Pantera that we were talking the lion guys.
01:17:58
Speaker 9: Yep, yep, exactly.
01:17:59
Speaker 1: Yeah. We were with some dudes that were we just shared a camp with them, and they were coming in to set up they were coming in to set up a huge camera trap array. Yeah, we’ll call them trail cams in our circle. They were coming in to set up a huge trail cam array around lions leopards. I think mainly, I think mainly those two. Yeah. Oh wow, yeah, yeah.
01:18:28
Speaker 5: I used to call them trail cams too, but I’ve been around jaguar biologists for so long I call them camera traps.
01:18:36
Speaker 1: Fast. You had to assimilate, Like I got a thing like like coyote, coyote. You know, there’s very like you don’t meet many people who you don’t meet trappers and stuff to.
01:18:50
Speaker 5: Say you got a code switch.
01:18:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, trail cams you kind of know where they’re coming from. Camera traps, you kind of know where to comes.
01:19:00
Speaker 5: You don’t call them mountain lion. Mountain lion, you call him cats, right, yeah.
01:19:04
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, So it’s a yeah, it’s funny you can tell someone’s background there, but it’s been what an amazing tool though, And my understanding too is with with leopards and also with jaguars, the rosettes are identifiable complete, so it gives you the ability to to name them and know them.
01:19:25
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, exactly, that’s how that’s how they Jack Child’s identified a jaguar in two thousand and five he caught him on his trail cams and in two thousand and five, and he looked at the rosettes and said, these are the same rosettes that I saw on the jaguar that we photographed in nineteen ninety six, and then.
01:19:48
Speaker 1: What year was it in two thousand and five? Okay, So he recognized.
01:19:52
Speaker 5: There was one that resembled Pinocchio and one resembled a cartoon character called Betty Boop. I don’t know, I don’t I’m not familiar, but that’s how he identified that cat. So that cat had been living in Arizona from nineteen ninety six through two thousand and five. Huh so, yeah, so that is the no.
01:20:13
Speaker 1: No Arizona that long without getting in trouble. Yeah, without getting in trouble. Yeah. Yeah, pretty amazing man. You know.
01:20:21
Speaker 5: Uh, they’re one thing their grout there. Jaguars have this modified hi oed bone in their throats so they can roar unlike any other cat in the United States, and so every jaguars roar is different too. That’s kind of their auditory signature. No no, no roar is the same.
01:20:40
Speaker 1: Huh really? Yeah? Do you know the story This was another controversial one in the book. Do you tell the story of the jaguar that gets killed by researchers in Arizona? Tell that story real quick?
01:20:53
Speaker 5: Oh man, that’s a that’s a that’s a sore one. Right, that’s a complicated one. So that that’s called that’s macho b that. So in two thousand and eight, oh man, this is gonna be tough. In two thousand and eight, the Department of Homeland Security set aside or made it known they had fifty million dollars to give to agencies who were studying who wanted to study the effects of the border wall on endangered species. And there was a group called the Jaguar Borderland Detection Group, and they set up trail cams all over southern Arizona from the Chiracaua Mountains or the Anamous Mountains in New Mexico all the way to the Barbakiveries, you know, in southwest of Tucson. And I’ve kind of lost my thought from moment.
01:22:00
Speaker 1: Oh we’re talking about that cat that turned up got killed. Yeah, So so.
01:22:06
Speaker 5: They what what the Arizona Game and Fish Department wanted. They wanted to They wanted to capture and collar a jaguar. Now, there was a group called the jag the Jaguar Conservation Group, which was made up of guys in the government, conservationists ranchers, et cetera. And the environmentalists in that group said, if you’re not going to set aside critical habitat and refuse to why do we have to call her a jaguar Because that’s essentially what you want to know. You want to figure out what his range is and where.
01:22:45
Speaker 1: He’s But then you’re not going to do anything with the info. But you’re not going to do anything.
01:22:49
Speaker 5: You’re not going to do anything with the info. So so the so there was a surreptitious plan to capture a cat, this Macho B, in an area where they were also trying to trap mountain lions and bears. So in February eighteenth, two thousand and nine, Macho B was captured, and he was captured in a snare which they baited with the scat of a female jaguar in heat. Yeah, this is this is a long.
01:23:42
Speaker 1: This is gonna be a long. There’s like some little ring go here, I pressed.
01:23:47
Speaker 5: Yeah, it’s it’s still a sore point down there.
01:23:52
Speaker 1: And so.
01:23:55
Speaker 5: There was this guy named Amo McCain who was had studied in Brazil with learned and was an amazing tracker. Well, he had set up this snare with these two other biologists from the Arizona Game and Fish Department, and he said everything had been cleared, everything was above board. Well, it turns out it wasn’t above board. So this jaguar, Macho B, was snared in February eighteenth of two thousand and nine. Two biologists said he was extremely frail at the time, and so the they collared him, and then they waited six hours for the telezol to drift out of his body, and then the jaguar stumbled off, but he already was in bad condition. And then about two weeks later, they weren’t getting a signal from Macho B from the collar. So about two weeks later some Arizona Game and Fish people went to check on Macho B. And they said he was extremely frail and stumbling around.
01:25:09
Speaker 1: Check on him, houf and not getting a signal from the collar.
01:25:12
Speaker 5: They went back to that that site, the snare site, and essentially he hadn’t moved. The jaguar hadn’t moved. So then like a couple of days later.
01:25:25
Speaker 1: So they’re not getting a move they’re not getting moved, they’re not getting any movement off the college.
01:25:30
Speaker 5: So then on like March second, two thousand and nine, a whistleblower came out. This woman named Janey Brunn, who was working with the Borderland Detection Group, said that she had placed the female scat at the snare site to.
01:25:52
Speaker 1: Lure Macho B.
01:25:55
Speaker 5: So right there, the Arizona Game and Fish essentially rationale went out the window because it was deliberate.
01:26:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, because their deal was that it just inadvertently got.
01:26:09
Speaker 5: It was an incidental thing, but they had baited it.
01:26:14
Speaker 1: But they had baited.
01:26:15
Speaker 7: It for jaguar, for jaguars, And I’d like to know what it takes to get female jaguar in heat’s gap.
01:26:24
Speaker 5: That’s a great I have no idea. It’s a great question. I have no idea. That should be asked.
01:26:30
Speaker 1: But then a day later, so what how is that a whistleboard? That seems more like an admission.
01:26:39
Speaker 5: Well, because the the the Game and Fish department was trying to cover up that it was, you know, an incidental inadvertent.
01:26:48
Speaker 1: Oh, and so she was like, hey, it wasn’t. In fact, I did it.
01:26:52
Speaker 5: And then she wrote eventually wrote a book called Cloak and Jaguar.
01:27:00
Speaker 1: Was actually it was actually a.
01:27:01
Speaker 5: Pretty good book. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right right, So anyway.
01:27:07
Speaker 1: We had good titles. So anyway, on.
01:27:11
Speaker 10: Let’s see March third, another party went out to check on Macho B and captured him because they could tell that he you know, he was hurting.
01:27:26
Speaker 1: He was hurting and hurting bad.
01:27:28
Speaker 5: So they brought him to the Phoenix Zoo and they did the bunch of tests and they.
01:27:32
Speaker 1: Were like this, this jaguar is going to die. So they thought about they thought about putting and what did the tests revealed that he been drugged bad or he was starving. He was starving. He he he was he had already starving.
01:27:45
Speaker 5: Yeah, already starving physically in bad condition. And his kidneys were shot old old animal, so he would kidneys were shot from the drugs. No kidneys were shot from dehydration. When when they found him the first time, he was hypothermic. I think his core pressure was his core temperature was like ninety degrees or something like that. So so yeah, I mean this if I want so, I’m trying to give you some kind of broad brushstrokes. But ultimately they had to put the jaguar down. And when they put had to put the jaguar down on March third, all the pay you know, papers across the Country covered the death of Macho B. And then the whole, the whole kind of I hate to say, guys, but the whole.
01:28:40
Speaker 1: Thing just blew up.
01:28:41
Speaker 5: Sure, and to two reporters for the Arizona Daily Star, a guy named Tim Steller and I think Tom Davis waded into this for for months, wading into all the all the all the literature, and ultimately sided that what had happened was that the Arizona Game and Fish Department did not have an incidental take permit from the US Fish and Wildlife Service for jaguars. They had no jaguar protocol handling protocol, so they just you know, because ultimately there was another reporter who reported on this and said it was driven by greed, driven by environmental politics, and driven by a desire to get some of that homeland security money that for that they had set aside for endangered species.
01:29:41
Speaker 2: Can you get close it to your micro Yes.
01:29:42
Speaker 1: Sure.
01:29:42
Speaker 5: They they thought if they could capture Macho B, they would be able to get, you know, some of that homeland security money.
01:29:50
Speaker 1: Does that all make sense? It’s yeah, here’s the one part. Here’s the one part doesn’t make sense. Yeah, not nothing. If this jaguar there seems to me like a little bit like what was the result of and what was before? If this jaguar is on death’s door, right, how much does he give a shit about a female dropping I’m saying, he’s out doing jaguars stuff. Okay, he got himself, Like, he gets himself to the snare location, right, and they might have had a great set, a great trail. But he’s there. He’s enough to be interested, he’s got curiosity. He gets hooked. But then all of a sudden, it’s like, oh no, he was half dead already. It’s like, are you sure? Because he showed up there but never left, so you caught him at the moment at his last gasp was stepping on that plate. He’s like, I’m good for one more step. It’s just I feel like there’s a little you know, like you could say like, oh no, he was all but he was in rough shape. He was all beat up. It’s like, could have been that bad shap, dude. He caught him. Yeah, right, If he’s in bad shape, he’s laying in a thicket.
01:31:08
Speaker 5: Right, Well, I should on the second printing of my book.
01:31:15
Speaker 1: Having not been there, having brief consideration of the fact that case.
01:31:21
Speaker 5: No, So that that was a real that for me, that was a real conundrum about do I include that story? Do I dredge up all that old crap?
01:31:32
Speaker 1: Well you have to, yeah, but because it’s a new story. Yeah, that’s right.
01:31:39
Speaker 5: But there were a lot of people, you know, who were kind of injured by by the story. And Jack Childs said it put put jaguar biology in Arizona back into the Stone Age. So I really really thought long and hard, or thought long and hard about whether I wanted to tell that story, and ultimately I decided to because guys, I mean that pretty much has set the course for jaguar conservation in the Southwest in what way. It just it’s just it’s a stain. It’s a stain that you know that nobody, nobody wants to dredge up.
01:32:17
Speaker 1: And note right now, nobody really wants to touch.
01:32:22
Speaker 5: The jim Heth helthfel finger that the Arizona Game and Fish Department may be a little more receptive to jaguars in Arizona had this not happened. But they’re just they just don’t like talking about it anymore, rightfully, So.
01:32:39
Speaker 1: You look skeptically, Well, no, I’m just picturing the email on it.
01:32:41
Speaker 5: That’s what I’m thinking, literally literally think.
01:32:45
Speaker 1: We will get Yeah, I’m not saying who, but there will be emails.
01:32:48
Speaker 5: Yeah, there will be emails. It’s a I mean, it’s a it’s a complicated, unfortunate, tawdry story, you know. It just it’s just I think there were a lot of people who meant well and things just went bad.
01:33:04
Speaker 1: But but I mean, just just to talk shop a little bit, not even about jaguars, just to talk shop a little bit. The the as a writer whatever, yeah, podcast or writer researcher, the why do you got to go bringing this up? Thing? Right? I understand it. But it’s like the answer is kind of like because because right, so I should apology.
01:33:30
Speaker 2: You know what I’m saying.
01:33:30
Speaker 1: It’s like, because it mattered, It mattered, Yeah, mattered, matters, It matters.
01:33:37
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, it’s it’s a it’s a big, big deal and a lot of a lot of jaguar biologists were like, I didn’t give a shit about a geriatric old jaguar that died in Arizona. But but because.
01:33:52
Speaker 1: You know, but it’s also the cover of the only one in the reality.
01:33:56
Speaker 5: Yeah, and it was the only one in the country at that time.
01:34:00
Speaker 1: So trust me, if that if they had hooked a mountain lion and it died, we would have been talking about it. We wouldn’t know. But it’s like the only one. There’s just I mean, you can’t well and like bad stuff happens. I have a dear friend who I’m not gonna name his name because what he said to me in private. He said this one time he was doing a mark and recapture project. I’m not gonna tell you what kind of because people will put it together. He’s doing a market recaptured project with with with wildlife, he said. His advisor once said to him, if you’re not killing shit, you’re not working hard. Wow, because he initially was like so afraid of and he’s supposed to be getting collars, yeah, on right, and he was so afraid that it was crippling. And eventually someone said that if you’re not if you’re not killing seff, you’re not doing it. It’s hands on work. Yeah, it’s like you got there’s an inherent meaning, there’s like an inherent risk. Yeah, that becomes very different. One. There’s one. There’s one. It’s a different conversation.
01:35:14
Speaker 5: Well, the protocol for capturing jaguars in for instance, Brazil is like super complicated.
01:35:20
Speaker 1: Sure.
01:35:20
Speaker 5: Yeah, And if you’re going to do if you’re going to do a capturing coloring program, which I was part of.
01:35:26
Speaker 1: You thought you were talking about.
01:35:27
Speaker 5: Seeing this magnificent jaguar, you know, just behind the glass, and how it made you feel.
01:35:33
Speaker 1: You know, we had prepared.
01:35:35
Speaker 5: Night after night after night for the chance of capturing a jaguar, and when it finally happened, no one had ever told me about what an emotional experience it would be. When they presented that jaguar and laid them on the back you know, of the truck and said, okay, now you can touch that jaguar.
01:35:57
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
01:35:59
Speaker 5: I mean I still still like, I still get a little shaky thinking about it.
01:36:03
Speaker 1: It was just like, you know.
01:36:04
Speaker 5: As the jaguars breathing, like touching, you know, touching the belly and just moving my hand, you know, moving my hand along the jaguar and the chail.
01:36:13
Speaker 1: Trying to get one of those teeth out. You would love jaguar too, to hang from their neck. But it was really like he’s yeah, so, I mean, but that was that was pretty laid a hand on, laid a hand on one. Yeah. Yeah, it was pretty and that’s gotta feel just like muscle man, just complete muscle.
01:36:42
Speaker 5: Yeah, like the hind quarters you know that’s oh man, Yeah, just solid muscle, solid muscle.
01:36:50
Speaker 1: That’s cool that he’s breathing, you know.
01:36:51
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was pretty pretty special.
01:36:56
Speaker 1: Exp what’s a jaguar smell like?
01:36:58
Speaker 5: Just nothing, no fact, And that jaguar oddly didn’t smell. But there’s this guy named Eduardo Correo in Costa Rica who said he was talking about how elusive jaguars are, you know, cryptic, and he could he said he could be crawling through the jungle and he knew that jaguar was close because his trans he because his his receiver. He was getting beeps. And he said what he does is, he said, you know, jaguar could be three feet away from me, you and you wouldn’t see him. He’d listen for the monkeys, or he’d.
01:37:36
Speaker 1: Use his nose. Oh, you’re kidding me.
01:37:38
Speaker 5: No, he said, jaguars reek, so he would use his nose and smell them out.
01:37:43
Speaker 1: Huh. Johnny got to do that with lions. Oh you did well, collared lions and y’all. He was saying It’s amazing, man, Like tell him, like, you get close to that sucker and you don’t know he’s there.
01:37:54
Speaker 7: Oh that yeah, I thought you were talking about the part where we had him drugged and then we’re handling them.
01:37:59
Speaker 1: Oh no, you’re like letting me get this close.
01:38:02
Speaker 7: Yeah, but no, we he was doing a study where he was basically seeing if he repeated hazing would cause like, would be a deterrent for mountain lions proximity to humans.
01:38:16
Speaker 2: Right, oh yeah, if that makes sense. In the one broad brushstroke and so to do.
01:38:20
Speaker 7: That, they were collaring them and then walk once they had him collared, walking towards known locations of lions, coincidentally playing the Meat Eater podcast at eighty decibels on a speaker, and then he’s watching the GPS as he walks towards it, and he’s like, okay, we’re at fifty meters, we’re at thirty meters and the closest one we got to I think was twelve And I’m like, are we going to keep going?
01:38:46
Speaker 1: And he’s like, no, at this point, we can stop.
01:38:49
Speaker 2: It’s there.
01:38:50
Speaker 7: And what was amazing is that it’s literally right there. He says, it’s in that cops of trees and he goes, oh, now it’s moving and you’re looking right there, and you ever see ith you never see the cat?
01:39:02
Speaker 1: Yeah, right, so amazing. Yeah that’s great, Yeah, so amazing. Are you to retire now? Oh?
01:39:09
Speaker 5: Man, No, you know, I’m a writer. I can’t I’ll retire and I’m pushing up daisies here. I’m not sure, you know, that’s a good question. Usually I should have a book, you know, another book project ready to go, but I don’t.
01:39:27
Speaker 1: Looking for that plane. Is this for the hell of it?
01:39:30
Speaker 5: Looking looking for that plane is about, you know, a passion project.
01:39:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was not a book I assumed as a book project.
01:39:38
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, you know, it could be, you know, it could be like a long form story or something like that. But I’m not sure if it’s a book project. But I’d love to write about New Guinea again. Maybe maybe next book will take me back to Alaska.
01:39:51
Speaker 1: I don’t know. I got a few ideas.
01:39:53
Speaker 5: But this book, this book because well for a lot of reasons, because of COVID. Actually, the the guy who filled it, who became the new Alan Rabinowitz, who was a great friend of Alan Rabinowitz, a guy named Howard Quigley.
01:40:08
Speaker 1: He died in the middle of my research and it just you know what he did cancer too.
01:40:17
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, yeah, And so this project took me way longer than it should have, and it became ultimately it became a passion project, you know, not a not a not a pain project.
01:40:30
Speaker 1: Yeah, you spent much time.
01:40:32
Speaker 5: Yeah yeah, yeah, and some you know, not unnecessarily, but necessarily.
01:40:37
Speaker 1: But yeah, like the the economics that makes sense.
01:40:40
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, which you know a lot of writers will tell you these days. It’s hard hard to make for the economics to make sense.
01:40:47
Speaker 1: But you know, I got a couple of ideas. But you know, we’ll we’ll see it’s hit me at one. I’ll tell you if it’s a good one or not. I was thinking tons of time right now. Yeah, okay, I was thinking i’d tell the don’t give it away, and if it’s a cut it out of the podcast. I better not talk. I better not say. Give me a hint.
01:41:08
Speaker 5: Alaska.
01:41:10
Speaker 1: That’s idea about as vague as yeah, the collapse of the Yukon salmon collapse. Yeah, that’s it. That’s it.
01:41:19
Speaker 5: That’s a great story.
01:41:20
Speaker 1: I got it. Well, that is no, but that’s a great story. So should do a book on that.
01:41:25
Speaker 5: Yeah, somebody should. That’s you know, I know a lot of guys who ran fish wheels on on on the Yukon and.
01:41:31
Speaker 1: They’re you know, you know what the answer is that they’re leaning toward yeah, hat trees. Oh is that right? Really? In Alaska of all places, that’s the political that’s the that’s what they’re coming in with, is like, oh that’s easy hat tries.
01:41:46
Speaker 7: Wow, that’s the fix, not the that’s not the reason.
01:41:53
Speaker 1: It’s it’s it’s like because it’s the whole thing of it’s it’s just like, what’s the problem everything m hammer and fishing, the see like hammer and fishing to see intercept fisheries, water temperatures, it’s like it’s just too big and too it’s it’s it’s you can’t unravel it. Everybody’s got it’s this. It’s that there’s a real problem. I mean, it seems to be that there’s a real problem with like intercept fisheries, like hitting those fish, hitting hitting those fish before they’re in the water in the fresh so you know, and they got like even like subsistence people like subsistence people living along the river, like Native alask and subsistence fishermen aren’t able to put their wheels out. It’s bad. And I guess like the way that they’re you know, as people at high levels in the state look at they’re like, why it’s easy fishery setcheries.
01:42:51
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, well Alaska, yeah right, I mean the public lands issue up there is pretty dire now.
01:42:57
Speaker 1: Too, right now it is, yeah, right now it is. Yeah. Alright, that’s a good book. Thanks, come back out and finish it. Yeah, tell us what you find out. How I save the sam I think cover Yeah, yeah, we can get it. We can get on this right now. I’ll blur it right now. Help book. You guys are amazing. Hell yeah, oh throw well James Campbell, thanks for coming on.
01:43:35
Speaker 5: Yeah, I appreciate it.
01:43:36
Speaker 1: Thank you. I got one more for you. What’s your favorite book that you wrote, Like one where the fight of your man.
01:43:43
Speaker 5: At the height of them. I like to think I’m still at the height of my powers.
01:43:49
Speaker 1: You know, I wrote a book, say this one because it’s for sale right now?
01:43:51
Speaker 5: Well, that’s true.
01:43:52
Speaker 1: I mean that, Thank you. Apparently I’m a really marketing firm as well. Publisher’s gonna kill me. Yeah, I mean, this was a.
01:44:04
Speaker 5: Real passion project. There’s no question about it. But you know, I love you know, I love writing all my books. I got another one about my daughter and I doing a bunch of stuff in Alaska, including building a cabin with my cousin I’m ocorth and you know, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. That was a particularly personal one. But yeah, all of them, you know, you know, audios. I mean, you’re a writer, it’s all you know, it’s all really meaningful stuff, all of them you do, and then when you’re done, you’re like kick them out of the house, like I’m.
01:44:41
Speaker 1: Tired of that book. Yeah. Yeah. The latest is A Heart of the Jaguar, the extraordinary conservation effort to save the America’s legendary cat. And then if you’re into whiskey, whiskey too, I highly recommend Ghost Mountain. Thank you, Ghost Mountain Boys. Right, I can’t see the covers, the proper title Ghost Mountain, Ghost Mountain Boys, about the you know, the Pacific Theater during World War Two, particularly the Battle of New for New Guinea. Oh, that rips your heart out there, That still still rips my heart out. A lot of suffering, a lot of heroism, a lot of sacrifice. Thanks for coming on my pleasure. I really enjoyed it. Thanks guys, Thanks Jams,
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