00:00:01
Speaker 1: As native animals. Wolves shape American ecologies for millions of years and impressed early travelers with their numbers and tameness, but were rapidly destroyed in the West when old world stock raising replaced an Indian managed world. I’m Dan Flores and this is the American West, brought to you by Velvet Buck Wine. Where the hunt meets the harvest. A portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers. Limited supply available at Velvetbuck Vineyards dot com.
00:00:35
Speaker 2: Enjoy responsible Wolf West.
00:00:58
Speaker 1: At the midpoint of the nineteenth century, when Americans were regularly traveling through the West, but except for spotty locales in the Southwest and on the West Coast, had yet to settle it, aspects of the ancient Indian managed continent were still in place across much of the western country. Judging by the accounts of those who witnessed this period, the Catlans Bodmer’s Autumns, this native West would have been something to see, one of the spectacles of the world. No element of this surviving version of Western America amazed travelers as much as the staggering abundance of wild animals and for people used to the civilized conditions of the East or Europe. No Western animal imparted as much shock and awe as wolves. Michael Steck, a physician traveling the Santa Fe Trail in the early eighteen fifties, was one of many who offers us a glimpse of what life in a fully wolfed West was like. Steck and his party found that any time they got among bison herds, wolves became so astonishingly numerous that, as he wrote, we see immense numbers of them. A common thing is to see fifty at a sight in the daytime. We are never out of sight of them, see hundreds in a day. That comported with wildlife painter John James Ottoman’s comment on the Upper Missouri River that if ever there was a country where wolves are surpassingly abundant, it’s the one we are now in. But here’s the thing.
00:02:31
Speaker 2: Today.
00:02:32
Speaker 1: You could drive repeatedly across the country where Steck wrote of seeing hundreds of wolves a day, or along the Missouri, where Autobun reported the most abundant wolf population he had ever encountered, and never see a single wolf, not one. Our erasure of them in the years from eighteen fifty to nineteen twenty five was that thorough until about nineteen twenty five, though, the American West was, and for five five million years had been, wolf country. Consider that for a moment and understand what an anomaly the past almost wolf three hundred years has been to a story like that. The West wolves were from a family of animals, the Canaday, that evolved in North America, and although some of them migrated elsewhere and took on their present forms in Asia and Europe before they returned to America until the nineteen twenties, there was never a time when wolves were not America’s keystone predators. Before humans first got here twenty two thousand or so years ago, wolves probably shaped life in America more profoundly than any other mammal. Wolves, in other words, played a crucial role in Western nature for millions of years before we ever set foot on the continent. Long before we Old Worlders arrived with our peculiar hatred of predators, virtually every ecology in the West was shaped from the top down by the presence of wolves. The Canaday family first appears in the fossil record of the American Southwest about five and a half million years ago. Like American evolved wild horses, our early wild canids became geographically cosmopolitan by crossing the land bridges connecting America to Eurasia. At the same time, there were other wolves at stayed home, giving rise to animals that became Eastern wolves and spawning the intriguing red wolf of the South.
00:04:37
Speaker 2: As well as coyotes. As we all know.
00:04:41
Speaker 1: Now from this year’s the Extinction announcement from Colossal Bioengineering and full disclosure, I’m a member of Colossal’s Conservation Advisory Board, the supersized American direwolf was also part of the candid mix in ancient America. There’s still unresolved science dire wolves. A twenty twenty one article in Nature arguing that dire wolves may be different enough from other American wolves to belong in a genus other than Canus, one called Ainoscion. Before about twenty five thousand years ago, when gray wolves began loping home to America from Eurasia, very large and very white dire wolves dominated the wolf story in America. At Rancho Lebrea Tarpits in California, more than four thousand of these burly one hundred and fifty pound wolves died in the asphalt seeps. Their remains there outnumber those of gray wolves by one hundred to one. Game of Thrones and George R. R.
00:05:45
Speaker 2: Martin.
00:05:45
Speaker 1: Notwithstanding, dire wolves were not faded to survive the extinction crash that ended the American places, saying ten thousand years ago. During that great extinction pulse, smaller gray wolves somehow out competed dire wolves, but direwolf extinction still left America with a soup of several wolf types, including coyotes. There were no survivors of the direwolf genus. Ain’t no psion though, until colossal scientists added into a gray wolf genome twenty specific genes of direwolf DNA from remains that were seventy two thousand and thirteen thousand years old, then, through a surrogate mother, scientist birth Romulus Remus and Callisi in late twenty twenty four and early twenty twenty five. As for gray wolves, once they joined the other American canids in the late Pleistocene, they decidedly made their presence felt. Big five to six foot long pack hunters weighing eighty to one hundred and twenty pounds, gray wolves outmatched their long lost relations Eastern and red wolves and coyotes in both size and packing stings. Once direwolves disappeared from the continent, gray wolves were left at the swaggering big dogs. Everywhere, including the West, gray wolves seem to have migrated home to America in distinctive waves half a century ago. Biological taxonomy designated a wopping twenty three species of Canus loupus. In twenty eleven, though, the US Fish and Wildlife Service decided to come to terms with modern genetic research on wolves and concluded that North America’s wolves sprang from two origins. Eastern wolves, red wolves, and coyotes all represented American wolf evolution animals that never left the continent. Gray Wolves, on the other hand, constituted animals that had started here, spent some millions of years in Eurasia, then returned in several separate distinct waves of animals during the Pleisocene. This taxonomic rethink has shrunk the number of gray wolf subspecies from the twenty three of the nineteen forties down to only four.
00:08:00
Speaker 2: Arctic white wolves.
00:08:01
Speaker 1: Canus lupus arctos, found in the extreme north of the continent were probably the last to come home to America. The rocky mountain wolf Canus Lupus occidentalis, found from the Montana Rockies northward to Alaska, was likely another late arrival from Asia. The small gray wolves of Mexico and the American Southwest Canus Lupus bailei, the Mexican wolf, may have led the migrations home. But the wolf that occupied more of America than any other, extending from the Pacific across the Great Plains, onto the western Great Lakes, and northward through much of the eastern half of Canada, was Canus lupus nubilus. This was the famed buffalo wolf, the Lobo loafer or white wolf of the plains of so much Western history. All these gray wolves arrived in time for one of the grandest predator barbecues in world history. Before the Pleistocene ended, gray wolves joined short face bears, saber tooth and scimitar cats, false cheetahs, step lions, and running hyenas to chase and pull down camels, sloths, horses, longhorned bison, and perhaps mammoth calfs in an Africa like world that almost seems like science fiction to us now. After the Pleascistine extinctions took out all the giants. A reconstituted western Bestieri bequeathed to Western gray wolves their classic place in American ecology, with buffalo the only western grazer still standing. After the extinctions, bison numbers skyrocketed to between twenty to thirty million animals, some one and a half to two million buffalo wolves served as their primary predators in this new order, As famed Western trader and author Josiah Gregg put it in the eighteen forties, although the buffalo is the largest, he has by no means the control among the prairie animals. The scepter of authority has been lodged with the large gray wolf as keystone predators. Wolves apparently influence continental ecology and ways that ripple through nature, affecting not just populations of prey species, but also other predators and scavengers, even down to the kind of vegetation like aspens or cottonwoods found on a landscape. With gray wolves present, coyote populations went down and fox numbers went up, and a kind of bigger dog beats up littler dog equation. Wolf predation exerts strong evolutionary pressures on the behaviors and even habitat selections of wolf prey species. Such was the scepter of authority the gray wolf wielded on Western landscapes a century ago, and for multiple millions of years before that, Wild America was a world in.
00:10:53
Speaker 2: Good part created by wolves. In a North America.
00:10:59
Speaker 1: Inhabited by native people who never domesticated or herded wild ungulates, and who thought of all wolves as kin teachers and totem animals. Wolves were free to play their top of the pyramid roles as keystone predators, shaping ecologies down to the birds that sang and the plants that grew. But four hundred years ago, the arrival of Old worlders at once challenged that ancient algorithm from the Old World’s foothold in Massachusetts, Bostonian William Wood wrote of the wolf from the very beginning as a special and confusing problem for colonizers. The confusion came from America’s wolves not acting the way Europeans had been told wolves should act. In America, Wood wrote, it was never known yet that a wolf ever set up on a man or a woman. That seemed impossible, given the folk traditions about wolves in the Old World. All those folk tales and biblical passages about ravening wolves left colonists disoriented when America’s wolves showed no aggression towards people. But wolves in the numbers of America held were still unexpected, and that led to a certain despair in sixteen thirties New England, since, as Wood put it, there’s little hope of their utter destruction. So from the start the wolf was an animal of special concern for Europeans. But why Partly there was their lack of familiarity with the real thing. England’s own wolves hadn’t lasted beyond the fourteen hundreds. Virginians and New Englanders were living among wolves for the first time in their lives, and, as Wood implied, they didn’t like it in the least. Then there were their imported cultural traditions. When you had hearded domesticated animals for eight thousand years, as these old worlders had, and was your way of understanding how the world worked, there was a natural tendency to see wolves as a supernatural malediction. For Christians. Adams fall from the Garden of Eden into an earth compromised by evil struck them as the self evident origin of wolves, After all, didn’t wolves share the yellow eyes medieval illustration gave to Satan. Some of America’s wolves were even black, a coloring that to Europeans was suspicious in the sixteen twenties. The actual explanation for black wolves lay in scientific work four centuries in the future. A genomic study from our time indicates that black coachs in America’s wolves sprang from a hybridization event between wolves and domestic dogs in the northwest of the continent approximately thirteen thousand years back during Clovis times. The mutation conferred a fitness advantage, perhaps in disease resistance, that other wolves sensed, so the visual clue of blackness affected mating choice, allowing at least some black wolves to greet Europeans. Thousands of years later, Native people admired wolves, whatever their color, for their bravery, hunting skills, and devotion to mates and packs. Europeans saw those same animals as bloodthirsty monsters, evil actors in a fallen world. Folk stories of were wolves dim memories of part human, part animal fantasies from the Paleolithic still circulated in colonial times and fed a suspicion that wolves might be avatars of a residual animality in humans, so the unsuspecting animals were soon to enjoy the full colonial experience of a wolf war.
00:14:53
Speaker 2: The reality was that wolf.
00:14:55
Speaker 1: Social lives and ecological roles were so similar to our own that it was no accident that tamed wolves had become our first domesticated animals twenty five thousand years before. Wolf societies were much like human hunter gatherer bands. In both, the leadership was usually matriarchal. The alpha female wolf directs a pack’s movements, while the larger males, especially those between about two and five years old, are the primary hunters. As highly social creatures, wolves are members of family packs led by high status breeders who avoid breeding with close kin, so a pack’s grown pups eventually move out in search of mating opportunities. While they’re individualistic, wolf pups like young humans, learned from their elders, they are steep in pack culture. Wolves have strong emotional attachments. After absences, they greet by standing on their hind legs, a greeting known as a rally. They also interact with a remarkable range of body language and facial expressions, howling, which is contagious for wolves is one of their common ways to express their emotional states, and it enables them to recognize distant wolves from the harmonic structure of their voices. No one knows how many wolves were in colonial America, but since food determines pup survival, the population of wolves in any given setting rested on food availability. This means that packs competed with one another for prime prey territories. In fact, before Old Worlders arrived, the main mortality in wolves came from other wolves. Europeans imagined America’s wolves as vicious slaughterers of helpless prey. In the real world, something different was playing out. Chasing down in neck wrestling big animals armed with hooves and antlers is dangerous in the extreme despite their wrong jaw muscles. The geometry of wolve’s long muzzles actually inhibits their bite force so impossible, they go for low hanging fruit. Highly perceptive about cost benefit, they scavenge animals already dead on the hunt. They try for fawns and young animals are injured, diseased, or old ones. Their strategy is to test prey in search of those least dangerous and easiest to run down.
00:17:28
Speaker 2: Even then, wolf chase.
00:17:30
Speaker 1: Success dips as low as ten percent. One of Western painter George Catlan’s memorable observations was about how dearly a wolf pack won a meal. Even an old or sick buffalo, he wrote, was a huge and furious animal, and would often deal death by wholesale to his canine assailants, as Catlan put it, which he is tossing into the air or stamping to death under his feet. Catlan’s painting White Wolves Attacking Buffalo showed such a scene with an aging bull fighting a wolfpack with such resolution that, as Catlan wrote, his eyes were entirely eaten out of his head, the grizzle of his nose was mostly gone, his tongue was half eaten off, and the skin and flesh of his legs torn almost literally into strings. Yet even with the bull in that condition, numerous wolves, as Catlan said, were crushed to death by the feet or horns.
00:18:31
Speaker 2: Of the bull.
00:18:33
Speaker 1: This kind of wolf natural history was invisible to the new colonists, because all the settlers really cared about was fashioning a wolf free America. In fact, Woods, Massachusetts Colony passed the first environmental law in colonial American history. It was a bounty on the continents wolves. When Western travelers like Meriwether Lewis, George Catlin, and John James Ottoman first observed wolves in the West, they referred to them as the shepherds of the buffalo herds. Josiah Gregg said of plains lobos that although there were immense numbers of them upon the prairies, their presence in the landscape was often determined by bison herds. In this regard, Western wolves resembled grizzly bears, always found in largest numbers where they could scavenge buffalo drowned in rivers, or where weak animals were easier to attack. William Clark observed the most common wolf hunting technique for buffalo in April of eighteen oh five, when Lewis and Clark were ascending the Missouri through what is now North Dakota. Lewis wrote that Captain Clark informed me that he saw a large drove of buffalo pursued by wolves today that they at length caught a calf which was unable to keep up with the herd. An old Pawnee adage, in fact, was that wolves ran down and devoured four out of every ten bison calves born an ancient American equation that left both species healthy across at least half a million years. One trade everyone commented on when they were first among the West wolves was how tame they were, Having no reason to fear wolves. Native people had long let them hang around camps and villages, so Audubon had marveled at how wolves would lie on the banks as their steamboat passed, yawning at them like dogs. William Clark had an unconcerned wolf walk by so near that he impulsively stabbed it with the ban at on the muzzle of his rifle. At Fort Union, Audubon’s party was met by the American Fur Company’s Alexander Culbertson, whose chief hobby, when boredom set in, was running down wolves on his Indian pony. As Audubon’s companion Edward Harris described it, with wolves in constant view, the trader offered their party a little wolf entertainment.
00:21:11
Speaker 2: Mister Culbertson, Harris tells us.
00:21:14
Speaker 1: Started his beautiful blackfoot pied mare at full speed when within half a mile of the wolf, who turned and galloped off leisurely until mister Culbertson was within two or three hundred yards of him when he started.
00:21:29
Speaker 2: Off at the top of his speed.
00:21:31
Speaker 1: Within the time it took Harris to scribble his account, Culbertson was back at the post with the wolf draped across the saddle horn shot through its shoulders as the trader had chased him at breakneck speed across the prairie. It was an impressive performance, no doubt, so long as you hadn’t experienced it from the wolf end of the show. Centuries of peaceful relations with native peoples had taught the West wolves not to fear humans right old world folklore, Western bar talk, and Hollywood’s sensationalism. Today, like Liam Neeson’s twenty eleven film The Gray, the truth is that, except in the rare rabies case, the West wolves were in no way aggressive towards people. In fact, it was a Western trope that both wolves and coyotes were rank howards around humans. While scornful of canine cowardice, early observers in the West never tired of commenting about how trusting wolves seem to be trotting in front of their horses like dogs are sitting and watching curiously as travelers passed within feet, But soon enough, with everyone traveling the West’s armed to the teeth and taking shots at almost every wolf they saw, wolves learned to keep their distance. Rifle fire was an initial and casual wolf persecution, but it was merely a hint of the changes about to come. In rapid succession across the nineteen shi century, with a wild animal products industry well established in the West and many thousands of overland migrants crossing the region every year, what should have been canine good times actually ushered in the end game for the wolf West. In eighteen seventy two, the Brooklyn painter John Gast distilled an important assumption about both Indians and the country’s wild animals into a famous visual image. Gas American Progress painting portrayed a blonde, giant and angelic white garb striding across the West, stringing telegraph wires behind her, with wagons of settlers in her wake. Disappearing off the edges of the canvas were the native people, but also herds of buffalo and packs of wolves consigned to the margins of the future. Viewers of American Progress seen to understand in an America modeled on Europe, not just the native people, but all those iconic wild animals had to go. Most Americans appeared to assume that in an America making itself a clone of the old world, a fate of animals like this was inevitable. Buffalo stood first in the rank of those incompatible with civilization. Wolves well the plans since colonial times had been their total eradication. Eventually, other animals, grizzly bears, cougars, jaguars, wild horses, eagles, and, judging by the reaction to their extinction, even passenger pigeons joined the ranks of species. Civilization would not tolerate their destruction. Gas painting, implied, was no one’s fault. Simply enough, Ancient America’s time was over. Incompatibility was a shame, but it seemed to comfort us. Distilled from the imported nuts of East India tree, a substance called strychnine ushered in this new order. It became available in America when a firm in Philadelphia began offering cheap packages of strychnine in crystal form in eighteen thirty four. Since there were few predators left in the East by then, most of the poison went west, sold in bulk in every store and trading post. Naturally, there were no restrictions of any kind on its use. It was cheap, unregulated, and it was lethal chemical warfare. Western travelers used it both to collect pelts and just to see its effects. In an age inured to carnage, it was a horrifying killer. Inside a few minutes, a white tablet gulped down from a bated carcass launched a victim into waves of convulsive cramping. Poisoned wolves died from asphyxiation, but strychnine wrenched the body so violently as to leave a signature death pose, a corpse with a sharply arched spine and a tail frazzled as if the animal had been electrocuted on the frontier. People who did this for a living were called wolfers, a Western occupation we’ve probably deliberately left in the dust bin of history so we didn’t have to look at it too closely. Poisoning animals didn’t even require a wolfer to be present, and unlike trapping, poisoning didn’t call for any sort of skill. You just baited a carcass or put out chunks of meat laced with poison, and then headed a camp to enjoy life while the strychnine did his work. Teams of wolfers driving ox dron wagons began laying out strychnine in the Yellowstone Country as early as eighteen sixty four. Approaching a buffalo or horse carcass that baited, wolfers would start finding victims appearing sprayed across the landscape as if by some spinning centrifuge a half mile from their bait animal. The targets were wolves and coyotes, but the poison killed everything interested in a rotting piece of meat. Eagles, vultures, ravens, magpies, red foxes, gray foxes, swift foxes, tiny kit foxes, skunks. As these animals died, their convulsive vomiting sprayed poison across the grass. Poison grass could take out collateral victims like horses. When Native people lost ponies this way, they developed a special hatred for wolfers. This kind of poisoning preyed on a wolf’s inclination to scavenge and avoid injury in a hunt, and astonishing forty dead wolves per bated carcass was common. One party in the Texas Panhandle picked up sixty four wolves one morning, barely a mile from their camp. They made four thousand dollars in one winter, and can this. James Mead once poisoned eighty two wolves in a single baiting in the Texas Panhandle. Into the eighteen nineties, Wolfer’s Jack Abernathy Alan Stagg, and Alec Lewis averaged two hundred monsters that was their nickname for gray wolves a year, killing two hundred and ninety six one year on a single giant ranch the Xit. For more than two decades, wolf and coyote pelts traded as money in the West, worth a dollar apiece and two dollars if you could get the pelts all the way.
00:28:34
Speaker 2: To New York.
00:28:35
Speaker 1: There are no figures for this most disgusting of all wild animal economies, and for good reason, it’s little remembered in the story of America. But there’s every likelihood that from the eighteen sixties through the eighteen nineties, poisoning wildlife for money killed Western animals in numbers that competed with the death tolls of Buffalo. For a couple of decades after the Civil War, while US Indian policy herded the tribes under reservations and Western market hunts produced the most devastating slaughter of wildlife and world history. Wolves continued to thrive despite strychnine, but with most of their prey animals now erased, wolves were forced to turn to domesticated cattle and sheep as prey, except those were the property of ranchers who stood on eight thousand years of history of battling predators, so now as hated symbols of wild America. Wolves from the eighteen eighties through the nineteen twenties became special targets in the in game wolf War. One stockman launched to convert the ancient world that acquired into a money making pasture for cow’s sheep and the market. From the founding of the American colonies through the last decades of the eighteen hundreds, bounties paid eight on wolf scalps became the basic military strategy against wolves. Western stock associations paid bounties in every Western state and territory, and bounties on predators became a primary and acceptable act of governments too. In Montana, the territorial government sometimes used up two thirds of its annual budgets paying bounties on predators. Between eighteen eighty three and nineteen twenty eight, Montana’s governments paid bounties on a staggering one hundred eleven thousand, five hundred and forty five wolves and eight hundred eighty six thousand, three hundred sixty seven coyotes, subsidizing both ranchers and wolfers. As late as eighteen ninety nine, the state paid out bounties on a whopping twenty three thousand, five hundred seventy five wolves. It didn’t stop there or even slow down. The war against wolves and coyotes in Montana even produced a state law passed in nineteen oh five ordering veterinarians to infect any wild canines that came their way with sarcoptic mange, then released them to spread the disease among the wild populations. As a result, wild canids in Montana and Wyoming still suffer from a strikingly high mange infection rate even today. With this kind of multi pronged pressure, wolf populations went under so dramatically that after bountying more than twenty three thousand wolves in eighteen ninety nine, Montana paid for only seventeen dead gray wolves in the year nineteen twenty, and this ability to kill animals on mass Americans were absolutely unmatched. By the twentieth century, ranchers and wolfers were naming the last individual wolves still alive in Montana the last This one was called Snowdrift. In the Dakotas, the last one was the custuerwolf, an animal charge with livestock depredations a t rex couldn’t have pulled off. At the beginning of the century, a Canadian writer named Ernest Thompson Seton, who had extensive outdoor experience and also employed scientific methodology in his work, tried to take on the huge implications of the new Darwinism in the world around him. Setan moved to New Mexico and began to write books, books that strongly appealed to the new centuries readers. To counter the so called nature read in tooth and claw conclusions that others had drawn from Darwinian evolution, writers like Seton and Jack London looked for examples among wild creatures of traits humans admired, individuality, compassion, cooperation, loyalty, and an ability to transfer culture learning across generations. One of Setan’s most popular stories employing this approach was about one of those legendary last wolves in New Mexico’s case a wolf Setan called Lobo, King of Carumpa. Lobo was a male wolf Setan had known years before he became a writer, when he was himself a trapper and wolf hunter who had finally captured Lobo. He had done that by baiting his traps with the scent of Lobo’s mate, a female wolf the ranchers called Blanca, a beautiful animal Setan had trapped and killed while listening to Lobo howling mournfully in the distance to no reply. As Setan described him, Lolo was an amazingly canny wolf, but with one fatal flaw. That flaw was Lobo’s fidelity to his mate. Setan caught Lobo in traps laced with Blockeka scent, and the ranchers then hauled Lobo alive to a ranch yard and chained him there as a prize to show the community. Within days, Lobo died, looking off at the New Mexico planes that had been his and Blanca’s world. Lobo’s and Blanca’s story first appeared in Setan’s book Wild Animals I Have Known, and it was one of the stories that gave that famous book its running theme. Those in America who celebrated the destruction of the West wolves sneered, but Setan’s book was pointing towards a different kind of future. The theme of wild animals I have known, he wrote was simple, we and the beasts are kN.
00:35:05
Speaker 3: So Dan, thinking about wolves. One of the points that you raise in this episode is that the perception of wolves coming from the old world doesn’t match up with the reality of wolves in the New world. And it got me thinking about when we were working on our Long Hunter project and our Mountain Man project. We do have instances of guys being bitten by wolves, and it’s always when they’re sleeping around a campfire, and I had sort of read that as we’re working on it. I’d read that as like evidence of wolves being all over the place and just a presence on the landscape. And then in light of your episode had caused me to rethink it. These wolves are sneaking in and you know, they’re not super aggressive, they’re just approaching guys when they’re asleep. I don’t know that there’s a question there necessarily, but I mean with.
00:36:04
Speaker 2: The Long Hunter instance, it was a rabbit wolf. Yeah, and there’s there’s a rabbit there’s.
00:36:09
Speaker 1: A rabbit wolf rabbit mountain man at one of the rendezvous too. Yeah, there’s a wolf that runs around at a rendezvous in the eighteenth things and bites people.
00:36:17
Speaker 3: I guess it strikes me because you read it, you write accounts from those periods, and you’re like, Wow, wolves were everywhere, wolves were biting people. And then when you take a step back and you sort of contextualize it with how many wolves there were, there are sort of these rare, very rare instances that jump out to us. But in the grand scheme of things, the wolves are pretty much off on their own.
00:36:41
Speaker 2: And yeah, you.
00:36:42
Speaker 4: Can find guy after guy after guy after guy that gets tore up by a grizzly bear. Yeah, No, guys are getting tore up by wolves, right.
00:36:49
Speaker 2: No, they’re not.
00:36:50
Speaker 1: And uh, I mean one of the reasons I wanted to include that quote from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. This is in William Woods’s book that he publishes in sixteen thirty two, when he’s running through the accounts of all these new animals that are in the Americas, he makes that statement that I, as far as I can find, remains true all through American history, certainly through the West and the West wolves. He makes that statement that there has not been an instance where a wolf has set upon a man or a woman in our colony, and he’s already said there are wolves around all over the place, but there has not been an instance. And the reason he said that, I’m pretty certain is because these people came out of Western Europe. For one thing, England hadn’t had wolves since the fourteen hundreds, so there have been multiple generations of people who the only thing they know about wolves is, you know, these fairy tales and folk tales that they’ve hurt handed down. Is they are expecting once they hear that there are wolves in North America, that wolves are going to be tearing people limb from limb, and suddenly the reality is, wow, there’s not been a single instance where a wolf has set upon a man or a woman in our experience. And that’s kind of what tracks through the story here, especially in the West. What most people in the nineteenth century in the West, especially after they had had generations of this kind of interaction with wolves, what their reaction to wolves was is wolves are cowards. Wolves are not aggressive and are going to attack you. They’re cowards, and that became the detegration that people levied against them. You know, the Native people think am as boy wolves are these wonderful animals. They’re loyal to their families and you know, and they’re brave, and and the European euro American perspective was because the wolves who are not of aggressive there are a bunch of cowards and that’s that’s how they.
00:39:15
Speaker 2: That’s how they respond.
00:39:16
Speaker 4: There’s a lot of I hesitate to say evidence because I don’t know that I’ve seen it in evidentiary form. You hear people say that the wolves of Europe, the wolves in Romania, wolves in other places, that it’s a there is a there’s a legacy of greater aggression and like a higher propensity to attack people with some of these Eurasian wolves, more livestock depredation.
00:39:44
Speaker 2: Do you know that? Do you know that to be true?
00:39:46
Speaker 4: Or is that?
00:39:47
Speaker 2: Is that not true?
00:39:50
Speaker 1: I know that that’s what’s thought to be true. That’s what the folklore of the wolf is has always been, and that folklore was brought to them America. So that’s one of the you know, and it’s still I mean, I encountered people, you know, when I was living in the Bitterroot Valley. Back a decade ago, I had a neighbor who when wolves were recovering in the Sapphire Mountains right above us, and I would occasionally see a pack run across the road. As I would come home from a graduate class at night at ten o’clock, pack of wolves would run across the road. I could go outside, usually two or three times a year, and I’d hear wolves. How I had a neighbor who had grown up in California who walked up to the house one day and said something like, well, I guess you know that these wolves are probably I mean, we’re in mortal danger. These wolves are close, and these things they’re going to tear my wife off the front porch and maul her in the yard. I can’t let my son and his granddaughter come over because I know they’re going to get my granddaughter.
00:40:53
Speaker 4: And you know, I was trying to tell you they haven’t got man the tree, haven’t got anybody.
00:40:58
Speaker 1: They have, there’s no but it did not work. I told him that, and I could tell he was completely unconvinced. And so these stories, I mean, they go obviously back a long way into the old world. I mean, they are still current with us where you know. And I went to a wolf conference in southern New Mexico and Las Crusis one time, about twenty years ago, and there was a woman who was representing the livestock industry who showed our asseymbol throng of an audience of two hundred and fifty people or so, how deadly Mexican wolves were and how scary they were to have them on the ground. And what she showed us was a photograph of a cowboy in full shaps and hat and everything, his boots running towards a front porch, running towards the photographer and he’s really balling the jack and back in the background maybe one hundred yards away, so far away. She had to draw a circle around it to make sure that the audience saw it was a wolf standing in the road. And she said, this is an example of how bloodthirsty these wolves are.
00:42:06
Speaker 2: Had he not.
00:42:07
Speaker 1: Run for the porch, this wolf was going to pull him down. Yeah, And it’s a wolf standing curiously in the road watching a cowboy in shaps run up the up the dirt road.
00:42:18
Speaker 4: There’s a great way of looking at the risk. And you see it with grizzly bears, And it’d be interesting to look at it with contemporary Europe, you know, or in your aging countries to.
00:42:28
Speaker 2: Have wolves would be like, what are the odds.
00:42:32
Speaker 4: Than in a given year any individual, Yeah, acts will have a violent altercation with a human, you know. And then when you look at like the menagerie of North American wildlife, it’s like grizzlies.
00:42:46
Speaker 2: Are grizzlies are mountain lions? Yeah?
00:42:49
Speaker 4: Are well, Yeah, grizzlies are high and every and everybody else is kind of like inconsequential. But I would be curious to know, like if the europe if that European sense which you see cited all the time when it talks about the American the immediate American hatred of wolves coming from this big bad wolf in Europe thing to just be interesting to look at and be like, was it any more was it any more true in Europe than here? Or was it just as untrue there as it was here? About the human health risk with wolves, Yeah, not the inconvenience of livestock, but the health risk I.
00:43:31
Speaker 1: Think, you know. And there’s a guy who’s who’s written a recent book which I just blurbed for him on Europe’s wolves. And what he did was there was a wolf in Romania that tracked sort of a you know, one of these single colonizing wolves, that tracked three or four hundred miles from southern southeastern Europe towards France. And this guy, a couple of years later, went out and he that exact route that this wolf had taken and wrote a book about it. And one of the things he said that struck me because I.
00:44:08
Speaker 2: Didn’t know this.
00:44:10
Speaker 1: Europe now has more wolves in it than the United States does. The United States, accepting Alaska, the lower forty eight, Europe has more wolves than the Lower forty eight, and Europe is attempting to be as welcoming of wolves as possible. Now, Obviously, according to this guy’s journey, he was running into people, you know, every few days who were outraged, just as a lot of Montana ranchers are outraged that there were wolves returning to Europe, and so some of those same sensibilities. But it’s going to require somebody doing a book to try to find whether or not evidence actually exists, because some of the things I’ve read about wolf attacks in Europe are well okay, So there’s always the rabid animal that’s that could be involved, and there were evidently a lot of wolf dog hybrids and those animals, at least some people have argued, may have been responsible for some of the attacks that have so anyway, it’s that kind of story. And obviously in the nineteenth century when people are coming west. I mean, what I tried to get across this episode is that hell wolves have been They had been in the West and in America for five million years. All of the wildlife, the way trees and grass grew was sort of dependent on there being this keystone predator at the top of everything. So it’s a little bit like taking the beavers out or taking the sea otters out. When you do that, the ecologies start scrambling and changing because you’ve got in place this animal that’s been there for millions of years and producing its effect the world. And yet you know, we come from the old world with this kind of wolf hostility, and our task immediately is to try to get rid of them is just as fast as we can.
00:46:12
Speaker 3: I think one thing that I’ve gotten from your work in terms of just how I conceptualize and certain animals, this relationship between coyotes and wolves and they look alike, but there’s obvious differences. But this idea that you know, wolves go up, coyotes go down, foxes go up, and it’s sort of this continuous balancing act between these. I don’t know if you can sort of talk about the coyote story because that’s obviously an area of expertise, but how that relates to the wolf story, because there’s some interesting parallels, but then obviously those two animals, their histories diverge in very clear ways.
00:46:56
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:46:56
Speaker 1: So I’ve done obviously the Old Man America episode on you know, the Native stories about coyote with a capital C as the deity figure, and I’m going to do one more episode later in the year that’s going to be about the sort of the coyote story because the coyote, unlike wolves, Europeans had no familiarity with coyotes, and so they didn’t actually know what to think about them, and it took, you know, some time, It took particularly you know, Mark Twain in roughing it sort of giving Americas on America’s an idea of how to think about coyotes, and and it was not a favorable and appraisal unfortunately. But coyotes and wolves obviously go back a long way. They are closely related. They can hybridize, although one of the interesting things that’s happening these days is that coyotes will readily hybridize and the wolves will too, with eastern wolves and red wolves, but not gray wolves. And the gray wolves that are in the West seem to be sort of mortal enemies of coyotes, and we have some explanations for that, and I can talk about them a little later in the series. But they’re closely related, they’re related enough to hybridize. But I had a biologist at the Predator Research Facility in Logan, Utah tell me one time that they had deliberately induced a pregnancy and a coyote with wolf sperm, and when she had this litter, she immediately killed every one of them.
00:48:41
Speaker 2: Wow.
00:48:42
Speaker 1: Yeah, she killed every one of them within a day, her own pups.
00:48:48
Speaker 4: Her hatred wolves greater than her love of her own children.
00:48:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, her love of her own pups.
00:48:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think the end of a book. Yeah, read that to my kids at night. Yeah, they love that. Not that and she ate them.
00:49:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, but you know, I mean one of the stories I obviously told in this this particular episode is about the Wolfers, which is uh and I you know, have to observe that’s not of sort of a Western figure that has made it into Hollywood movies. But holy cow, these guys they killed untold thousands of animals and not just wolves because the baits, the strych nine baits they were putting out. They were killing everything that came and took the baits. So they were killing eagles and ravens and hawks and skunks and raccoons and foxes and coyotes and you know, and also wolves.
00:49:43
Speaker 4: I’ll tell you another interesting bycatch.
00:49:45
Speaker 2: They would get yeah in.
00:49:48
Speaker 4: Life and Death at the Mouth of the Muscleshell, which is like a trader’s journal.
00:49:51
Speaker 1: Yeah. Uh.
00:49:53
Speaker 4: They it seems like when they get little free time, like the guys in this little community which is now under the wa waters of Fort Peck Reservoir, they kind of like, as they get a minute or they get the right amount of drunk or whatever, it’s decided that they’ll go and lace some baits, just like a fall like nothing else nothing better else to fall back is lay some baits in it. He talks about, I can’t even remember what tribe it is. They come in pissed because they’ve lost twenty four of their dogs to a bait. Yeah, and they want to raise it. They want to raise a fuss about it.
00:50:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, And.
00:50:36
Speaker 1: Of strict nine poisoning because wolves and coyotes would vomit the stryct nine onto the grass, and Indian pony herds would if they happen to be herded in that spot, and aiding that grass horses would suddenly die from being killed by strick nine.
00:50:55
Speaker 3: What’s the This might be a two technical what’s the half life or whatever? The appropriate term would be a strictionne it seems like one of the like a heavy metal almost that is just sort of it’s accumulates and yeah, like where does it end? The horse eats the grass and the horse does then yeah, comes against the horse.
00:51:14
Speaker 1: Yeah, I wish I could answer that question. I don’t really know, but I do think it remains toxic, you know, exposed above ground in a form that another animal can get for quite a while. Yeah.
00:51:28
Speaker 4: One last question for you on this. Dire wolves been in the news Colossal Bioscience, Colossal Biosciences, where you and I are on the conservation advisory board. They’ve taken they’ve identified some dire wolf genes I believe nineteen, and we’re able to put them, combine them with a gray wolf, and then use surrogate pops to birth some Yeah, and it’s sparked this huge debate of how you know when they when when someone declares it a dire wolves, Like, what does it require to say an animal is what it is? Does it have to pass the look test? Does it have to pass the genetic purity marker?
00:52:12
Speaker 2: Like?
00:52:12
Speaker 4: Like, who gets to say that that’s what that is? And you and I had talked before about.
00:52:20
Speaker 2: Even if you had, if you knew you had.
00:52:22
Speaker 4: The complete animal, how do you account for the culture?
00:52:28
Speaker 2: You know?
00:52:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s that’s the to me, the whole thing. And we have talked about it, say, because animals have culture, and so particularly for social animals like wolves, I mean, they teach their pups what the potential prey is, how to function in a landscape. And these are animals that, these these dire wolves, if that’s what we can call them, that are not going to have any culture to rely on the culture they’re going to be taught basically as whatever they’re human handlers are exposing them to, you know, And the other thing about this. I mean, this is, as you and I both know and I’ve talked about, this is a kind of a genetic experiment to see if it’s possible to de extinct an animal, and canids appear to be easier to do this with than anything else, and so that’s why Colossal ended up doing this wolf experiment to begin with. But you can’t really say that these animals ultimately are dire wolves. They’re wolves that are going to have some direwolf genetics, and we’re going to get a chance to see. I mean, one of the things obviously that these genetic these spliced in genes have done is they’ve produced animals that are white, and that’s one of the arguments that dire wolves probably had white coats, particularly thick white coats, and these animals have that. I think the next testing to be interested in is to see exactly how big they get, because our perception, particularly from Librea tar pits, where there are just hundreds of direwolf skulls available from dire wolves that were caught in the tar there is that dire wolves were probably about twenty five thirty percent larger than gray wolves, which means if these animals get to adulthood, and they do express direwolf genetics. I mean they’re going to weigh one hundred and sixty hundred and sixty five pounds or something. So that’s going to be I think, an interesting test to see. I don’t know how it’s going to turn out, but it’s a very fascinating.
00:54:40
Speaker 4: It’s it’s been just for the debate in the conversation that it’s inspired about kidding about wildlife and the role of wildlife and extinction. My first date with my wife, my very first date, we went to Librea tar pit it is and they have a display on a wall of seventy five wolf skulls, and I have a skull shelf in my house that was inspired by the It’s not lit the same way, but it was inspired inspired by that, inspired by that, and I got in trouble on my first date because we want you know, they play those movies on Circle. Well, I’m sitting there and we come in and we watched the end half of a movie and I found myself explaining, so what we’ll do is we’ll watch the end half and then it’ll start over and we’ll just watch up to where I started.
00:55:35
Speaker 2: And she’s like, oh that this is how that that that’s how this works. Oh thank you for.
00:55:42
Speaker 4: Thank you for explaining. I was toy lost as how we’re gonna see the whole movie. Thanks for helping me out. I just couldn’t visualize how this is gonna work.
00:55:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, well guys, thanks for all the question man.
00:56:01
Speaker 2: Yeah this is this has been great fun as always. Ye all right
00:56:05
Speaker 4: M mmmmm
Read the full article here