Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to stuff you missed in history class. A production
of I heart radio. Hello and welcome to the PODCAST.
I'm Tracy v Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. We have
gotten so many requests over the years for an episode
on Eugene Jacques Bullard and for a while I was
(00:25):
answering a lot of them because there were a lot,
and my answer was like yes, he's on the list.
There's one book I really want to read as part
of the research. I can't get my hands on it
right now because overwhelmingly the request that we got described
Bullard as the first black American fighter pilot, which is true,
(00:47):
but he also had this really full and fascinating life
beyond that that isn't really touched on and like the
viral facebook posts and stuff that people were sending us
as part of their episode requests. There's one book that's
focused mostly on that, though. It's called Eugene Bullard, black
expatriate and Jazz Age Paris, but I could only find
it in one library I had access to. That library
(01:10):
stopped lending books at the beginning of the pandemic and
once they started lending books again, getting to the library
was a different pandemic issue and uh, then all of
that was resolved and it took me another year plus
to actually get back to looking at this because I
had plenty of other stuff to do. Um. Also, a
(01:33):
folks are about to send me a note about Inter
Library loan. I know about Inter Library Loan. That was
not an option for similar reasons during this stretch of time. So, anyway,
all of this is resolved. My resource issues resolved, library
access resolved, uh, and there are also new resources about
him that have come out more recently. So we are
(01:53):
finally getting to this much requested episode that people have
been asking us to do for years, and actually we're
doing two episodes because it turns out when you get
more into all the stuff that's beyond being a combat
pilot in World War One, it turns into a lot.
So M you will get it all. Eugene James Bullard
(02:15):
was the seventh of ten children born to William and
Josephine Bullard, and most people called him Jean. Although some
sources say his date of birth is unclear, it was
recorded in the Family Bible as October. The bullards lived
in Columbus, Georgia, which is in the western part of
the state, right on the Chattahoochee River on the border
(02:35):
with Alabama. William had been enslaved from birth and he
had both African and Muskogee Creek Ancestry. Most accounts also
described Josephine as creek, but it's not totally clear how
many connections the family had to other indigenous people while
Jean was growing up. The city of Columbus is located
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in the Muscogee nation's ancestral lands. It's in a county
that was named for the Muskogee, but the federal government
had removed many of the Muskogee from Georgia and other
parts of the southeast over the eighteen twenties and thirties.
This removal is really a whole other story, but it
was connected to a fraudulent treaty that had been negotiated
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without most of the Muskogee nations involvement and in violation
of Muskogee law, and it was part of a bigger
federal effort to remove indigenous peoples from the eastern us
to land west of the Mississippi River. But intermarriages between
people with African and Muskogee ancestry weren't uncommon during this period.
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The muskogee both enslaved people of African descent and accepted
free black people as tribal citizens, and it's possible that
William Bullard had been living amongst some of the Muskogee
people who were still in Georgia when he married Josephine
in eighteen eighty two. Yeah, we really just don't have
a lot of information about how he conceived of this
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as part of his identity, and most sources describe him
as African American or black. As a large family of
both indigenous and African ancestry, though, the bullards often really
struggled financially. William mostly worked as a Stevadore or doing
other labor, while Josephine took in laundry. They also took
in borders to their home to try to make extra money.
(04:22):
While they were doing all this to try to make
ends meet, Josephine also tried to protect Jean and his
siblings from the extreme and sometimes violent racism of the
world they were living in. For example, two black men
were lynched and their bodies were desecrated in the middle
of town when Jean was just a year old, Jean
(04:43):
started attending a school that had been founded by the
Freedman's bureau in Nineteen O one, at which point it
became a lot harder for his family to shield him
from racism. His mother also died on August nineteen o
two at the age of thirty seven. Jean was almost seven.
Her cause of death is not noted anywhere, but taking
in laundry was hot, exhausting work, and this followed a
(05:06):
stretch of particularly hot weather in Georgia. Jean's last year
at the Freedman's bureau school was in nineteen Oh six,
when he was ten, and around that same time his
father had a fight with the white foreman at a
warehouse where he worked. This foreman had been harassing and
abusing black employees, and William seems to have foreseen that
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this was going to end in violence and that when
it did, his life would be at risk. Jean later
related a conversation William had with him and his siblings
who were still living at home, telling them that if
something ever happens to him, he wanted them all to
be good. Eventually, this foreman hit William with a hook
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that was used to unload bales of cotton, and William
fought back, throwing him through a hole in the floor
that dropped into a cellar under the warehouse. The foreman
was badly injured but survived. William apparently had a good
rapport with the owner of the warehouse, W C Bradley,
and he had already told Bradley about the foreman's abuse.
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Bradley seems to have tried to keep this whole incident quiet,
but words still got out about it. A mob of drunk,
angry white men came to the Bullard House to kill William.
William was inside the House with his shotgun aimed at
the locked front door, and the children were all hiding
when they couldn't get into the house, and it also
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seemed like nobody was home. The mob seems to have
eventually given up. Jean was still a child, but at
this point he decided it was time to leave. The
first few times he tried, though, his father found him,
brought him home and punished him for running away. Then,
when Jean was eleven, he sold a goat and cart
that belonged to him to another boy for a dollar
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in fifty cents, and he left again, this time managing
to evade his father. For about the next five years,
Jeanne traveled all over Georgia, living and working for an
assortment of people, including Black Sharecroppers, white landowners and a
group of Romani people from England. This particular group had
(07:14):
a big influence on him. Jeanne stayed with them for
several months. He helped care for their horses and learned
to race them, and they told him that the racism
he had been living through in Georgia didn't exist in England.
When it became clear that they did not plan to
go back to England anytime soon, Jeanne left, hoping that
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he would be able to make it there on his own.
This took a while. He worked for a series of
people in rural parts of Georgia before hopping a train
to Atlanta. When he got to Newport News, Virginia, he
stowed away on a ship that he thought was headed
across the Atlantic, but it docked at the port in Norfolk,
Virginia just a few hours later. In Norfolk he found
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a ship called the Marta Russ which was headed for Scotland.
The crew spoke mostly German, but some spoke a little English,
and they seemed happy to let Jean run errands for
them while they prepared to leave in exchange for a
little money. Jean used this money to buy himself some
food and then he hid aboard the martyr roost before
it departed on March fourth nine. About three days into
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the voyage, though, he ran out of that food and
he came out of hiding. He was put to work
in the boiler room, hauling cinders and ashes to be
dumped overboard, and then he started learning some German from
the crew. He was put ashore when they got to Aberdeen, Scotland,
and the captain gave him five English pounds. He stayed
in Aberdeen for a few months before making his way
(08:40):
to Glasgow. Bullard described himself as feeling like he had
been born into a new world. The people around him
were mostly white, and it would be wrong to suggest
that no one was prejudiced or that there was no racism.
It would also be inaccurate to say that there was
never any racist violence. As one example in Asgo in nineteen,
(09:01):
a white mob chased down a group of predominantly black
sailors and lay siege to their boarding house. But overall,
people seemed to Eugene with curiosity, not with the malicious
hostility he had been enduring from white people in the
United States. Something happened during this period that really emphasized
this difference. It's not clear exactly how or how much
(09:24):
bullard was in touch with his family after leaving the US,
but not long after arriving in Europe he got word
that his oldest brother, hector, had been lynched. Hector had
inherited a peach farm that had been passed down through
their mother's side of the family and white squatters had
tried to take it over. Hector had refused to give
(09:44):
into them and they had murdered him. We'll get back
to Eugene's story and what happened while he was in
the UK. After a sponsor break in late nineteen twelve,
(10:06):
Eugene bullard moved to Liverpool. He'd been making ends meet
through a range of odd jobs, including acting as a
lookout for street performers to warn them if the police
were coming. In Liverpool, he worked at a carnival attraction
where somebody would put their face through a hole in
a sheet and then they would try to dodge as
(10:26):
customers through these soft rubber balls at them. In bullard's
own account, he told the proprietor of this attraction that
he would make a lot more money if bullard was
the target instead of a white person. This turned out
to be true. I find this whole idea deeply troubling, uh,
(10:47):
but based on his own descriptions, this is another example
of how he just felt a lot safer as a
black man in Europe than he had felt in the
United States. In Liverpool, Bullard also started performing with a
Vaudeville company, something else that he saw differently in Europe
than in the US. Black Vaudeville performers were expected to
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follow a lot of the same racist tropes in England
as they were in the US, and white performers on
both sides of the Atlantic performed in black face, but
bullard saw this as flouting stereotypes and expectations, not as
being subjected to them or reinforcing them. Bullard also made
friends with a man named Chris Baldwin, who owned a
(11:30):
boxing gym and started teaching Bullard how to box, and
soon bullard was making connections with other black boxers from
the United States who were in the UK. This included
Jack Johnson and Aaron Lister Brown, who was known as
the Dixie Kid. Brown invited Bullard to come with him
to London so they could train together. And London bullard
(11:51):
started living in a predominantly black neighborhood and a lot
of the other residents there were also black expatriots from
the United States. Own and Bullard traveled to cities around
Europe to box, but it took a while for Bullard
to get where he really wanted to go, and that
was Paris. A lot of accounts of his life describe
him as having family from Martinique and hearing through family
(12:14):
lore that France was racially tolerant, although that doesn't line
up with the historical record and it might be a
backstory that he developed once he was in France to
try to explain his affinity for the country. Yeah, he
clearly got the idea from someone at some point that
Paris was a place he would like to be, uh,
but exactly who that was or how is a little fuzzier.
(12:38):
Bullard did finally get to Paris for a boxing match
in late nineteen thirteen, though, and as expected, he immediately
fell in love with it. As soon as he was
back in London after the match, he talked to Brown
about wanting to go back to Paris as soon as possible,
but the dixie kid already had a string of matches
lined up in London. So bullard decided to make his
(13:00):
way back to Paris on his own. He joined a
menstrual troop that was starting on a tour, and then
he quit as soon as they got to Paris. They're
basically his ride, with him doing some work along the way.
After settling in Paris, bullard started using the middle name
Jacques as a nod to his love for his new home.
I understand completely, Jean. However, on June nineteen fourteen, not
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long after bullard finally got to France, archduke friends Ferdinand
of Austria and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenburg, were assassinated,
sparking the first World War. Even though he was not
French and the United States was not yet involved in
the war, bullard wanted to serve the nation that he
had fallen in love with and he joined the French
(13:44):
Foreign Legion on October nine nineteen fourteen, which would have
been his nineteenth birthday. Bullard was initially stationed along the
sum river as a machine gunner, and he also did
extremely dangerous work, like trying to retrieve bodies for no
man's land and cutting through barbed wire and preparation for
assaulting the enemy's trenches. Over the course of Nineteen fifteen,
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the foreign legions saw so many casualties in this area
that units had to be merged together as they lost
too many soldiers. Meanwhile, it doesn't seem like Bullard had
any contact with his father since arriving in Europe, but
somehow William Bullard had figured out where he was and
what he was doing, and William was trying to find him.
(14:31):
William Bullard wrote a letter to the U S State Department,
apparently believing that at nineteen, Jean was too young to
legally enlist, although that was not the case. Somehow William's
attempts to find Jean got all the way to the
U S Secretary of State and then the American Ambassador
in Paris, William Sharp, although sharp does not seem to
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have taken any action on it. Okay, it's uh kind
of heartrending the effort that he was going through to
find his son, but also seemingly totally misguided about whether
Jean had the legal right to be doing what he
was doing, which he did by late Nineteen fifteen. Tens
of thousands of men in the French Foreign Legion had
(15:13):
been killed in action, and that included a lot of
people among Bullard's unit at the battle of Champagna. At
that point their numbers were just too far reduced to
keep consolidating these foreign legion units, so survivors were transferred
into the regular French army. Bullard was sent to the
one Seventieth Infantry Regiment of the Moroccan division, nicknamed the
(15:37):
swallows of death. When he got there, bullard continued to
be a machine gunner. The Battle of their dome stretched
through almost all of nineteen sixteen as Germany tried to
capture the French fort city of their don't. There don't
had both strategic and symbolic importance, and Germany hoped that
France's efforts to defend it would turn into a war
(15:57):
of attrition. They're done. was nicknamed the Meat Grinder because
of its relentless deadliness, and that had been Germany strategy
from the beginning. Bullard was seriously wounded at verdant on
March Second Nineteen Sixteen, just a couple of weeks into
a nearly year long battle. An artillery shell had exploded
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nearby him, knocking out most of his teeth and also
killing several of the men who were with him. He
continued fighting, though, and then three days later was seriously
wounded for the second time, this time in the leg,
while trying to deliver a message from one officer to another.
That wound could have killed him. It barely missed his
femeral artery and he had to be evacuated and taken
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to Lyon by Red Cross train. He was hospitalized for
months and while in the hospital he was awarded the
Quadriger for his heroism. This was one of fourteen honors
that he would earn during the war. Yeah, it wasn't
the first one he received, but it was one of
the most notable. Bullard spent about six months in recovery
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and physical therapy from his leg injury and while he
did recover more function in his leg than doctors had expected,
he still needed a cane to walk afterward. There was
no way he could go back to being a machine
gunner for the infantry. Apart from it being an infantry role,
the machine gunners were like hauling these very heavy machine
guns from place to place. He thought his skills as
(17:26):
a machine gunner in the infantry might make him a
good aircraft gunner, though. So he asked for a transfer,
and we'll get to that after a quick sponsor break.
Eugene Bullard had some leave and he went back to
(17:47):
Paris until October of nineteen sixteen, and after that he
went to CASILLAC, France, to train as an aircraft gunner.
It's possible that he always thought this might be a
way to move into training as a pilot, but at
some point he heard about the Lafayette Esqua Drille. This
was named for the Markete Lafayette and organized by Americans
(18:09):
to give American pilots a chance to fly for France.
It was also an effort to put some pressure on
the United States to become involved in the war, kind
of like hey, these Americans are already flying for France
and they are making you look bad by not also
stepping up. After learning about the Lafayette Escadrille, Bullard asked
if he could move into pilot training instead of gunnery training,
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and he was transferred to aviation school in tour in
the fall of nineteen sixteen. Bullard earned his pilot certificate
on May five nineteen seventeen. And then he went back
to Paris for almost a week of leave. At some
point previously he had made a bet with American expatriate
Jeff Dixon, who was in Europe hoping to become a
boxing promoter. Dixon had met Bullard two thousand dollars that
(18:56):
he would never become a pilot. Bullard collect did his
winnings and spent his leave treating everyone he knew to
dinners and drinks and generally having a good time. But
then Bullard didn't receive orders for where to report once
his leave was over. That seems to have been due
to the influence of Edmund Gross, who was a doctor
who had helped establish the Lafayette Escadrille as well as
(19:19):
the American Hospital of Paris and the American ambulance field service.
Grows apparently didn't want a black man in the Lafayette
ESCA drill and he seems to have pulled strings to
try to keep bullard out of the service. Some of
the accounts of all this described. The evidence of all
of this is circumstantial, but they're sure is a lot
(19:40):
of it. There are a lot of times where bullard
was kept from doing something and Dr Gross seems to
have been involved. Finally, Bullard was ordered to report for
further combat flight training on August five nineteen. Ultimately, Bullard
was assigned to ESCA drills, sp a nineties three, flying
his first mission in September of nineteen seventeen, and he
(20:04):
had a monkey named Jimmy with him, which he had
brought back from Paris. It is not clear exactly how
he got Jimmy, but bullard called him his co pilot
and hid him in his flight jacket on missions. The
fuselage of his plane was also decorated with a heart
pierced with a dagger, in the words to lesson Quiku Rouge,
(20:24):
or all blood that flows is red. been a lot
of ways, bullard's day to day life as a pilot
was better than it had been in the infantry. Just
the basic living essentials were safer and cleaner and more predictable.
He had regular meals and snacks and a clean place
to sleep, and he wasn't in the trenches anymore. But
(20:45):
at the same time, being a combat pilot was really dangerous.
More than two hundred Americans flew for France during the war,
both in the ESKDRILL and in other units and sixty
eight of them were killed. Since they usually flew in
these single seat biplanes, the men who were killed usually
died alone. This was just a different kind of grief
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and trauma than what Bullard had been experiencing in the infantry,
where the vast scale of death could become so overwhelming
that it was almost numbing. So it was like both
of them were really traumatic. In some ways, being a
pilot felt more acute, if that makes sense. Bullard flew
about twenty missions during his time as a pilot as
(21:28):
part of ESKU DRILL SPA Ninety three and later Esqdril
sp a eight five. He reported that he had shot
down to German planes during that time. Those were not confirmed, though,
which wouldn't have been unusual if the planes crashed behind
German lines and nobody else was around to see it.
Bullard also crashed at one point after his plane was
(21:48):
hit from the ground. He hid from German troops until
the French came to retrieve the plane. His time as
a pilot did not last for very long, though. The
United States became involved in world one in April of
nineteen seventeen, and once American troops actually started arriving in Europe.
Months later, the American pilots and the Lafayette Esquadrille were
(22:09):
transferred into the American military, but not bullard. There is
some conflicting information around this. Bullard blamed Dr Edmund Gross,
who definitely did write a letter laying out some flatly
false reasons to keep bullard out of the American military.
Gross said that Bullard had been imprisoned for ten days,
(22:31):
which he had not, after an altercation with an officer.
That altercation did happen in response to that officer's racism.
Other French officers who had witnessed this had sided with Bullard,
who was reprimanded but definitely not jailed. And this officer
was in command of some of the troops that had
been recruited from France's colonial territories, so those would have
(22:55):
been people of Color, and apparently the officer was saying
really disparaging things and Eugene Jack Bullard was not having
it and other officers backed him up as being in
the right. Gross also said that Bullard had been imprisoned
for a further twenty days for wearing a forage air
that was only allowed to be warned by members of
(23:15):
the Foreign Legion, which gross implied Bullard was not one of.
Bullard had been wearing this for a jaire because he
earned it as a member of the French Foreign Legion,
which gross had either overlooked in his record or just
lied about in this letter. There was no twenty day
jail term involved with all of this, because Bullard had
(23:38):
not been doing anything wrong. He was wearing a decoration
he had earned. Gross wrote back to captain W W
Hoffman of the American Expeditionary Force that Bullard was being
transferred back to the French infantry. For All these reasons.
It's also noted that all the other pilots being transferred
(23:58):
into the American military were officers and Bullard wasn't. And
one source on Bullard claims that his physical exam didn't
disqualify him from service, but did note that both his
feet and his tonsils were too large and his name
was last on the list of pilots whose physicals were acceptable. However,
(24:18):
even without any of that, it is extremely unlikely that
the US military would have accepted Bullard as a pilot.
The US military was racially segregated and most black men
served in labor battalions the ones who served in combat
roles were in the ninety second and ninety three combat divisions,
most famously in the three sixty ninth infantry, better known
(24:42):
as the Harlem Hell Fighters. We have an episode on
the Harlem Hell Fighters that we ran as a Saturday
classic in June. Of the American military just would not
have viewed to black pilot as an option. Gross had
not wanted Bullard to fly for the Lafayette Esquadrille in
the first place and had subjected him to a lot
of petty slates, including paying him late and never giving
(25:05):
him an honorary scroll that the French Ministry of war
had presented to all the other pilots. So at this
point gross seems to have taken the opportunity to end
his service as a pilot entirely. In January of nine eighteen,
Bullard was transferred back to the one infantry. Around this
same time there was a brief mention of him and
(25:27):
then double a CPS publication the crisis, mentioning that he
had joined the French Foreign Legion, been wounded at ver done,
earned the Quada gair and enlisted in the Aviation Corps.
After leaving the hospital, following his injury. This did not
have the most recent news involving him. Presumably the person
who wrote this did not know that information yet, but
(25:48):
this seems to be the only mention of Eugene Bullard
in American media from during the war. Although bullard had
been able to fly a plane, his earlier leg wound
still affected his mobility and that he couldn't just move
back into his previous role as a machine gunner. So
he spent the rest of World War One in a
service battalion. After the war, his service was seen as
(26:10):
particularly heroic since he was one of the Americans who
served in France long before the US entered the war
and had been wounded more than once in the process.
Because he had been wounded in service to France, Bullard
was also eligible for French citizenship and later identified himself
as a French citizen. After the war was over, Bullard
(26:31):
went back to Paris. He doesn't seem to have had
his monkey Jimmy with him anymore. According to some accounts,
Jimmy died during the flu pandemic. We'll talk more about
bullard's life in Paris in our next episode. Will we
talk about Listener Mail in the meantime, we will uh.
(26:52):
This listener mail is from Heather, and Heather wrote. High
Holly and Tracy. I hope this email finds you well.
I started listening to your podcast after the start of
the pandemic and I have to say it has been
essential to my daily walking routine and general intellectual enrichment. Today,
on my daily walk with our dog Zoro, I listened
to the episode on Thomas Midgley Jr and his deadly
(27:13):
inventions and the last part on the history of free on.
You ended it by mentioning that the world's response to
the science showing free once negative impact on the Ozon
layer demonstrated what was possible when a substitute is available.
What is interesting is that what eventually replaced free on
and other CFCs used as a flat refrigerants, Hydrofluoro carbons,
(27:34):
or h f CS, are now considered among the culprits
of global warming and climate change, being accountable for about
one percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Recent years have
seen the global community rally around initiatives to phase out HFCs,
in a movement reminiscent of the global phase out of
free on and CFCs and the U N, EU and
(27:56):
many nations are legislating to reduce their usage. In the US,
the bipartisan followed by two expl exclamation points in parentheses,
twenty American innovation and manufacturing, or aim act mandates the
eventual phase out of listed high global warming potential or
(28:16):
G W P, HFCs. The irony in all of this
is that the substitutes available and being promoted, ammonia, propane
and carbon dioxide, are the very chemicals that were considered
too toxic or flammable to continue to use the refrigeration
back in the first part of the twentieth century and
made free on a viable alternative back then. However, in
the present day these chemicals can be used as refrigerants
(28:38):
much more safely due to the advanced engineering of refrigeration
equipment that prevents fires and leaks. In most cases, these
natural refrigerants have zero or very low G W P. Anyway,
I thought you might enjoy this Fitnte uh and then
heather also included pictures of cat, Cathulu, the great old one.
(28:58):
She's not actually that, but does sometimes embody her love,
crafty and namesakes behaviors. Oh and the dog is cute too.
So we have a dog picture. This dog is super cute.
I do not know if this is a girl dog
or a boy dog, but dog it's kind of rolling
around with the mouth open, adorable posture. Um. And then
(29:22):
also such a very cute cat making very cute cat faces. Um.
It looks like this kitty cat has a tipped ear
in one picture, so I wonder what the Kitty Cat's
background is. Uh, that's a lot of Um. FERRELS and
strays have their ears tipped after being vaccinated, spader, neutered
(29:42):
and vaccinated and sometimes returned to their feral colonies. Yes,
because they can test positive for things they have been
vaccinated for. Yes, yes. Or you can have a cat
like my now gone cat, Mr Burns, who tears his
own ear in a way that makes people think that happened,
but in fact he just got a claw cotton impulse.
(30:04):
Oh No, he was for Mr Burn so thank you
for all these cat pictures and for this footnote. Another
thing that we did not mention in the episode is
that new ozone depleting substances are being developed all the
time and the progress towards the whole in the ozone
layer in general. Ozone Depletion repairing itself only continues to
(30:27):
work if we continue to not use those substances once
they're known to be ozone depleting. We did not specifically
say that in the episode, so I wanted to take
the opportunity to say it now. Thank you again, Heather,
for this note and all of the adorable animal pictures.
If you would like to send us a note about
this or any other podcast, we're a history podcast at
(30:47):
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this has been the case wherever we're still between office
is so still not a great way to send us
any physical items. See what happens with that. Uh. You
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(31:09):
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