April 7, 2021 • 52 mins
There are two types of people in the South -- those who have seen mountain lions and those who haven’t. Supposedly extirpated from the South, the native species has lived on through backwoods lore and many believe they never left. Did they? Clay Newcomb explores the touchy topic by interviewing biologists, investigating two eye-witness sightings, and talking with a psychologist about people seeing things that aren’t real. This is a lesson in biology and human nature, and a great story that gets to the truth about mountain lions in the South.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
My name is Clay Nukelem and I'm a seventh generation
or Kansan. I'm a husband, a father, a hunter, a
mule skinner, a writer. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm a person
of faith. We're starting a new podcast here a meat eater,
and I hope you'll follow along. I'm interested in that
intersection of where tradition and contemporary life meet. On this podcast,
(00:25):
we're gonna look back into history and find relevance for today.
I like looking for insight and unlikely places, searching for
relevance and things that have been forgotten. And I love
telling the story of Americans who lived their life close
to the land. This podcast is going to be an
(00:46):
efficient listen with an engaging glance into history and an
interesting guest where we'll explore unique people, unique topics, and
unique stories. I hope that you'll follow along on the
air Grease Podcast. There it is. That's the name of
our new podcast, the Bear Grease Podcast. Why the name
(01:09):
bear Grease? If you know much about me, you know
that I love some bear grease, which is the rendered
fat of a bear, literally the cooked lard of a
bear that's turned into oil at one time. Bear grease
or bear oil was a highly valued commodity and it
was used for cooking and all other sorts of practical stuff.
(01:31):
It was even used as currency. It had a ton
of value, and today most people wouldn't know anything about it.
Technology and modern times have buried some pretty cool stuff
that we're rediscovering and we're redefining now even what's relevant
by looking back, some of the things that time has
(01:53):
forgotten are ripe for a cultural resurrection. Bear Grease is
a metaphor or and as you follow along, I think
you'll begin to understand what I mean. How certain are
(02:15):
you that you saw two mountain lions? No doubt? Have
you ever seen a lion? Mountain lion in Arkansas? I
think there's panther. I think there's black mountain lions. Myself.
On this episode of the Bear Grease Podcast will be
exploring the myth of the Southern mountain lion and how
(02:37):
the lore or maybe the hard science, we don't know
which one has forever and inextricably connected itself to Southern culture.
We're going to talk to some mountain lion believers, a biologists,
and even a psychologist to get some answers about lions
and about human nature. Well, I mean, I don't have
(02:59):
any proof of it. I just always have heard that.
You've heard it, you've heard of cognitive I mean I
just believed the propaganda. My name is Clay Nukelem and
this is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things
(03:21):
forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and
where we'll tell the story of Americans who lived their
lives close to the land. There are two kinds of
people in the South, those that have seen mountain lions
(03:44):
in those that haven't. Both of these groups carry their
own unique stigmas, perhaps both equally as wrought with irony
as the other. They seem to huddle tightly and cult
like clans of believers and unbelievers. But to understand the
tension between those who have seen mountain lions and those
(04:04):
who haven't, and yes, there is tension, you'll have to
understand a bit of history. The mountain lion Puma con
color is a large tan colored feline weighing up to
two dred pounds or more. It, along with the jaguar,
which are extremely rare and primarily live south of the
(04:27):
US border in Mexico, are the only large cats in
North America since the extinction of the giant cats of
the Pleistocene, which basically was an epoch of time that
ended about ten thousand years ago. These Pleistocene cats included
saber tooth cats, American lions, American jaguars, the American cheetah.
(04:48):
This place used to be crawling with giant purring predators. However,
today we've pretty much got one large cat in the
United States and Canada. The old mountain lion or puma
or panther, or the painter or the catamount all the
same animal, but they have different names and different regions.
(05:09):
You might recognize one of these, But the mountain lion's
native range extends from the Canadian Yukon all the way
down to the Andes Mountains of South America, and from
the east and west its range goes from the Atlantic
Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. This is fascinating that they
are the most widespread terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere.
(05:34):
To bring it home simply to North America. Prior to
European settlement, they had the widest geographic spread of any
large mammal, more than white tailed deer, more than elk,
or than Buffalo more than anything, and here in lies
are issue in They used to be here. But by
(05:55):
the turn of the twentieth century, mountain lions were extirpated
from almost one hundred percent of their eastern range in
the entire Eastern Deciduous Forest. The word extra pated means
that they didn't go extinct, but they were removed from
a specific region. The Eastern Deciduous Forest basically extends from
(06:19):
east Texas all the way to Maine, and from Wisconsin
all the way down to Florida. Basically, it's the eastern
one third of the United States. It's worth noting that
mountain lions in southern Florida held on and were never
entirely gone, perhaps making them the only mountain lions east
of the Mississippi for a very long time. Or were
(06:41):
they have they been in much of the Eastern Deciduous
Forest all this time, just right under our noses. A
lot of people think so, but for sure throughout the
twentieth century, mountain lion populations only survived, according to science anyway,
in the rugged out in this regions of the western
(07:01):
US and Canada. Though lions haven't been in the South
for the last hundred years, or at least that's what
the government biologists tell us. Lots of people still see them.
In fact, I know some of these hillbillies that aren't
afraid to stand up against the statistics and against the
science and boldly proclaimed their eyewitness convictions. Some might even
(07:26):
call it conservation slander. The myth of the Southern mountain
lion is so strongly imbedded into our culture they might
as well actually be here. Or maybe they are here,
maybe they've been here all along. The only way that
I know how to get to the bottom of this
is to hear some of these stories for myself, and
(07:47):
some of these stories are pretty close to home. Just
for the record, I've never seen a mountain lion in
the South, but my dear sweet dad, Gary Newcom has,
And here's his story. When was it? Tell me when
(08:08):
it was? Oh, I would say twenty years ago, years
ago to say late nineties, Well, yeah, probably probably. And
I was in one of my favorite hunting areas, driving
on a Warehouser road. But then I looked to my left,
and when I turned my truck in the middle of
(08:29):
the road to make that turn, I looked up there
and there was what I thought was a bobcat. I thought,
that's a big old bobcat, is it? Yeah? Yeah, it's
like it's later in the afternoon, but still real clear light.
I mean, it wasn't like dusty or anything. And I
thought a bobcat. And then I saw the tail and
(08:50):
I go, I look, yeah, it's some outline and you
know it was hundred yards you know, it was pretty
good ways off. You saw a distinctive just think deep,
no question about it. So what color was I want
to say blue? Yeah it was. It was just a
tan colored animals. Yeah, I mean like, okay, so you're
(09:13):
my dad, and I inherently trust your judgment. You've been
around seventy two years. How certain are you if you
if there was a way to tell, I mean, like,
if there was really a way to know whether it
was a mountain lie or not in your life depended
on how certain are you that it was a mountain,
it would be Oh yeah, I mean, I don't know
(09:36):
what has a tail that this as long as the body,
it seemed to me, like, what did it do? Was
just standing the road and ran on It took his time,
came across the road. By the time I saw it
as pretty close to the ditch, and and if if
I remember correctly, it looked at me. So it didn't
just darted. No, no, no, it was moving slow, so
you gotta look at it. Yeah, and so, but I
(09:58):
didn't catch it from over here to here. I caught
it towards the you know, just maybe two or three
steps from the ditch, and then it just eased off
in the ditch and then went into the cut over
you know, ten year old cut. And uh, when I
saw the tale, you know, I sit here, I's just
(10:18):
thinking mountain lion, you know, I mean, it's just I mean,
what what has it said? Yeah, Brent Reeves would be
considered a hill billy if he didn't live in the
Arkansas Delta or the swamp country. Regardless of semantics. He's
a close friend of mine, veteran outdoorsman, and he's been
(10:40):
in law enforcement for the last thirty years. I've only
known him to stretch the truth on occasion. And he
claims to not just have seen one mountain lion, but too.
I'll let you judge his story. So, Brent, tell me
about not one mountain lion, but two mountain lions that
(11:00):
you've seen in Arkansas. I will gladly relate the following.
The first one was probably in nineteen I'm gonna say
it was an eight eight. Me and three other guys
were working for a private UH timber management company, and
we were in Ashley County, Arkansas, which is in right
(11:20):
next to two counties away from from Mississippi and southeast Arkansas.
We were driving down the timber company road going to
manage September is probably nine o'clock in the morning, good daylight,
and a panther, mountain lion, cougar, whatever you want to
call it, jumped out in front of our truck at
about thirty yards and loped down the road in front
of us for twenty thirty seconds, and we're right behind it,
(11:45):
and it ran off into a section September that we
drove down another quarter of a mile and went in
ourselves to cruise the timber see how much timber was
in there. That was the at first one I've ever seen.
And we got back that afternoon. There was no cell
phones or anything back during that time. So when we
got back to the office that afternoon, I called a
(12:08):
friend and we then reported to the Game and Fish
and we got a call back I think the next
day that they had had reports to that in the
area and actually attributed it to one that had escaped captivity.
So it was it was known in that area to
be rambling around. And so that wasn't the only mountain
(12:30):
lion you've seen, You've seen another one. How did that?
My friend David Boudra and I we're going coon hunt
one evening. This would have been even a real name.
It is. It is getting fisher and Fisher it is.
It is a real name, and he can attest to it.
But but David and I were going coon hunting one
(12:51):
evening in Cleveland County where I grew up, and it's
dusky dark, you don't have to drive with your lights on.
And we were driving next to this big clear cut
fresh clear cut, and there was two or three big
trees that weren't mergetable for logs or anything. So the
timber company left him out there. And this tree was
probably it was a big white oak tree. It was
(13:13):
probably hundred and fifty two hundred yards away from the
timber access road and we're driving down through there. It's
in the fall of the year, so the leaves are
coming off pretty good and I look out there and
I can see a silhouette of what I thought was
a turkey, and I told David, I said, David looked
at the big old turkey saitting on the limb out there,
and he said, yeah, I see it. Well, I had
(13:34):
my coon hunting light on. I just turned my light
on see if I could see if it was a
gobbler or a hen. And when I turned it on,
the eyes were glowing back at me, which turkey's eyes
don't normally do that. And we slowed down and David said, man,
that's not a that's not a turkey. And we slowed
down to look at it, and it turned started walking
down that limb, and you could plainly see that big
(13:57):
long tail out from out behind it. That thing walked
down towards the trunk of the tree, got to where
the limb leaves the trunk of the tree, put his
feet down, their paws and just dropped down into that
clear cut. And then we turned around and went back
the other direction and turned their dogs loose. Let me
(14:17):
ask you this, on both of these sightings, now thirty
years later, if your life depended on it, and there
was a way to know the absolute truth and they
said they're gonna burn your house down if you're wrong.
How certain are you that you saw two mountain lions?
No doubt? And the thing about it is, both times
(14:40):
I had a witness with me. Of course, one of
them was a coon. I'm gonna I'm gonna need their
phone numbers. One of them is, I say was one
of them is a coupon hunter, and they you know
he's not vaccinated against lyon. But I'm telling you no,
no doubt about it. I'll let you be the edge
of whether you believe these two stories or not. But
(15:02):
I've got somebody that has the credentials to validate them
or take away all their credibility. I'm not sure which
one it will be. Myron Means is a statewide large
carnivore program coordinator for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission.
If there's an expert on mountain lions around these parts,
it's my Iron Means. I think you can give us
(15:24):
some insight into the facts of whether the mythical mountain
lions of the South are real or if they're just
a farcical relic of folklore passed on from a time
when they were actually here. Myra and When I first
met you ten eleven years ago, you were the Arkansas
(15:45):
Bear Coordinator black Bear Bio. Just that's right, and now
you're not. Your your title has changed. What's your new
title with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. My new
title is Statewide Large Carnivore Program Coordinator for Arkansas Game
and Fish Commission. That's a mouthful. Something happened because at
(16:06):
one time there was just one large carnivore acknowledged by
the Game and Fish and your title change, which indicates
what happened. Well long about ten years ago, right after
I took the bear program coordinator position, we started seeing
mountlines in the state. And it's not that they weren't
(16:29):
seen prior to that, it's just that, you know, we
didn't have there were very very few ways to uh
document a siting. I mean, you know, if you think
back historically, people didn't have game cameras back much in
the eighties, you know, and that's come that's kind of
come along in the past fifteen years or so. But anyway,
(16:50):
what basically what happened was mountainlins started showing up in
the state from time to time, and UH, Game and
Fish recognized that, you know, you need to have someone
that's kind of coordinating the sightings, coordinating the verifications, uh,
and just kind of packaging mountainlin stuff. So it's not
(17:11):
necessarily that now there are lions here and there weren't before,
but we're we just know about them. Is that what
I'm hearing you say? That's right, that's right. You know,
for a lot came primarily because of game cameras or
you know, if someone has one like on a phone
video or something like that. But it's primarily been the
game cameras. Uh. That's really what has helped us, you know,
(17:36):
document the occurrence and mountlines in the States. So here's
here's the question. Where did they come from? Because bears
mountain lions, this would be historic mountain lion range here
in Arkansas and in all of the eastern United States.
So where did our lines come from? Well, that's ah,
that's a million dollar question. Who knows. The only evidence
(18:00):
that we have currently was from a mountain line that
was shot by a deer hunter back into two thousand
and sixteen. Now that was harvested or shot in Bradley
County by a deer hunter. That mountain lion was also
previously documented on a cash in Marion County about two
months prior to that, So that would have been in Uh,
(18:23):
that was in two thousand and fourteen. I'm sorry. Uh.
So the DNA evidence that we collected from that cat
in both instances, UH told us that number one, it's
the same cat. UH told us that number two, that
cat had origins from the South Dakota population. Now that
doesn't necessarily mean that cat was born in South Dakota.
(18:47):
It just means that it's d n A origins came
from that South Dakota population. Now, if you think of
it in terms of where would it most likely come from, Well,
there's established mountain populations in the Dakotas, South Dakota, which
would be north and west of us, slightly primarily north,
(19:09):
but still in the Mississippi River drainage for the most part. Well,
it'd be kind of it'd be probably closer tied to
the Missouri River drainage. Uh. There's an established population in
northwest Nebraska. There's an established population out in the Panhandle
of Oklahoma. There's an established population of lines in the
(19:31):
Panhandle of Texas and in southern Texas. So I mean, uh,
and of course you have the Florida panthers in Florida.
So those are really the the closest quote established, how
many that would be from here? You know, the closest
population would probably be the Panhandle of Oklahoma, you know,
out in the Black Hills area. But is it likely
(19:54):
that those caps would move all the way across Oklahoma?
Probably not, But because the travel corridors in the habitat
just isn't there. Is it likely that a cat could
move out of the Dakotas across northern Nebraska, uh into
eastern Nebraska and hit the Missouri River drainage and follow
the Missouri River down through the ozarks of Missouri and
(20:18):
then into the ozarks of Arkansas and then go who
knows where else. That's probably the most likely. So it's
almost like highways, like habitat highways, like you could you
could track good lion habitat all the way back to
the Dakotas and Nebraska. Sure you could. I mean, you
know there's gonna be some spancees of maybe hundred hundred
(20:41):
fifty mile maybe even two hundred mile gaps, But you
have to think and in travel terms, you know, that's
something that a mountain lion could do. In a day
or two. Byron, what about captive lions getting out? Because
I remember growing up in western Arkansas, you'd hear the
odd persons say they saw line and it was always
(21:02):
thrown back up on cap. They said, somebody had a
captive line and they let it lose. What do you
think of that? Yeah, And a matter of fact, you know,
that was really kind of the official, I guess position
of the agency through the eighties and nineties, that more
than likely if someone saw a mountain line, more than
likely it was the result of an escaped cat or
(21:23):
some a cat that someone couldn't care for anymore. They removing,
maybe the owner died, maybe something, and so what are
they gonna do? Just turn it out? So that was
really kind of the official position of the agency for
a couple of decades. Uh, that more n likely if
you saw a cat, it was probably a release cat
(21:43):
or an escaped cat. You know, that takes all the
fun I've seen a mountain line. Well, it certainly presented
a lot of gotcha opportunities, you know, for the agency. Uh,
for a long time, back in the early two thousand's
is probably when the agency started turning around saying more
than likely rather than being an escaped cap because a
lot of those captive breeders kind of fell out. You know,
(22:06):
when I was a kidulations yeah, and it just wasn't
the thing. I mean, I could remember, believe it or not.
When I was a kid, I knew two people that
I went to a grade school with that had pet
mountain lines. I mean, you know so so, I mean
back in the seventies, you know, it wasn't that odd
(22:27):
of a deal for someone to have a mountain line
as a pet. You know, we still have no proof.
A lot of people try to play gotcha all the
time with us and say, well, gaming Fish says that,
you know, we don't have mountain lines. Well, you know,
we've never said we don't have mountlines. What we've said
for the past forty years or plus years is that
(22:48):
we don't have any evidence of an established, reproducing population
of mountainlines. And has that changed, still has not changed.
We still don't have evidence of a reading population mountain
lions here. We do not. Well, let me ask you this,
do you feel like today in Arkansas there are mountain
lions that are living here year round? I think there
(23:10):
are mountain lions that live here year around. I think
virtually all of the mountain lions that we have documented
sightings of over the past, uh well since two thousand ten,
I feel like they're all males, you know, either young
males or older males. A lot of the picture evidence
translates to them being older males. I'm not talking really
(23:31):
old males, but mature males. And that would be very
characteristic of an expanding population of large carnivores, whether it
be bears or lions. You would start to see these
fringe areas that would start to get satellite males. And uh,
you know a lot of people don't realize with mountain
lions is that you know, you're you're talking about a
(23:54):
young animal that gets pushed out of the population, a
young male that basically gets kicked out on the streets.
You know, it's not something that they're just gonna travel
another fifty miles down the road and establish, you know,
a territory of their own. I mean, you're talking about
animals that have no qualms about traveling hundreds of miles
(24:16):
in order to find a suitable territory that has food,
cover and females. Well, in the absence of females, they're
not going to establish a territory. I mean, it's just
that simple. So when you think of the behavior that
takes place in these animals they move into, say if
(24:37):
they did come from the Dakotas they move into the Missouri,
they go down the Missouri drainage, they're starting to mature.
They're no longer six months old, they're a year old.
They're mature. Male. Uh So, there are a couple of
things that are driving that young mountain lion to exist.
One of them is food and the other one is reproduction.
(25:00):
And until he finds both of those, he's not So
he's looping down into Missouri and going back. Probably he
might be going back. He much might just continue to
keep going until he does find a female. And whether
that means he has to cross four or five six
states to do it, they'll do it. Wow. In the
(25:22):
nineteen nineties movie Dumb and Dumber, Jim Carrey, when he's
confronted with the fact that his girlfriend is leaving him
forever and she gives him an inkling of hope that
perhaps she'll come back to him, he says, so you're
telling I feel like what Myron just said, and talking
(25:42):
about the dispersal of mountain lions and their ability to
travel such long distances give some credibility to the lore
of the Southern mountain lion because we have an established
population of lions in southern Florida and then in the
West and would not be unheard of for lions travel
(26:04):
that distance. So maybe there is something to all these
mountain lions sightings, regardless of the fact that many of
these sightings could have and very well may have been
captive lions released that people were seen. So do you
(26:25):
do you foresee a time like with the so with that,
with the habitat structure that we currently have between here
and these populations, do you forecast a time It might
be twenty years from now, fifty years from now, five
years from now. I don't know, will we have an
established breeding populations line, because what would typically happen, as
(26:47):
I understand dispersal of these large carnivores, is like the
males start making these satellite loops and then at some
point females, you know, like at some point we're gonna
get a picture of a female in Arkansas. Well, you know,
Missouri came up about four believe it's about four years ago.
And they collected some hair off of a confirmed sighting.
(27:09):
They confirmed that it was a female. Uh. The experts
that I have talked to about mountain lions, all of
them have been pretty consistent in saying that if you
do have a female in a geographic area, a male
will finder. It's just a matter of time. When you
do have a female show up, you will have a
(27:30):
breeding population. What I want to kind of talk to
you about now is like mountain lion folklore essentially in
places where they're historically haven't been lions in the last
hundred years. So in Arkansas we have those arcs and washtaws,
which would have these big vast sections of public land
that would be for all of our deer populations would
(27:52):
be less dense populations of deer than on private land.
There's less deer in the mountains than there are in
these agricultural areas, and civilizers, well, it seems to me
that there is a unorthodox shift in mountain lion folklore
in these like backwoods places, and I'm like, well, there's
not enough deer there, Like there there's there's not enough
(28:13):
game for these animals to be living. Like I think
people would have this idea that a mountain lion, if
he was living here, he'd be living way out and
you know x X Mountain, which is far back in there.
But what we're seeing with these lion sightings that you
guys are confirming is that they're not necessarily in the
backwoods there in places with higher deer density. Is that true?
(28:35):
I think that would be the natural place to set
up a territory exactly along the lines of what you're
speaking of. I'll give you an example. Custer, South Dakota,
is a very very small mountain town. And if you
look a lot of the mountain towns up in the
Black Hills, you know, they're very small communities in the
lower portions of these valleys with the road highways running
(28:58):
through them. And when you drive through them, you can
see the edge of town, you know, up on the
side of the mountain over there you can sit to
the left and right. And when we were driving through there,
one of the houndsmen that I was spent some time with,
he'd be like, oh, yeah, you know, a mount line
took a labrador from that guy's house right over there,
and we go down the road and well, that guy
was had his truck parked up at this you know,
(29:21):
this bar or whatever it was sitting on the edge
of town that you could see up there. But it's
on the edge of town. Well, they came down and
drug a deer out of that guy's truck, you know,
and he's telling me all these stories, and uh, you know,
mountain lions just don't have that secretiveness to them that
I really thought they did. I mean, I thought they
would stay, you know, a hundred miles away from a
(29:44):
civilization or whatever, and and really they're not. It kind
of cues back into what you were saying. They're gonna
they're gonna go, and they're gonna set up shop where
food is available, where it's the easiest, and where there's
the most of It would be more natural for mountain
line to set up an area that they're going to
stay in a territory in the heart of the Ozark
(30:07):
National Forest, or would it be more likely that he's
set up in a territory on the fringes of national forest.
Probably more likely to set up a territory on the
fringes of national forest. But you're still talking about an
animal leaven in prime mountain lion habitat. You're talking about
an animal that has home ranges of you know, hundred
plus square miles. So let's talk about where lines have
(30:30):
been seen in Arkansas and how you guys determine that
one is a sighting is valid. Probably a hundred and
fifty plus sightings that people contact us a year now
of those sightings that we're able to have physical evidence of,
whether it be a track, whether it be a game
(30:53):
camera photo, whether it be a phone photo video, whatever else,
something that we have physical evidence that we can go out.
We take a field investigation form. We go out on
any sighting that has physical evidence and we'll record it.
If it's a game camera photo, we're gonna record where
the picture was, you know, whether it was yes, verify
(31:14):
that it was taken from this camera at this spot.
You have background everything. You're doing an investigation to verify
that A, you know, it was a mountain line, B
it was taken at this location. Because there's a lot
of Internet hoaxes going out there. You know this this
mountain line was taken at a friend of mine's, friends, uncle's,
(31:37):
you know, best cousins. Whatever camera last week comes out
that's been floating around the internet for six years and
it was. You know, I was gonna say that if
the game in fish gets a hundred and fifty sightings
per year, I know about fifty of those guys, and
I can tell you they're full of it. But what
bulls right down to it. For the last decade or so,
(31:59):
the amount of sightings that we have been able to
verify and hold onto your seat, the mountain sightings that
we have been able to verify per year averages to
about one wow, one to two sightings per year that
we're able to verify and say yes, that's without a
doubt amount line, What is your personal feeling on all
(32:24):
these other sightings? And just because someone can't verify sighting
doesn't mean that it's not legit. It just means that
they just means that us as a as a conservation
agency here or a scientific agency. I mean, you know,
we can't. I can't go out there and say, well,
we've got a hundred mountain lines in the state because
we've had this many sightings. I mean, I can't gotta
(32:44):
have evidence. I gotta have evidence of it. I gotta
have proof of it. I mean, you know, we don't
just go out there and on on a whim and
and say we've got this mini bear, this mini deers.
So what's your gut about all these other sightings? Are
people wrong or are people right? And it's just not verifiable.
I think about ninety eight percent of the sightings that
(33:07):
we get our misidentification, what are they see in? Uh,
you'd be surprised at the amount of video or picture
sightings that are sent to me every year. And I'm
not talking about three or four. I'm talking about ten's
fifty sixty, you know, maybe more pictures or videos that
(33:28):
are sent to me every year that are housecats house cats?
You mean to tell me that people are mistaken house
cats for mountain lions, a fifteen pound cat versus a
hundred and fifty pound cat. Believe it. Feral housecats are
estimated to number seventy million, maybe even more. They're everywhere,
(33:52):
and people don't understand scale often when they see an
animal and get a picture of it. The biggest misidentification
is by far and away, Uh, domestic house cats are
just feral housecats. House cats in general. UH do have
a lot of bobcat pictures that are sent to me,
even videos of bobcats. And you know, there's some anatomical
(34:16):
features that bobcats possessed that housecats or mountain lions don't possess.
One of them, of course, is obvious, the bob tail.
But I've seen a lot of pictures where a hind
foot actually looks like a continuation of a tail, and
then you look up at the head of it and
you see these big, huge white dots on the backs
of the ears, which are specific to bobcats, not mountain lions.
(34:40):
Mountain lions don't have white patches on the back side. Okay,
here's the here's the question of the hour. Okay, I've
found living in the South, living in Arkansas, there's two
kinds of people. There's people that have seen mountain lions
and there are people that have not. So myran means,
taken out of his position at the Arkansas Game and
(35:01):
Fish Commission, have you ever seen a lion mountain lion
in Arkansas? Good? Thank goodness, firing. I wish I had.
But you know, I mean, you know, I tell people
this all the time, the amount of people that have
seen mountain lions and everything else. I mean, if you
think about that, it's it's it's a lot of people,
a lot of people claimed to have seen him, and uh,
(35:23):
I'm not here to tell anybody that they didn't see
what they thought they saw. We're up to like since
two thousand and ten, we're up to nineteen verified sightings
in the last ten years in Arkansas. To understand why
people so badly want to believe in mountain lions, we're
(35:45):
gonna have to understand a bit about human nature. Dr.
Richard Back has been a clinical psychologist since nineteen seventy nine,
and he has some unique insight into why humans act
the way they do. Dr Back of the of the hundreds,
(36:06):
if not thousands, of mountain lions sightings that people would
have claimed over the years to have happened here in Arkansas,
and the actual number of verified sightings being so small,
why do people Why do people believe that they've seen
a lion when statistically they probably actually didn't. Well, it's
(36:28):
probably two things going on there. One is that it's
kind of an exciting thing to think is possible. And
if people have any sort of belief established already, you know,
whether they've read articles on mountain lions, or they had
an uncle or grandfather talked about the mountain lions. If
(36:50):
there's some connection somewhere and the person probably can't even
identify where it was. But if it's an established fact
that there are mountain lions, then when they see something
that can be fit into that perception, they'll they'll they'll
tend to do it, and then you can't talk them
(37:12):
out of it no matter what you show them, and
they are really confirming what they already believe or picked
up somewhere. Is there a psychological term that would describe
somebody that had a belief that may not even be true,
and then something happened and they slotted that event that
happened into a belief that wasn't real. Is there is
(37:35):
there a psychological term for that. Yes, it's called confirmation bias,
and it's just practically every person has it but is
unaware of it and would certainly deny it if you ask.
It's all over our lives. I guess, yeah, it's all
over our lives. We end up believing things not even
(37:55):
knowing where that comes from. In terms of what we
think is the best model car or or the best
football team or the best state to live in. We
end up believing that and we couldn't really even probably
voice reasons why We just like that, and then we
cherry pick any sword of evidence, whether it's from newspapers
(38:19):
or sports announcers or neighbors. But we cherry pick in
terms of selecting information that supports what we already believe. Yeah,
So it would be like really reasonable if if you
were a young child growing up in somebody that you
respected or maybe some of you didn't respect, told you
(38:40):
that there were mountain lines here, regardless of that was
like patently false, you would probably go through your life
with a slot in your mind that there are potentially
mountain lines here. So if you saw a flash a
brown fur across the road, that might just easily slot
into that place and it just be fact inside of
(39:01):
your mind. Yes, yeah, that would happen. Can you tell
me about naive realism what that means. Yeah, Naive realism is,
I guess, in a sense, the foundation of confirmation bias.
Naive realism is really kind of uh, fancy term for
what I think we've probably all noticed, and that is
almost everyone else we deal with thinks that they're right. Uh.
(39:25):
And that's because most people do think and believe that
their way of perceiving the world and interpreting data and
selecting and making decisions. We all believe that we've come
up on the right way of living life. So it's
like you could be living just kind of you could
(39:46):
just kind of have this false reality. Yeah, well yeah,
lots of people do. And if anyone tries to convince
them that they have a false reality, then they fall
back on confirmation by us to really ignore anything they're
saying that disputes what they believe and that, but they'll
select all sorts of data that confirms there body confirms
(40:08):
or bias. This is a great place to hear a
story that actually happened. Scott Brown is my longtime good friend.
He's a veteran woodsman, and I trust whatever the guy says.
You're gonna get a kick out of this story. But
I want you to ask yourself, which character in this
(40:30):
story are you? So you know where I where I work,
we sell hunting licenses, and usually the first the week
right before modern gun Deer season opens, it just gets
really busy. So I'm back there one night, I'm helping
out and just trying to help him sell licenses, and
(40:51):
a guy walks up and he says, Hey, I need
to buy a license, And I said okay, no problem.
I said what license you need and he said, well,
I just need the Big Game license, the annual Big
Game license. And said, okay, no problem. And so I
asked for his driver's license and I'm I'm plugging his information.
He says, well, that license allowed me to kill one
of these and I said, what is it? And he
(41:13):
shows me his phone. He's got this picture on his
phone and when he shows it to me, it is,
without question a bobcat. I mean it's it's, without question
a bobcat. I've seen a lot of bobcats and I'm
a hundred percent certain it was a bobcat. Had speckles
on its belly. I mean it was. It's a bobcat,
no question. And I said, yeah, yeah, it's it's a
(41:35):
trail camera picture. Something he had on his trail camera
there around his house somewhere. And I said, yeah, yeah,
you shoot bobcats, coyotes and allow you shoot all that stuff.
And when I said that, he was just I mean,
he just snapped at me. He just said, that's not
a bobcat. And I said, oh, it wasn't, and he
said no, and he kind of hands the phone back
(41:55):
over to me again. I'm thinking maybe I made a mistake.
So I look at it again and I come to
the same conclusion. It is a bobcat. I mean, there's
just no question about it. And of course, you know,
I didn't say anything. I just said, yeah, yeah, sure enough,
you know, and just kind of blew him off, you know,
as if he wants to believe that, he can believe that.
(42:17):
I suppose. Well, it gets better. So as he tells
me that there's three or four guys waiting and they're
they're just standing around us. They're waiting on us, you know,
so they can get a license. And the guy goes,
did you say you have a mountain line on camera?
And guy said yeah, yeah. So he kind of turns
his phone around and shows this other guy and it
kind of draws a crowd, and there's a three or
(42:38):
four guys there and they're all like, oh, man, sure enough,
you know it's a it's a big mountain line. Look
at that thing. And they're all just handing around there.
In the span of about one minute, he had convinced
five people standing back there that he had a mountain
line on camera, and every one of them believed it
and had no trouble believing it. The only person by
(43:00):
back there that thought otherwise was me, and it was
it was because it was clearly a bobcat. This is
how it started. Yeah, And I thought, man, this is
how the legends and the myths and all these things
you hear about people of seeing mountain lions get started.
It just takes one person to see one. Now, all
those five guys they left, I went wherever they went
(43:20):
for the rest of the day and told how many
people they saw a mountain lion on some guys game camera.
And then thus, there's a mountain lion around and everybody's
seen it, when actually only one guy saw it. It
wasn't even a mountain lion. Now back to Myron, do
you want to delve into the black panther myth? Absolutely yes.
(43:43):
I meant to say that. In the South, particularly Myron,
you hear this. You hear people talking about black panthers
like I with my own ears, have heard countless grown
men that I believe to be like rational thinking people
tell me that they've seen black panthers. What's the deal
(44:06):
with that? Well, I'll speak in scientific terms of black panthers.
We can't have this discussion without talking about black panthers.
My old, my, what a topic. Before we start, let
me ask you a question. Do you believe in black
panthers in North America? If you do or you don't,
(44:29):
I gay wrong? Te you? You know some people that do,
and they're probably normal, maybe even successful humans. I want
you to think about that for a minute. I was
shocked when my own father told me this story. When
I was a kid, would go to Bucks Nord ain't
(44:50):
Ali and Aunt Ali. They weren't an they ain't ain't
Ali and ain't Ali. And then you'd go down to
the Ali's house and she had the dog trot, and
you'd spend a night down there, and you'd hear a
panthers scream every now and then. Now, do you I
don't have to be honest with you. I would be
afraid that it was this cognitive disconnect where Lewin had
(45:13):
talked about it so much, and they talked about it
so much that when you mean, when you were there,
it was like in this place you can hear panthers,
oh man. And when you drove you, when you drove
into Bucks, North, it was like if you were a
city boy and guys like you and I that have
a heart for the outdoors, even as a little kid.
(45:36):
I mean, it would just be so exciting. The trees
were over the road, and when you pulled up an
ain't Alley's house, the yard was all sandy dirt, with
doodle bugs everywhere in this big old dog trot down
the middle, and a big old porch across the front,
and june bugs. We'd always catch june bugs and fly
those june bugs and we doodle bug and then at dark,
(46:00):
you know, case man, he's thinking panthers would scream, or
you know mountain lions. I think there's panther. I think
there's black mountain lions myself. Do you realize Well, I
mean I don't have a proof of it. I just
always have heard that. You've heard so you've heard of
cognitive DIC. I mean I just believed the propaganda. You
so you you have like you're seventy two years old,
(46:22):
that in Arkansas whole life, and you believe it. I'm
not worried about you believing that. I'm just trying to
get to the root of where that comes from. Hey
who told Hey, Hey, when when I when I was
a kid, when when you'd have a group of kids
around and your favorite aunt would be there and she
(46:43):
would it would say, hey, tell us a story, and
they go, well, you know, there's just a little family
and when they were you know, they were walking home
one night and all of a sudden they looked around.
There's a black panther and they take the booty off
the baby. And you know those stories that just was
all through was just always there. Yeah, you know, throw
(47:03):
a booty off, and then the diaper, and then the shirt,
and then all of a sudden he pitched the baby back. Anyway,
but i'd hear I'd hear adults talking about black panthers.
Now back to Myron, People for generations have called panthers
(47:30):
mountain lions, catamounts, cougars, lions. They're all the same animal,
you know. They have a whole litany of common localized
names that people have called them, but when it comes
right down to it, they're all mountain lions. They're all
the same animals. There's no other species in North America
of big cat, no currently on the land, well not
(47:53):
in the United States anyway. Well, jaguars down inside are
the only animal large cat that has known to exist
or have occurrence for a melanistic color face, which is
a quote black color phase are two of the large cats,
jaguars and leopards. Okay, so there has never been a
(48:19):
documented melanistic color phase of the mountain lion in history. Okay,
so not even in people, not even in the Smithsonian Institute.
So if you think in terms of black panthers, what
most people are calling black panthers are black mountain lines,
(48:43):
and uh, scientifically the animals never existed. I think a
lot of it is folklore. I think a lot of
it is uh, misidentification, folklore, you know, things of that nature.
And uh, I mean, is it is it plausible that
(49:03):
a large black cat, jaguar or leopard could never occur
in Arkansas? It could if one of two things happened.
Either A it escaped from someone's cage somewhere and it
was a jaguar or a leopard, or b you had
maybe a jaguar move up from Central America into Arkansas,
(49:27):
which is just not plausible. Uh, you'd probably have just
as good a chance to see in an ostrich as
you would have black you know, jaguar. I have a
lot of people you know that getting mad at me. Well,
you're trying to tell me I didn't say it. No,
I don't try to tell anybody they didn't see what
they think they saw, or someone they know didn't see
(49:47):
what they think through saw. I just stand on the
on the scientific facts of the issue and the scientific
fact behind the whole black panther deal. It's just that
that particular animal does not exist or it's never been
documented to occur in a melanistic color face and black
color face. Believing and trusting people is part of the
(50:14):
community structure of humankind. It's part of what separates us
from the animals and what's made us biologically successful as
a species. If we doubted everything people said and demanded
proof of everything, we wouldn't have made it past the
difficulty of our archaic past of slinging rocks and stuff
and huddling and caves. Blind trust in our fellow man
(50:39):
is evidence of our humanity, and deep down I believe
that we want to believe people. Deep down, we want
to trust our brother or sister. If there is any
good in the folk lore of the Mountain lion in
the black Panther, it's found in the social mechanics of
wanting to believe the best of your neighbor and taking
(51:02):
your friend at his word. Perhaps we need some more
of that in today's time. Though mountain lions were certainly
gone for the large part of the last hundred years
in the South, wouldn't you know it, The truth has
swung back around and found us still sitting here believing
mountain lions are back. And this is a conservation success story.
(51:25):
But it's also a story of how the truth, though
temporarily labeled as folklore and it was, has once again
been found as truthful. Mountain lions are here, and maybe
they always have been. And if anybody ever doubts that
Gary Nwcomb or Brent Reeves did not see a mountain lion,
(51:50):
I'll punch him in the teeth, because I'll believe those
two until the day I die. Long live the beast,
and long live the good word of our brother and
sister m HM.
My name is Clay Nukelem and I'm a seventh generation
or Kansan. I'm a husband, a father, a hunter, a
mule skinner, a writer. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm a person
of faith. We're starting a new podcast here a meat eater,
and I hope you'll follow along. I'm interested in that
intersection of where tradition and contemporary life meet. On this podcast,
(00:25):
we're gonna look back into history and find relevance for today.
I like looking for insight and unlikely places, searching for
relevance and things that have been forgotten. And I love
telling the story of Americans who lived their life close
to the land. This podcast is going to be an
(00:46):
efficient listen with an engaging glance into history and an
interesting guest where we'll explore unique people, unique topics, and
unique stories. I hope that you'll follow along on the
air Grease Podcast. There it is. That's the name of
our new podcast, the Bear Grease Podcast. Why the name
(01:09):
bear Grease? If you know much about me, you know
that I love some bear grease, which is the rendered
fat of a bear, literally the cooked lard of a
bear that's turned into oil at one time. Bear grease
or bear oil was a highly valued commodity and it
was used for cooking and all other sorts of practical stuff.
(01:31):
It was even used as currency. It had a ton
of value, and today most people wouldn't know anything about it.
Technology and modern times have buried some pretty cool stuff
that we're rediscovering and we're redefining now even what's relevant
by looking back, some of the things that time has
(01:53):
forgotten are ripe for a cultural resurrection. Bear Grease is
a metaphor or and as you follow along, I think
you'll begin to understand what I mean. How certain are
(02:15):
you that you saw two mountain lions? No doubt? Have
you ever seen a lion? Mountain lion in Arkansas? I
think there's panther. I think there's black mountain lions. Myself.
On this episode of the Bear Grease Podcast will be
exploring the myth of the Southern mountain lion and how
(02:37):
the lore or maybe the hard science, we don't know
which one has forever and inextricably connected itself to Southern culture.
We're going to talk to some mountain lion believers, a biologists,
and even a psychologist to get some answers about lions
and about human nature. Well, I mean, I don't have
(02:59):
any proof of it. I just always have heard that.
You've heard it, you've heard of cognitive I mean I
just believed the propaganda. My name is Clay Nukelem and
this is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things
(03:21):
forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and
where we'll tell the story of Americans who lived their
lives close to the land. There are two kinds of
people in the South, those that have seen mountain lions
(03:44):
in those that haven't. Both of these groups carry their
own unique stigmas, perhaps both equally as wrought with irony
as the other. They seem to huddle tightly and cult
like clans of believers and unbelievers. But to understand the
tension between those who have seen mountain lions and those
(04:04):
who haven't, and yes, there is tension, you'll have to
understand a bit of history. The mountain lion Puma con
color is a large tan colored feline weighing up to
two dred pounds or more. It, along with the jaguar,
which are extremely rare and primarily live south of the
(04:27):
US border in Mexico, are the only large cats in
North America since the extinction of the giant cats of
the Pleistocene, which basically was an epoch of time that
ended about ten thousand years ago. These Pleistocene cats included
saber tooth cats, American lions, American jaguars, the American cheetah.
(04:48):
This place used to be crawling with giant purring predators. However,
today we've pretty much got one large cat in the
United States and Canada. The old mountain lion or puma
or panther, or the painter or the catamount all the
same animal, but they have different names and different regions.
(05:09):
You might recognize one of these, But the mountain lion's
native range extends from the Canadian Yukon all the way
down to the Andes Mountains of South America, and from
the east and west its range goes from the Atlantic
Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. This is fascinating that they
are the most widespread terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere.
(05:34):
To bring it home simply to North America. Prior to
European settlement, they had the widest geographic spread of any
large mammal, more than white tailed deer, more than elk,
or than Buffalo more than anything, and here in lies
are issue in They used to be here. But by
(05:55):
the turn of the twentieth century, mountain lions were extirpated
from almost one hundred percent of their eastern range in
the entire Eastern Deciduous Forest. The word extra pated means
that they didn't go extinct, but they were removed from
a specific region. The Eastern Deciduous Forest basically extends from
(06:19):
east Texas all the way to Maine, and from Wisconsin
all the way down to Florida. Basically, it's the eastern
one third of the United States. It's worth noting that
mountain lions in southern Florida held on and were never
entirely gone, perhaps making them the only mountain lions east
of the Mississippi for a very long time. Or were
(06:41):
they have they been in much of the Eastern Deciduous
Forest all this time, just right under our noses. A
lot of people think so, but for sure throughout the
twentieth century, mountain lion populations only survived, according to science anyway,
in the rugged out in this regions of the western
(07:01):
US and Canada. Though lions haven't been in the South
for the last hundred years, or at least that's what
the government biologists tell us. Lots of people still see them.
In fact, I know some of these hillbillies that aren't
afraid to stand up against the statistics and against the
science and boldly proclaimed their eyewitness convictions. Some might even
(07:26):
call it conservation slander. The myth of the Southern mountain
lion is so strongly imbedded into our culture they might
as well actually be here. Or maybe they are here,
maybe they've been here all along. The only way that
I know how to get to the bottom of this
is to hear some of these stories for myself, and
(07:47):
some of these stories are pretty close to home. Just
for the record, I've never seen a mountain lion in
the South, but my dear sweet dad, Gary Newcom has,
And here's his story. When was it? Tell me when
(08:08):
it was? Oh, I would say twenty years ago, years
ago to say late nineties, Well, yeah, probably probably. And
I was in one of my favorite hunting areas, driving
on a Warehouser road. But then I looked to my left,
and when I turned my truck in the middle of
(08:29):
the road to make that turn, I looked up there
and there was what I thought was a bobcat. I thought,
that's a big old bobcat, is it? Yeah? Yeah, it's
like it's later in the afternoon, but still real clear light.
I mean, it wasn't like dusty or anything. And I
thought a bobcat. And then I saw the tail and
(08:50):
I go, I look, yeah, it's some outline and you
know it was hundred yards you know, it was pretty
good ways off. You saw a distinctive just think deep,
no question about it. So what color was I want
to say blue? Yeah it was. It was just a
tan colored animals. Yeah, I mean like, okay, so you're
(09:13):
my dad, and I inherently trust your judgment. You've been
around seventy two years. How certain are you if you
if there was a way to tell, I mean, like,
if there was really a way to know whether it
was a mountain lie or not in your life depended
on how certain are you that it was a mountain,
it would be Oh yeah, I mean, I don't know
(09:36):
what has a tail that this as long as the body,
it seemed to me, like, what did it do? Was
just standing the road and ran on It took his time,
came across the road. By the time I saw it
as pretty close to the ditch, and and if if
I remember correctly, it looked at me. So it didn't
just darted. No, no, no, it was moving slow, so
you gotta look at it. Yeah, and so, but I
(09:58):
didn't catch it from over here to here. I caught
it towards the you know, just maybe two or three
steps from the ditch, and then it just eased off
in the ditch and then went into the cut over
you know, ten year old cut. And uh, when I
saw the tale, you know, I sit here, I's just
(10:18):
thinking mountain lion, you know, I mean, it's just I mean,
what what has it said? Yeah, Brent Reeves would be
considered a hill billy if he didn't live in the
Arkansas Delta or the swamp country. Regardless of semantics. He's
a close friend of mine, veteran outdoorsman, and he's been
(10:40):
in law enforcement for the last thirty years. I've only
known him to stretch the truth on occasion. And he
claims to not just have seen one mountain lion, but too.
I'll let you judge his story. So, Brent, tell me
about not one mountain lion, but two mountain lions that
(11:00):
you've seen in Arkansas. I will gladly relate the following.
The first one was probably in nineteen I'm gonna say
it was an eight eight. Me and three other guys
were working for a private UH timber management company, and
we were in Ashley County, Arkansas, which is in right
(11:20):
next to two counties away from from Mississippi and southeast Arkansas.
We were driving down the timber company road going to
manage September is probably nine o'clock in the morning, good daylight,
and a panther, mountain lion, cougar, whatever you want to
call it, jumped out in front of our truck at
about thirty yards and loped down the road in front
of us for twenty thirty seconds, and we're right behind it,
(11:45):
and it ran off into a section September that we
drove down another quarter of a mile and went in
ourselves to cruise the timber see how much timber was
in there. That was the at first one I've ever seen.
And we got back that afternoon. There was no cell
phones or anything back during that time. So when we
got back to the office that afternoon, I called a
(12:08):
friend and we then reported to the Game and Fish
and we got a call back I think the next
day that they had had reports to that in the
area and actually attributed it to one that had escaped captivity.
So it was it was known in that area to
be rambling around. And so that wasn't the only mountain
(12:30):
lion you've seen, You've seen another one. How did that?
My friend David Boudra and I we're going coon hunt
one evening. This would have been even a real name.
It is. It is getting fisher and Fisher it is.
It is a real name, and he can attest to it.
But but David and I were going coon hunting one
(12:51):
evening in Cleveland County where I grew up, and it's
dusky dark, you don't have to drive with your lights on.
And we were driving next to this big clear cut
fresh clear cut, and there was two or three big
trees that weren't mergetable for logs or anything. So the
timber company left him out there. And this tree was
probably it was a big white oak tree. It was
(13:13):
probably hundred and fifty two hundred yards away from the
timber access road and we're driving down through there. It's
in the fall of the year, so the leaves are
coming off pretty good and I look out there and
I can see a silhouette of what I thought was
a turkey, and I told David, I said, David looked
at the big old turkey saitting on the limb out there,
and he said, yeah, I see it. Well, I had
(13:34):
my coon hunting light on. I just turned my light
on see if I could see if it was a
gobbler or a hen. And when I turned it on,
the eyes were glowing back at me, which turkey's eyes
don't normally do that. And we slowed down and David said, man,
that's not a that's not a turkey. And we slowed
down to look at it, and it turned started walking
down that limb, and you could plainly see that big
(13:57):
long tail out from out behind it. That thing walked
down towards the trunk of the tree, got to where
the limb leaves the trunk of the tree, put his
feet down, their paws and just dropped down into that
clear cut. And then we turned around and went back
the other direction and turned their dogs loose. Let me
(14:17):
ask you this, on both of these sightings, now thirty
years later, if your life depended on it, and there
was a way to know the absolute truth and they
said they're gonna burn your house down if you're wrong.
How certain are you that you saw two mountain lions?
No doubt? And the thing about it is, both times
(14:40):
I had a witness with me. Of course, one of
them was a coon. I'm gonna I'm gonna need their
phone numbers. One of them is, I say was one
of them is a coupon hunter, and they you know
he's not vaccinated against lyon. But I'm telling you no,
no doubt about it. I'll let you be the edge
of whether you believe these two stories or not. But
(15:02):
I've got somebody that has the credentials to validate them
or take away all their credibility. I'm not sure which
one it will be. Myron Means is a statewide large
carnivore program coordinator for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission.
If there's an expert on mountain lions around these parts,
it's my Iron Means. I think you can give us
(15:24):
some insight into the facts of whether the mythical mountain
lions of the South are real or if they're just
a farcical relic of folklore passed on from a time
when they were actually here. Myra and When I first
met you ten eleven years ago, you were the Arkansas
(15:45):
Bear Coordinator black Bear Bio. Just that's right, and now
you're not. Your your title has changed. What's your new
title with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. My new
title is Statewide Large Carnivore Program Coordinator for Arkansas Game
and Fish Commission. That's a mouthful. Something happened because at
(16:06):
one time there was just one large carnivore acknowledged by
the Game and Fish and your title change, which indicates
what happened. Well long about ten years ago, right after
I took the bear program coordinator position, we started seeing
mountlines in the state. And it's not that they weren't
(16:29):
seen prior to that, it's just that, you know, we
didn't have there were very very few ways to uh
document a siting. I mean, you know, if you think
back historically, people didn't have game cameras back much in
the eighties, you know, and that's come that's kind of
come along in the past fifteen years or so. But anyway,
(16:50):
what basically what happened was mountainlins started showing up in
the state from time to time, and UH, Game and
Fish recognized that, you know, you need to have someone
that's kind of coordinating the sightings, coordinating the verifications, uh,
and just kind of packaging mountainlin stuff. So it's not
(17:11):
necessarily that now there are lions here and there weren't before,
but we're we just know about them. Is that what
I'm hearing you say? That's right, that's right. You know,
for a lot came primarily because of game cameras or
you know, if someone has one like on a phone
video or something like that. But it's primarily been the
game cameras. Uh. That's really what has helped us, you know,
(17:36):
document the occurrence and mountlines in the States. So here's
here's the question. Where did they come from? Because bears
mountain lions, this would be historic mountain lion range here
in Arkansas and in all of the eastern United States.
So where did our lines come from? Well, that's ah,
that's a million dollar question. Who knows. The only evidence
(18:00):
that we have currently was from a mountain line that
was shot by a deer hunter back into two thousand
and sixteen. Now that was harvested or shot in Bradley
County by a deer hunter. That mountain lion was also
previously documented on a cash in Marion County about two
months prior to that, So that would have been in Uh,
(18:23):
that was in two thousand and fourteen. I'm sorry. Uh.
So the DNA evidence that we collected from that cat
in both instances, UH told us that number one, it's
the same cat. UH told us that number two, that
cat had origins from the South Dakota population. Now that
doesn't necessarily mean that cat was born in South Dakota.
(18:47):
It just means that it's d n A origins came
from that South Dakota population. Now, if you think of
it in terms of where would it most likely come from, Well,
there's established mountain populations in the Dakotas, South Dakota, which
would be north and west of us, slightly primarily north,
(19:09):
but still in the Mississippi River drainage for the most part. Well,
it'd be kind of it'd be probably closer tied to
the Missouri River drainage. Uh. There's an established population in
northwest Nebraska. There's an established population out in the Panhandle
of Oklahoma. There's an established population of lines in the
(19:31):
Panhandle of Texas and in southern Texas. So I mean, uh,
and of course you have the Florida panthers in Florida.
So those are really the the closest quote established, how
many that would be from here? You know, the closest
population would probably be the Panhandle of Oklahoma, you know,
out in the Black Hills area. But is it likely
(19:54):
that those caps would move all the way across Oklahoma?
Probably not, But because the travel corridors in the habitat
just isn't there. Is it likely that a cat could
move out of the Dakotas across northern Nebraska, uh into
eastern Nebraska and hit the Missouri River drainage and follow
the Missouri River down through the ozarks of Missouri and
(20:18):
then into the ozarks of Arkansas and then go who
knows where else. That's probably the most likely. So it's
almost like highways, like habitat highways, like you could you
could track good lion habitat all the way back to
the Dakotas and Nebraska. Sure you could. I mean, you
know there's gonna be some spancees of maybe hundred hundred
(20:41):
fifty mile maybe even two hundred mile gaps, But you
have to think and in travel terms, you know, that's
something that a mountain lion could do. In a day
or two. Byron, what about captive lions getting out? Because
I remember growing up in western Arkansas, you'd hear the
odd persons say they saw line and it was always
(21:02):
thrown back up on cap. They said, somebody had a
captive line and they let it lose. What do you
think of that? Yeah, And a matter of fact, you know,
that was really kind of the official, I guess position
of the agency through the eighties and nineties, that more
than likely if someone saw a mountain line, more than
likely it was the result of an escaped cat or
(21:23):
some a cat that someone couldn't care for anymore. They removing,
maybe the owner died, maybe something, and so what are
they gonna do? Just turn it out? So that was
really kind of the official position of the agency for
a couple of decades. Uh, that more n likely if
you saw a cat, it was probably a release cat
(21:43):
or an escaped cat. You know, that takes all the
fun I've seen a mountain line. Well, it certainly presented
a lot of gotcha opportunities, you know, for the agency. Uh,
for a long time, back in the early two thousand's
is probably when the agency started turning around saying more
than likely rather than being an escaped cap because a
lot of those captive breeders kind of fell out. You know,
(22:06):
when I was a kidulations yeah, and it just wasn't
the thing. I mean, I could remember, believe it or not.
When I was a kid, I knew two people that
I went to a grade school with that had pet
mountain lines. I mean, you know so so, I mean
back in the seventies, you know, it wasn't that odd
(22:27):
of a deal for someone to have a mountain line
as a pet. You know, we still have no proof.
A lot of people try to play gotcha all the
time with us and say, well, gaming Fish says that,
you know, we don't have mountain lines. Well, you know,
we've never said we don't have mountlines. What we've said
for the past forty years or plus years is that
(22:48):
we don't have any evidence of an established, reproducing population
of mountainlines. And has that changed, still has not changed.
We still don't have evidence of a reading population mountain
lions here. We do not. Well, let me ask you this,
do you feel like today in Arkansas there are mountain
lions that are living here year round? I think there
(23:10):
are mountain lions that live here year around. I think
virtually all of the mountain lions that we have documented
sightings of over the past, uh well since two thousand ten,
I feel like they're all males, you know, either young
males or older males. A lot of the picture evidence
translates to them being older males. I'm not talking really
(23:31):
old males, but mature males. And that would be very
characteristic of an expanding population of large carnivores, whether it
be bears or lions. You would start to see these
fringe areas that would start to get satellite males. And uh,
you know a lot of people don't realize with mountain
lions is that you know, you're you're talking about a
(23:54):
young animal that gets pushed out of the population, a
young male that basically gets kicked out on the streets.
You know, it's not something that they're just gonna travel
another fifty miles down the road and establish, you know,
a territory of their own. I mean, you're talking about
animals that have no qualms about traveling hundreds of miles
(24:16):
in order to find a suitable territory that has food,
cover and females. Well, in the absence of females, they're
not going to establish a territory. I mean, it's just
that simple. So when you think of the behavior that
takes place in these animals they move into, say if
(24:37):
they did come from the Dakotas they move into the Missouri,
they go down the Missouri drainage, they're starting to mature.
They're no longer six months old, they're a year old.
They're mature. Male. Uh So, there are a couple of
things that are driving that young mountain lion to exist.
One of them is food and the other one is reproduction.
(25:00):
And until he finds both of those, he's not So
he's looping down into Missouri and going back. Probably he
might be going back. He much might just continue to
keep going until he does find a female. And whether
that means he has to cross four or five six
states to do it, they'll do it. Wow. In the
(25:22):
nineteen nineties movie Dumb and Dumber, Jim Carrey, when he's
confronted with the fact that his girlfriend is leaving him
forever and she gives him an inkling of hope that
perhaps she'll come back to him, he says, so you're
telling I feel like what Myron just said, and talking
(25:42):
about the dispersal of mountain lions and their ability to
travel such long distances give some credibility to the lore
of the Southern mountain lion because we have an established
population of lions in southern Florida and then in the
West and would not be unheard of for lions travel
(26:04):
that distance. So maybe there is something to all these
mountain lions sightings, regardless of the fact that many of
these sightings could have and very well may have been
captive lions released that people were seen. So do you
(26:25):
do you foresee a time like with the so with that,
with the habitat structure that we currently have between here
and these populations, do you forecast a time It might
be twenty years from now, fifty years from now, five
years from now. I don't know, will we have an
established breeding populations line, because what would typically happen, as
(26:47):
I understand dispersal of these large carnivores, is like the
males start making these satellite loops and then at some
point females, you know, like at some point we're gonna
get a picture of a female in Arkansas. Well, you know,
Missouri came up about four believe it's about four years ago.
And they collected some hair off of a confirmed sighting.
(27:09):
They confirmed that it was a female. Uh. The experts
that I have talked to about mountain lions, all of
them have been pretty consistent in saying that if you
do have a female in a geographic area, a male
will finder. It's just a matter of time. When you
do have a female show up, you will have a
(27:30):
breeding population. What I want to kind of talk to
you about now is like mountain lion folklore essentially in
places where they're historically haven't been lions in the last
hundred years. So in Arkansas we have those arcs and washtaws,
which would have these big vast sections of public land
that would be for all of our deer populations would
(27:52):
be less dense populations of deer than on private land.
There's less deer in the mountains than there are in
these agricultural areas, and civilizers, well, it seems to me
that there is a unorthodox shift in mountain lion folklore
in these like backwoods places, and I'm like, well, there's
not enough deer there, Like there there's there's not enough
(28:13):
game for these animals to be living. Like I think
people would have this idea that a mountain lion, if
he was living here, he'd be living way out and
you know x X Mountain, which is far back in there.
But what we're seeing with these lion sightings that you
guys are confirming is that they're not necessarily in the
backwoods there in places with higher deer density. Is that true?
(28:35):
I think that would be the natural place to set
up a territory exactly along the lines of what you're
speaking of. I'll give you an example. Custer, South Dakota,
is a very very small mountain town. And if you
look a lot of the mountain towns up in the
Black Hills, you know, they're very small communities in the
lower portions of these valleys with the road highways running
(28:58):
through them. And when you drive through them, you can
see the edge of town, you know, up on the
side of the mountain over there you can sit to
the left and right. And when we were driving through there,
one of the houndsmen that I was spent some time with,
he'd be like, oh, yeah, you know, a mount line
took a labrador from that guy's house right over there,
and we go down the road and well, that guy
was had his truck parked up at this you know,
(29:21):
this bar or whatever it was sitting on the edge
of town that you could see up there. But it's
on the edge of town. Well, they came down and
drug a deer out of that guy's truck, you know,
and he's telling me all these stories, and uh, you know,
mountain lions just don't have that secretiveness to them that
I really thought they did. I mean, I thought they
would stay, you know, a hundred miles away from a
(29:44):
civilization or whatever, and and really they're not. It kind
of cues back into what you were saying. They're gonna
they're gonna go, and they're gonna set up shop where
food is available, where it's the easiest, and where there's
the most of It would be more natural for mountain
line to set up an area that they're going to
stay in a territory in the heart of the Ozark
(30:07):
National Forest, or would it be more likely that he's
set up in a territory on the fringes of national forest.
Probably more likely to set up a territory on the
fringes of national forest. But you're still talking about an
animal leaven in prime mountain lion habitat. You're talking about
an animal that has home ranges of you know, hundred
plus square miles. So let's talk about where lines have
(30:30):
been seen in Arkansas and how you guys determine that
one is a sighting is valid. Probably a hundred and
fifty plus sightings that people contact us a year now
of those sightings that we're able to have physical evidence of,
whether it be a track, whether it be a game
(30:53):
camera photo, whether it be a phone photo video, whatever else,
something that we have physical evidence that we can go out.
We take a field investigation form. We go out on
any sighting that has physical evidence and we'll record it.
If it's a game camera photo, we're gonna record where
the picture was, you know, whether it was yes, verify
(31:14):
that it was taken from this camera at this spot.
You have background everything. You're doing an investigation to verify
that A, you know, it was a mountain line, B
it was taken at this location. Because there's a lot
of Internet hoaxes going out there. You know this this
mountain line was taken at a friend of mine's, friends, uncle's,
(31:37):
you know, best cousins. Whatever camera last week comes out
that's been floating around the internet for six years and
it was. You know, I was gonna say that if
the game in fish gets a hundred and fifty sightings
per year, I know about fifty of those guys, and
I can tell you they're full of it. But what
bulls right down to it. For the last decade or so,
(31:59):
the amount of sightings that we have been able to
verify and hold onto your seat, the mountain sightings that
we have been able to verify per year averages to
about one wow, one to two sightings per year that
we're able to verify and say yes, that's without a
doubt amount line, What is your personal feeling on all
(32:24):
these other sightings? And just because someone can't verify sighting
doesn't mean that it's not legit. It just means that
they just means that us as a as a conservation
agency here or a scientific agency. I mean, you know,
we can't. I can't go out there and say, well,
we've got a hundred mountain lines in the state because
we've had this many sightings. I mean, I can't gotta
(32:44):
have evidence. I gotta have evidence of it. I gotta
have proof of it. I mean, you know, we don't
just go out there and on on a whim and
and say we've got this mini bear, this mini deers.
So what's your gut about all these other sightings? Are
people wrong or are people right? And it's just not verifiable.
I think about ninety eight percent of the sightings that
(33:07):
we get our misidentification, what are they see in? Uh,
you'd be surprised at the amount of video or picture
sightings that are sent to me every year. And I'm
not talking about three or four. I'm talking about ten's
fifty sixty, you know, maybe more pictures or videos that
(33:28):
are sent to me every year that are housecats house cats?
You mean to tell me that people are mistaken house
cats for mountain lions, a fifteen pound cat versus a
hundred and fifty pound cat. Believe it. Feral housecats are
estimated to number seventy million, maybe even more. They're everywhere,
(33:52):
and people don't understand scale often when they see an
animal and get a picture of it. The biggest misidentification
is by far and away, Uh, domestic house cats are
just feral housecats. House cats in general. UH do have
a lot of bobcat pictures that are sent to me,
even videos of bobcats. And you know, there's some anatomical
(34:16):
features that bobcats possessed that housecats or mountain lions don't possess.
One of them, of course, is obvious, the bob tail.
But I've seen a lot of pictures where a hind
foot actually looks like a continuation of a tail, and
then you look up at the head of it and
you see these big, huge white dots on the backs
of the ears, which are specific to bobcats, not mountain lions.
(34:40):
Mountain lions don't have white patches on the back side. Okay,
here's the here's the question of the hour. Okay, I've
found living in the South, living in Arkansas, there's two
kinds of people. There's people that have seen mountain lions
and there are people that have not. So myran means,
taken out of his position at the Arkansas Game and
(35:01):
Fish Commission, have you ever seen a lion mountain lion
in Arkansas? Good? Thank goodness, firing. I wish I had.
But you know, I mean, you know, I tell people
this all the time, the amount of people that have
seen mountain lions and everything else. I mean, if you
think about that, it's it's it's a lot of people,
a lot of people claimed to have seen him, and uh,
(35:23):
I'm not here to tell anybody that they didn't see
what they thought they saw. We're up to like since
two thousand and ten, we're up to nineteen verified sightings
in the last ten years in Arkansas. To understand why
people so badly want to believe in mountain lions, we're
(35:45):
gonna have to understand a bit about human nature. Dr.
Richard Back has been a clinical psychologist since nineteen seventy nine,
and he has some unique insight into why humans act
the way they do. Dr Back of the of the hundreds,
(36:06):
if not thousands, of mountain lions sightings that people would
have claimed over the years to have happened here in Arkansas,
and the actual number of verified sightings being so small,
why do people Why do people believe that they've seen
a lion when statistically they probably actually didn't. Well, it's
(36:28):
probably two things going on there. One is that it's
kind of an exciting thing to think is possible. And
if people have any sort of belief established already, you know,
whether they've read articles on mountain lions, or they had
an uncle or grandfather talked about the mountain lions. If
(36:50):
there's some connection somewhere and the person probably can't even
identify where it was. But if it's an established fact
that there are mountain lions, then when they see something
that can be fit into that perception, they'll they'll they'll
tend to do it, and then you can't talk them
(37:12):
out of it no matter what you show them, and
they are really confirming what they already believe or picked
up somewhere. Is there a psychological term that would describe
somebody that had a belief that may not even be true,
and then something happened and they slotted that event that
happened into a belief that wasn't real. Is there is
(37:35):
there a psychological term for that. Yes, it's called confirmation bias,
and it's just practically every person has it but is
unaware of it and would certainly deny it if you ask.
It's all over our lives. I guess, yeah, it's all
over our lives. We end up believing things not even
(37:55):
knowing where that comes from. In terms of what we
think is the best model car or or the best
football team or the best state to live in. We
end up believing that and we couldn't really even probably
voice reasons why We just like that, and then we
cherry pick any sword of evidence, whether it's from newspapers
(38:19):
or sports announcers or neighbors. But we cherry pick in
terms of selecting information that supports what we already believe. Yeah,
So it would be like really reasonable if if you
were a young child growing up in somebody that you
respected or maybe some of you didn't respect, told you
(38:40):
that there were mountain lines here, regardless of that was
like patently false, you would probably go through your life
with a slot in your mind that there are potentially
mountain lines here. So if you saw a flash a
brown fur across the road, that might just easily slot
into that place and it just be fact inside of
(39:01):
your mind. Yes, yeah, that would happen. Can you tell
me about naive realism what that means. Yeah, Naive realism is,
I guess, in a sense, the foundation of confirmation bias.
Naive realism is really kind of uh, fancy term for
what I think we've probably all noticed, and that is
almost everyone else we deal with thinks that they're right. Uh.
(39:25):
And that's because most people do think and believe that
their way of perceiving the world and interpreting data and
selecting and making decisions. We all believe that we've come
up on the right way of living life. So it's
like you could be living just kind of you could
(39:46):
just kind of have this false reality. Yeah, well yeah,
lots of people do. And if anyone tries to convince
them that they have a false reality, then they fall
back on confirmation by us to really ignore anything they're
saying that disputes what they believe and that, but they'll
select all sorts of data that confirms there body confirms
(40:08):
or bias. This is a great place to hear a
story that actually happened. Scott Brown is my longtime good friend.
He's a veteran woodsman, and I trust whatever the guy says.
You're gonna get a kick out of this story. But
I want you to ask yourself, which character in this
(40:30):
story are you? So you know where I where I work,
we sell hunting licenses, and usually the first the week
right before modern gun Deer season opens, it just gets
really busy. So I'm back there one night, I'm helping
out and just trying to help him sell licenses, and
(40:51):
a guy walks up and he says, Hey, I need
to buy a license, And I said okay, no problem.
I said what license you need and he said, well,
I just need the Big Game license, the annual Big
Game license. And said, okay, no problem. And so I
asked for his driver's license and I'm I'm plugging his information.
He says, well, that license allowed me to kill one
of these and I said, what is it? And he
(41:13):
shows me his phone. He's got this picture on his
phone and when he shows it to me, it is,
without question a bobcat. I mean it's it's, without question
a bobcat. I've seen a lot of bobcats and I'm
a hundred percent certain it was a bobcat. Had speckles
on its belly. I mean it was. It's a bobcat,
no question. And I said, yeah, yeah, it's it's a
(41:35):
trail camera picture. Something he had on his trail camera
there around his house somewhere. And I said, yeah, yeah,
you shoot bobcats, coyotes and allow you shoot all that stuff.
And when I said that, he was just I mean,
he just snapped at me. He just said, that's not
a bobcat. And I said, oh, it wasn't, and he
said no, and he kind of hands the phone back
(41:55):
over to me again. I'm thinking maybe I made a mistake.
So I look at it again and I come to
the same conclusion. It is a bobcat. I mean, there's
just no question about it. And of course, you know,
I didn't say anything. I just said, yeah, yeah, sure enough,
you know, and just kind of blew him off, you know,
as if he wants to believe that, he can believe that.
(42:17):
I suppose. Well, it gets better. So as he tells
me that there's three or four guys waiting and they're
they're just standing around us. They're waiting on us, you know,
so they can get a license. And the guy goes,
did you say you have a mountain line on camera?
And guy said yeah, yeah. So he kind of turns
his phone around and shows this other guy and it
kind of draws a crowd, and there's a three or
(42:38):
four guys there and they're all like, oh, man, sure enough,
you know it's a it's a big mountain line. Look
at that thing. And they're all just handing around there.
In the span of about one minute, he had convinced
five people standing back there that he had a mountain
line on camera, and every one of them believed it
and had no trouble believing it. The only person by
(43:00):
back there that thought otherwise was me, and it was
it was because it was clearly a bobcat. This is
how it started. Yeah, And I thought, man, this is
how the legends and the myths and all these things
you hear about people of seeing mountain lions get started.
It just takes one person to see one. Now, all
those five guys they left, I went wherever they went
(43:20):
for the rest of the day and told how many
people they saw a mountain lion on some guys game camera.
And then thus, there's a mountain lion around and everybody's
seen it, when actually only one guy saw it. It
wasn't even a mountain lion. Now back to Myron, do
you want to delve into the black panther myth? Absolutely yes.
(43:43):
I meant to say that. In the South, particularly Myron,
you hear this. You hear people talking about black panthers
like I with my own ears, have heard countless grown
men that I believe to be like rational thinking people
tell me that they've seen black panthers. What's the deal
(44:06):
with that? Well, I'll speak in scientific terms of black panthers.
We can't have this discussion without talking about black panthers.
My old, my, what a topic. Before we start, let
me ask you a question. Do you believe in black
panthers in North America? If you do or you don't,
(44:29):
I gay wrong? Te you? You know some people that do,
and they're probably normal, maybe even successful humans. I want
you to think about that for a minute. I was
shocked when my own father told me this story. When
I was a kid, would go to Bucks Nord ain't
(44:50):
Ali and Aunt Ali. They weren't an they ain't ain't
Ali and ain't Ali. And then you'd go down to
the Ali's house and she had the dog trot, and
you'd spend a night down there, and you'd hear a
panthers scream every now and then. Now, do you I
don't have to be honest with you. I would be
afraid that it was this cognitive disconnect where Lewin had
(45:13):
talked about it so much, and they talked about it
so much that when you mean, when you were there,
it was like in this place you can hear panthers,
oh man. And when you drove you, when you drove
into Bucks, North, it was like if you were a
city boy and guys like you and I that have
a heart for the outdoors, even as a little kid.
(45:36):
I mean, it would just be so exciting. The trees
were over the road, and when you pulled up an
ain't Alley's house, the yard was all sandy dirt, with
doodle bugs everywhere in this big old dog trot down
the middle, and a big old porch across the front,
and june bugs. We'd always catch june bugs and fly
those june bugs and we doodle bug and then at dark,
(46:00):
you know, case man, he's thinking panthers would scream, or
you know mountain lions. I think there's panther. I think
there's black mountain lions myself. Do you realize Well, I
mean I don't have a proof of it. I just
always have heard that. You've heard so you've heard of
cognitive DIC. I mean I just believed the propaganda. You
so you you have like you're seventy two years old,
(46:22):
that in Arkansas whole life, and you believe it. I'm
not worried about you believing that. I'm just trying to
get to the root of where that comes from. Hey
who told Hey, Hey, when when I when I was
a kid, when when you'd have a group of kids
around and your favorite aunt would be there and she
(46:43):
would it would say, hey, tell us a story, and
they go, well, you know, there's just a little family
and when they were you know, they were walking home
one night and all of a sudden they looked around.
There's a black panther and they take the booty off
the baby. And you know those stories that just was
all through was just always there. Yeah, you know, throw
(47:03):
a booty off, and then the diaper, and then the shirt,
and then all of a sudden he pitched the baby back. Anyway,
but i'd hear I'd hear adults talking about black panthers.
Now back to Myron, People for generations have called panthers
(47:30):
mountain lions, catamounts, cougars, lions. They're all the same animal,
you know. They have a whole litany of common localized
names that people have called them, but when it comes
right down to it, they're all mountain lions. They're all
the same animals. There's no other species in North America
of big cat, no currently on the land, well not
(47:53):
in the United States anyway. Well, jaguars down inside are
the only animal large cat that has known to exist
or have occurrence for a melanistic color face, which is
a quote black color phase are two of the large cats,
jaguars and leopards. Okay, so there has never been a
(48:19):
documented melanistic color phase of the mountain lion in history. Okay,
so not even in people, not even in the Smithsonian Institute.
So if you think in terms of black panthers, what
most people are calling black panthers are black mountain lines,
(48:43):
and uh, scientifically the animals never existed. I think a
lot of it is folklore. I think a lot of
it is uh, misidentification, folklore, you know, things of that nature.
And uh, I mean, is it is it plausible that
(49:03):
a large black cat, jaguar or leopard could never occur
in Arkansas? It could if one of two things happened.
Either A it escaped from someone's cage somewhere and it
was a jaguar or a leopard, or b you had
maybe a jaguar move up from Central America into Arkansas,
(49:27):
which is just not plausible. Uh, you'd probably have just
as good a chance to see in an ostrich as
you would have black you know, jaguar. I have a
lot of people you know that getting mad at me. Well,
you're trying to tell me I didn't say it. No,
I don't try to tell anybody they didn't see what
they think they saw, or someone they know didn't see
(49:47):
what they think through saw. I just stand on the
on the scientific facts of the issue and the scientific
fact behind the whole black panther deal. It's just that
that particular animal does not exist or it's never been
documented to occur in a melanistic color face and black
color face. Believing and trusting people is part of the
(50:14):
community structure of humankind. It's part of what separates us
from the animals and what's made us biologically successful as
a species. If we doubted everything people said and demanded
proof of everything, we wouldn't have made it past the
difficulty of our archaic past of slinging rocks and stuff
and huddling and caves. Blind trust in our fellow man
(50:39):
is evidence of our humanity, and deep down I believe
that we want to believe people. Deep down, we want
to trust our brother or sister. If there is any
good in the folk lore of the Mountain lion in
the black Panther, it's found in the social mechanics of
wanting to believe the best of your neighbor and taking
(51:02):
your friend at his word. Perhaps we need some more
of that in today's time. Though mountain lions were certainly
gone for the large part of the last hundred years
in the South, wouldn't you know it, The truth has
swung back around and found us still sitting here believing
mountain lions are back. And this is a conservation success story.
(51:25):
But it's also a story of how the truth, though
temporarily labeled as folklore and it was, has once again
been found as truthful. Mountain lions are here, and maybe
they always have been. And if anybody ever doubts that
Gary Nwcomb or Brent Reeves did not see a mountain lion,
(51:50):
I'll punch him in the teeth, because I'll believe those
two until the day I die. Long live the beast,
and long live the good word of our brother and
sister m HM.
Host
Clay Newcomb
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