November 4, 2025 • 56 mins
As a native family of American animals, for more than five million years wolves of various kinds have been keystone predators of western ecologies. Before humans arrived they shaped the West more than any other mammal species. Numerous, nearly tame, and admired by Native people, wolves continued this role until the arrival of people from the Old World initiated a continent-wide war against wolves. While wolf pelts became a target of the western market hunt, into the early 20th century most wolves were destroyed by bounty hunters and “wolfers,” who trapped and poisoned hundreds of thousands of wolves at the behest of livestock associations and state governments.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
As native animals. Wolves shape American ecologies for millions of
years and impressed early travelers with their numbers and tameness,
but were rapidly destroyed in the West when old world
stock raising replaced an Indian managed world. I'm Dan Flores
and this is the American West, brought to you by
(00:22):
Velvet Buck Wine. Where the hunt meets the harvest. A
portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers.
Limited supply available at Velvetbuck Vineyards dot com.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Enjoy responsible Wolf West.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
At the midpoint of the nineteenth century, when Americans were
regularly traveling through the West, but except for spotty locales
in the Southwest and on the West Coast, had yet
to settle it, aspects of the ancient Indian managed continent
were still in place across much of the western country.
Judging by the accounts of those who witnessed this period,
(01:19):
the Catlans Bodmer's Autumns, this native West would have been
something to see, one of the spectacles of the world.
No element of this surviving version of Western America amazed
travelers as much as the staggering abundance of wild animals
and for people used to the civilized conditions of the
East or Europe. No Western animal imparted as much shock
(01:43):
and awe as wolves. Michael Steck, a physician traveling the
Santa Fe Trail in the early eighteen fifties, was one
of many who offers us a glimpse of what life
in a fully wolfed West was like. Steck and his
party found that any time they got among bison herds,
wolves became so astonishingly numerous that, as he wrote, we
(02:05):
see immense numbers of them. A common thing is to
see fifty at a sight in the daytime. We are
never out of sight of them, see hundreds in a day.
That comported with wildlife painter John James Ottoman's comment on
the Upper Missouri River that if ever there was a
country where wolves are surpassingly abundant, it's the one we
(02:27):
are now in. But here's the thing.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Today.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
You could drive repeatedly across the country where Steck wrote
of seeing hundreds of wolves a day, or along the Missouri,
where Autobun reported the most abundant wolf population he had
ever encountered, and never see a single wolf, not one.
Our erasure of them in the years from eighteen fifty
to nineteen twenty five was that thorough until about nineteen
(02:56):
twenty five, though, the American West was, and for five
five million years had been, wolf country. Consider that for
a moment and understand what an anomaly the past almost
wolf three hundred years has been to a story like that.
The West wolves were from a family of animals, the Canaday,
(03:20):
that evolved in North America, and although some of them
migrated elsewhere and took on their present forms in Asia
and Europe before they returned to America until the nineteen twenties,
there was never a time when wolves were not America's
keystone predators. Before humans first got here twenty two thousand
(03:40):
or so years ago, wolves probably shaped life in America
more profoundly than any other mammal. Wolves, in other words,
played a crucial role in Western nature for millions of
years before we ever set foot on the continent. Long
before we Old Worlders arrived with our peculiar hatred of predators,
(04:00):
virtually every ecology in the West was shaped from the
top down by the presence of wolves. The Canaday family
first appears in the fossil record of the American Southwest
about five and a half million years ago. Like American
evolved wild horses, our early wild canids became geographically cosmopolitan
(04:24):
by crossing the land bridges connecting America to Eurasia. At
the same time, there were other wolves at stayed home,
giving rise to animals that became Eastern wolves and spawning
the intriguing red wolf of the South.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
As well as coyotes. As we all know.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Now from this year's the Extinction announcement from Colossal Bioengineering
and full disclosure, I'm a member of Colossal's Conservation Advisory Board,
the supersized American direwolf was also part of the candid
mix in ancient America. There's still unresolved science dire wolves.
A twenty twenty one article in Nature arguing that dire
(05:05):
wolves may be different enough from other American wolves to
belong in a genus other than Canus, one called Ainoscion.
Before about twenty five thousand years ago, when gray wolves
began loping home to America from Eurasia, very large and
very white dire wolves dominated the wolf story in America.
(05:27):
At Rancho Lebrea Tarpits in California, more than four thousand
of these burly one hundred and fifty pound wolves died
in the asphalt seeps. Their remains there outnumber those of
gray wolves by one hundred to one. Game of Thrones
and George R. R.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
Martin.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Notwithstanding, dire wolves were not faded to survive the extinction
crash that ended the American places, saying ten thousand years ago.
During that great extinction pulse, smaller gray wolves somehow out
competed dire wolves, but direwolf extinction still left America with
a soup of several wolf types, including coyotes. There were
(06:07):
no survivors of the direwolf genus. Ain't no psion though,
until colossal scientists added into a gray wolf genome twenty
specific genes of direwolf DNA from remains that were seventy
two thousand and thirteen thousand years old, then, through a
surrogate mother, scientist birth Romulus Remus and Callisi in late
(06:30):
twenty twenty four and early twenty twenty five. As for
gray wolves, once they joined the other American canids in
the late Pleistocene, they decidedly made their presence felt. Big
five to six foot long pack hunters weighing eighty to
one hundred and twenty pounds, gray wolves outmatched their long
lost relations Eastern and red wolves and coyotes in both
(06:53):
size and packing stings. Once direwolves disappeared from the continent,
gray wolves were left at the swaggering big dogs. Everywhere,
including the West, gray wolves seem to have migrated home
to America in distinctive waves half a century ago. Biological
taxonomy designated a wopping twenty three species of Canus loupus.
(07:18):
In twenty eleven, though, the US Fish and Wildlife Service
decided to come to terms with modern genetic research on
wolves and concluded that North America's wolves sprang from two origins.
Eastern wolves, red wolves, and coyotes all represented American wolf
evolution animals that never left the continent. Gray Wolves, on
(07:39):
the other hand, constituted animals that had started here, spent
some millions of years in Eurasia, then returned in several
separate distinct waves of animals during the Pleisocene. This taxonomic
rethink has shrunk the number of gray wolf subspecies from
the twenty three of the nineteen forties down to only four.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Arctic white wolves.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
Canus lupus arctos, found in the extreme north of the
continent were probably the last to come home to America.
The rocky mountain wolf Canus Lupus occidentalis, found from the
Montana Rockies northward to Alaska, was likely another late arrival
from Asia. The small gray wolves of Mexico and the
American Southwest Canus Lupus bailei, the Mexican wolf, may have
(08:24):
led the migrations home. But the wolf that occupied more
of America than any other, extending from the Pacific across
the Great Plains, onto the western Great Lakes, and northward
through much of the eastern half of Canada, was Canus
lupus nubilus. This was the famed buffalo wolf, the Lobo
loafer or white wolf of the plains of so much
(08:47):
Western history. All these gray wolves arrived in time for
one of the grandest predator barbecues in world history. Before
the Pleistocene ended, gray wolves joined short face bears, saber
tooth and scimitar cats, false cheetahs, step lions, and running
hyenas to chase and pull down camels, sloths, horses, longhorned bison,
(09:12):
and perhaps mammoth calfs in an Africa like world that
almost seems like science fiction to us now. After the
Pleascistine extinctions took out all the giants. A reconstituted western
Bestieri bequeathed to Western gray wolves their classic place in
American ecology, with buffalo the only western grazer still standing.
(09:32):
After the extinctions, bison numbers skyrocketed to between twenty to
thirty million animals, some one and a half to two
million buffalo wolves served as their primary predators in this
new order, As famed Western trader and author Josiah Gregg
put it in the eighteen forties, although the buffalo is
the largest, he has by no means the control among
(09:56):
the prairie animals. The scepter of authority has been lodged
with the large gray wolf as keystone predators. Wolves apparently
influence continental ecology and ways that ripple through nature, affecting
not just populations of prey species, but also other predators
and scavengers, even down to the kind of vegetation like
(10:19):
aspens or cottonwoods found on a landscape. With gray wolves present,
coyote populations went down and fox numbers went up, and
a kind of bigger dog beats up littler dog equation.
Wolf predation exerts strong evolutionary pressures on the behaviors and
even habitat selections of wolf prey species. Such was the
(10:42):
scepter of authority the gray wolf wielded on Western landscapes
a century ago, and for multiple millions of years before that,
Wild America was a world in.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Good part created by wolves. In a North America.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
Inhabited by native people who never domesticated or herded wild ungulates,
and who thought of all wolves as kin teachers and
totem animals. Wolves were free to play their top of
the pyramid roles as keystone predators, shaping ecologies down to
the birds that sang and the plants that grew. But
(11:19):
four hundred years ago, the arrival of Old worlders at
once challenged that ancient algorithm from the Old World's foothold
in Massachusetts, Bostonian William Wood wrote of the wolf from
the very beginning as a special and confusing problem for colonizers.
The confusion came from America's wolves not acting the way
(11:42):
Europeans had been told wolves should act. In America, Wood wrote,
it was never known yet that a wolf ever set
up on a man or a woman. That seemed impossible,
given the folk traditions about wolves in the Old World.
All those folk tales and biblical passages about ravening wolves
(12:06):
left colonists disoriented when America's wolves showed no aggression towards people.
But wolves in the numbers of America held were still unexpected,
and that led to a certain despair in sixteen thirties
New England, since, as Wood put it, there's little hope
of their utter destruction. So from the start the wolf
(12:27):
was an animal of special concern for Europeans. But why
Partly there was their lack of familiarity with the real thing.
England's own wolves hadn't lasted beyond the fourteen hundreds. Virginians
and New Englanders were living among wolves for the first
time in their lives, and, as Wood implied, they didn't
(12:48):
like it in the least. Then there were their imported
cultural traditions. When you had hearded domesticated animals for eight
thousand years, as these old worlders had, and was your
way of understanding how the world worked, there was a
natural tendency to see wolves as a supernatural malediction. For Christians.
(13:09):
Adams fall from the Garden of Eden into an earth
compromised by evil struck them as the self evident origin
of wolves, After all, didn't wolves share the yellow eyes
medieval illustration gave to Satan. Some of America's wolves were
even black, a coloring that to Europeans was suspicious in
(13:30):
the sixteen twenties. The actual explanation for black wolves lay
in scientific work four centuries in the future. A genomic
study from our time indicates that black coachs in America's
wolves sprang from a hybridization event between wolves and domestic
dogs in the northwest of the continent approximately thirteen thousand
(13:52):
years back during Clovis times. The mutation conferred a fitness advantage,
perhaps in disease resistance, that other wolves sensed, so the
visual clue of blackness affected mating choice, allowing at least
some black wolves to greet Europeans. Thousands of years later,
(14:12):
Native people admired wolves, whatever their color, for their bravery,
hunting skills, and devotion to mates and packs. Europeans saw
those same animals as bloodthirsty monsters, evil actors in a
fallen world. Folk stories of were wolves dim memories of
part human, part animal fantasies from the Paleolithic still circulated
(14:35):
in colonial times and fed a suspicion that wolves might
be avatars of a residual animality in humans, so the
unsuspecting animals were soon to enjoy the full colonial experience
of a wolf war.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
The reality was that wolf.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
Social lives and ecological roles were so similar to our
own that it was no accident that tamed wolves had
become our first domesticated animals twenty five thousand years before.
Wolf societies were much like human hunter gatherer bands. In both,
the leadership was usually matriarchal. The alpha female wolf directs
(15:18):
a pack's movements, while the larger males, especially those between
about two and five years old, are the primary hunters.
As highly social creatures, wolves are members of family packs
led by high status breeders who avoid breeding with close kin,
so a pack's grown pups eventually move out in search
(15:39):
of mating opportunities. While they're individualistic, wolf pups like young humans,
learned from their elders, they are steep in pack culture.
Wolves have strong emotional attachments. After absences, they greet by
standing on their hind legs, a greeting known as a rally.
(16:00):
They also interact with a remarkable range of body language
and facial expressions, howling, which is contagious for wolves is
one of their common ways to express their emotional states,
and it enables them to recognize distant wolves from the
harmonic structure of their voices. No one knows how many
wolves were in colonial America, but since food determines pup survival,
(16:24):
the population of wolves in any given setting rested on
food availability. This means that packs competed with one another
for prime prey territories. In fact, before Old Worlders arrived,
the main mortality in wolves came from other wolves. Europeans
imagined America's wolves as vicious slaughterers of helpless prey. In
(16:50):
the real world, something different was playing out. Chasing down
in neck wrestling big animals armed with hooves and antlers
is dangerous in the extreme despite their wrong jaw muscles.
The geometry of wolve's long muzzles actually inhibits their bite
force so impossible, they go for low hanging fruit. Highly
(17:10):
perceptive about cost benefit, they scavenge animals already dead on
the hunt. They try for fawns and young animals are injured, diseased,
or old ones. Their strategy is to test prey in
search of those least dangerous and easiest to run down.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
Even then, wolf chase.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Success dips as low as ten percent. One of Western
painter George Catlan's memorable observations was about how dearly a
wolf pack won a meal. Even an old or sick buffalo,
he wrote, was a huge and furious animal, and would
often deal death by wholesale to his canine assailants, as
(17:54):
Catlan put it, which he is tossing into the air
or stamping to death under his feet. Catlan's painting White
Wolves Attacking Buffalo showed such a scene with an aging
bull fighting a wolfpack with such resolution that, as Catlan wrote,
his eyes were entirely eaten out of his head, the
(18:14):
grizzle of his nose was mostly gone, his tongue was
half eaten off, and the skin and flesh of his
legs torn almost literally into strings. Yet even with the
bull in that condition, numerous wolves, as Catlan said, were
crushed to death by the feet or horns.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
Of the bull.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
This kind of wolf natural history was invisible to the
new colonists, because all the settlers really cared about was
fashioning a wolf free America. In fact, Woods, Massachusetts Colony
passed the first environmental law in colonial American history. It
was a bounty on the continents wolves. When Western travelers
(19:01):
like Meriwether Lewis, George Catlin, and John James Ottoman first
observed wolves in the West, they referred to them as
the shepherds of the buffalo herds. Josiah Gregg said of
plains lobos that although there were immense numbers of them
upon the prairies, their presence in the landscape was often
determined by bison herds. In this regard, Western wolves resembled
(19:25):
grizzly bears, always found in largest numbers where they could
scavenge buffalo drowned in rivers, or where weak animals were
easier to attack. William Clark observed the most common wolf
hunting technique for buffalo in April of eighteen oh five,
when Lewis and Clark were ascending the Missouri through what
(19:45):
is now North Dakota. Lewis wrote that Captain Clark informed
me that he saw a large drove of buffalo pursued
by wolves today that they at length caught a calf
which was unable to keep up with the herd. An
old Pawnee adage, in fact, was that wolves ran down
and devoured four out of every ten bison calves born
(20:09):
an ancient American equation that left both species healthy across
at least half a million years. One trade everyone commented
on when they were first among the West wolves was
how tame they were, Having no reason to fear wolves.
Native people had long let them hang around camps and villages,
(20:30):
so Audubon had marveled at how wolves would lie on
the banks as their steamboat passed, yawning at them like dogs.
William Clark had an unconcerned wolf walk by so near
that he impulsively stabbed it with the ban at on
the muzzle of his rifle. At Fort Union, Audubon's party
(20:51):
was met by the American Fur Company's Alexander Culbertson, whose
chief hobby, when boredom set in, was running down wolves
on his Indian pony. As Audubon's companion Edward Harris described it,
with wolves in constant view, the trader offered their party
a little wolf entertainment.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
Mister Culbertson, Harris tells us.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
Started his beautiful blackfoot pied mare at full speed when
within half a mile of the wolf, who turned and
galloped off leisurely until mister Culbertson was within two or
three hundred yards of him when he started.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
Off at the top of his speed.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
Within the time it took Harris to scribble his account,
Culbertson was back at the post with the wolf draped
across the saddle horn shot through its shoulders as the
trader had chased him at breakneck speed across the prairie.
It was an impressive performance, no doubt, so long as
you hadn't experienced it from the wolf end of the show.
(21:53):
Centuries of peaceful relations with native peoples had taught the
West wolves not to fear humans right old world folklore,
Western bar talk, and Hollywood's sensationalism. Today, like Liam Neeson's
twenty eleven film The Gray, the truth is that, except
in the rare rabies case, the West wolves were in
(22:14):
no way aggressive towards people. In fact, it was a
Western trope that both wolves and coyotes were rank howards
around humans. While scornful of canine cowardice, early observers in
the West never tired of commenting about how trusting wolves
seem to be trotting in front of their horses like
dogs are sitting and watching curiously as travelers passed within feet,
(22:40):
But soon enough, with everyone traveling the West's armed to
the teeth and taking shots at almost every wolf they saw,
wolves learned to keep their distance. Rifle fire was an
initial and casual wolf persecution, but it was merely a
hint of the changes about to come. In rapid succession
across the nineteen shi century, with a wild animal products
(23:03):
industry well established in the West and many thousands of
overland migrants crossing the region every year, what should have
been canine good times actually ushered in the end game
for the wolf West. In eighteen seventy two, the Brooklyn
painter John Gast distilled an important assumption about both Indians
(23:26):
and the country's wild animals into a famous visual image.
Gas American Progress painting portrayed a blonde, giant and angelic
white garb striding across the West, stringing telegraph wires behind her,
with wagons of settlers in her wake. Disappearing off the
(23:48):
edges of the canvas were the native people, but also
herds of buffalo and packs of wolves consigned to the
margins of the future. Viewers of American Progress seen to
understand in an America modeled on Europe, not just the
native people, but all those iconic wild animals had to go.
(24:09):
Most Americans appeared to assume that in an America making
itself a clone of the old world, a fate of
animals like this was inevitable. Buffalo stood first in the
rank of those incompatible with civilization. Wolves well the plans
since colonial times had been their total eradication. Eventually, other animals,
(24:30):
grizzly bears, cougars, jaguars, wild horses, eagles, and, judging by
the reaction to their extinction, even passenger pigeons joined the
ranks of species. Civilization would not tolerate their destruction. Gas painting, implied,
was no one's fault. Simply enough, Ancient America's time was over.
(24:51):
Incompatibility was a shame, but it seemed to comfort us.
Distilled from the imported nuts of East India tree, a
substance called strychnine ushered in this new order. It became
available in America when a firm in Philadelphia began offering
cheap packages of strychnine in crystal form in eighteen thirty four.
(25:17):
Since there were few predators left in the East by then,
most of the poison went west, sold in bulk in
every store and trading post. Naturally, there were no restrictions
of any kind on its use. It was cheap, unregulated,
and it was lethal chemical warfare. Western travelers used it
both to collect pelts and just to see its effects.
(25:40):
In an age inured to carnage, it was a horrifying killer.
Inside a few minutes, a white tablet gulped down from
a bated carcass launched a victim into waves of convulsive cramping.
Poisoned wolves died from asphyxiation, but strychnine wrenched the body
so violently as to leave a signature death pose, a
(26:01):
corpse with a sharply arched spine and a tail frazzled
as if the animal had been electrocuted on the frontier.
People who did this for a living were called wolfers,
a Western occupation we've probably deliberately left in the dust
bin of history so we didn't have to look at
(26:22):
it too closely. Poisoning animals didn't even require a wolfer
to be present, and unlike trapping, poisoning didn't call for
any sort of skill. You just baited a carcass or
put out chunks of meat laced with poison, and then
headed a camp to enjoy life while the strychnine did
his work. Teams of wolfers driving ox dron wagons began
(26:44):
laying out strychnine in the Yellowstone Country as early as
eighteen sixty four. Approaching a buffalo or horse carcass that baited,
wolfers would start finding victims appearing sprayed across the landscape
as if by some spinning centrifuge a half mile from
their bait animal. The targets were wolves and coyotes, but
(27:06):
the poison killed everything interested in a rotting piece of meat. Eagles, vultures, ravens, magpies,
red foxes, gray foxes, swift foxes, tiny kit foxes, skunks.
As these animals died, their convulsive vomiting sprayed poison across
the grass. Poison grass could take out collateral victims like horses.
(27:30):
When Native people lost ponies this way, they developed a
special hatred for wolfers. This kind of poisoning preyed on
a wolf's inclination to scavenge and avoid injury in a hunt,
and astonishing forty dead wolves per bated carcass was common.
One party in the Texas Panhandle picked up sixty four
(27:52):
wolves one morning, barely a mile from their camp. They
made four thousand dollars in one winter, and can this.
James Mead once poisoned eighty two wolves in a single
baiting in the Texas Panhandle. Into the eighteen nineties, Wolfer's
Jack Abernathy Alan Stagg, and Alec Lewis averaged two hundred
(28:14):
monsters that was their nickname for gray wolves a year,
killing two hundred and ninety six one year on a
single giant ranch the Xit. For more than two decades,
wolf and coyote pelts traded as money in the West,
worth a dollar apiece and two dollars if you could
get the pelts all the way.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
To New York.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
There are no figures for this most disgusting of all
wild animal economies, and for good reason, it's little remembered
in the story of America. But there's every likelihood that
from the eighteen sixties through the eighteen nineties, poisoning wildlife
for money killed Western animals in numbers that competed with
the death tolls of Buffalo. For a couple of decades
(29:01):
after the Civil War, while US Indian policy herded the
tribes under reservations and Western market hunts produced the most
devastating slaughter of wildlife and world history. Wolves continued to
thrive despite strychnine, but with most of their prey animals
now erased, wolves were forced to turn to domesticated cattle
(29:22):
and sheep as prey, except those were the property of
ranchers who stood on eight thousand years of history of
battling predators, so now as hated symbols of wild America.
Wolves from the eighteen eighties through the nineteen twenties became
special targets in the in game wolf War. One stockman
(29:46):
launched to convert the ancient world that acquired into a
money making pasture for cow's sheep and the market. From
the founding of the American colonies through the last decades
of the eighteen hundreds, bounties paid eight on wolf scalps
became the basic military strategy against wolves. Western stock associations
(30:07):
paid bounties in every Western state and territory, and bounties
on predators became a primary and acceptable act of governments too.
In Montana, the territorial government sometimes used up two thirds
of its annual budgets paying bounties on predators. Between eighteen
eighty three and nineteen twenty eight, Montana's governments paid bounties
(30:31):
on a staggering one hundred eleven thousand, five hundred and
forty five wolves and eight hundred eighty six thousand, three
hundred sixty seven coyotes, subsidizing both ranchers and wolfers. As
late as eighteen ninety nine, the state paid out bounties
on a whopping twenty three thousand, five hundred seventy five wolves.
(30:55):
It didn't stop there or even slow down. The war
against wolves and coyotes in Montana even produced a state
law passed in nineteen oh five ordering veterinarians to infect
any wild canines that came their way with sarcoptic mange,
then released them to spread the disease among the wild populations.
(31:16):
As a result, wild canids in Montana and Wyoming still
suffer from a strikingly high mange infection rate even today.
With this kind of multi pronged pressure, wolf populations went
under so dramatically that after bountying more than twenty three
thousand wolves in eighteen ninety nine, Montana paid for only
(31:38):
seventeen dead gray wolves in the year nineteen twenty, and
this ability to kill animals on mass Americans were absolutely unmatched.
By the twentieth century, ranchers and wolfers were naming the
last individual wolves still alive in Montana the last This
(32:00):
one was called Snowdrift. In the Dakotas, the last one
was the custuerwolf, an animal charge with livestock depredations a
t rex couldn't have pulled off. At the beginning of
the century, a Canadian writer named Ernest Thompson Seton, who
had extensive outdoor experience and also employed scientific methodology in
(32:21):
his work, tried to take on the huge implications of
the new Darwinism in the world around him. Setan moved
to New Mexico and began to write books, books that
strongly appealed to the new centuries readers. To counter the
so called nature read in tooth and claw conclusions that
(32:42):
others had drawn from Darwinian evolution, writers like Seton and
Jack London looked for examples among wild creatures of traits
humans admired, individuality, compassion, cooperation, loyalty, and an ability to
transfer culture learning across generations. One of Setan's most popular
(33:04):
stories employing this approach was about one of those legendary
last wolves in New Mexico's case a wolf Setan called Lobo,
King of Carumpa. Lobo was a male wolf Setan had
known years before he became a writer, when he was
himself a trapper and wolf hunter who had finally captured Lobo.
(33:27):
He had done that by baiting his traps with the
scent of Lobo's mate, a female wolf the ranchers called Blanca,
a beautiful animal Setan had trapped and killed while listening
to Lobo howling mournfully in the distance to no reply.
As Setan described him, Lolo was an amazingly canny wolf,
(33:50):
but with one fatal flaw. That flaw was Lobo's fidelity
to his mate. Setan caught Lobo in traps laced with
Blockeka scent, and the ranchers then hauled Lobo alive to
a ranch yard and chained him there as a prize
to show the community. Within days, Lobo died, looking off
(34:12):
at the New Mexico planes that had been his and
Blanca's world. Lobo's and Blanca's story first appeared in Setan's
book Wild Animals I Have Known, and it was one
of the stories that gave that famous book its running theme.
Those in America who celebrated the destruction of the West
wolves sneered, but Setan's book was pointing towards a different
(34:36):
kind of future. The theme of wild animals I have known,
he wrote was simple, we and the beasts are kN.
Speaker 3 (35:05):
So Dan, thinking about wolves. One of the points that
you raise in this episode is that the perception of
wolves coming from the old world doesn't match up with
the reality of wolves in the New world. And it
got me thinking about when we were working on our
Long Hunter project and our Mountain Man project. We do
(35:26):
have instances of guys being bitten by wolves, and it's
always when they're sleeping around a campfire, and I had
sort of read that as we're working on it. I'd
read that as like evidence of wolves being all over
the place and just a presence on the landscape. And
then in light of your episode had caused me to
(35:48):
rethink it. These wolves are sneaking in and you know,
they're not super aggressive, they're just approaching guys when they're asleep.
I don't know that there's a question there necessarily, but
I mean with.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
The Long Hunter instance, it was a rabbit wolf. Yeah,
and there's there's a rabbit there's.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
A rabbit wolf rabbit mountain man at one of the
rendezvous too. Yeah, there's a wolf that runs around at
a rendezvous in the eighteenth things and bites people.
Speaker 3 (36:17):
I guess it strikes me because you read it, you
write accounts from those periods, and you're like, Wow, wolves
were everywhere, wolves were biting people. And then when you
take a step back and you sort of contextualize it
with how many wolves there were, there are sort of
these rare, very rare instances that jump out to us.
But in the grand scheme of things, the wolves are
(36:39):
pretty much off on their own.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
And yeah, you.
Speaker 4 (36:42):
Can find guy after guy after guy after guy that
gets tore up by a grizzly bear. Yeah, No, guys
are getting tore up by wolves, right.
Speaker 2 (36:49):
No, they're not.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
And uh, I mean one of the reasons I wanted
to include that quote from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. This
is in William Woods's book that he publishes in sixteen
thirty two, when he's running through the accounts of all
these new animals that are in the Americas, he makes
(37:13):
that statement that I, as far as I can find,
remains true all through American history, certainly through the West
and the West wolves. He makes that statement that there
has not been an instance where a wolf has set
(37:35):
upon a man or a woman in our colony, and
he's already said there are wolves around all over the place,
but there has not been an instance. And the reason
he said that, I'm pretty certain is because these people
came out of Western Europe. For one thing, England hadn't
had wolves since the fourteen hundreds, so there have been
(37:56):
multiple generations of people who the only thing they know
about wolves is, you know, these fairy tales and folk
tales that they've hurt handed down. Is they are expecting
once they hear that there are wolves in North America,
that wolves are going to be tearing people limb from limb,
and suddenly the reality is, wow, there's not been a
(38:19):
single instance where a wolf has set upon a man
or a woman in our experience. And that's kind of
what tracks through the story here, especially in the West.
What most people in the nineteenth century in the West,
especially after they had had generations of this kind of
interaction with wolves, what their reaction to wolves was is
(38:43):
wolves are cowards. Wolves are not aggressive and are going
to attack you. They're cowards, and that became the detegration
that people levied against them. You know, the Native people
think am as boy wolves are these wonderful animals. They're
loyal to their families and you know, and they're brave,
(39:04):
and and the European euro American perspective was because the
wolves who are not of aggressive there are a bunch
of cowards and that's that's how they.
Speaker 2 (39:15):
That's how they respond.
Speaker 4 (39:16):
There's a lot of I hesitate to say evidence because
I don't know that I've seen it in evidentiary form.
You hear people say that the wolves of Europe, the
wolves in Romania, wolves in other places, that it's a
there is a there's a legacy of greater aggression and
(39:38):
like a higher propensity to attack people with some of
these Eurasian wolves, more livestock depredation.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
Do you know that? Do you know that to be true?
Speaker 4 (39:46):
Or is that?
Speaker 2 (39:47):
Is that not true?
Speaker 1 (39:50):
I know that that's what's thought to be true. That's
what the folklore of the wolf is has always been,
and that folklore was brought to them America. So that's
one of the you know, and it's still I mean,
I encountered people, you know, when I was living in
the Bitterroot Valley. Back a decade ago, I had a
neighbor who when wolves were recovering in the Sapphire Mountains
(40:14):
right above us, and I would occasionally see a pack
run across the road. As I would come home from
a graduate class at night at ten o'clock, pack of
wolves would run across the road. I could go outside,
usually two or three times a year, and I'd hear wolves.
How I had a neighbor who had grown up in
California who walked up to the house one day and
said something like, well, I guess you know that these
(40:35):
wolves are probably I mean, we're in mortal danger. These
wolves are close, and these things they're going to tear
my wife off the front porch and maul her in
the yard. I can't let my son and his granddaughter
come over because I know they're going to get my granddaughter.
Speaker 4 (40:53):
And you know, I was trying to tell you they
haven't got man the tree, haven't got anybody.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
They have, there's no but it did not work. I
told him that, and I could tell he was completely unconvinced.
And so these stories, I mean, they go obviously back
a long way into the old world. I mean, they
are still current with us where you know. And I
went to a wolf conference in southern New Mexico and
Las Crusis one time, about twenty years ago, and there
(41:21):
was a woman who was representing the livestock industry who
showed our asseymbol throng of an audience of two hundred
and fifty people or so, how deadly Mexican wolves were
and how scary they were to have them on the ground.
And what she showed us was a photograph of a
cowboy in full shaps and hat and everything, his boots
(41:45):
running towards a front porch, running towards the photographer and
he's really balling the jack and back in the background
maybe one hundred yards away, so far away. She had
to draw a circle around it to make sure that
the audience saw it was a wolf standing in the road.
And she said, this is an example of how bloodthirsty
(42:05):
these wolves are.
Speaker 2 (42:06):
Had he not.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
Run for the porch, this wolf was going to pull
him down. Yeah, And it's a wolf standing curiously in
the road watching a cowboy in shaps run up the
up the dirt road.
Speaker 4 (42:18):
There's a great way of looking at the risk. And
you see it with grizzly bears, And it'd be interesting
to look at it with contemporary Europe, you know, or
in your aging countries to.
Speaker 2 (42:28):
Have wolves would be like, what are the odds.
Speaker 4 (42:32):
Than in a given year any individual, Yeah, acts will
have a violent altercation with a human, you know. And
then when you look at like the menagerie of North
American wildlife, it's like grizzlies.
Speaker 2 (42:46):
Are grizzlies are mountain lions? Yeah?
Speaker 4 (42:49):
Are well, Yeah, grizzlies are high and every and everybody
else is kind of like inconsequential. But I would be
curious to know, like if the europe if that European
sense which you see cited all the time when it
talks about the American the immediate American hatred of wolves
coming from this big bad wolf in Europe thing to
(43:13):
just be interesting to look at and be like, was
it any more was it any more true in Europe
than here? Or was it just as untrue there as
it was here? About the human health risk with wolves, Yeah,
not the inconvenience of livestock, but the health risk I.
Speaker 1 (43:31):
Think, you know. And there's a guy who's who's written
a recent book which I just blurbed for him on
Europe's wolves. And what he did was there was a
wolf in Romania that tracked sort of a you know,
one of these single colonizing wolves, that tracked three or
four hundred miles from southern southeastern Europe towards France. And
(43:55):
this guy, a couple of years later, went out and
he that exact route that this wolf had taken and
wrote a book about it. And one of the things
he said that struck me because I.
Speaker 2 (44:08):
Didn't know this.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
Europe now has more wolves in it than the United
States does. The United States, accepting Alaska, the lower forty eight,
Europe has more wolves than the Lower forty eight, and
Europe is attempting to be as welcoming of wolves as possible. Now, Obviously,
(44:30):
according to this guy's journey, he was running into people,
you know, every few days who were outraged, just as
a lot of Montana ranchers are outraged that there were
wolves returning to Europe, and so some of those same sensibilities.
But it's going to require somebody doing a book to
try to find whether or not evidence actually exists, because
(44:52):
some of the things I've read about wolf attacks in
Europe are well okay, So there's always the rabid animal
that's that could be involved, and there were evidently a
lot of wolf dog hybrids and those animals, at least
some people have argued, may have been responsible for some
(45:13):
of the attacks that have so anyway, it's that kind
of story. And obviously in the nineteenth century when people
are coming west. I mean, what I tried to get
across this episode is that hell wolves have been They
had been in the West and in America for five
million years. All of the wildlife, the way trees and
(45:35):
grass grew was sort of dependent on there being this
keystone predator at the top of everything. So it's a
little bit like taking the beavers out or taking the
sea otters out. When you do that, the ecologies start
scrambling and changing because you've got in place this animal
that's been there for millions of years and producing its
(45:59):
effect the world. And yet you know, we come from
the old world with this kind of wolf hostility, and
our task immediately is to try to get rid of
them is just as fast as we can.
Speaker 3 (46:12):
I think one thing that I've gotten from your work
in terms of just how I conceptualize and certain animals,
this relationship between coyotes and wolves and they look alike,
but there's obvious differences. But this idea that you know,
(46:33):
wolves go up, coyotes go down, foxes go up, and
it's sort of this continuous balancing act between these. I
don't know if you can sort of talk about the
coyote story because that's obviously an area of expertise, but
how that relates to the wolf story, because there's some
interesting parallels, but then obviously those two animals, their histories
(46:54):
diverge in very clear ways.
Speaker 2 (46:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (46:56):
So I've done obviously the Old Man America episode on
you know, the Native stories about coyote with a capital
C as the deity figure, and I'm going to do
one more episode later in the year that's going to
be about the sort of the coyote story because the coyote,
(47:18):
unlike wolves, Europeans had no familiarity with coyotes, and so
they didn't actually know what to think about them, and
it took, you know, some time, It took particularly you know,
Mark Twain in roughing it sort of giving Americas on
America's an idea of how to think about coyotes, and
and it was not a favorable and appraisal unfortunately. But
(47:42):
coyotes and wolves obviously go back a long way. They
are closely related. They can hybridize, although one of the
interesting things that's happening these days is that coyotes will
readily hybridize and the wolves will too, with eastern wolves
and red wolves, but not gray wolves. And the gray
wolves that are in the West seem to be sort
(48:03):
of mortal enemies of coyotes, and we have some explanations
for that, and I can talk about them a little
later in the series. But they're closely related, they're related
enough to hybridize. But I had a biologist at the
Predator Research Facility in Logan, Utah tell me one time
(48:24):
that they had deliberately induced a pregnancy and a coyote
with wolf sperm, and when she had this litter, she
immediately killed every one of them.
Speaker 2 (48:41):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (48:42):
Yeah, she killed every one of them within a day,
her own pups.
Speaker 4 (48:48):
Her hatred wolves greater than her love of her own children.
Speaker 1 (48:53):
Yeah, her love of her own pups.
Speaker 2 (48:57):
Yeah, I think the end of a book. Yeah, read
that to my kids at night. Yeah, they love that.
Not that and she ate them.
Speaker 1 (49:08):
Yeah, but you know, I mean one of the stories
I obviously told in this this particular episode is about
the Wolfers, which is uh and I you know, have
to observe that's not of sort of a Western figure
that has made it into Hollywood movies. But holy cow,
these guys they killed untold thousands of animals and not
(49:28):
just wolves because the baits, the strych nine baits they
were putting out. They were killing everything that came and
took the baits. So they were killing eagles and ravens
and hawks and skunks and raccoons and foxes and coyotes
and you know, and also wolves.
Speaker 4 (49:43):
I'll tell you another interesting bycatch.
Speaker 2 (49:45):
They would get yeah in.
Speaker 4 (49:48):
Life and Death at the Mouth of the Muscleshell, which
is like a trader's journal.
Speaker 1 (49:51):
Yeah. Uh.
Speaker 4 (49:53):
They it seems like when they get little free time,
like the guys in this little community which is now
under the wa waters of Fort Peck Reservoir, they kind
of like, as they get a minute or they get
the right amount of drunk or whatever, it's decided that
they'll go and lace some baits, just like a fall
like nothing else nothing better else to fall back is
(50:15):
lay some baits in it. He talks about, I can't
even remember what tribe it is. They come in pissed
because they've lost twenty four of their dogs to a bait. Yeah,
and they want to raise it. They want to raise
a fuss about it.
Speaker 2 (50:34):
Yeah, And.
Speaker 1 (50:36):
Of strict nine poisoning because wolves and coyotes would vomit
the stryct nine onto the grass, and Indian pony herds
would if they happen to be herded in that spot,
and aiding that grass horses would suddenly die from being
killed by strick nine.
Speaker 3 (50:55):
What's the This might be a two technical what's the
half life or whatever? The appropriate term would be a
strictionne it seems like one of the like a heavy
metal almost that is just sort of it's accumulates and yeah,
like where does it end? The horse eats the grass
and the horse does then yeah, comes against the horse.
Speaker 1 (51:14):
Yeah, I wish I could answer that question. I don't
really know, but I do think it remains toxic, you know,
exposed above ground in a form that another animal can
get for quite a while. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (51:28):
One last question for you on this. Dire wolves been
in the news Colossal Bioscience, Colossal Biosciences, where you and
I are on the conservation advisory board. They've taken they've
identified some dire wolf genes I believe nineteen, and we're
able to put them, combine them with a gray wolf,
(51:51):
and then use surrogate pops to birth some Yeah, and
it's sparked this huge debate of how you know when
they when when someone declares it a dire wolves, Like,
what does it require to say an animal is what
it is? Does it have to pass the look test?
Does it have to pass the genetic purity marker?
Speaker 2 (52:12):
Like?
Speaker 4 (52:12):
Like, who gets to say that that's what that is?
And you and I had talked before about.
Speaker 2 (52:20):
Even if you had, if you knew you had.
Speaker 4 (52:22):
The complete animal, how do you account for the culture?
Speaker 2 (52:28):
You know?
Speaker 1 (52:28):
Yeah, that's that's the to me, the whole thing. And
we have talked about it, say, because animals have culture,
and so particularly for social animals like wolves, I mean,
they teach their pups what the potential prey is, how
to function in a landscape. And these are animals that,
(52:50):
these these dire wolves, if that's what we can call them,
that are not going to have any culture to rely
on the culture they're going to be taught basically as
whatever they're human handlers are exposing them to, you know,
And the other thing about this. I mean, this is,
as you and I both know and I've talked about,
this is a kind of a genetic experiment to see
(53:13):
if it's possible to de extinct an animal, and canids
appear to be easier to do this with than anything else,
and so that's why Colossal ended up doing this wolf
experiment to begin with. But you can't really say that
(53:34):
these animals ultimately are dire wolves. They're wolves that are
going to have some direwolf genetics, and we're going to
get a chance to see. I mean, one of the
things obviously that these genetic these spliced in genes have
done is they've produced animals that are white, and that's
one of the arguments that dire wolves probably had white coats,
(53:55):
particularly thick white coats, and these animals have that. I
think the next testing to be interested in is to
see exactly how big they get, because our perception, particularly
from Librea tar pits, where there are just hundreds of
direwolf skulls available from dire wolves that were caught in
the tar there is that dire wolves were probably about
(54:17):
twenty five thirty percent larger than gray wolves, which means
if these animals get to adulthood, and they do express
direwolf genetics. I mean they're going to weigh one hundred
and sixty hundred and sixty five pounds or something. So
that's going to be I think, an interesting test to see.
I don't know how it's going to turn out, but
(54:38):
it's a very fascinating.
Speaker 4 (54:40):
It's it's been just for the debate in the conversation
that it's inspired about kidding about wildlife and the role
of wildlife and extinction. My first date with my wife,
my very first date, we went to Librea tar pit
it is and they have a display on a wall
of seventy five wolf skulls, and I have a skull
(55:04):
shelf in my house that was inspired by the It's
not lit the same way, but it was inspired inspired
by that, inspired by that, and I got in trouble
on my first date because we want you know, they
play those movies on Circle. Well, I'm sitting there and
we come in and we watched the end half of
a movie and I found myself explaining, so what we'll
(55:25):
do is we'll watch the end half and then it'll
start over and we'll just watch up to where I started.
Speaker 2 (55:35):
And she's like, oh that this is how that that
that's how this works. Oh thank you for.
Speaker 4 (55:42):
Thank you for explaining. I was toy lost as how
we're gonna see the whole movie. Thanks for helping me out.
I just couldn't visualize how this is gonna work.
Speaker 1 (55:55):
Yeah, well, well guys, thanks for all the question man.
Speaker 2 (56:01):
Yeah this is this has been great fun as always.
Ye all right
Speaker 4 (56:05):
M mmmmm
As native animals. Wolves shape American ecologies for millions of
years and impressed early travelers with their numbers and tameness,
but were rapidly destroyed in the West when old world
stock raising replaced an Indian managed world. I'm Dan Flores
and this is the American West, brought to you by
(00:22):
Velvet Buck Wine. Where the hunt meets the harvest. A
portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers.
Limited supply available at Velvetbuck Vineyards dot com.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Enjoy responsible Wolf West.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
At the midpoint of the nineteenth century, when Americans were
regularly traveling through the West, but except for spotty locales
in the Southwest and on the West Coast, had yet
to settle it, aspects of the ancient Indian managed continent
were still in place across much of the western country.
Judging by the accounts of those who witnessed this period,
(01:19):
the Catlans Bodmer's Autumns, this native West would have been
something to see, one of the spectacles of the world.
No element of this surviving version of Western America amazed
travelers as much as the staggering abundance of wild animals
and for people used to the civilized conditions of the
East or Europe. No Western animal imparted as much shock
(01:43):
and awe as wolves. Michael Steck, a physician traveling the
Santa Fe Trail in the early eighteen fifties, was one
of many who offers us a glimpse of what life
in a fully wolfed West was like. Steck and his
party found that any time they got among bison herds,
wolves became so astonishingly numerous that, as he wrote, we
(02:05):
see immense numbers of them. A common thing is to
see fifty at a sight in the daytime. We are
never out of sight of them, see hundreds in a day.
That comported with wildlife painter John James Ottoman's comment on
the Upper Missouri River that if ever there was a
country where wolves are surpassingly abundant, it's the one we
(02:27):
are now in. But here's the thing.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Today.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
You could drive repeatedly across the country where Steck wrote
of seeing hundreds of wolves a day, or along the Missouri,
where Autobun reported the most abundant wolf population he had
ever encountered, and never see a single wolf, not one.
Our erasure of them in the years from eighteen fifty
to nineteen twenty five was that thorough until about nineteen
(02:56):
twenty five, though, the American West was, and for five
five million years had been, wolf country. Consider that for
a moment and understand what an anomaly the past almost
wolf three hundred years has been to a story like that.
The West wolves were from a family of animals, the Canaday,
(03:20):
that evolved in North America, and although some of them
migrated elsewhere and took on their present forms in Asia
and Europe before they returned to America until the nineteen twenties,
there was never a time when wolves were not America's
keystone predators. Before humans first got here twenty two thousand
(03:40):
or so years ago, wolves probably shaped life in America
more profoundly than any other mammal. Wolves, in other words,
played a crucial role in Western nature for millions of
years before we ever set foot on the continent. Long
before we Old Worlders arrived with our peculiar hatred of predators,
(04:00):
virtually every ecology in the West was shaped from the
top down by the presence of wolves. The Canaday family
first appears in the fossil record of the American Southwest
about five and a half million years ago. Like American
evolved wild horses, our early wild canids became geographically cosmopolitan
(04:24):
by crossing the land bridges connecting America to Eurasia. At
the same time, there were other wolves at stayed home,
giving rise to animals that became Eastern wolves and spawning
the intriguing red wolf of the South.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
As well as coyotes. As we all know.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Now from this year's the Extinction announcement from Colossal Bioengineering
and full disclosure, I'm a member of Colossal's Conservation Advisory Board,
the supersized American direwolf was also part of the candid
mix in ancient America. There's still unresolved science dire wolves.
A twenty twenty one article in Nature arguing that dire
(05:05):
wolves may be different enough from other American wolves to
belong in a genus other than Canus, one called Ainoscion.
Before about twenty five thousand years ago, when gray wolves
began loping home to America from Eurasia, very large and
very white dire wolves dominated the wolf story in America.
(05:27):
At Rancho Lebrea Tarpits in California, more than four thousand
of these burly one hundred and fifty pound wolves died
in the asphalt seeps. Their remains there outnumber those of
gray wolves by one hundred to one. Game of Thrones
and George R. R.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
Martin.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Notwithstanding, dire wolves were not faded to survive the extinction
crash that ended the American places, saying ten thousand years ago.
During that great extinction pulse, smaller gray wolves somehow out
competed dire wolves, but direwolf extinction still left America with
a soup of several wolf types, including coyotes. There were
(06:07):
no survivors of the direwolf genus. Ain't no psion though,
until colossal scientists added into a gray wolf genome twenty
specific genes of direwolf DNA from remains that were seventy
two thousand and thirteen thousand years old, then, through a
surrogate mother, scientist birth Romulus Remus and Callisi in late
(06:30):
twenty twenty four and early twenty twenty five. As for
gray wolves, once they joined the other American canids in
the late Pleistocene, they decidedly made their presence felt. Big
five to six foot long pack hunters weighing eighty to
one hundred and twenty pounds, gray wolves outmatched their long
lost relations Eastern and red wolves and coyotes in both
(06:53):
size and packing stings. Once direwolves disappeared from the continent,
gray wolves were left at the swaggering big dogs. Everywhere,
including the West, gray wolves seem to have migrated home
to America in distinctive waves half a century ago. Biological
taxonomy designated a wopping twenty three species of Canus loupus.
(07:18):
In twenty eleven, though, the US Fish and Wildlife Service
decided to come to terms with modern genetic research on
wolves and concluded that North America's wolves sprang from two origins.
Eastern wolves, red wolves, and coyotes all represented American wolf
evolution animals that never left the continent. Gray Wolves, on
(07:39):
the other hand, constituted animals that had started here, spent
some millions of years in Eurasia, then returned in several
separate distinct waves of animals during the Pleisocene. This taxonomic
rethink has shrunk the number of gray wolf subspecies from
the twenty three of the nineteen forties down to only four.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Arctic white wolves.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
Canus lupus arctos, found in the extreme north of the
continent were probably the last to come home to America.
The rocky mountain wolf Canus Lupus occidentalis, found from the
Montana Rockies northward to Alaska, was likely another late arrival
from Asia. The small gray wolves of Mexico and the
American Southwest Canus Lupus bailei, the Mexican wolf, may have
(08:24):
led the migrations home. But the wolf that occupied more
of America than any other, extending from the Pacific across
the Great Plains, onto the western Great Lakes, and northward
through much of the eastern half of Canada, was Canus
lupus nubilus. This was the famed buffalo wolf, the Lobo
loafer or white wolf of the plains of so much
(08:47):
Western history. All these gray wolves arrived in time for
one of the grandest predator barbecues in world history. Before
the Pleistocene ended, gray wolves joined short face bears, saber
tooth and scimitar cats, false cheetahs, step lions, and running
hyenas to chase and pull down camels, sloths, horses, longhorned bison,
(09:12):
and perhaps mammoth calfs in an Africa like world that
almost seems like science fiction to us now. After the
Pleascistine extinctions took out all the giants. A reconstituted western
Bestieri bequeathed to Western gray wolves their classic place in
American ecology, with buffalo the only western grazer still standing.
(09:32):
After the extinctions, bison numbers skyrocketed to between twenty to
thirty million animals, some one and a half to two
million buffalo wolves served as their primary predators in this
new order, As famed Western trader and author Josiah Gregg
put it in the eighteen forties, although the buffalo is
the largest, he has by no means the control among
(09:56):
the prairie animals. The scepter of authority has been lodged
with the large gray wolf as keystone predators. Wolves apparently
influence continental ecology and ways that ripple through nature, affecting
not just populations of prey species, but also other predators
and scavengers, even down to the kind of vegetation like
(10:19):
aspens or cottonwoods found on a landscape. With gray wolves present,
coyote populations went down and fox numbers went up, and
a kind of bigger dog beats up littler dog equation.
Wolf predation exerts strong evolutionary pressures on the behaviors and
even habitat selections of wolf prey species. Such was the
(10:42):
scepter of authority the gray wolf wielded on Western landscapes
a century ago, and for multiple millions of years before that,
Wild America was a world in.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Good part created by wolves. In a North America.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
Inhabited by native people who never domesticated or herded wild ungulates,
and who thought of all wolves as kin teachers and
totem animals. Wolves were free to play their top of
the pyramid roles as keystone predators, shaping ecologies down to
the birds that sang and the plants that grew. But
(11:19):
four hundred years ago, the arrival of Old worlders at
once challenged that ancient algorithm from the Old World's foothold
in Massachusetts, Bostonian William Wood wrote of the wolf from
the very beginning as a special and confusing problem for colonizers.
The confusion came from America's wolves not acting the way
(11:42):
Europeans had been told wolves should act. In America, Wood wrote,
it was never known yet that a wolf ever set
up on a man or a woman. That seemed impossible,
given the folk traditions about wolves in the Old World.
All those folk tales and biblical passages about ravening wolves
(12:06):
left colonists disoriented when America's wolves showed no aggression towards people.
But wolves in the numbers of America held were still unexpected,
and that led to a certain despair in sixteen thirties
New England, since, as Wood put it, there's little hope
of their utter destruction. So from the start the wolf
(12:27):
was an animal of special concern for Europeans. But why
Partly there was their lack of familiarity with the real thing.
England's own wolves hadn't lasted beyond the fourteen hundreds. Virginians
and New Englanders were living among wolves for the first
time in their lives, and, as Wood implied, they didn't
(12:48):
like it in the least. Then there were their imported
cultural traditions. When you had hearded domesticated animals for eight
thousand years, as these old worlders had, and was your
way of understanding how the world worked, there was a
natural tendency to see wolves as a supernatural malediction. For Christians.
(13:09):
Adams fall from the Garden of Eden into an earth
compromised by evil struck them as the self evident origin
of wolves, After all, didn't wolves share the yellow eyes
medieval illustration gave to Satan. Some of America's wolves were
even black, a coloring that to Europeans was suspicious in
(13:30):
the sixteen twenties. The actual explanation for black wolves lay
in scientific work four centuries in the future. A genomic
study from our time indicates that black coachs in America's
wolves sprang from a hybridization event between wolves and domestic
dogs in the northwest of the continent approximately thirteen thousand
(13:52):
years back during Clovis times. The mutation conferred a fitness advantage,
perhaps in disease resistance, that other wolves sensed, so the
visual clue of blackness affected mating choice, allowing at least
some black wolves to greet Europeans. Thousands of years later,
(14:12):
Native people admired wolves, whatever their color, for their bravery,
hunting skills, and devotion to mates and packs. Europeans saw
those same animals as bloodthirsty monsters, evil actors in a
fallen world. Folk stories of were wolves dim memories of
part human, part animal fantasies from the Paleolithic still circulated
(14:35):
in colonial times and fed a suspicion that wolves might
be avatars of a residual animality in humans, so the
unsuspecting animals were soon to enjoy the full colonial experience
of a wolf war.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
The reality was that wolf.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
Social lives and ecological roles were so similar to our
own that it was no accident that tamed wolves had
become our first domesticated animals twenty five thousand years before.
Wolf societies were much like human hunter gatherer bands. In both,
the leadership was usually matriarchal. The alpha female wolf directs
(15:18):
a pack's movements, while the larger males, especially those between
about two and five years old, are the primary hunters.
As highly social creatures, wolves are members of family packs
led by high status breeders who avoid breeding with close kin,
so a pack's grown pups eventually move out in search
(15:39):
of mating opportunities. While they're individualistic, wolf pups like young humans,
learned from their elders, they are steep in pack culture.
Wolves have strong emotional attachments. After absences, they greet by
standing on their hind legs, a greeting known as a rally.
(16:00):
They also interact with a remarkable range of body language
and facial expressions, howling, which is contagious for wolves is
one of their common ways to express their emotional states,
and it enables them to recognize distant wolves from the
harmonic structure of their voices. No one knows how many
wolves were in colonial America, but since food determines pup survival,
(16:24):
the population of wolves in any given setting rested on
food availability. This means that packs competed with one another
for prime prey territories. In fact, before Old Worlders arrived,
the main mortality in wolves came from other wolves. Europeans
imagined America's wolves as vicious slaughterers of helpless prey. In
(16:50):
the real world, something different was playing out. Chasing down
in neck wrestling big animals armed with hooves and antlers
is dangerous in the extreme despite their wrong jaw muscles.
The geometry of wolve's long muzzles actually inhibits their bite
force so impossible, they go for low hanging fruit. Highly
(17:10):
perceptive about cost benefit, they scavenge animals already dead on
the hunt. They try for fawns and young animals are injured, diseased,
or old ones. Their strategy is to test prey in
search of those least dangerous and easiest to run down.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
Even then, wolf chase.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Success dips as low as ten percent. One of Western
painter George Catlan's memorable observations was about how dearly a
wolf pack won a meal. Even an old or sick buffalo,
he wrote, was a huge and furious animal, and would
often deal death by wholesale to his canine assailants, as
(17:54):
Catlan put it, which he is tossing into the air
or stamping to death under his feet. Catlan's painting White
Wolves Attacking Buffalo showed such a scene with an aging
bull fighting a wolfpack with such resolution that, as Catlan wrote,
his eyes were entirely eaten out of his head, the
(18:14):
grizzle of his nose was mostly gone, his tongue was
half eaten off, and the skin and flesh of his
legs torn almost literally into strings. Yet even with the
bull in that condition, numerous wolves, as Catlan said, were
crushed to death by the feet or horns.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
Of the bull.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
This kind of wolf natural history was invisible to the
new colonists, because all the settlers really cared about was
fashioning a wolf free America. In fact, Woods, Massachusetts Colony
passed the first environmental law in colonial American history. It
was a bounty on the continents wolves. When Western travelers
(19:01):
like Meriwether Lewis, George Catlin, and John James Ottoman first
observed wolves in the West, they referred to them as
the shepherds of the buffalo herds. Josiah Gregg said of
plains lobos that although there were immense numbers of them
upon the prairies, their presence in the landscape was often
determined by bison herds. In this regard, Western wolves resembled
(19:25):
grizzly bears, always found in largest numbers where they could
scavenge buffalo drowned in rivers, or where weak animals were
easier to attack. William Clark observed the most common wolf
hunting technique for buffalo in April of eighteen oh five,
when Lewis and Clark were ascending the Missouri through what
(19:45):
is now North Dakota. Lewis wrote that Captain Clark informed
me that he saw a large drove of buffalo pursued
by wolves today that they at length caught a calf
which was unable to keep up with the herd. An
old Pawnee adage, in fact, was that wolves ran down
and devoured four out of every ten bison calves born
(20:09):
an ancient American equation that left both species healthy across
at least half a million years. One trade everyone commented
on when they were first among the West wolves was
how tame they were, Having no reason to fear wolves.
Native people had long let them hang around camps and villages,
(20:30):
so Audubon had marveled at how wolves would lie on
the banks as their steamboat passed, yawning at them like dogs.
William Clark had an unconcerned wolf walk by so near
that he impulsively stabbed it with the ban at on
the muzzle of his rifle. At Fort Union, Audubon's party
(20:51):
was met by the American Fur Company's Alexander Culbertson, whose
chief hobby, when boredom set in, was running down wolves
on his Indian pony. As Audubon's companion Edward Harris described it,
with wolves in constant view, the trader offered their party
a little wolf entertainment.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
Mister Culbertson, Harris tells us.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
Started his beautiful blackfoot pied mare at full speed when
within half a mile of the wolf, who turned and
galloped off leisurely until mister Culbertson was within two or
three hundred yards of him when he started.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
Off at the top of his speed.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
Within the time it took Harris to scribble his account,
Culbertson was back at the post with the wolf draped
across the saddle horn shot through its shoulders as the
trader had chased him at breakneck speed across the prairie.
It was an impressive performance, no doubt, so long as
you hadn't experienced it from the wolf end of the show.
(21:53):
Centuries of peaceful relations with native peoples had taught the
West wolves not to fear humans right old world folklore,
Western bar talk, and Hollywood's sensationalism. Today, like Liam Neeson's
twenty eleven film The Gray, the truth is that, except
in the rare rabies case, the West wolves were in
(22:14):
no way aggressive towards people. In fact, it was a
Western trope that both wolves and coyotes were rank howards
around humans. While scornful of canine cowardice, early observers in
the West never tired of commenting about how trusting wolves
seem to be trotting in front of their horses like
dogs are sitting and watching curiously as travelers passed within feet,
(22:40):
But soon enough, with everyone traveling the West's armed to
the teeth and taking shots at almost every wolf they saw,
wolves learned to keep their distance. Rifle fire was an
initial and casual wolf persecution, but it was merely a
hint of the changes about to come. In rapid succession
across the nineteen shi century, with a wild animal products
(23:03):
industry well established in the West and many thousands of
overland migrants crossing the region every year, what should have
been canine good times actually ushered in the end game
for the wolf West. In eighteen seventy two, the Brooklyn
painter John Gast distilled an important assumption about both Indians
(23:26):
and the country's wild animals into a famous visual image.
Gas American Progress painting portrayed a blonde, giant and angelic
white garb striding across the West, stringing telegraph wires behind her,
with wagons of settlers in her wake. Disappearing off the
(23:48):
edges of the canvas were the native people, but also
herds of buffalo and packs of wolves consigned to the
margins of the future. Viewers of American Progress seen to
understand in an America modeled on Europe, not just the
native people, but all those iconic wild animals had to go.
(24:09):
Most Americans appeared to assume that in an America making
itself a clone of the old world, a fate of
animals like this was inevitable. Buffalo stood first in the
rank of those incompatible with civilization. Wolves well the plans
since colonial times had been their total eradication. Eventually, other animals,
(24:30):
grizzly bears, cougars, jaguars, wild horses, eagles, and, judging by
the reaction to their extinction, even passenger pigeons joined the
ranks of species. Civilization would not tolerate their destruction. Gas painting, implied,
was no one's fault. Simply enough, Ancient America's time was over.
(24:51):
Incompatibility was a shame, but it seemed to comfort us.
Distilled from the imported nuts of East India tree, a
substance called strychnine ushered in this new order. It became
available in America when a firm in Philadelphia began offering
cheap packages of strychnine in crystal form in eighteen thirty four.
(25:17):
Since there were few predators left in the East by then,
most of the poison went west, sold in bulk in
every store and trading post. Naturally, there were no restrictions
of any kind on its use. It was cheap, unregulated,
and it was lethal chemical warfare. Western travelers used it
both to collect pelts and just to see its effects.
(25:40):
In an age inured to carnage, it was a horrifying killer.
Inside a few minutes, a white tablet gulped down from
a bated carcass launched a victim into waves of convulsive cramping.
Poisoned wolves died from asphyxiation, but strychnine wrenched the body
so violently as to leave a signature death pose, a
(26:01):
corpse with a sharply arched spine and a tail frazzled
as if the animal had been electrocuted on the frontier.
People who did this for a living were called wolfers,
a Western occupation we've probably deliberately left in the dust
bin of history so we didn't have to look at
(26:22):
it too closely. Poisoning animals didn't even require a wolfer
to be present, and unlike trapping, poisoning didn't call for
any sort of skill. You just baited a carcass or
put out chunks of meat laced with poison, and then
headed a camp to enjoy life while the strychnine did
his work. Teams of wolfers driving ox dron wagons began
(26:44):
laying out strychnine in the Yellowstone Country as early as
eighteen sixty four. Approaching a buffalo or horse carcass that baited,
wolfers would start finding victims appearing sprayed across the landscape
as if by some spinning centrifuge a half mile from
their bait animal. The targets were wolves and coyotes, but
(27:06):
the poison killed everything interested in a rotting piece of meat. Eagles, vultures, ravens, magpies,
red foxes, gray foxes, swift foxes, tiny kit foxes, skunks.
As these animals died, their convulsive vomiting sprayed poison across
the grass. Poison grass could take out collateral victims like horses.
(27:30):
When Native people lost ponies this way, they developed a
special hatred for wolfers. This kind of poisoning preyed on
a wolf's inclination to scavenge and avoid injury in a hunt,
and astonishing forty dead wolves per bated carcass was common.
One party in the Texas Panhandle picked up sixty four
(27:52):
wolves one morning, barely a mile from their camp. They
made four thousand dollars in one winter, and can this.
James Mead once poisoned eighty two wolves in a single
baiting in the Texas Panhandle. Into the eighteen nineties, Wolfer's
Jack Abernathy Alan Stagg, and Alec Lewis averaged two hundred
(28:14):
monsters that was their nickname for gray wolves a year,
killing two hundred and ninety six one year on a
single giant ranch the Xit. For more than two decades,
wolf and coyote pelts traded as money in the West,
worth a dollar apiece and two dollars if you could
get the pelts all the way.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
To New York.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
There are no figures for this most disgusting of all
wild animal economies, and for good reason, it's little remembered
in the story of America. But there's every likelihood that
from the eighteen sixties through the eighteen nineties, poisoning wildlife
for money killed Western animals in numbers that competed with
the death tolls of Buffalo. For a couple of decades
(29:01):
after the Civil War, while US Indian policy herded the
tribes under reservations and Western market hunts produced the most
devastating slaughter of wildlife and world history. Wolves continued to
thrive despite strychnine, but with most of their prey animals
now erased, wolves were forced to turn to domesticated cattle
(29:22):
and sheep as prey, except those were the property of
ranchers who stood on eight thousand years of history of
battling predators, so now as hated symbols of wild America.
Wolves from the eighteen eighties through the nineteen twenties became
special targets in the in game wolf War. One stockman
(29:46):
launched to convert the ancient world that acquired into a
money making pasture for cow's sheep and the market. From
the founding of the American colonies through the last decades
of the eighteen hundreds, bounties paid eight on wolf scalps
became the basic military strategy against wolves. Western stock associations
(30:07):
paid bounties in every Western state and territory, and bounties
on predators became a primary and acceptable act of governments too.
In Montana, the territorial government sometimes used up two thirds
of its annual budgets paying bounties on predators. Between eighteen
eighty three and nineteen twenty eight, Montana's governments paid bounties
(30:31):
on a staggering one hundred eleven thousand, five hundred and
forty five wolves and eight hundred eighty six thousand, three
hundred sixty seven coyotes, subsidizing both ranchers and wolfers. As
late as eighteen ninety nine, the state paid out bounties
on a whopping twenty three thousand, five hundred seventy five wolves.
(30:55):
It didn't stop there or even slow down. The war
against wolves and coyotes in Montana even produced a state
law passed in nineteen oh five ordering veterinarians to infect
any wild canines that came their way with sarcoptic mange,
then released them to spread the disease among the wild populations.
(31:16):
As a result, wild canids in Montana and Wyoming still
suffer from a strikingly high mange infection rate even today.
With this kind of multi pronged pressure, wolf populations went
under so dramatically that after bountying more than twenty three
thousand wolves in eighteen ninety nine, Montana paid for only
(31:38):
seventeen dead gray wolves in the year nineteen twenty, and
this ability to kill animals on mass Americans were absolutely unmatched.
By the twentieth century, ranchers and wolfers were naming the
last individual wolves still alive in Montana the last This
(32:00):
one was called Snowdrift. In the Dakotas, the last one
was the custuerwolf, an animal charge with livestock depredations a
t rex couldn't have pulled off. At the beginning of
the century, a Canadian writer named Ernest Thompson Seton, who
had extensive outdoor experience and also employed scientific methodology in
(32:21):
his work, tried to take on the huge implications of
the new Darwinism in the world around him. Setan moved
to New Mexico and began to write books, books that
strongly appealed to the new centuries readers. To counter the
so called nature read in tooth and claw conclusions that
(32:42):
others had drawn from Darwinian evolution, writers like Seton and
Jack London looked for examples among wild creatures of traits
humans admired, individuality, compassion, cooperation, loyalty, and an ability to
transfer culture learning across generations. One of Setan's most popular
(33:04):
stories employing this approach was about one of those legendary
last wolves in New Mexico's case a wolf Setan called Lobo,
King of Carumpa. Lobo was a male wolf Setan had
known years before he became a writer, when he was
himself a trapper and wolf hunter who had finally captured Lobo.
(33:27):
He had done that by baiting his traps with the
scent of Lobo's mate, a female wolf the ranchers called Blanca,
a beautiful animal Setan had trapped and killed while listening
to Lobo howling mournfully in the distance to no reply.
As Setan described him, Lolo was an amazingly canny wolf,
(33:50):
but with one fatal flaw. That flaw was Lobo's fidelity
to his mate. Setan caught Lobo in traps laced with
Blockeka scent, and the ranchers then hauled Lobo alive to
a ranch yard and chained him there as a prize
to show the community. Within days, Lobo died, looking off
(34:12):
at the New Mexico planes that had been his and
Blanca's world. Lobo's and Blanca's story first appeared in Setan's
book Wild Animals I Have Known, and it was one
of the stories that gave that famous book its running theme.
Those in America who celebrated the destruction of the West
wolves sneered, but Setan's book was pointing towards a different
(34:36):
kind of future. The theme of wild animals I have known,
he wrote was simple, we and the beasts are kN.
Speaker 3 (35:05):
So Dan, thinking about wolves. One of the points that
you raise in this episode is that the perception of
wolves coming from the old world doesn't match up with
the reality of wolves in the New world. And it
got me thinking about when we were working on our
Long Hunter project and our Mountain Man project. We do
(35:26):
have instances of guys being bitten by wolves, and it's
always when they're sleeping around a campfire, and I had
sort of read that as we're working on it. I'd
read that as like evidence of wolves being all over
the place and just a presence on the landscape. And
then in light of your episode had caused me to
(35:48):
rethink it. These wolves are sneaking in and you know,
they're not super aggressive, they're just approaching guys when they're asleep.
I don't know that there's a question there necessarily, but
I mean with.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
The Long Hunter instance, it was a rabbit wolf. Yeah,
and there's there's a rabbit there's.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
A rabbit wolf rabbit mountain man at one of the
rendezvous too. Yeah, there's a wolf that runs around at
a rendezvous in the eighteenth things and bites people.
Speaker 3 (36:17):
I guess it strikes me because you read it, you
write accounts from those periods, and you're like, Wow, wolves
were everywhere, wolves were biting people. And then when you
take a step back and you sort of contextualize it
with how many wolves there were, there are sort of
these rare, very rare instances that jump out to us.
But in the grand scheme of things, the wolves are
(36:39):
pretty much off on their own.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
And yeah, you.
Speaker 4 (36:42):
Can find guy after guy after guy after guy that
gets tore up by a grizzly bear. Yeah, No, guys
are getting tore up by wolves, right.
Speaker 2 (36:49):
No, they're not.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
And uh, I mean one of the reasons I wanted
to include that quote from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. This
is in William Woods's book that he publishes in sixteen
thirty two, when he's running through the accounts of all
these new animals that are in the Americas, he makes
(37:13):
that statement that I, as far as I can find,
remains true all through American history, certainly through the West
and the West wolves. He makes that statement that there
has not been an instance where a wolf has set
(37:35):
upon a man or a woman in our colony, and
he's already said there are wolves around all over the place,
but there has not been an instance. And the reason
he said that, I'm pretty certain is because these people
came out of Western Europe. For one thing, England hadn't
had wolves since the fourteen hundreds, so there have been
(37:56):
multiple generations of people who the only thing they know
about wolves is, you know, these fairy tales and folk
tales that they've hurt handed down. Is they are expecting
once they hear that there are wolves in North America,
that wolves are going to be tearing people limb from limb,
and suddenly the reality is, wow, there's not been a
(38:19):
single instance where a wolf has set upon a man
or a woman in our experience. And that's kind of
what tracks through the story here, especially in the West.
What most people in the nineteenth century in the West,
especially after they had had generations of this kind of
interaction with wolves, what their reaction to wolves was is
(38:43):
wolves are cowards. Wolves are not aggressive and are going
to attack you. They're cowards, and that became the detegration
that people levied against them. You know, the Native people
think am as boy wolves are these wonderful animals. They're
loyal to their families and you know, and they're brave,
(39:04):
and and the European euro American perspective was because the
wolves who are not of aggressive there are a bunch
of cowards and that's that's how they.
Speaker 2 (39:15):
That's how they respond.
Speaker 4 (39:16):
There's a lot of I hesitate to say evidence because
I don't know that I've seen it in evidentiary form.
You hear people say that the wolves of Europe, the
wolves in Romania, wolves in other places, that it's a
there is a there's a legacy of greater aggression and
(39:38):
like a higher propensity to attack people with some of
these Eurasian wolves, more livestock depredation.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
Do you know that? Do you know that to be true?
Speaker 4 (39:46):
Or is that?
Speaker 2 (39:47):
Is that not true?
Speaker 1 (39:50):
I know that that's what's thought to be true. That's
what the folklore of the wolf is has always been,
and that folklore was brought to them America. So that's
one of the you know, and it's still I mean,
I encountered people, you know, when I was living in
the Bitterroot Valley. Back a decade ago, I had a
neighbor who when wolves were recovering in the Sapphire Mountains
(40:14):
right above us, and I would occasionally see a pack
run across the road. As I would come home from
a graduate class at night at ten o'clock, pack of
wolves would run across the road. I could go outside,
usually two or three times a year, and I'd hear wolves.
How I had a neighbor who had grown up in
California who walked up to the house one day and
said something like, well, I guess you know that these
(40:35):
wolves are probably I mean, we're in mortal danger. These
wolves are close, and these things they're going to tear
my wife off the front porch and maul her in
the yard. I can't let my son and his granddaughter
come over because I know they're going to get my granddaughter.
Speaker 4 (40:53):
And you know, I was trying to tell you they
haven't got man the tree, haven't got anybody.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
They have, there's no but it did not work. I
told him that, and I could tell he was completely unconvinced.
And so these stories, I mean, they go obviously back
a long way into the old world. I mean, they
are still current with us where you know. And I
went to a wolf conference in southern New Mexico and
Las Crusis one time, about twenty years ago, and there
(41:21):
was a woman who was representing the livestock industry who
showed our asseymbol throng of an audience of two hundred
and fifty people or so, how deadly Mexican wolves were
and how scary they were to have them on the ground.
And what she showed us was a photograph of a
cowboy in full shaps and hat and everything, his boots
(41:45):
running towards a front porch, running towards the photographer and
he's really balling the jack and back in the background
maybe one hundred yards away, so far away. She had
to draw a circle around it to make sure that
the audience saw it was a wolf standing in the road.
And she said, this is an example of how bloodthirsty
(42:05):
these wolves are.
Speaker 2 (42:06):
Had he not.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
Run for the porch, this wolf was going to pull
him down. Yeah, And it's a wolf standing curiously in
the road watching a cowboy in shaps run up the
up the dirt road.
Speaker 4 (42:18):
There's a great way of looking at the risk. And
you see it with grizzly bears, And it'd be interesting
to look at it with contemporary Europe, you know, or
in your aging countries to.
Speaker 2 (42:28):
Have wolves would be like, what are the odds.
Speaker 4 (42:32):
Than in a given year any individual, Yeah, acts will
have a violent altercation with a human, you know. And
then when you look at like the menagerie of North
American wildlife, it's like grizzlies.
Speaker 2 (42:46):
Are grizzlies are mountain lions? Yeah?
Speaker 4 (42:49):
Are well, Yeah, grizzlies are high and every and everybody
else is kind of like inconsequential. But I would be
curious to know, like if the europe if that European
sense which you see cited all the time when it
talks about the American the immediate American hatred of wolves
coming from this big bad wolf in Europe thing to
(43:13):
just be interesting to look at and be like, was
it any more was it any more true in Europe
than here? Or was it just as untrue there as
it was here? About the human health risk with wolves, Yeah,
not the inconvenience of livestock, but the health risk I.
Speaker 1 (43:31):
Think, you know. And there's a guy who's who's written
a recent book which I just blurbed for him on
Europe's wolves. And what he did was there was a
wolf in Romania that tracked sort of a you know,
one of these single colonizing wolves, that tracked three or
four hundred miles from southern southeastern Europe towards France. And
(43:55):
this guy, a couple of years later, went out and
he that exact route that this wolf had taken and
wrote a book about it. And one of the things
he said that struck me because I.
Speaker 2 (44:08):
Didn't know this.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
Europe now has more wolves in it than the United
States does. The United States, accepting Alaska, the lower forty eight,
Europe has more wolves than the Lower forty eight, and
Europe is attempting to be as welcoming of wolves as possible. Now, Obviously,
(44:30):
according to this guy's journey, he was running into people,
you know, every few days who were outraged, just as
a lot of Montana ranchers are outraged that there were
wolves returning to Europe, and so some of those same sensibilities.
But it's going to require somebody doing a book to
try to find whether or not evidence actually exists, because
(44:52):
some of the things I've read about wolf attacks in
Europe are well okay, So there's always the rabid animal
that's that could be involved, and there were evidently a
lot of wolf dog hybrids and those animals, at least
some people have argued, may have been responsible for some
(45:13):
of the attacks that have so anyway, it's that kind
of story. And obviously in the nineteenth century when people
are coming west. I mean, what I tried to get
across this episode is that hell wolves have been They
had been in the West and in America for five
million years. All of the wildlife, the way trees and
(45:35):
grass grew was sort of dependent on there being this
keystone predator at the top of everything. So it's a
little bit like taking the beavers out or taking the
sea otters out. When you do that, the ecologies start
scrambling and changing because you've got in place this animal
that's been there for millions of years and producing its
(45:59):
effect the world. And yet you know, we come from
the old world with this kind of wolf hostility, and
our task immediately is to try to get rid of
them is just as fast as we can.
Speaker 3 (46:12):
I think one thing that I've gotten from your work
in terms of just how I conceptualize and certain animals,
this relationship between coyotes and wolves and they look alike,
but there's obvious differences. But this idea that you know,
(46:33):
wolves go up, coyotes go down, foxes go up, and
it's sort of this continuous balancing act between these. I
don't know if you can sort of talk about the
coyote story because that's obviously an area of expertise, but
how that relates to the wolf story, because there's some
interesting parallels, but then obviously those two animals, their histories
(46:54):
diverge in very clear ways.
Speaker 2 (46:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (46:56):
So I've done obviously the Old Man America episode on
you know, the Native stories about coyote with a capital
C as the deity figure, and I'm going to do
one more episode later in the year that's going to
be about the sort of the coyote story because the coyote,
(47:18):
unlike wolves, Europeans had no familiarity with coyotes, and so
they didn't actually know what to think about them, and
it took, you know, some time, It took particularly you know,
Mark Twain in roughing it sort of giving Americas on
America's an idea of how to think about coyotes, and
and it was not a favorable and appraisal unfortunately. But
(47:42):
coyotes and wolves obviously go back a long way. They
are closely related. They can hybridize, although one of the
interesting things that's happening these days is that coyotes will
readily hybridize and the wolves will too, with eastern wolves
and red wolves, but not gray wolves. And the gray
wolves that are in the West seem to be sort
(48:03):
of mortal enemies of coyotes, and we have some explanations
for that, and I can talk about them a little
later in the series. But they're closely related, they're related
enough to hybridize. But I had a biologist at the
Predator Research Facility in Logan, Utah tell me one time
(48:24):
that they had deliberately induced a pregnancy and a coyote
with wolf sperm, and when she had this litter, she
immediately killed every one of them.
Speaker 2 (48:41):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (48:42):
Yeah, she killed every one of them within a day,
her own pups.
Speaker 4 (48:48):
Her hatred wolves greater than her love of her own children.
Speaker 1 (48:53):
Yeah, her love of her own pups.
Speaker 2 (48:57):
Yeah, I think the end of a book. Yeah, read
that to my kids at night. Yeah, they love that.
Not that and she ate them.
Speaker 1 (49:08):
Yeah, but you know, I mean one of the stories
I obviously told in this this particular episode is about
the Wolfers, which is uh and I you know, have
to observe that's not of sort of a Western figure
that has made it into Hollywood movies. But holy cow,
these guys they killed untold thousands of animals and not
(49:28):
just wolves because the baits, the strych nine baits they
were putting out. They were killing everything that came and
took the baits. So they were killing eagles and ravens
and hawks and skunks and raccoons and foxes and coyotes
and you know, and also wolves.
Speaker 4 (49:43):
I'll tell you another interesting bycatch.
Speaker 2 (49:45):
They would get yeah in.
Speaker 4 (49:48):
Life and Death at the Mouth of the Muscleshell, which
is like a trader's journal.
Speaker 1 (49:51):
Yeah. Uh.
Speaker 4 (49:53):
They it seems like when they get little free time,
like the guys in this little community which is now
under the wa waters of Fort Peck Reservoir, they kind
of like, as they get a minute or they get
the right amount of drunk or whatever, it's decided that
they'll go and lace some baits, just like a fall
like nothing else nothing better else to fall back is
(50:15):
lay some baits in it. He talks about, I can't
even remember what tribe it is. They come in pissed
because they've lost twenty four of their dogs to a bait. Yeah,
and they want to raise it. They want to raise
a fuss about it.
Speaker 2 (50:34):
Yeah, And.
Speaker 1 (50:36):
Of strict nine poisoning because wolves and coyotes would vomit
the stryct nine onto the grass, and Indian pony herds
would if they happen to be herded in that spot,
and aiding that grass horses would suddenly die from being
killed by strick nine.
Speaker 3 (50:55):
What's the This might be a two technical what's the
half life or whatever? The appropriate term would be a
strictionne it seems like one of the like a heavy
metal almost that is just sort of it's accumulates and yeah,
like where does it end? The horse eats the grass
and the horse does then yeah, comes against the horse.
Speaker 1 (51:14):
Yeah, I wish I could answer that question. I don't
really know, but I do think it remains toxic, you know,
exposed above ground in a form that another animal can
get for quite a while. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (51:28):
One last question for you on this. Dire wolves been
in the news Colossal Bioscience, Colossal Biosciences, where you and
I are on the conservation advisory board. They've taken they've
identified some dire wolf genes I believe nineteen, and we're
able to put them, combine them with a gray wolf,
(51:51):
and then use surrogate pops to birth some Yeah, and
it's sparked this huge debate of how you know when
they when when someone declares it a dire wolves, Like,
what does it require to say an animal is what
it is? Does it have to pass the look test?
Does it have to pass the genetic purity marker?
Speaker 2 (52:12):
Like?
Speaker 4 (52:12):
Like, who gets to say that that's what that is?
And you and I had talked before about.
Speaker 2 (52:20):
Even if you had, if you knew you had.
Speaker 4 (52:22):
The complete animal, how do you account for the culture?
Speaker 2 (52:28):
You know?
Speaker 1 (52:28):
Yeah, that's that's the to me, the whole thing. And
we have talked about it, say, because animals have culture,
and so particularly for social animals like wolves, I mean,
they teach their pups what the potential prey is, how
to function in a landscape. And these are animals that,
(52:50):
these these dire wolves, if that's what we can call them,
that are not going to have any culture to rely
on the culture they're going to be taught basically as
whatever they're human handlers are exposing them to, you know,
And the other thing about this. I mean, this is,
as you and I both know and I've talked about,
this is a kind of a genetic experiment to see
(53:13):
if it's possible to de extinct an animal, and canids
appear to be easier to do this with than anything else,
and so that's why Colossal ended up doing this wolf
experiment to begin with. But you can't really say that
(53:34):
these animals ultimately are dire wolves. They're wolves that are
going to have some direwolf genetics, and we're going to
get a chance to see. I mean, one of the
things obviously that these genetic these spliced in genes have
done is they've produced animals that are white, and that's
one of the arguments that dire wolves probably had white coats,
(53:55):
particularly thick white coats, and these animals have that. I
think the next testing to be interested in is to
see exactly how big they get, because our perception, particularly
from Librea tar pits, where there are just hundreds of
direwolf skulls available from dire wolves that were caught in
the tar there is that dire wolves were probably about
(54:17):
twenty five thirty percent larger than gray wolves, which means
if these animals get to adulthood, and they do express
direwolf genetics. I mean they're going to weigh one hundred
and sixty hundred and sixty five pounds or something. So
that's going to be I think, an interesting test to see.
I don't know how it's going to turn out, but
(54:38):
it's a very fascinating.
Speaker 4 (54:40):
It's it's been just for the debate in the conversation
that it's inspired about kidding about wildlife and the role
of wildlife and extinction. My first date with my wife,
my very first date, we went to Librea tar pit
it is and they have a display on a wall
of seventy five wolf skulls, and I have a skull
(55:04):
shelf in my house that was inspired by the It's
not lit the same way, but it was inspired inspired
by that, inspired by that, and I got in trouble
on my first date because we want you know, they
play those movies on Circle. Well, I'm sitting there and
we come in and we watched the end half of
a movie and I found myself explaining, so what we'll
(55:25):
do is we'll watch the end half and then it'll
start over and we'll just watch up to where I started.
Speaker 2 (55:35):
And she's like, oh that this is how that that
that's how this works. Oh thank you for.
Speaker 4 (55:42):
Thank you for explaining. I was toy lost as how
we're gonna see the whole movie. Thanks for helping me out.
I just couldn't visualize how this is gonna work.
Speaker 1 (55:55):
Yeah, well, well guys, thanks for all the question man.
Speaker 2 (56:01):
Yeah this is this has been great fun as always.
Ye all right
Speaker 4 (56:05):
M mmmmm
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