Ep. 84: Surviving and Conserving Tigers (feat. Dr. John Goodrich)

Dr. John Goodrich is not only a Siberian Tiger attack survivor, he's a world-leading expert on tigers and big cats, and serves as Chief Scientist for Panthera, a world-wide NGO that aims to protect and conserve wild cats. John has worked with many species other than Siberian Tigers, including Snow Leopards in Afghanistan (if you'd like to see a clip from the documentary he's featured in about his work, check it out here), Amur leopards, and different species of bears.

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Thanks for listening!

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Welcome to episode eighty four of Get Out, a Live,
a bi weekly podcast about animal tacks, why they happen,
and how we can avoid them. I'm your host, Ashley,
and today we have such a special episode, but very
quickly before we get into that episode, as a thank
you to all of you who take a moment to
leave a review for this podcast. I read one on
every episode, So today's comes from Apple podcast by on

(00:39):
the Don't and it's titled good Stuff. I'm really enjoying
this podcast with Ashley. Now, thanks f thank YOUF short
and sweet love it. That sound that you're hearing is
my twelve week old kitten, Gus, who insists on being
part of all of this.

Speaker 2 (00:55):
So if you.

Speaker 1 (00:56):
Hear any background noises, I apologize, but that's him. I'm
going to keep this very brief. We have such a
good interview coming up with someone who is not only
a worldwide expert on a species that we talk about
quite often on this podcast, tigers, but he also belongs
to a very small group of people who can say
that they survived a tiger attack. This turned out to

(01:18):
be a wonderful conversation about tiger conservation, tiger trafficking, and
poaching and what it means to really protect tigers and
how we can all do our parts. So, without further ado,
please enjoy this interview with doctor John Goodrich.

Speaker 3 (01:33):
So my name is John Goodrich. I am chief scientist
at the organization Pantherra, which I think we'll talk about
in a little bit. And before I was chief scientist,
I was director of Panthera's tiger program. But I've been
doing tiger conservation work since nineteen ninety five and now
as chief scientist for a Pantherra, I get to be

(01:53):
involved in the conservation of all wildcats.

Speaker 1 (01:57):
And what made you choose to tigers specifically. I know
that we're going to get into some of the other
animals that you've studied in a bit, but like, was
tigers your favorite or just the most interesting or had
the biggest need that you saw?

Speaker 3 (02:10):
When I was in college and as a graduate student,
tigers never even crossed my mind. I wasn't dreaming that big.
But you know, I was born a biologist. Some of
my earliest memories are of out catching frogs and tadpoles
in my backyard and that sort of thing. It was
always most fascinated by the animals that I couldn't see,

(02:30):
but I'd go out and I'd see their tracks and
the other evidence that they left behind. And so that
got me very interested in carnivor ecology because usually it's carnivores.
They're the ones that are so snaky and snaking around
at night, and you don't get to see them very often,
And so I focused on carnivores for my graduate research.

(02:50):
Both for my masters. I did my masters on black
bears in Nevada and for my PhD, which I did
on badgers in Wyoming. But again I tiger's never occurred
to me, but one of my master's thesis advisors put
me in touch with Morris Horknocker, who had in the
early nineteen nineties just started a tiger project in Russia.

(03:13):
And when I finished my PhD in nineteen ninety five,
the person who was running that project took a different job,
and Morris offered me the job to go to Russia
and run a project radio tracking Siberian tigers. So, yeah,
I jumped on a plane, and I was supposed to
go for a two to three year stint, but it

(03:34):
turned into fifteen years that I lived and worked in Russia.

Speaker 1 (03:37):
So wow, what was it like living in Russia?

Speaker 3 (03:40):
Oh, my gosh, it was. It was crazy, it was.
And you know, I hadn't traveled much. I'd been to Mexico,
I'd been to Canada. Canada doesn't really count as international travel.
But yeah, showing up in Russia in nineteen ninety five,
just after Peristroika, it was definitely a culture shock for
me and going going into a different world. But it

(04:02):
was you know that fifteen years of my life were
some of the best of times and some of the
worst at times for sure.

Speaker 1 (04:08):
Yeah, that's so interesting because I don't run into many
people who have lived in Russia for any period of time,
So that is super cool. And I'm assuming you got
to work with like a lot of Did you get
to work with a lot of Russian biologists who were
also working with tigers?

Speaker 2 (04:21):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (04:22):
Absolutely, Yeah, we worked nice. You know, I was the
head American biologist on the project. Yevgeny Smirnoff was the
head Russian biologist on the project, and he worked for
the sikotil In Reserve and he was their tiger biologist
and so we worked together. But my entire crew was Russian. There,
you know, the occasional American that came through and helped out.

(04:45):
And there was a guy named bart Schier who was
there when I arrived, and he helped us, especially with
capturing tigers. But for the most part it was me
in a Russian crew, so I had to go through
the survival survival, learning Russian by survival, I guess you'd
call it.

Speaker 1 (05:03):
Yeah, Oh my gosh, Yeah, did they speak English? Like,
did you have a huge language barrier?

Speaker 2 (05:08):
There? Huge language barrier?

Speaker 3 (05:10):
Of the two Russian field assistance I had when I
got there, one spoke some some broken English, the others
didn't speak a word of English, and the Yevgeny the
biologists didn't really speak any English either, But we did
have There was a woman in town that we hired
as an interpreter, but she couldn't be there in the
field with us all the time and that sort of thing,

(05:30):
so it was more we'd use her for meetings with
the reserve director and that sort of thing.

Speaker 1 (05:36):
Yeah, I can imagine, especially if you're working with an
animal that can be so dangerous, like having good communications
probably incredibly important. I can't imagine what that is like
with the language barrier.

Speaker 2 (05:45):
Wow, Ye, it was.

Speaker 3 (05:46):
Challenging, and you know, we're two months into it, we
were capturing tigers.

Speaker 1 (05:51):
So yeah, geez, So how were tigers I guess back then,
like as you're working on that project, how were they
perceived in Russia? Like were people generally like happy to
have them around or not so much?

Speaker 3 (06:04):
It's pretty similar to wherever you go. You know, everybody
loves tigers, right for whatever reason, everybody hates wolves. Everybody
loves tigers. So yes, people were happy to around have
them around. But it's also kind of the not in
my backyard thing where tigers are dangerous.

Speaker 2 (06:21):
They can kill people.

Speaker 3 (06:22):
In Russia, that happened very rarely, and they were usually
killing people that were trying to kill them. But they
killed dogs and they would kill livestock. And you know,
I lived in a small town called Tournae and literally
had tigers walk through my backyard, kill my neighbors dogs,
you know, kill livestock nearby that I had to investigate.
So there's that kind of people like tigers. They wanted

(06:45):
them around, but they didn't really want them that close.
So you're you're always you know, working with with any
large carnivor, you're always trying to manage that human carnivore relationship.

Speaker 1 (06:57):
Yeah, so after you studied tigers, it seems like you
went on to have a very varied range of animals
that you worked with. So of the animals that you've
worked with, like bears, other big cats, like snow leopards.
What animal or what project have you been most excited
to hop in on.

Speaker 2 (07:19):
I'm no good at favorites. I generally don't have any.

Speaker 3 (07:21):
Yeah, it's it's always hard for me to pick because
there's so many amazing things about all the projects that
I worked on. But I would say that the tiger
project in Russia be probably the top of the list
there because I think it was really impactful. The things
we learned have not just impacted tiger conservation in Russia
but worldwide. And you know, I think one of our

(07:44):
biggest results from our work in Russia was we put
poaching on the map. You know, when I first started
in tiger conservation in nineteen ninety five, it was all
about habitat conservation and preserving enough habitat for tigers. Well,
in Russia there's tons of habitat, but what we found
in the fifteen years and radio coloring over fifty tigers

(08:04):
more than seventy percent of our tigers were killed by poachers.

Speaker 2 (08:08):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (08:09):
And everybody knew that poaching was a problem, not just
in Russia but worldwide, but this really put it on
the map. Yeah, And we got some good publications out
about poaching and really got people to understand that poaching
is the main problem that was driving the decline in
tigers at that time, not just in Russia but worldwide.

Speaker 2 (08:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (08:32):
So you also worked on radio coloring snow leopards, I
believe for like the first time in what was it, Afghanistan.

Speaker 3 (08:40):
Yep, we put that Yeah, Yeah, which that would be
my second choice of amazing projects to work on.

Speaker 2 (08:45):
It was.

Speaker 3 (08:46):
I was only there for a couple of months. I
went to Afghanistan in twenty twelve to help start this
snow Leupper project and there was a National Geographic film
crew there and they made a film about it called
The snow leperad of Afghanianistan. But it was it was
an amazing adventure, just crazy, and of course we were

(09:07):
in Afghanistan at the time, so there was that whole
aspect of security that or insecurity you might say that
it came into it. But it was an incredible adventure
and we literally we you know, I got there and
things weren't quite ready to start capturing snow leopards yet,
and we had to push really hard to get it

(09:27):
going and get all the local permissions and all the
equipment in and that sort of thing. And I remember
we it was early afternoon we got the final permission
in a meeting in a village headman's house, and that
the crew was kind of like, okay, well we should,
you know, get our stuff together, but let's let's head

(09:47):
out in the morning. And I said, no, we're going
now before something somebody can stop us, right, And so
we went out with a skeleton crew and just a
cameraman from the National Geographic Crew and the rest of
the crew was going to come in the morning. We
set one snare that day, and that night we caught
a snow leopard.

Speaker 1 (10:05):
Oh my god, that is so lucky.

Speaker 3 (10:08):
Yeah, And to put that into context, we trapped for
two more months and only caught one more snow lefpart.
So it was just like the luckiest thing in the world.
But I was so happy that we made that push
to get out there, because he wouldn't have been there
the second night.

Speaker 1 (10:23):
Yeah, And did you find. Was that project more just
like trying to get a sense of how many there were,
or like how they were using to habitat, or were
you also finding information about like poaching for them as well.

Speaker 2 (10:33):
Well.

Speaker 3 (10:34):
I was just there to help them capture and put
collars on the snow leopard, so I wasn't involved in
the project after that, but it was I think the
project was to get a general understanding of snow leppard
snow leopard ecology and movements in the area. But the
biggest threat to snow leopards there was human wildlife conflict,
mostly snow leopards preying on livestock, and there were goats

(10:58):
and sheep, especially goats all over the place and so
heavily grazed that they were out competing the local wildlife
and the snow leopards price so the snow leopards had
not much wild prey to prey on. They would end
up praying on goats, and so I think they were
trying to get a handle on that and come up
with ways to prevent that depredation.

Speaker 1 (11:21):
Nice. So moving on to your work with Pantherra, So
could you, first of all, for those who don't know
about PANTHERA explain a little bit about the organization and
then how you got involved with it.

Speaker 3 (11:32):
Sure, Panther is the only NGO, non government organization in
the world that works exclusively on wildcats, and that's all
we do is the conservation of all forty wildcat species.
And we have specific programs for all the big cats.
We've got the tiger program, the jaguar program, and so on,
and then a program that covers all the small cats.

(11:54):
But we focus on science based conservation of wildcats around
the world. And we're medium sized organization. We're I think
between between three and four hundred staff members right now
and with programs in roughly fifty countries around the world.

Speaker 1 (12:11):
Are those projects, I mean, I'm sure there's a ton
of projects, but like are a lot of them based
on radio coloring and working through human wildlife conflict stuff.

Speaker 3 (12:20):
We do some radio coloring, but not that much. We're
more focused on conservation activities, so working out Oh, there's
a lot of human wildlife conflict work, especially for the
big cats, but small cats too. It's always an issue
for mostly for big cats. Counterproaching is and counter wildlife

(12:41):
trade activities are incredibly important. A lot of our research
is more focused on monitoring wildcat numbers and distribution, but
also in monitoring our activities. Every we strive to anyway
every conservation intervention that we implement, right to monitor that

(13:01):
intervention and figure out if it's working or not. So
it's all it's all very adaptive. We're constantly looking at
cat numbers. If cat numbers aren't stable or increasing, that's
our goal. For tigers. Our goal is to increase tiger numbers.
So if they're not increasing, we're not doing our job.
We need to go back and look at the data
on all of our interventions to try to figure out

(13:22):
where we're going wrong and what we can do better.
And I think that sets us apart from a lot
of conservation organizations where we absolutely demand success and we
work very hard and use science to determine if we're
being successful or not. And if we're not being successful why,
And if we are being successful, why you know we're

(13:43):
doing something great and how can we you know? So,
if something in the tiger program is working really well,
we're seeing tiger numbers increasing, is that an an intervention
that we can implement for other species?

Speaker 1 (13:56):
Yeah, So before we get into one of your very
close encounters with tigers. Can you give us like a
background either on Siberian tigers alone or just like tigers
in the world in general, across different subspecies and whatnot.
Can you give us like a how are tigers doing?
And how I've heard that numbers have been increasing? Is
that true for all of them? What's going on with tigers?

Speaker 2 (14:19):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (14:20):
Well, and that's a fun question for me. You know,
twenty years ago that was a really depressing question to answer. Yeah,
now it's kind of a fun question to answer because
tigers are recovering. I've been lucky enough to span my
you know, almost thirty years of tiger conservation and go
from steep decline. We're in total panic mode where we
were thinking in ten years, twenty years we might not

(14:40):
have wild tigers out there anymore, to a point where
tigers are still endangered, but it seems that populations are increasing.
It's hard to say on a global scale or a
range wide scale for tigers because it's it's hard to
count animals over such a huge area, right, But the
data suggests that tiger globally, tiger numbers in the wild

(15:01):
may be increasing but are at least stable. But we
know for sure at a number of sites, both sites
where Panthera's worked at websites where other organizations and governments
are working as well, the tiger numbers have increased dramatically
at some of these sites. Some of the sites we've
worked on in Nepal and India and in Thailand, we've
seen increases of up to four.

Speaker 2 (15:22):
Hundred and fifty percent.

Speaker 3 (15:23):
So the cool thing about that is we've developed a model,
and we being not just Panther. Panther has developed I
think an awesome model for tiger conservation, but the tiger
community and conservation community in general has developed this model
for tiger conservation that is working, and in general, it
focuses on locking down tiger populations in protected areas, stopping

(15:47):
the poaching or at least reducing it to the point
where tiger numbers are increasing. You know, you're never going
to completely stop poaching in wildlife trade. It's kind of
like the drug trade. It's always going to be there.
But if you can stop it enough so that your
wildlife populations aren't declining and they can recover, then you've
done your job. And we've done that in a number

(16:08):
of places for tigers and then if if populations are
increasing in these protected areas, which we call source populations,
then tigers starts spilling out into the wider landscape.

Speaker 1 (16:20):
Nice.

Speaker 2 (16:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (16:21):
On this podcast, we've talked specifically so much about tigers
and Nepal tigers in India because it seems like, at
least from what I've seen over doing this podcast, that
that's where a lot of human wildlife conflicts happen, probably
just because there's so many people in so like not
as much space for tigers. So that's why I was
so interested to talk to you, because working with tigers
in Siberia, I don't often hear about things happening there

(16:44):
with tigers. So I guess that's a segue into what
we're going to talk about next. But you belong to
a very small group of people who can say that
they've been attacked by a tiger. So can you tell
us where you were and like what led into that happen.

Speaker 2 (17:00):
Yeah? Sure.

Speaker 3 (17:01):
So we were in far southeastern Russia, outside of the
city of lot of Astok and very close to the
border with North Korea and China, and we were running
an effort actually focused on capturing and radio coloring leopards
but tigers as well. Our leopards were our first goal

(17:21):
at that time amore leopards. They were estimated to be
about forty left in the wild, so they're critically endangered,
and we were starting a project on them to figure
out what their threats are and what they've needed and
how we could help leopard population. But there were also
tigers there, and we were also coloring tigers, and so
we were in a remote camp and I had a crew,

(17:44):
including myself, of six people. And the way we capture
tigers and leopards was by setting these cable foot snares
that are attached to a tree on one end and
the other end has a loop that sits over a spring,
so that when a tiger a leopard through it, the
spring pulls the snare cable up and tight around the
animals spot. And we had three different lines trap lines

(18:09):
going out from this base camp, and we'd go out
every morning in teams of two to check the snares.
We also had radio transmitters on all the snares which
we would monitor around the clock, and if we got
a signal at two o'clock in the morning, we'd get
the crew together and go in to see what we
caught and get it out of the snare as quickly
as possible. But we check them every day anyway, just

(18:30):
in case there was a failure of the transmitter or
something went wrong. You don't want an animal caught in
a foot snare for an extended period of time. And
so on this day we were short handed because one
of the graduate students that was working on the field
team had to go into town to take exams. So
we had three snare lines to check. Normally we would

(18:51):
go in teams of two, but one snare line had
to be checked by a team of one. Me being
the most experienced, I went out by myself to check
what was the easiest Nairow line. So I got up
in the morning and went to the cooked tent, got
my coffee and beautiful fall morning. The Russian the Russian
Far East is very much like New England here in

(19:12):
North America, where it just beautiful mixed hardwood conniffer forests.
But autumn is just a lovely time with the leaves
changing and fiery ride Japanese maples. And so I'm just
strolling down the trail with me with my coffee to
check the traps. We didn't have any radio signals, so
I'm not expecting to catch anything and just enjoying a nice,

(19:33):
easy morning walk down an old logging road. And as
I approached the last nare, I heard a growl. I thought, holy,
holy cow, we caught a tiger. I tell it right
away by the growl. It was a tiger, and so
I put my coffee down and got myself ready and
got out. I had a signal flare that we used
for protection. I would normally carry bear spray as well,

(19:55):
but I had left that in camp with my wife,
who was back in camp with my with our one
and a half year old daughter, so I left that
with her. But I got my flare out, and this
flare is it doesn't It's a flare that you just
hold in your hand. It's for a marine signal flare,
so if you're in the water, you can hold up
this flare and people will know where you are to

(20:17):
rescue you. But it doesn't shoot a flare into the air.
So I got that ready and started to approach the
snare because I had to get a look at the tiger,
estimate its weight, and then go back to camp, get
the rest of the crew and we would go into
an esthetize the tiger, and I started to approach the snare,
and when I was about forty yards away, the tiger
did what all tigers do when you approach him in

(20:40):
a snare, and they get up and try to run away.
And so he jumped up and tried to run away,
and immediately saw that it was an adult male tiger
and tried to run away, and he hit the end
of the snare cable, just like kind of a dog
hitting the end of his chain. And then he did
when he couldn't run away, he did what all tigers
do when they're in a snare, and he turned around
and charged me. And I was already backing away. I'd

(21:02):
gotten the information I needed, slowly backing away from the
tiger and he's charging.

Speaker 2 (21:08):
This was normal.

Speaker 3 (21:08):
I wasn't too concerned about it until he didn't hit
the end of the cable and he just kept coming.
And so I've got this three d and fifty four
hundred pound tiger just just charging towards me, ears back,
these huge platterli like paws that are bigger than my face,
just reaching out towards me, claws extended, and he's kind

(21:29):
of roaring and popping his teeth as he's conscious.

Speaker 2 (21:32):
Guy just kind of ring, and.

Speaker 3 (21:36):
You know, I just stopped, and I thought the only
thought that really that I remember going through my mind
was he's not stopping, and so I popped my flare immediately.
These flares kept burning really fast, but for me, time
had just slowed down, you know, and I could see
every detail of this, this tiger charging me, and I'm
holding the flare out in front of me, and it

(21:56):
got going, and you have this big, bright, loud flame
and the tiger's coming towards me, and just for a
split second, he disappeared behind the flame and just as
quickly reappeared coming through the flame, hits me square in
the shoulders, carried me about ten yards back, and just
slammed me into the ground. And so then I'm lying

(22:18):
on the ground. I've got this tiger literally standing on
my shoulders. I've got a scratch on my left shoulder,
and he's right in my face, roaring at me. I
put my left hand up, just defensively, you know, just
an instinctive reaction, and he just started biting my left
hand like a stapler and just you know, quirk biting
all the way through it. Bones are crunching, but I

(22:40):
still have my flare. I didn't knock the flare out
of my hand, so I took the flare from my
right hand and I jammed it up under his sort
of under his chin.

Speaker 1 (22:48):
You know.

Speaker 3 (22:48):
I didn't want to hit him in the eyes from
blind them or something, but just got him kind of
in the side of the face. And as soon as
that flare hit him, he just bolted.

Speaker 2 (22:56):
He took off, and it.

Speaker 3 (22:57):
Was incredible to see he just how quickly and muscularly,
and just was magnificent to watch him powering up this
hill as he ran away from me, just as quickly
as he charged me, and he was gone. So I
stood up, and I first looked at my hand, which
hurt a lot, and you know, I looked at it
and it wasn't bleeding badly, even though he'd bitten through

(23:19):
my hand five or six times.

Speaker 2 (23:21):
So I kind of thought, well, that's going to need.

Speaker 3 (23:23):
Some work, but it's not life threatening. And then I
also felt pain and on my inside of my thigh,
I thought, oh my god, funeral artery. Looked down. There's
a tear of my pants, but no blood, So okay,
I kind of went, wow, I'm alive. I'm okay, and
then you know, the fight turned to flight, and you know,
thought started going through my head, well, what if I'm mistaken.

(23:45):
It's not a male, it's a female, check protecting her cubs.
She's going to come back, and you know, thoughts like that,
and I just took off running down the trail. Yeah,
And so I ran down the trail for a while
until I was out of breath, and then started walking
and then started I started getting shocky, and the you know,
around the edges of my vision things started to fade,
and this sort of gray cloud moving in, and I thought, oh,

(24:07):
my gosh, this is ridiculous. I'm just survived a tiger
attack and I'm going to pass out and die of
shock out in here in the forest. So I stopped,
and I bent over and I kind of put my
head down to creased blood float of my brain and
just started yelling to bring myself around. And it worked
and I started feeling better and then continued odd down
the trail. My wife was back in camp in the tent,

(24:30):
literally changing our daughter Nina Nina and stapers at the time,
and she hears this yelling in the forest so she
jumps on them up. She had a radio and she
was in charge of managing radio contact between the three
among the three field teams, because we couldn't contact each
other usually, but we always had a signal back to camp.

(24:51):
So she gets on the radio and says, what's all
the yelling in the forest?

Speaker 2 (24:53):
What's going on?

Speaker 3 (24:54):
And of course the other two teams come back on
and say, I don't know, we don't hear any yelling,
and I had lost my radio in the fight with
the tiger, and so I didn't respond. So she totally panics,
and so as I'm approaching camp, but fortunately very close
to camp, only a couple three hundred yards away, and
she's running down the trail with Nina literally bouncing along
on her shoulders, and you know, I'm like, I'm okay,

(25:16):
I'm okay, Yeah, you.

Speaker 2 (25:19):
Know, I'm bit up.

Speaker 3 (25:20):
I've been attacked by a tiger, but I'm all right,
and she We called in the rest of the crew,
and fortunately had a veterinarian on the crew who did
the initial field first aid. But then I had to
go into a lot of ustok and go to the
hospital and have some reconstructive work done in my hand
but my only permanent injury is I can't bend my
ring finger on my left hand, so I figure I

(25:42):
got my pretty lucky Uh yeah.

Speaker 1 (25:45):
Also, the thing I can't stop thinking about obviously horrifying
that a tiger was charging you. I can't imagine what
it was like to be your wife and you're like, cool.
I hear my husband screaming, and I know that he's
going to look for tigers who are in the worst
possible state. And she had to bring your baby with her.
I can't imagine what that was like, going towards what

(26:08):
you might think, be like your maled husband without angry
tiger having to take your kid, Like what a badass
she is?

Speaker 2 (26:15):
Good for her? O my god.

Speaker 1 (26:19):
So one of our patrons, Page asked, which I think
we already know the answer to this, but what do
you think helped you the most in escaping the tiger?

Speaker 3 (26:29):
Fifteen years of thinking about that moment every single day
is one. I was terrified, maybe even petrified, but I
knew what to do, and I thought about it so
much that it was just instinctive. Pull the flare, don't run,
stand your ground. But also understanding tigers and tiger behavior

(26:52):
helped me tremendously. I knew what was going on, and
I'd been charged by a number of times before this
a different incident where a person that was with me
got attacked very much in the same way that I
got attacked. So I've had that experience, but just understanding.
You know, if you're being approached by a big a

(27:14):
predator any be it a big cat, be it a bear.
If their ears back, roaring, charging like that, it's a
defensive charge.

Speaker 2 (27:24):
That means they're.

Speaker 3 (27:25):
Afraid of you and they feel the need to protect
themselves or their cubs. You're going to act differently in
that situation than if you see a tiger sneaking through
a mountain lion, let's say, or a bear sneaking through
the forest towards you crouched, you know, looking interested. That's
more like curiosity or a predation attempt. You want to

(27:47):
behave very differently and towards that animal. If it's sneaking
towards you, you want to act aggressively towards the animal that's
that's charging and roaring and swatting their paws and that
sort of thing. That's a defensive charge. You want to
not act aggressively. You wanted to defend yourself if it
comes to it, but you want to back slowly away,
you know, try not to stare them directly in the eyes,

(28:09):
that sort of thing, Whereas if it's a predation attempt,
you want to be aggressive and fight back and make
them know that you're not an animal that is to
be preyed upon. And so in this case, I knew
it was going on. I knew the tiger was afraid
of me, and I had a pretty good idea that
the flare that I had would be very helpful. I'd
actually never used a flare in defense. I'd always use

(28:31):
pepper spray in defense of tigers and bears charging, and
the pepper spray works well. Didn't have my pepper spray,
I don't think it would have stopped this charge because
he was you know, this was full on. There was
no bluff involved in this. But I always thought, well,
if the pepper spray doesn't work, the flare is a
good hot weapon that you use when the animal is
on top of you, and it hopefully it will work.

(28:54):
And boy, did it work good. You know, he was
gone in an instant.

Speaker 1 (28:58):
So something what happened is the first time when he
tried to run away from you. He must have broken
the tie to like the tree or whatever.

Speaker 3 (29:05):
Right, what had happened is all the the snares have
a swivel in them because you know, if you twist
a piece of wire enough, it'll break you or I
would be hard pressed to break a piece of three
sixteenth cinch aircraft grade steel cable, but a tiger or
a bear twisting it can. But so you put a
swivel in there and that keeps them from twisting it up. Well,

(29:27):
the swivel had frozen up, and after when I came
back to the site afterwards to look at it, it
looked for all the world like that tiger got caught
in that snare and he just laid down and started spinning,
and he just twisted that cable and unfortunately for me,
it didn't break when he was trying to run away.

Speaker 2 (29:47):
It broke when he charged.

Speaker 1 (29:50):
So yeah, oh my gosh. I can also imagine what
helped you in that moment is the fact that you
had been charged so many times. I feel like if
this was, you know, someone's first time being charged, you
might panic, But for you, you saw what the end
result was. Where you were like Okay, it's going to
run to the end of the snare and then I'm
going to be okay. So I'm sure that also helped

(30:10):
in like your mental well being at the time of
being like, all right, it's just going to charge the
end of the snare and then I'll be fine. So
you might not have even had the time to run away,
and then by the time you realized it was like, okay,
well now I can't. There's little no other option but
to stand here and just like take this.

Speaker 2 (30:25):
Yeah, but the.

Speaker 3 (30:28):
Instinct to run has never happened to me really.

Speaker 2 (30:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (30:34):
And all the times I've been charged by tigers three
or four times and some incident, it's just because I
know so well that there's no way I'm going to
outrun a tiger or a bear fair. It's just pathetic
and that's just going to trigger their predation instinct. You know,
it's just turning around and running. If you don't have
a tree right there, well, with tigers, climbing a tree

(30:56):
probably isn't going to help you. Yeah, And even with
a bear, if you can't get up that tree really
quick and out of their reach, it's not going to
help you. And at that distance, at forty yards, you've
got a second, you know, So you know, the instinct
to run has never happened to me. There was one
time when we were charged by a tiger that would

(31:18):
We blundered into it at about ten yards max, a
little bit less than that probably, and all I'm walking
and all of a sudden, there's a tiger right there.

Speaker 2 (31:28):
I did turn around.

Speaker 3 (31:30):
Because what I was thinking in that situation was I'm
so close. There's no doubt this tiger is going to charge,
and I just wanted to find a tree to put
between me and him, yeah, with the hope of breaking
that charge. So I turned around. No tree, and then
I turned back around. But that's a whole nother story.
But otherwise, you know, it just you just don't run
in those situations. You can't because that will just give

(31:53):
them confidence that, yeah, they can win this fight and
they're charging. You know, most in most cases with big
cats or bears, it's not a predation attempt. It's the
animal is afraid. It's trying to protect itself or its cubs,
and that just gives them the confidence of Okay, I'm
just gonna kill this thing, and Mike, I'll be safe

(32:15):
for my cubs will be safe.

Speaker 1 (32:17):
Yeah, And you know this might sound morbid, but like
I feel like, in most cases, if you see the
animal coming at you, it's probably a good bet that
it's defensive. Otherwise, if you're being stalked by a tiger
that's trying to kill you, in most of the stories
we've covered, no one even knows until it's too late
and you're like in its mouth.

Speaker 3 (32:36):
That's really like I say, I always say the exact
same thing. In nine percent of the time, it's just
going to be bang and the lights are out right yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (32:46):
Which is probably for the best.

Speaker 3 (32:48):
But they also I mean big predators. Tigers bears also
sometimes approached curiously. And I've heard a plenty as tiger
stories like this where the tiger's just walking towards you.

Speaker 2 (33:02):
He's not acting. It's not acting aggressive. Ears are pricked.

Speaker 3 (33:05):
They're kind of you know, looking at you, interested, curious. Well,
think about your house cat curiously checking something out. Curiosity
can quickly turn to predation for a cat or any
any predator, and so that but that's the time when
you want to act aggressive, yell at them, look big,
and maybe even run towards them, which takes a certain

(33:29):
kind of moxy, but I've never fortunately had to do that.

Speaker 2 (33:33):
But yeah, that's that's.

Speaker 3 (33:35):
When you want to say, Nope, I'm not something you
want to mess with.

Speaker 2 (33:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (33:40):
So one of our patrons, Ali asked, has the attack
changed how you view tigers and has it changed your
goals in working with them?

Speaker 3 (33:47):
Not in the least. You know, the tiger was just
being a tiger. It was being perfectly normal. It did
exactly what I had always expected tigers would do in
that situation. You know, they and especially in Russia, tigers
were very secretive. And whenever I saw a tiger, just

(34:08):
when I was on foot in the forest, they always
just ran away and ran away fast. And so you know,
the tiger trying to run away first in the snare,
and it happened every single time we caught a tiger.
I'd caught over seventy you know, tigers and snarees probably
seventy different times. Every single time. They first try to
run away, but when they can't run away, they're going

(34:28):
to charge and then and that charge is sirius. So
it was it was doing exactly what I expected, exactly
what I would probably.

Speaker 2 (34:35):
Do in that situation.

Speaker 3 (34:37):
You know, if my life is threatened, to try to
get away, and if if I can't, then fight. So
it was perfectly normal. And you know, the tiger didn't
have anything against me. This wasn't personal or anything. So
it didn't change the way I felt about tigers at all.
I think it did do two things for me. One was,

(34:58):
you know, after the attack and we're driving to the
hospital in Vadivostok, I remember thinking, wow, well that was
pretty traumatic. I wonder if I'm going to have like
nightmares about it or anything, and completely the opposite happened.
I used to have these sort of nightmares or stress
dreams about you know, usually it would be a tiger
not really charging, but approaching me with this curious way

(35:21):
that I just mentioned, and it gets too close and
I'm really scared, and I try to spray it with
my pepper spray and the pepper spray just dribbles out,
you know, that kind of thing, and eventually I'd wake
up just kind of anxiety dreams more than nightmares. After
the attack, the dream stopped.

Speaker 2 (35:39):
Wow, that was it. That was the end.

Speaker 3 (35:41):
So not only do I not have nightmares about the attack,
but these anxiety dreams that I used to have about
being approached by tigers. Just quit because it told me
that I just gave me confidence.

Speaker 2 (35:52):
I knew what to do. I could get through it, right. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (35:55):
The other thing it did for me, though, that I
think is very useful in my concervation career, is I've
been attacked by a tiger. It gives me a very
different insight into human wildlife conflict. And you know, I've
talked to a number of different people that have been
attacked by tigers, that have had relatives killed by tigers,

(36:16):
and lots of people who've had their dogs and livestock
and that sort of thing killed by tigers. But it
gives me insights and more of an empathetic understanding of
what these people have been through.

Speaker 2 (36:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (36:29):
Well, especially, I think it's so easy for so many people,
especially if you don't live around these animals, to go
somewhere where they are and be like, oh, no, you
should want to love them and live around them. But
it's like, who are you to say that when you
don't have a three hundred pound cat in your backyard
killing your dogs every time you let them out?

Speaker 2 (36:44):
You know? Yeah, so yeah.

Speaker 3 (36:46):
And you know, and it's amazing to me how many people,
especially in Nepal and India that live next to tigers,
have had relatives or village members killed by tigers and
they still want tigers around. A lot of those people,
of course not all of them, but a lot of
those people still want tigers around, still still love tigers

(37:06):
and have that kind of level of tolerance. It's amazing.

Speaker 1 (37:11):
Yeah, I wish that's what we had in America for
so many predators like wolves and mountain lions. It's like,
it's weird that we have such an intolerance. I don't
really understand why. I guess I don't know if you
have any insights from your background as to why people
hate them so much, But I can never really understand it.

Speaker 3 (37:27):
Yeah, And it's it's really wolves. I mean, for the
most part, people don't hate mountain lions. There are a
lot of people either love you know, it's this weird
spectrum of people that just fanatically love wolves and people
that just fanatically hate wolves. And it's it's I find
that really bizarre. But even in Russia, of biologists that

(37:50):
I work with worked with in Russia would shoot wolves
on site.

Speaker 2 (37:54):
If they had the opportunity. Hated them.

Speaker 3 (37:57):
Wow, And that was a shocker for me because I'm
used to to conservation biologists that have a little bit
more objective view of it. But also interesting was the
difference between bears and tigers in Russia. Lots of people
were killed, not lots, but you know, it happened every
few years that a person would be killed by a
brown bear, same species as our grizzly bears. It make

(38:19):
the local news. If a tiger killed a person, it
was national international news overnight. Wow, you know, it's kind
of bear killed someone again, whatever tiger killed a person
in and it was this big deal. I had never
really understood that difference.

Speaker 1 (38:36):
Yeah, that is so weird that I've also experienced that
that people in Russia hate wolves, and I'm like, I
don't know, like it doesn't seem like they're really killing people,
Like they might be killing your livestock, but isn't other
stuff killing your livestock, And like we have dogs and
they're so close to wols. Yeah, I just that's so interesting.

Speaker 3 (38:54):
It's uh And you know, for the livestock killing part,
I get it that, you know, I can understand the
hatred there. Wolves almost never killed the instances of recorded
instances of wolves killing people is ridiculously low, way lower
than mountain lions, for example, So that's not really a concern.

(39:15):
But just the fanatical love and the fanatical hate for
wolves is perplexing to me. I was just actually this
morning reading an article about a hunting guide in Canada
who had a picture of a wolf on his website
that turned out to be this famous wolf that a
wildlife photographer had followed for years. But that wolf was

(39:39):
eventually killed by a hunter, which was obviously for this
photographer had followed this wolf through so many years, was
a very tragic event. Well, she saw this the photo
on this website and wrote a post about it, and
the post went viral. This guy's the hunting guide is
getting death threats.

Speaker 2 (40:00):
You know.

Speaker 3 (40:00):
It's just it's so both sides of the spectrum are
totally fanatical. It's just yeah, it's just very perplexing.

Speaker 1 (40:09):
Yeah, that's like how I mean, it's not as bad
with coyotes, but yeah, I find the same thing. It's
like you either really hate them or you really love them,
and it's like very hard to find it in between.
But anyways, back to tigers. So on this podcast, we
always try to be really honest about like the circumstances
involving attacks and like how likely they are. So, you know,

(40:29):
we were talking about the attacks that happen in India
and Nepal, So what are the most common circumstances in
which they might attack somebody and how often are these
things even happening, which you've kind of touched on a little.

Speaker 3 (40:42):
Bit, but yeah, well and yeah, and as you mentioned
early on, it's very different regionally, but those differences are
largely due to differences in human and tiger densities. So
in India and Nepoul you have the best tiger habitats.
You have some habitats that have as many as twenty
tigers per one hundred square kilometers. I'm not sure how

(41:05):
to translate that into square miles, but that's a mind
blowing densities. You know, there's lots of tigers in these habitats,
but they're isolated in these very small protected areas. But
and these very small protected areas are surrounded by some
of the highest human densities in the world, getting up

(41:27):
to a thousand people per square kilometer, which is insane.
So you have lots of tigers and lots of people
living right next to each other, so of course they're
bumping into each other all the time. And in Indian
they probably have to wonder why there aren't more conflicts.
And you know, tons of people in both countries, tons

(41:48):
of people per year are killed by tigers, and you
hardly hear about it. It's just kind of everyday life
for them. So then you go to a place like Russia,
where they're one tiger less than zero point five to
one tigers per one hundred square kilometers and human densities

(42:09):
somewhere in the same neighborhood, there's hardly anybody there. There's
hardly any tigers there. They very rarely run into each other,
so you don't get a lot of conflict. Usually when
tigers attacked people in Russia, when during my tenure there
from nineteen ninety five to twenty ten, it was more
often than not a poacher tracking a tiger and trying
to kill it, shooting it, botching the shot, and the

(42:31):
tiger turns around and kills the poacher, or at least
mauls the poacher. It was in Russia it was more
tigers attacking livestock, but there weren't a lot of livestock,
and the livestock that were there were generally tended pretty closely,
as much to protect them from neighbors as it was
to protect them from tigers. So they'd have somebody out

(42:53):
with the livestock during the day and then they bring
them in at night.

Speaker 2 (42:56):
But dogs.

Speaker 3 (42:57):
Tigers killed a lot of dogs, and they would come
right into yards and take dogs off of chains, and
so that was pretty traumatic for people in pretty upsetting.
And I can remember a couple of cases where people
ran out to protect their dogs and got attacked by tigers.

Speaker 1 (43:12):
So, yeah, why are they killing dogs? Is it like
a predation thing or like a competition thing both.

Speaker 3 (43:19):
It was really fascinating the relationship between wolves and tigers
in Russia. So back in the nineteen forties, when there
was estimated only to be about forty Siberian tigers in
the wild in Russia, there were lots of wolves, and
over the decades, as tiger numbers increased because Russia, once
they realized they had so few tigers, they started implementing

(43:42):
more and more conservation measures until tigers became completely protected
in the nineteen seventies. But as tiger numbers increased, wolf
numbers declined, and you can you know, correlation isn't causation,
but you can suspect that that means that the tigers
were killing wolf. We had a really interesting situation It

(44:04):
was actually after I left Russia, but started around twenty
ten where the tiger population that we've been radio tracking
was hit by a wave of canine distemper, which is
fatal to most tigers, and so the tiger population on
the Sikotel and the reserve crashed within a year. Wolves
were showing up in camera trap photos. We had never

(44:25):
camera gotten a camera trap photo of a wolf before,
so it just happened that quickly. So it's pretty clear
that the tigers and wolves have a very competitive relationship,
and tigers went out in that relationship, and it's direct
predation by tigers on wolves. And I think tigers just
extend that to dogs. But often the tigers that are

(44:49):
going into villages and killing dogs and taking that risk,
they're usually most often we're young, young animals that had
just set off on their own. They're very hungry and
they're looking at the dog as easy prey.

Speaker 1 (45:03):
Yeah, especially if they're chained up.

Speaker 2 (45:05):
Especially if the chained up, it's risky. You got to
go into a village. But if you're hungry enough, you
do it.

Speaker 1 (45:12):
Yeah. So we've talked about tigers quite a bit on
this podcast. But like I mentioned before we start talking,
I'm pursuing a wide life forensics degree, so I would
love to dive deeper into the topic of poaching and
the illegal trade, both of live tigers and tiger parts.
So can you give us like a very simplified rundown
on how they're traded and why and where they're traded.

Speaker 3 (45:37):
Sure, tigers are an incredibly valuable species for the traditional
traditional Asian medicine. Tigers are protected by law wherever they occur.
Even captive tigers in the US are protected by law.
You can't sell them internationally, at least or even across
state borders. In the US, you can't legally sell tiger parts.

(46:01):
So wherever tigers are, it is illegal to poach them
and sell their body parts. But their body parts are
very valuable, not only as an aphrodisiac, which is a
big part of it, but almost every part of a
tiger has some cure or some value for traditional Asian medicine.

Speaker 2 (46:19):
And so you can think about it.

Speaker 3 (46:20):
Of you know, there is the group of people that
are buying tiger parts, tiger bone wine, or tiger cakes,
which are boiled down tiger bones as an aphrodisiac. But
you can also think of the people who, well, my
child is dying of cancer and none of the traditional
treatments have worked. I'm going to buy some authentic tiger

(46:42):
parts to you know, as a last resort. So there's
kind of two different ends of the spectrum there. But
so tigers are poached in the wild to be sold,
mostly for traditional Asian medicine, but also as trophies. There
are still wealthy people that want to hang a tiger
skin on their wall, and they are proached throughout their range.

(47:03):
And as I mentioned earlier, I think that's one of
the greatest things that well, most tragic but also most
important things. Not greatest, but most important things we found
with our research in Russia because it was one of
the very few long term radio tracking studies of tigers,
was that around seventy percent of our tigers were poached.

(47:24):
And you can't get that information, you know, data on
causes of mortality. You can't get it in any other
way than putting radio callers on Otherwise, the data that
you get or the tigers that are the animals that
are found in roadkills and things like that. But that's
obviously a very misrepresented sample. If they're approaching going on,
you don't detect that very much otherwise. So there's lots

(47:47):
of poaching going on. Because tigers are so valuable, people
go out catch them and sell them on the black market.
But the illegal wildlife trade, not just tigers, but lots
of different wildlife species, is tied to drug trade, is
tied to arm trade, human trafficking, so it's all part
of a much larger market and organized crime crime.

Speaker 2 (48:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (48:10):
And you know, something I've learned in my studies is
that of the types of like illegal trafficking, you know, drugs, humans,
wildlife is the least supported financially or like compared to
those other two, the least quote unquote like cared about.
So I can imagine, you know, tigers, this huge charismatic
species people really care about. It's probably easier to find

(48:33):
ways to like stop poaching for them than some other
animals like panglins, that people didn't even really know about
until I feel like COVID happened and then everyone was like, wait,
there's this little thing that everyone's trying to poach for
their scales or whatever. But yeah, I can imagine it's
there's different layers of like trying to combat poaching depending
on the animal that you're working with.

Speaker 3 (48:55):
Absolutely, and that that's really a really important point. You know,
tiger is a flagship species for conservation, be anti poaching
or just protecting biodiversity in general.

Speaker 2 (49:06):
You know, if you're so.

Speaker 3 (49:07):
A lot of what we've done for tiger conservation is
getting well trained poaching patrols on the ground to stop
the poaching where it's happening. It's all being funded by
tiger conservation dollars. But those poaching patrols don't ignore a
bird being poached, a deer being poached.

Speaker 2 (49:25):
It's all, you know. So it's it's.

Speaker 3 (49:27):
Under the umbrella of tiger conservation protecting all species in
that protected area, and that you know, we can extend
that to biodiversity and climate conservation. I think charismatic species
like tigers play an incredibly important role.

Speaker 2 (49:44):
A lot of people and.

Speaker 3 (49:45):
Even governments are overwhelmed by the thought of trying to
protect biodiversity or protect climate. It's such a big thing
and such a complex thing, and how do we how
do we even measure biodiversity And how does a country,
a government keep track of all the species in their country. Well,
if you use charismatic species like tigers as umbrellas and

(50:08):
flagships for conservation, not just to stop poaching, but for
biodiversity and climate initiatives, that can play a huge role
in helping governments and people to get a handle on
biodiversity and climate conservation. You don't have to try to
protect all species. You can choose a suite. You'd probably
not just a single flagship species. It wouldn't be just tigers.

(50:29):
You choose a suite of flagship species that is going
to cover your biodiversity and climate protection needs and the
species and the forests and the carbon that you need
to protect as part of those initiatives.

Speaker 1 (50:43):
Yeah, So organizations like Panthera, what are they doing in
combat this illegal trade? Is it a lot of the
anti poaching units like you were just talking about.

Speaker 3 (50:52):
Yeah, especially for tigers, you know, and twenty years ago
tiger populations were just plummeting and it was all being
driven or primarily being driven by poaching of tigers. And
to give you an idea of how extreme that poaching is,
there is about a million square kilometers of vacant tiger

(51:13):
habitat out there. In other words, it's tiger habitat. There
should be tigers there. They're not there because the tigers
and or their prey have been poached out. And that's
roughly half of the existing range of tiger habitat that's
out there. So this massive problem. In twenty years ago,
it was a complete panic. We're the people involved in

(51:34):
tiger conservation. We're just going, oh my god, we're going
to see tigers disappear, except for maybe in a few
protect well protected reserves in India. And so what we
really focused on in Pantherra's program was, like I said, before,
locking down these protected areas, getting really well trained anti
poaching units out there patrolling on the ground to stop

(51:56):
that poaching, and just focused on that very narrow problem
and intervention as a way to protect what we called
source populations for tigers and just to stop the extinction,
and within the thinking being Okay, once we get a
handle on this, then we can expand our conservation interventions

(52:16):
to wildlife trade at the country and international level, to
human tiger conflict, to habitat protection, to connectivity and all
of that, but just that intense focus on locking down
protected areas is largely what has turned the tide for
tiger conservation.

Speaker 1 (52:33):
I think, yeah, and did you or has there been
efforts to supplement wild tiger populations with like captive tiger
breeding or anything like.

Speaker 3 (52:43):
That a little bit. I'm not aware of anything that was. Well,
there was the South China tiger effort that never really
ended up in tiger's being released into the wild, and
that's a that's a long twisted story. But otherwise I'm
not I'm not aware of any efforts to supplement with
captive tigers. But certainly one of the best examples of

(53:07):
supplementing and re establishing tiger populations comes from Russia, and
it started with some of our work. So when I
was in Russia, not every year, but often you would
get orphaned cubs coming into captivity, and orphaned cubs and
then tigers that were, you know, teenagers that just set
out on their own, that would end up in captivity

(53:28):
because they were you know, emaciated, maybe a hurt par
or something like that. And you could take those tigers
and rehabilitate them and release them back into the wild.
And so we got involved in some of that and
successfully released some tigers. Some tigers weren't successful releases, but
some were. And the Russian government, following that those initial

(53:51):
releases that we were involved in, started a program and
started a rehabilitation center for these tigers and have since
established a new population and a former part of the
Siberian tigers range to the west of where tigers are
now just by taking these these orphaned animals, rehabilitating them

(54:11):
and just dumping them back out into the wild a
hard release, and they now have a small breeding population.
And it was in the news some years ago because
they had radio colored some of their tigers, and there
was one tiger that wandered into China and back and
forth between Russia and China, and they called him Putin's tiger,

(54:32):
and Putin was very involved in tiger conservation as well.

Speaker 1 (54:37):
Really, wow, it seems like Russia's really in the forefront
of tiger conservation. I had no idea.

Speaker 3 (54:44):
Yeah, it's interesting because their tiger conservation initiatives in their
their conservation and issues in general started over a century ago,
and the Zappo Yetnik system, their their primary reserve system,
was establish to protect source populations of wildlife So the
Sekotilin Zappa Yetnik, which I've been calling Skotilin Reserve was

(55:08):
established in I don't remember the exact date, well, let's
say around nineteen ten to protect sable populations because Russia
recognized this sable is a really valuable species, incredibly valuable
for the fur trade. But they also recognize that all
this fur trapping was going to wipe sables out. So
they had this idea of if we protect these populations,

(55:30):
they will just just like our idea of source populations
and protecting these source populations for tigers, protect source populations
at sables so that they can repopulate the range where
we're trapping them heavily. And so that established the Sapa
Vietnik system, which are strictly protected areas. The public is
not allowed into them, so they're excellent areas for wildlife conservation.

Speaker 1 (55:54):
Nice. So getting towards wrapping up, one of our patrons,
Jenny asked, can you talk about what you think is
the most helpful thing we can do as individuals to
help conservation of big cats and to make sure more
don't become extinct or endangered.

Speaker 3 (56:09):
That's yeah, that's such a good question and a question
that gets that I get asked all the time, and
I never feel like I have a very good answer.
For people that aren't living in a tiger range country,
it's a very different thing. Obviously, giving money to organizations
like Panthera is incredibly helpful, and we absolutely depend on

(56:36):
grants and donations. That's all we have and we can't
operate without them. So I can't stress how important that is,
but I know that people want more than that. They
want to be able to do more than that. Another
thing that you can do is support legislation that supports
international conservation efforts. The US Mission Wildlife Service has grant

(56:59):
programs support tiger conservation and conservation of other species. They
have grant programs that support wildlife anti wildlife crime initiatives
and our initiatives. International initiatives and conventions on climate change
and biodiversity are important to tiger conservation as well, So

(57:20):
supporting legislation and encouraging our legislators to sign on to
those international conventions is very important. And just using you
know people that are social media influencers or have a
good following, and it's one thing I like to tell kids.
Use your social media accounts to if you're passionate about

(57:41):
tiger conservation or whatever kind of conservation, use your social
media accounts to promote that and let people know because
a lot of people don't really know what the what
the issues are and.

Speaker 2 (57:54):
How we try to solve them.

Speaker 1 (57:55):
So yeah, one thing I always like to throw in,
no matter what anymal talking about, is like vote and
vote at like every single level that you can, especially local,
and vote for people that care about these things. And
if those people don't get elected, call the people that
do get elected and make sure that they care and
know about this thing that you're concerned about.

Speaker 3 (58:15):
Letters.

Speaker 2 (58:16):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (58:20):
All right, last question, just a fun one. What's one
of your favorite moments from your wildlife research that really
stuck with you.

Speaker 3 (58:28):
Gosh, that's a really tough one too, because there are
so many, a lot, so many favorite moments, you know.
I think anytime that I've seen a tiger in the wild,
when I was by myself and on foot in the
forest in Russia, there were lots of those moments and
they're all favorites. And I think catching that first snow

(58:50):
leopard in Afghanistan and just what an amazing and lucky
moment it was, and that happened in the middle of
the night. We were anesthetizing that snow leopard one o'clock
in the morning.

Speaker 2 (59:02):
Was just incredible.

Speaker 3 (59:03):
And just to have the honor and the privilege to
hold a wild tiger in my hands, or a wild
amare leopard, or a wild snow leopard or it is
just an incredible honor and privilege.

Speaker 2 (59:15):
It's humbling.

Speaker 1 (59:17):
So yeah, I know, I saw pictures of you with
tigers that you had to necessize for research, and I'll
post them on our social media's it is you forget
how big they are. They are so much bigger than
you like in the picture. It is enormous how big
those wild tigers are. It is crazy. Well, thank you

(59:38):
so much for doing this.

Speaker 2 (59:39):
Oh it's my pleasure.

Speaker 3 (59:40):
Thanks thanks for hosting me, and thanks for giving me
the opportunity to let people know about tiger conservation.

Speaker 1 (59:47):
Yeah, anytime. Where can people follow you your research or Panthera's.

Speaker 3 (59:51):
Research Www dot Panthera dot org.

Speaker 1 (59:55):
So nice, easy. And do you guys have social media?
I'm assuming there's like Instagram and stuff like that for Panthera.

Speaker 3 (01:00:01):
Too, But yeah, but I'm an old guy. So I
barely know what Instagram is, but but yes we have
we have social media again. We have Instagram and Twitter
and or x I guess it is now and Facebook,
et cetera. So but yeah, I'm the wrong person to
ask about.

Speaker 2 (01:00:16):
Those, Yea.

Speaker 1 (01:00:17):
I figured you're not like running the social media accunts anyway,
So I'll just I'll find him and I'll link them
in the episode description. But thank you so much John
for joining us and telling everyone about you.

Speaker 2 (01:00:26):
I appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (01:00:27):
Yeah, and that was my interview with doctor John Goodrich
of Panthera and doctor John Goodrich, Siberian Tiger Attacks Survivor.
I hope you all enjoyed that interview. I know I
certainly did, and hopefully maybe someday we can hear from
doctor Goodrich again about a different species or more on tigers.

(01:00:47):
But thank you all so much for listening. Please check
out the episode description on more ways to find Panthera.
I'll also link to that nat geodocumentary that he mentioned
up top about snow leopards. You can also check out
the episode description for links to our social media's I
can't wait for you all to hear the next episode
to come out with another fantastic guest, and we actually

(01:01:09):
hinted on the species or some of the species that
we will be talking about in that episode in this episode,
so stay tuned for that, Thank you all, and we'll
be back in two weeks with that episode. See ya,