Joe Rogan Experience #942 — Dan Flores Transcript

Transcript

0:00 three two boom we're live how are you sir I'm very good Joe it's good to meet you man great And just all around us, especially I live in a fairly rural area around here, They were doing the same thing around me when I was a kid growing up in Louisiana. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, it's a separate species from gray wolves and red wolves, they're essentially making roll call.

3:50 there in the last 20 or 25 years. They were arguing that, you know, and they had some pretty eradicate, and I mean totally exterminate, coyotes in the American West. Hawaii just because they haven't stowed away and made it across the Pacific yet. always produces exactly the opposite effect. There's very, very few left, right? to evolve these abilities to adapt and survive. They evolved those abilities

8:09 And when gray wolves returned, I mean, they basically just started kicking the crap out of coyotes. red wolves, and other eastern wolves like the Algonquin wolf in eastern Canada and northern I mean, it's sort of the result of coyotes spreading across the South has essentially kind of killed our hope that we were going to save the endangered red wolf as an independent species because red wolves so quickly and easily hybridize with coyotes that coyote genes swamp

11:09 We've got four subspecies of gray wolves in North America, all of which seem to have come back to North America, by the way, at different times. too, because it gave us a sense of what happens with coyotes when nobody is harassing them, But it doesn't, they don't, their population sort of levels off and stays at a carrying capacity. mode and generate more and more and more pups and have more and more pups survive.

14:06 have larger litters of pups. And that makes it possible for them to have a litter of seven or eight pups and get six to seven of them to adulthood. And that's what sends them colonizing across the continent. Yeah, it was ranchers and just travelers on the Oregon Trail and on the immigrant trails. settled, there were wolf drives and wolf roundups and every kind of attempt to wipe out wolves as

17:46 And they do it, as you just mentioned, primarily because wolves are such pack animals, Montana, for instance. 1899, the state of Montana bounded 23,000 wolves. That was 1899, the state of Montana bountied 23,000 wolves. It's so, you know, wonderfully counterintuitive in the whole kind of environmental story of America Yeah, it's got to be very frustrating to people in a lot of ways, but it's kind of amazing. I mean, it's really kind of magical in a lot of ways that they're so adaptable.

21:37 genetic work on canids. One of his papers is called, the title includes the phrase, Enigmatic Wolf-Like Canids. They argue that coyotes, red wolves, and eastern wolves all come out of a clade. And Robert Wayne and the group of geneticists who work with him all seem to just rely specifically on genetics, it seems like there's got to be a lot of different, it just, it's very odd to me that we

25:20 in the West and began competing with these larger, more strapping coyotes, coyotes sort of sought a American wolves, essentially in the last seven or eight or 10 years. in August or September, all the coyote droppings that I've found on the place, they really go for that sort of stuff. So bizarre. It's just such a strange animal. actually wolves are such pack animals that they have a much wider range of expressions

29:02 that's not so pack oriented. And so, you know, and the horses, for instance, same thing. Yeah, they did it on foot. Somehow or another, the animal came from North America and made it I mean, the frank answer is we don't really know what happened to them. And because it begins to, it starts as a browsing animal in the forest and ultimately domestic horse. But these animals had traveled across the land bridges. The Bering land bridge,

34:01 They've got the running ability. And they became, I mean, it's a fascinating thing to kind of imagine because the West 10, 15, 25,000 years ago had been a place had been dominated by bison for a long time. And now horses are back in the mix. there are plenty of people out there who who argue that the domestic horse, the feral horse That's actually not a huge amount of time in evolutionary terms.

37:20 Now, is that there's a lot of controversy as to what the zebra striping is for, right? Yeah, look in the Prior Mountains Wild Horse Range in Montana, and you'll see a whole population of animals that come out of that 10,000 years ago that claimed the woolly mammoth, saber-toothed tiger, all these different animals, Well, we did the same thing. And I mean, like all elephants, mammoths had really long gestation periods. It took them,

41:18 some of the predators, we think they went because their prey species disappeared. But, I mean, the amazing thing with the horses is just hard to fathom Have you ever looked into, oh, is this one of the animals? And they have this black stripe down the back. the African lion. And we had a short-faced bear that was probably even more ferocious than modern-day grizzlies.

43:50 It's a huge animal. It looks like something in a movie. The hell pig? And as I said, at least one biologist argues and that goes back in the record for a very long time, is that the Earth actually doesn't spin from the sun for a period of 30,000, 40,000 years. of the ice age. Really fascinating stuff. he says that directly corresponds And I think, you know, as in so many questions out there, you know, we haven't figured out

48:58 of a cycle where you end up with a lot of different new animals. But when change comes, you often lose a good many of Most people sort of concede that, okay, in the case of the mammoths, our evidence tends to point more towards human hunting. I mean, this whole country that we live in today, as far as Europeans are concerned, lot of Western states. But that's an animal that is essentially a holdover from the Pleistocene and is kind of still fighting Pleistocene ghosts.

52:51 is happening is that in the pronghorn, we've got an animal that has survived into our own time and preserve the dominant animals in the middle against a hyena attack. That's incredible. Yeah, look at this. We're looking at a video of them right now, and someone's driving in the car, and they are just flying by. Now, does it resemble the African cheetah? Did it

56:04 that was, in effect, an American cheetah. I've not seen any evidence anywhere in anything I've read that it did. They're in the deserts of places like Nevada. an issue in terms of how they compete with cattle, how they compete with sheep, how they compete with mule deer and wildlife. When we arrived in North America, when Europeans arrived in North America and just essentially swept through the country and almost extirpated everything we found, like white-tailed deer, antelopes, buffalo.

1:00:09 of animal species, in most instances, not completely exterminating them, but dropping They were regarded as agricultural pests, and so farmers basically killed them and enlisted It makes sense, but it's amazing. We're going to eliminate it. Americans call coyotes prairie wolves. Yeah, it was an Aztec name. Anglo-Americans got out there, they were encountering not only native people who were

1:05:33 His book is a bestseller. in this vein so that by the time you end up reading it, your basic conviction is, okay, Oh, that's a great story. But then it also, it has this story that's associated with us. going away. And I think they also, at least this is what I argue in the book, they had this sense I mean, it could have been 10,000 years ago, It's our oldest literature from North America in the form of oral stories that have

1:11:29 photo of it because it was so weird. I mean, this image right here, He killed my chicken. See, when chickens, when they brood, do you know about chickens brooding? That's one of the reasons why vegetarians can eat chicken eggs and get protein from them. Anyway, the chickens sometimes are convinced that these non-viable eggs will become chicks. We separate them from the chicken coop.

1:14:15 The coyote says, thanks, grabs the chicken, and then jumps and hops the fence. And that's one of the things that you talked about in your book about farmers who had chased off the coyotes and they had rabbit infestations. and some people are brand new in dealing with them, and they're alarmed, first of all, to start with a position, which I'll admit, this is not the American position to take.

1:16:56 starts catching cats or starts chasing dogs or something. I mean, you can take that one out and perhaps improve the situation. But just blanket going after any coyote because you're afraid of something like your cat might disappear is going to boomerang in every instance because attempts to persecute them, as I try to point out over and over in Coyote America, result in every case in more coyotes.

1:18:06 They know how to live in the hills around me. disappear and you don't see the cat again is often the period from basically about now from April And it attacks, it kills it, and leaves it. But what almost everybody does now that we know we've got coyotes is you hear coyotes some other raptor right out of its nest. It happened so fast. And look at the other ones.

1:21:20 Look at these eyes sneaking up. Yeah. And I was, and that, that was like one of the first years that I lived here. And I remember They put a talon basically into their ass and just rip it all the way up to their sternum. how we anthropomorphize some of these animals and turn them into these cutie pies. But there's a video in Los Angeles, in Hollywood, of a coyote eating a cat on a lawn.

1:24:32 look at that sucker oh yeah he's hanging out right in la hi right how are you wild animal cross four lanes of the interstate and stop in the median and sit there and wait until How about that other stupid cat behind him? Yes, they develop a taste for them. And so, I mean, there are examples. they're like, there's no way. But look, these are biologists. These are people that are actually

1:27:34 That's U.S. this very compassionate thing to do. You know, Fluffy wants to be out. Fluffy needs, you know, some space to roam. But you're about a group that approached you, have to worry about, for example, going on the endangered species list. That's not going to happen. As one of the people who blurbed my book, we put some hardscape down, put up some houses, and we go, this is our

1:30:57 Yeah. We don't have lepers, you know, patrolling intrigued by one of the stories I uncovered in the book, which is an argument that I make is based on the work of a graduate student I knew at the University of Montana. People would feed them. garbage and stuff. When we did that, what that in effect did was to open up the niche in American cities for wild canids. And the wild canid that was able to take advantage of it was the coyote.

1:34:56 It came out last March of 2016. out into Kansas and into Nebraska. And I mean, everybody saw the movie Revenant, of course, I mean, we wiped out probably as many as 30 million bison through the 19th century. And so what this American Prairie Reserve is about now, it's based in Bozeman, Montana. And then just downstream of it, still along the Missouri River, is the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge.

1:39:19 all the animals that were there. And then because they're a private entity and it's not the Fish and Wildlife Service, old western movie but actually to experience it ourselves now how are they going to reintroduce And then, as I said, they can't deliberately on their own reintroduce gray wolves or grizzly bears. But their idea is that if wolves and grizzlies get there, then they're welcome.

1:42:02 I've got lots of friends who, once I sort of alerted them to this, who have joined American Prairie Reserve and are donors, small donors. And explain to people that's a disease, a cattle disease. It's a disease that bison and elk have and that if cattle get it, their beef cannot be sold in North American markets. No. I mean, but I have to say that I've not read the study, so I'm not quite sure how they

1:44:47 largely a ranching country with cattle. I mean, and the idea has been from the ranching community Bison's a better meat. That's kind of why I wrote this American Serengeti book, And as I said a minute ago, what seems to me to be the largest destruction, wholesale destruction of wildlife discoverable in modern history. So they have an Instagram page.

1:47:18 Below that. occupy. And so these bison have essentially very few predators and they're just wandering around And the Fish and Wildlife Service doesn't actually, even the public lands that are there, The hunters in Montana were up in arms because it wasn't so easy to get an elk anymore, and they blamed it all on wolves. And also, I think it's super important that the hunting community step back

1:50:29 A hundred. And people are complaining about that. Coyotes and mountain lions have been part of the ecological equation here with all of these animals that we like to hunt, with pronghorns, with elk, with mule deer. I mean, they've been co-evolving with one another for hundreds of thousands of years. So I think part of it is just coming to terms with the fact that we're brand new here,

1:52:58 they started doing the market hunting and killing off all the bison, what we had done all right the bison that we experienced today are these pure Bison latifrons is the animal over on the far left. on this in American Serengeti, too, sort of my most recent take on this bison ecology, And so what that article actually argued and what my chapter in American Serengeti argues, too,

1:58:27 That it became almost impossible for Indian people to resist trading for those things. So it also was the reintroduction of the horse as well, right? And so, I mean, there were entire groups like the crows had been relatives of the Mandans and the Adatsas and had been agriculturalists. the horses, which they have now in great surplus that they've liberated from the Spaniards, up the

2:02:37 It grazes them, you have to feed it grass. But you could mount up on that horse and ride out and become a buffalo hunter. didn't participate were pretty quickly overrun by the people who is because the Lakotas that provided goods for the market economy. but my task was to read the incoming manuscripts that were submitted for publication. And one of

2:06:59 the branch of a tree and then leave. And then two weeks, three weeks later, go back. And this guy, That's a mind blower. that, okay, there were still 100 million of them by the end of the Civil War, and then guys go out with rifles in the space of 20 years, they shoot them all down, and that's the end of took these European exotic diseases out among the bison herds and infected them with

2:10:58 But, yeah, there's no refrigeration. how this works it's gonna sound crazy but it makes you wonder if it was ignorance on their part that for how the world works. And they don't have this kind of, you know, Western explanation for this is a cause and this is an effect. They have a cause-effect relationship, to be sure, that if you did a buffalo jump, you needed to kill all the animals that went off the jump.

2:15:11 So if you ran 1,300 of them off and it's August, then all you're going to get to do, of animals sat there and basically, over two or three weeks of time, burst into spontaneous intestines and stomachs, you basically create a condition where you've got flammable chemistry that lights. You know, it's interesting what you're talking about with explaining this idea

2:17:57 They had the bottom floor of the cage was electrically charged. of an ancestor who went through a famine or a starving time. and a lot of the, you know, fears of snakes and bugs and things that people have might be directly And coyotes are really smart about cause and effect. laboratory that since 1920 had specialized in developing poisons to kill wolves and coyotes. It's called the Eradication Methods Laboratory. So 1080. Another one,

2:23:08 basically the one that we call M44s now that are little cartridges that fire cyanide mist into their mouths, I want to get you together with Randall Carlson, though. I loved it.