Ep. 14: Wolf West

Summary

---

The American West, Ep.14: Wolf West

Host: Dan Flores (with panel & guests)
Release Date: November 4, 2025
Podcast: MeatEater – The American West

---

Episode Overview

In this wide-ranging episode, “Wolf West,” historian Dan Flores delivers a sweeping history of wolves and their place in the American West. Using vivid historical accounts, recent scientific research, and engaging conversations, the episode explores wolves as ancient keystone predators, their near-eradication due to European settlement, and how folklore often mismatched reality. The story covers the evolutionary saga of American wolves, indigenous perspectives, European attitudes, the strychnine era, and closes with reflections on the recent “de-extinction” of dire wolves and the complex legacies of predator management.

---

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Wolves as Ancient Keystone Predators

• Wolves’ Longevity and Ecological Impact:

  • Wolves have been major shapers of North American ecosystems for millions of years, long before human arrival (~22,000 years ago) ([04:30]).
  • As keystone predators, wolves not only regulated prey populations, but also indirectly stabilized entire landscapes, influencing forest composition and other predator species:

    “Virtually every ecology in the west was shaped from the top down by the presence of wolves.” (Dan Flores, [05:13])

• Evolutionary Background:

  • North American canids go back 5.5 million years, with dire wolves as the dominant species before going extinct after the Pleistocene ([06:15]).
  • The “buffalo wolf” (Canis lupus nubilus) was the most prevalent in historical times ([09:22]).

2. The Wolf’s Place in Native and Early American Worlds

• Native American Relationships:
  • Indigenous peoples saw wolves as kin, totem animals, and teachers, allowing them to fill their natural role as apex predators ([12:45]).
• Early European Observations:
  • Early explorers like Michael Steck and John James Audubon described an “astonishing abundance” of wolves — “hundreds in a day” ([02:38], [03:00]).
  • Wolves were notably unafraid of humans, often described as “tame” or curious, due to long co-existence with Native populations who didn’t persecute them ([24:03]).

3. Old World Folklore and the Roots of Anti-Wolf Sentiment

• Disorientation of Settlers:

  • European colonists brought deep-seated fear of wolves (from folk tales and religion), but were perplexed when American wolves showed “no aggression toward people” ([13:30]).
  • William Wood (1630s, Massachusetts) noted, “it was never known yet that a wolf ever set upon a man or a woman” ([13:55], [45:19]).

• Cultural Baggage & Scientific Explanation:

  • Cultural suspicion extended to black wolves, seen as especially sinister. Modern science links black coat genetics to early hybridization with dogs ~13,000 years ago ([15:25]).
  • Native admiration for wolves (for bravery, loyalty) contrasted sharply with European views of wolves as “bloodthirsty monsters” ([16:30]).

4. European Settlement and the Wolf Eradication Campaign

• Initial Policy – Bounties:
  • The first environmental law in colonial America was a wolf bounty ([20:00]).
• Industrial-Scale Killing:
  • Strychnine poison (introduced 1834) revolutionized wolf-killing; single carcasses could kill up to 40 wolves and many more non-target species ([34:45], [35:25]).
  • “Wolfers” (professional poisoners) decimated populations, causing untold collateral damage to raptors, scavengers, and even livestock ([36:30]).
• Government Policy:
  • States like Montana spent huge proportions of their budgets on wolf bounties (e.g., 23,575 wolves destroyed in Montana in 1899 alone) ([38:10]).
  • Additional cruelties included deliberate infection of wild canids with mange ([39:25]).

5. Wolves’ Social & Hunting Behavior: Misunderstood by Settlers

• Pack Structure & Emotional Life:
  • Wolf packs are matriarchal, highly cooperative, and exhibit complex emotions and culture (“rallies,” teaching pups, nuanced body language, contagious howling) ([17:49]).
• Hunting Strategies:
  • Wolves primarily scavenge or target the weak/young/injured; hunts are dangerous, with low success rates (~10%) ([18:50]).
  • Settlers mischaracterized them as rampant killers, ignoring the risk and cost to wolves themselves.

6. Eradication’s Broader Ecological Ripple Effects

• Trophic Cascades:
  • The near-extirpation of wolves led to surges in coyote populations and changes in the types of vegetation and other animal abundances ([10:50]).
• Wolves’ Role in the Buffalo Era:
  • Wolves regulated bison herds (Old Pawnee saying: wolves devour 4 out of 10 bison calves), maintaining a balance over millennia ([24:28]).

7. Legend of Lobo and the Changing Perception

• End of the Wolf West:
  • By the early 20th century, wolf extermination was nearly complete; the last individuals became legends (“Snowdrift,” “The Custer Wolf”) ([40:00]).
  • Ernest Thompson Seton’s account of “Lobo, King of Currumpa” personalized the last wolves, emphasizing their “individuality, compassion, cooperation, loyalty,” and highlighting Americans’ shifting attitudes ([39:59]).

    “We and the beasts are kin.” (Seton, [39:59])

8. Myths vs. Reality: Human–Wolf Conflict, Then and Now

• Wolf Attacks on Humans Are Vanishingly Rare:
  • Flores emphasizes, using colonial and modern examples, that North American wolves simply do not attack people, despite persistent folk fears ([44:45] onwards).
    • “There has not been an instance where a wolf has set upon a man or a woman in our experience.” (Flores, [46:16])
    • In folklore, wolves are dangerous; in reality, “wolves are cowards” — a denigration reflective of disappointment that they weren’t the monsters expected ([46:43]).
• Comparison with Europe:
  • Flores discusses the commonly held belief that Eurasian wolves are more aggressive, but notes that data is unclear and that much of this narrative may also be rooted in folklore or confusion with rabid or hybrid animals ([47:12]–[53:12]).
  • Today, Europe actually hosts more wolves than the lower 48 U.S. states; like in North America, folklore and resistance persist ([52:00]).

9. Wolves, Coyotes, and Predatory Balances

• Coyotes’ Story Diverges:
  • With wolf decline, coyote populations exploded; wolves and coyotes have a fraught evolutionary relationship, with limited hybridization, especially with gray wolves ([54:08]).
  • Anecdote: in a research facility, a coyote that birthed wolf-coyote hybrid pups “immediately killed every one of them… Her hatred of wolves was greater than her love of her own children.” ([56:39])

10. Dire Wolves and “De-Extinction”

• Cutting-Edge Science:
  • Recent bioengineering inserted 20 dire wolf genes into gray wolves, successfully birthing pups named Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi ([07:38], [59:48]).
  • Raises questions: how much “dire wolf” must be present — genetically and culturally — before revival is meaningful?

    “…the whole thing… animals have culture… particularly for social animals like wolves… these dire wolves… are not going to have any culture to rely on.” (Flores, [60:24])

    • The “de-extinct” dire wolves are larger, with thick white coats, but questions about their ecological role and cultural inheritance remain ([61:00]).

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On American wolves’ abundance:

  “A common thing is to see 50 at a site in the daytime. We are never out of sight of them, see hundreds in a day.”
  — Michael Steck, 1850s ([02:38])

• Misalignment between folklore and reality:

  "In America, Wood wrote, it was never known yet that a wolf ever set upon a man or a woman."
  — Narrator quoting William Wood ([13:55])

• On wolves’ ecological influence:

  “Wolves apparently influence continental ecology in 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 aspens or cottonwoods found on a landscape with gray wolves present.”
  — Narrator ([10:50])

• On changing perceptions:

  “The theme of Wild Animals I Have Known, he wrote, was ‘we and the beasts are kin.’”
  — Narrator, quoting Seton ([39:59])

• On ongoing wolf fears:

  “I had a neighbor... a pack of wolves would run across the road. ... He walked up to the house one day and said something like, well, I guess you know... 'these wolves are close and these things. They're gonna tear my wife off the front porch and maul her in the yard.' ... I tried to tell him they haven't got, man... But it did not work.”
  — Dan Flores ([48:31])

• On de-extinction and animal culture:

  “Animals have culture. ...these dire wolves...are not going to have any culture to rely on. The culture they're going to be taught... is whatever their human handlers are exposing them to.”
  — Dan Flores ([60:24])

---

Important Timestamps

• 02:38 — Early eyewitness accounts of wolf abundance in the West
• 04:30–10:50 — Wolves’ evolutionary story, dire wolves, and the ecological shaping of the American West
• 12:39 — Wolves as keystone predators and their unique role in North America
• 13:55–16:30 — Collision between European anti-wolf folklore and actual American wolf behavior
• 20:00 — The first American environmental law: placing a bounty on wolves
• 34:45–39:25 — The strychnine era; mass poisoning and its horrific consequences for wildlife
• 44:45–46:16 — The myth of wolf attacks on humans debunked with colonial and modern accounts
• 52:00 — Contemporary Europe now has more wolves than the US lower 48; ongoing culture wars
• 54:08–56:39 — Wolves and coyotes: evolutionary enmity and hybridization stories
• 59:48–62:35 — Dire wolf de-extinction, genetics vs. culture, and science’s limits

---

Episode Flow & Tone

Dan Flores' narration is vivid, wryly humorous, and often elegiac, blending scientific rigor with storytelling. The host and guests are curious, skeptical, and sometimes irreverent, using anecdotes and asides to break up the dense history, always maintaining a tone that honors both the animals and the human stories intertwined with them.

---

Conclusion

“Wolf West” is a rich, deeply informative episode offering both a broad historical sweep and incisive examination of the mythology and reality surrounding wolves in the American West. By exploring how human attitudes — born of fear, folklore, and economic interests — nearly destroyed a keystone species, it asks profound questions about ecological interconnectedness, legacy, and the consequences of our collective narratives. For listeners interested in American history, wildlife, or conservation, this is essential listening.

---

Transcript

[Host/Advertiser]

When you're in the back country, don't forget your own backcountry. Keep it pristine and confidently clean by bringing along Wet Extra Large Dude Wipes. Just like your truck gets muddy out in the wild soaking your butt, you never clean your vehicle with dry paper towels, so why would you clean your butt with dry toilet paper? Wetter cleans better so ditch the itch and switch from TP to Wet Extra Large Dude Wipes. Dude Wipes it is the best clean. Pants down. They're available at Amazon. That's where I usually order mine from, but you can get them at Walmart nationwide. Fantastic product. Proud to be doing ads for these.

[Co-host/Advertiser]

Boys at Dude Wipes.

[O'Reilly Auto Parts Advertiser]

Check Engine, ABS or maintenance light on. Take the guesswork out of your warning lights with O'Reilly Veriscan. The service is free and provides a report with solutions verified by ASE Certified Master Technicians. And if you need help, we could recommend a shop for you. Ask for O'Reilly Variscan today.

[Lego Star Wars Advertiser]

Oh oh oh. O'Reilly Auto Parts when you say Lego Star wars, the first thing you think of is imagination or action. Or both. Definitely both. Like with Jango Fett's Starship. I mean with Stud Blasters, Seismic charges and three minifigures, your kid is gonna be creating stories until the Banthas come home. And for yourself, there's the Jango Fett's Fire Spray Class Starship LEGO set from the Ultimate Collector series. Enjoy some Jedi Master level mindfulness during your building time. Shop now for Star wars lego sets on lego.com or in lego retail stores.

[Narrator/Historian]

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.

[Dan Flores]

I'm Dan Flores and this is the American west, brought to you by Velvet Buck Wine, where the hunt meets the harvest.

[Narrator/Historian]

A portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers.

[Dan Flores]

Limited supply available at velvetbuckvineards.com Enjoy responsibly.

[Narrator/Historian]

Wolf West at the midpoint of the 19th 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, the Catlins, Bodmers, Audubons, 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 and awe as wolves. Michael Steck, a physician traveling the Santa Fe Trail in the early 1850s, 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 anytime they got among bison herds, wolves became so astonishingly numerous that, as he wrote, we see immense numbers of them. A common thing is to see 50 at a site in the daytime. We are never out of sight of them, see hundreds in a day. That comported with wildlife. Painter John James Audubon's comment on the upper Missouri river that if ever there was a country where wolves are surpassingly abundant, it's the one we are now in. But here's the thing. Today you could drive repeatedly across the country where Steck wrote of seeing hundreds of wolves a day, or along the Missouri where Audubon 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 1850 to 1925 was that thorough. Until about 1925, though, the American west was and for 5 million years had been wolf country. Consider that for a moment and understand what an anomaly the past almost wolf free hundred years has been to a story like that. The west wolves were from a family of animals, the Canadae, 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 1920s, there was never a time when wolves were not America's keystone predators. Before humans first got here 22,000 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 foot on the continent. Long before we old worlders arrived with our peculiar hatred of predators, Virtually every ecology in the west was shaped from the top down by the presence of wolves. The Canadae 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 by crossing the land bridges connecting America to Eurasia. At the same time, there were other wolves that stayed home, giving rise to animals that became eastern wolves and spawning the intriguing red wolf of the south as well as coyotes. As we all know now from this year's de extinction announcement from colossal bioengineering and full disclosure. I'm a member of Colossal's Conservation Advisory Board. The super sized American dire wolf was also part of the canid mix in ancient America. There's still unresolved science about dire wolves. A 2021 article in Nature arguing that dire wolves may be different enough from other American wolves to belong in a genus other than Canis, one called Anocyon. Before about 25,000 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. At Rancho La Brea Tar Pits in California, more than 4,000 of these burly 150 pound wolves died in the asphalt seeps. Their remains there outnumber those of gray wolves by 100 to 1. Game of Thrones and George R.R. martin notwithstanding, dire wolves were not fated to survive the extinction crash that ended the American Pleistocene 10,000 years ago. During that great extinction pulse, smaller gray wolves somehow out competed dire wolves. But dire wolf extinction still left America with a soup of several wolf types, including coyotes. There were no survivors of the dire wolf genus Ainocyon, though, until Colossal scientists edited into a gray wolf genome 20 specific genes of dire wolf DNA from remains that were 72,000 and 13,000 years old. Then, through a surrogate mother, scientists birthed Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi in late 2024 and early 2025. 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 80 to 120 pounds, gray wolves outmatched their long lost relations, eastern and red wolves and coyotes, in both size and pack instincts. Once dire wolves disappeared from the continent, gray wolves were left as as 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 whopping 23 species of Canis lupus. In 2011, 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 to sprang from two origins. Eastern wolves, red wolves and coyotes all represented American wolf evolution, animals that never left the continent. Gray wolves, on 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 Pleistocene. This taxonomic rethink has shrunk the number of gray wolf to subspecies from the 23 of the 1940s down to only four Arctic white wolves found in the extreme north of the continent were probably the last to come home to America. The Rocky Mountain wolf, Canis 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, Canis lupus bailii, the Mexican wolf, May have 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 Canis lupus nubilis. This was the famed buffalo wolf, the lobo loafer or white wolf of the plains of so much 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 faced bears, saber tooth and scimitar cats, False cheetahs, step lions and running hyenas to chase and pull down camels, sloths, horses, longhorn bison, and perhaps mammoth calves in an Africa like world. That all almost seems like science fiction to us now. After the Pleistocene, extinctions took out all the giants. A reconstituted western bestiary bequeathed to western gray wolves their classic place in American ecology, With buffalo the only western grazer still standing. After the extinctions, bison numbers skyrocketed to between 20 to 30 million animals, some 1 1/2 to 2 million buffalo wolves served as their primary primary predators in this new order. As famed western trader and author Josiah Gregg put it in the 1840s, although the buffalo is the largest, he has by no means the control among the prairie animals. The scepter of authority has been lodged with the large gray wolf as keystone predators. Wolves apparently influence continental ecology in 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 aspens or cottonwoods found on a landscape with gray wolves present. Coyote populations went down and fox numbers went up. In a kind of bigger dog beats up littler dog equation, Wolf predation exerts strong evolutionary pressures on the behaviors and and even habitat selections of wolf prey species. Such was the 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 good part created by.

[Dan Flores]

Wolves.

[Narrator/Historian]

In a North America 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 400 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 Europeans had been told wolves should act. In America, Wood wrote, it was never known yet that a wolf ever set upon a man or a woman. That seemed impossible to, given the folk traditions about wolves in the Old World. All those folk tales and biblical passages about ravening wolves left colonists disoriented when America's wolves showed no aggression towards people. But wolves in the numbers America held were still unexpected. And that led to a certain despair in 1630s New England, since, as Wood put it, there's little hope of their utter destruction. So from the start, the wolf 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 1400s. Virginians and New Englanders were living among wolves for the first time in their lives. And as Wood implied, they didn't like it in the least. Then there were their imported cultural traditions. When you had herded domesticated animals for 8,000 years, as these Old Worlders had, and religion was your way of understanding how the world worked, there was a natural tendency to see wolves as a supernatural malediction. For Christians, Adam's 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 the 1620s, the actual explanation for black wolves lay in scientific work four centuries in the future. A genomic study from our time indicates that black coats in America's wolves sprang from a hybridization event between wolves and domestic dogs in the northwest of the continent approximately 13,000 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. 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 werewolves, dim memories of part human, part animal fantasies from the Paleolithic still circulated in colonial times and 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. The reality was that wolf's 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 25,000 years before. Wolf societies were much like human hunter gatherer bands. In both, the leadership was usually matriarchal. The alpha female wolf directs 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 who avoid breeding with close kin. So a pack's grown pups eventually move out in search of mating opportunities. While they're individualistic, wolf pups, like young humans, learn from their elders. They are steeped in pack culture. Wolves have strong emotional attachments. After absences, they greet by standing on their hind legs. A greeting known as a rally. They also interact with a remarkable range of body language and facial expressions.

[Dan Flores]

Expressions.

[Narrator/Historian]

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, 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 the real world, something different was playing out. Chasing down and neck wrestling big animals armed with hooves and antlers. And is dangerous in the extreme. Despite their strong jaw muscles, the geometry of wolves long muzzles actually inhibits their bite force. So impossible they go for low hanging fruit. Highly perceptive about cost benefit, they scavenge animals already dead. On the hunt, they try for fawns and young animals or injured, diseased or old ones. Their strategy is to test prey in search of those least dangerous and and easiest to run down. Even then, wolf chase success dips as low as 10%. One of Western painter George Catlin'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 Catlin put it, which he is tossing into the air, are stamping to death under his feet. Catlin's painting White Wolves Attacking Buffalo showed such a scene with an aging bull fighting a wolf pack with such resolution that, as Catlin wrote, his eyes were entirely eaten out of his head. The 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 Catlin said, were crushed to death by the feet or horns of the bull. 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, Wood's Massachusetts colony passed through the first environmental law in colonial American history. It was a bounty on the continent's wolves.

[Lego Star Wars Advertiser]

Does anything go better than Lego and Star Wars? I don't think so. Kids will love becoming a part of the galactic action while playing out their favorite adventures. Like with Jango Fett's Starship. I mean, this Lego set is fantastic. It features a detailed recreation of Jango Fett's starship with four stud shooters, a seismic charge dropping function, and wings that rotate with gravity. Plus it has three Jango Fett with two blasters and a jetpack, Young Boba Fett and Llama Su, perfect for endless play. Now for the big fans, there's Jango Fett's Firespray class Starship from the Ultimate Collector series. Packed with details and surprises for fans, this large scale set is perfect for anyone hunting for a mindful building escape. Plus you end up with a fantastic display piece. You can build this while your little ones build the kid set. You'll be like Django and Boba building an adventure shop. Now for Star wars lego sets on lego.com or in lego retail stores.

[Host/Advertiser]

Hey, I'm not ashamed to tell you I'm a big Dude Wipes fan. I keep Dude Wipes in my backpack. I keep Dude Wipes at our fish shack. I keep Dude Wipes in my truck, garage, wherever the hell. I just keep them around. And also, you know one of the reasons I got kids, man, when you got kids, you learn that you keep them around because little butts make big messes. When nature calls for your kid, answer with the pristine clean of Little Dude Wipes. They're gentle enough for little cheeks and strong enough for toddler streaks. So they can be the first generation that never has to suffer the agony of dry toilet paper. The next time your kid goes number two, show them their number one with Little Dude Wipes. Little Dude Wipes are wet, extra large flushable wipes, alcohol and chemical free they're the same size as extra large Dude Wipes. Perfect for the big messes the little kids make. Kids are known to get a little stinky Wipe away the funk with Little Dude Wipes Bubble gum. The bubble gum scented flushable wipe free little Stinker. Also available in fragrance free Little Dude Wipes are made with 100% plant based based natural fibers so you can keep the planet healthy for your little dude. Available exclusively at Walmart nationwide.

[Co-host/Advertiser]

And remember, check out the bubble gum. You'll get a kick out of it.

[Host/Advertiser]

We're thinking about connection to the land, to the history, to a legacy we can build. That yearning for your own piece of wild country. That yearning runs deep and in 2025, making that a reality is more important than ever. Whether you're a lifelong hunter or just starting out. If you dream of owning land to explore, to build memories, to leave something real for those who come after, then there's one place to start. Land.com it is the leading online network connecting buyers and sellers of rural properties. I can tell you in my life I've bought a couple small, little weird little spots and dude the smartest moves I ever made. Find the right agent who understands your needs. Explore diverse listings from timber tracks to ranches, and access the tools to make smart decisions. Don't let that vision of your own land stay a dream. Take action now. Head to land.com find your connection to the wild, your piece of history, your legacy. Land.com the Place to Find your open space.

[Narrator/Historian]

When Western travelers like Meriwether Lewis, George Catlin, and John James Ottoman first observ 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 grizzly bears, always found in largest numbers where they could scavenge. Buffalo drowned in rivers are where weak animals were easier to attack. William Clark observed the most common wolf hunting technique for buffalo in April of 1805, when Lewis and Clark were ascending the Missouri through what 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, an ancient American equation that left both species healthy across at least half a million years. One trait everyone commented on when they were first among the west, wolves was how tame they were, having no reason to fear wolves, and Native people had long let them hang around camps and villages. 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 a bayonet on the muzzle of his rifle. At Fort Union, Audubon's party 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. Mr. Culbertson, Harris tells us, started his beautiful Blackfoot pied mare at full speed when within half a mile of the wolf, who turned and galloped off leisurely until Mr. Culbertson was within 2 or 300 yards of him when he started off at the top of his speed. 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 traitor 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. Centuries of peaceful relations with native peoples had taught the west wolves not to fear humans. Despite Old World folklore, Western Bartok and Hollywood sensationalism Today, like Liam Neeson's 2011 film the Gray, the truth is that except in the rare rabies case, the west wolves were in no way aggressive towards people. In fact, it was a Western trope that both wolves and coyotes were rank cowards 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, or sitting and watching curiously as travelers passed within feet. But soon enough, with everyone traveling the west 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 19th century. With a wild animal products 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 1872, the Brooklyn painter John Gast distilled an important assumption about both Indians and the country's wild animals into a famous visual image. Gast's American Progress painting portrayed a blond giant in angelic white garb striding across the west, stringing telegraph wires behind her, with wagons of settlers in her wake. Disappearing off the 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 seem to understand in an America modeled on Europe, not just the native people, but all those iconic wild animals had to go. 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 civilizations. Wolves, well, the plan since colonial times had been their total eradication. Eventually, other animals, 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. Gast, painting implied, was no one's fault. Simply enough, ancient America's time was over. Incompatibility was a shame, but it seemed to comfort us. Distilled from the imported nuts of an 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 1834. 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. In an age inured to carnage, it was a horrifying killer. Inside a few minutes, a white tablet gulped down from a baited carcass launched the 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 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 dustbin of history, so we didn't have to look at 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. Poison and Then headed to camp to enjoy life while the strychnine did his work. Teams of wolfers driving ox drawn wagons began laying out strychnine in the Yellowstone country. As early as 1864, approaching a buffalo or horse carcass they'd 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 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. 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. An astonishing 40 dead wolves per baited carcass was common. One party in the Texas panhandle picked up 64 wolves one morning barely a mile from their camp. They made $4,000 in one winter. In Kansas, James Mead once poisoned 82 wolves in a single baiting in the Texas panhandle. Into the 1890s, Wolfers Jack Abernathy, Allen Stagg and Alec Lewis averaged 200 monsters that was their nickname for gray wolves a year, killing 296one 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 a piece and $2 if you could get the pelts all the way to New York. 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 frequently from the 1860s through the 1890s, poisoning wildlife for money killed western animals in numbers that competed with the death tolls of buffalo. For a couple of decades after the Civil War, while US Indian policy herded the tribes onto reservations and western market hunts produced the most devastating slaughter of wildlife in 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 and sheep as prey. Except those were the property of ranchers who stood on 8,000 years of history of battling predators. So now, as hated symbols of wild America, wolves from the 1880s through the 1920s became special targets in the end, game wolf. One stockman launched to convert the ancient world they had acquired into a money making Pasture for cows, sheep and the market. From the founding of the American colonies through the last decades of the 1800s, bounties paid on wolf scalps became the basic military strategy against wolves. Western stock associations 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 1883 and 1928, Montana's governments paid bounties on a staggering 111,545 wolves and 886,367 coyotes, subsidizing both ranchers and wolfers. As late as 1899, the state paid out bounties on a whopping 23,575 wolves. It didn't stop there or even slow down. The war against wolves and coyotes in Montana even produced a state law passed in 1905 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. 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 23,000 wolves in 1899, Montana paid for only 17 dead gray wolves in the year 1920. And this ability to kill animals en masse Americans were absolutely unmatched. By the 20th century, ranchers and wolfers were naming the last individual wolves still alive in Montana. The last one was called Snowdrift in the Dakotas. The last one was the Custer wolf, an animal charged 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 his work, tried to take on the huge implications of the new Darwinism in the world around him. Seton moved to New Mexico and began to write books, books that strongly appealed to the new century's readers to counter the so called nature red in tooth and claw conclusions that 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 cultural learning across generations. One of Seton's most popular stories employing this approach was about one of those legendary last wolves. In New Mexico's case, a wolf Seton called Lobo, King of Karumpa. Lobo was a male wolf Seton had known years before he became a rider, when he was himself a trapper and wolf hunter who had finally captured Lobo. 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 Seton had trapped and killed while listening to Lobo howling mournfully in the distance to no reply as Seton described him. Lolo was an amazingly canny wolf, and but with one fatal flaw. That flaw was Lobo's fidelity to his mate. Seton caught Lobo in traps laced with Blanca's 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 at the New Mexico plains that had been his and Blanca's world. Lobo's and Blanca's story first appeared in Seton'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 Satan's book was pointing towards a different kind of future. The theme of wild Animals I have Known, he wrote, was we and the beasts are kin.

[Lego Star Wars Advertiser]

When you say Lego Star wars, the first thing you think of is imagination. Or action. Or both. Definitely both. Like with Jango Fett's starship. I mean, with stud blasters, seismic charges, and three minifigures, your kid is gonna be creating stories until the Banthas come home. And for yourself, there's the Jango Fett's Firespray class Starship Lego set from the Ultimate Collector series. Enjoy some Jedi Master level mindfulness during your building time. Shop now for Star wars lego sets on lego.com or in lego retail stores.

[Host/Advertiser]

Hey, I'm not ashamed to tell you I'm a big Dude Wipes fan. I keep Dude Wipes in my backpack. I keep Dude Wipes at our fish shack. I keep dude whites in my truck, garage, wherever the hell. I just keep them around. And also, you know, one of the reasons I got kids, man, when you got kids, you learn that you keep them around because little butts make big messes. When nature calls for your kid, answer with the pristine clean of little dude wipes. They're gentle enough for little cheeks and strong enough for toddler streaks. So they can be the first generation that never has to suffer the agony of dry toilet paper. The next time your kid goes number two, show them their number one with little dude wipes. Little dude wipes are wet, extra large, flushable Wipes alcohol and chemical free. They're the same size as extra large dude wipes. Perfect for the big messes the little kids make. Kids are known to get a little stinky. Wipe away the funk with Little dude wipes bubble gum. The bubble gum scented flushable wipe free little stinker. Also available in fragrance free Little dude wipes are made with 100% plant based natural fibers so you can keep the planet healthy for your little dude. Available exclusively at Walmart nationwide. And remember, check out the bubble gum.

[Co-host/Advertiser]

You'll get a kick out of it.

[Host/Advertiser]

We're thinking about connection to the land, to the history, to a legacy we can build. That yearning for your own piece of wild country, that yearning runs deep. And in 2025, making that a reality is more important than ever. Whether you're a lifelong hunter or just starting out. If you dream of owning land to explore, to build memories, to leave something real for those who come after, then there's one place to start. Land.com. it is the leading online network connecting buyers and sellers of rural properties. I can tell you in my life I've bought a couple small, little weird little spots and dude, the smartest moves I ever made. Find the right agent who understands your needs. Explore diverse listings from timber tracks to ranches, and access the tools to make smart decisions. Don't let that vision of your own land stay a dream. Take action now. Head to land.com. find your connection to the wild, your piece of history, your legacy. Land.com the Place to Find your open space.

[Interviewer/Guest]

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 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, and just a presence on the landscape. And then in, in light of your episode, it caused me to rethink it. The these wolves are sneaking in and, and, 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, yeah, with.

[Co-host/Advertiser]

The, in the, the long hunter. Yeah.

[Host/Advertiser]

Since it was a rabid wolf.

[Interviewer/Guest]

Yeah. And there's. There's rat.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah. There's a rabid wolf, mountain man at one of the rendezvous, too.

[Interviewer/Guest]

Yeah.

[Dan Flores]

There's a wolf that runs around at a rendezvous in the 1830s and bites people.

[Interviewer/Guest]

I guess it strikes me because you read. You read accounts from those periods and you're like, wow, wolves were everywhere. Wolves were biting people.

[Host/Advertiser]

And.

[Interviewer/Guest]

And 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. In the grand scheme of things, the wolves are pretty much off on their own.

[Host/Advertiser]

And yeah, you can find guy after guy after guy after guy that gets.

[Co-host/Advertiser]

Tore up by a grizzly bear. Yeah, no guys are getting tore up by wolves, right?

[Dan Flores]

No, they're not. And 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 1632. When he's running through the accounts of all these new animals that are in the Americas. He makes that.

[Narrator/Historian]

That statement that as far as I can find, remains true all through American.

[Dan Flores]

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 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.

[Narrator/Historian]

And the reason he said that, I'm.

[Dan Flores]

Pretty certain, is because these people came out of Western Europe, for one thing, England hadn't had wolves since the 1400s. So there have been multiple generations of people who. The only thing they know about wolves is, you know, these fairy tales and.

[Narrator/Historian]

Folk tales that they've heard handed down.

[Dan Flores]

Is they are expecting once they hear.

[Narrator/Historian]

That there are wolves in North America, that wolves are going to be tearing people limb from limb.

[Dan Flores]

And suddenly the reality is, wow, there's.

[Narrator/Historian]

Not been a single instance where a.

[Dan Flores]

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.

[Narrator/Historian]

What most people in the 19th century.

[Dan Flores]

In the west, especially after they had had generations of this kind of interaction with wolves, what their reaction to wolves.

[Narrator/Historian]

Was is wolves are cowards. Wolves are not aggressive and are going to attack you.

[Dan Flores]

They're cowards. And that became the denigration that people levied against them. You know, the native people think of.

[Narrator/Historian]

Them as, boy, wolves are these wonderful animals.

[Dan Flores]

They're loyal to their families and, you know, and they're brave and. And the European Euro American perspective was because the wolves were not of aggressive. They're a bunch of cowards.

[Narrator/Historian]

And that's, that's how they, that's how they respond.

[Co-host/Advertiser]

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.

[Host/Advertiser]

And.

[Co-host/Advertiser]

Like a higher propensity to attack people with some of these Eurasian wolves, more livestock depredation.

[Host/Advertiser]

Do you know that?

[Co-host/Advertiser]

Do you know that to be true or is that, is, is that not true?

[Dan Flores]

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 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 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 10 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 howl. 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.

[Narrator/Historian]

These wolves are probably.

[Dan Flores]

I mean, we're in mortal danger. These wolves are close and these things. They're gonna 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.

[Narrator/Historian]

Gonna get my granddaughter.

[Dan Flores]

And you know, I was trying to.

[Narrator/Historian]

Tell him they haven't got, man the.

[Co-host/Advertiser]

Truth haven't got anybody.

[Narrator/Historian]

They haven't.

[Dan Flores]

There's no.

[Narrator/Historian]

But it did not work.

[Dan Flores]

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.

[Narrator/Historian]

And I went to a wolf conference.

[Dan Flores]

In southern New Mexico in Las Cruces one time about 20 years ago. And there was a woman who was representing the livestock industry who showed our assemble throng of an audience of 250 people or so how deadly Mexican wolves were and how scary they were to.

[Narrator/Historian]

Have them on the ground.

[Dan Flores]

And what she showed us was a.

[Narrator/Historian]

Photograph of a cowboy in full Chaps.

[Dan Flores]

And hat and everything, his boots running towards a front porch, running towards the photographer and he's really balling the jack. And back in the background, maybe 100.

[Narrator/Historian]

Yards away, so far away, she had to draw a circle around it to make sure that the audience saw it.

[Dan Flores]

Was a wolf standing in the road.

[Narrator/Historian]

And she said, this is an example of how bloodthirsty these wolves are. Had he not run for the porch, this wolf was going to pull him down.

[Dan Flores]

And it's a wolf standing curiously in the road, watching a cowboy in shaps run up the. Up the dirt road.

[Co-host/Advertiser]

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 Eurasian countries that have wolves. It'd be like, what are the odds that in a given year any individual. Yeah, X will have a violent altercation with a human, you know, and then when you look at like the. The menagerie of North American wildlife, it's like grizzlies are.

[Narrator/Historian]

Grizzlies are mountain lions.

[Co-host/Advertiser]

Yeah, well, yeah, grizzlies are high and everybody else is kind of like inconsequential.

[Host/Advertiser]

But I would be curious to know, like, if the Europe, if that European.

[Co-host/Advertiser]

Sensibility 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, it'd just be interesting to look at and be like, was it any more, was it any more true in.

[Host/Advertiser]

Europe than here or was it just.

[Co-host/Advertiser]

As untrue there as it was here about the human health risk with wolves?

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Co-host/Advertiser]

Not the inconvenience of livestock, but the.

[Narrator/Historian]

Health risk, I think.

[Dan Flores]

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 400 miles from southern southeastern Europe towards France. And this guy a couple of years later went out and he walked 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 didn't know this Europe now has more wolves in it than the United States does. The United States accepting Alaska, the lower 48. Europe has more wolves than the lower 48. And Europe is attempting to be as welcoming of wolves as possible. Now, obviously, 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.

[Narrator/Historian]

But it's going to require somebody doing.

[Dan Flores]

A book to try to find whether or not evidence actually exists. Because some of the things I've read about wolf attacks in Europe are, well, okay, so there's always the rabid animal that's, you know, 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 of the attacks that have. So anyway, it's.

[Narrator/Historian]

It's that kind of story.

[Dan Flores]

And obviously in the 19th 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 5 million years. All of the wildlife, the way trees and grass grew, was sort of dependent on there being this keystone predator at.

[Narrator/Historian]

The top of everything. So it's a little bit like taking.

[Dan Flores]

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. For millions of years.

[Host/Advertiser]

Yeah.

[Dan Flores]

And producing its effect on 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 as just as fast as we can.

[Interviewer/Guest]

I think one thing that I've gotten from your work in terms of just how I conceptualize certain animals is this relationship between coyotes and wolves. And they look alike, but there's obvious differences. But this idea that 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 diverge in very clear ways.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah. So I've done obviously the. 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, unlike wolves, Europeans, had no familiarity with coyotes.

[Narrator/Historian]

And so they didn't actually know what.

[Dan Flores]

To think about them. And it took, you know, some time. It took particularly, you know, Mark Twain in Roughing it, sort of giving America's an Americans an idea of how to think about coyotes. And. And it was not a favorable appraisal, unfortunately. But 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 so the gray wolves that are in the west seem to be sort of mortal enemies of coyotes. And we have some explanations for that. And I can talk about them a little later in the. 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 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.

[Co-host/Advertiser]

Wow.

[Narrator/Historian]

Yeah.

[Dan Flores]

She killed every one of them within a day. Her own pups.

[Co-host/Advertiser]

Her hatred of wolves was greater than her love of her own children.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah. Her love of her own pups. Yeah.

[Interviewer/Guest]

Like the end of a book.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Co-host/Advertiser]

Read that to my kids that night.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Co-host/Advertiser]

They'll love that.

[Host/Advertiser]

And she ate them.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah. But, you know, I mean, one of the stories I obviously told in this. This particular episode is about the wolfers, which is. And I, you know, have to observe that's not of sort of a western figure that has made it into Hollywood movies. No. But holy cow, these guys, they killed untold thousands of animals. And not just wolves, because the baits, the strict 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.

[Co-host/Advertiser]

I tell you. Another interesting bycatch they would get.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Co-host/Advertiser]

In life and death at the mouth of the muscle shell, which is like a trader's journal.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Co-host/Advertiser]

They. It seems like when they get little free time, like the guys in this little community which is now under the 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 they'll go and lace some baits. You know, just like a fault, like nothing else. Nothing. Better sort of fall back is lace and baits.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Host/Advertiser]

In it, he talks about.

[Co-host/Advertiser]

I can't remember what tribe it is. They come in pissed because they've lost 24 of their dogs to a bait.

[Host/Advertiser]

Yeah.

[Co-host/Advertiser]

And they want to raise. They want to raise a fuss about it.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Narrator/Historian]

And Indian horses 24.

[Dan Flores]

They're can dogs of strychnine poisoning because wolves and coyotes would vomit the strychnine onto the grass and Indian pony herds would. If they happened to be herded in that spot and eating that grass, horses would suddenly die from being killed by strychnine.

[Interviewer/Guest]

What's the, this might be too technical. What's the half life or whatever the appropriate term would be of strict strychnine? It seems like one of the, like a heavy metal almost that is just sort of.

[Dan Flores]

It's there.

[Interviewer/Guest]

Accumulates and. Yeah. Like where does it end? The horse eats the grass, then the horse dies, then. Yeah, the coyote comes and gets the horse.

[Narrator/Historian]

Yeah.

[Dan Flores]

I wish I could answer that question.

[Narrator/Historian]

I don't really know.

[Dan Flores]

But I do think it remains toxic, you know, exposed above ground in a, in a form that another animal can, can get for quite a while.

[Interviewer/Guest]

Yeah.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Co-host/Advertiser]

One last question for you on this. Dire wolves have been in the news. Colossal bioscience. Colossal Biosciences where you are on the conservation Advisory board. They've taken, they've identified some dire wolf genes, I believe 19. And we're able to put them, combine them with a gray wolf and then use surrogate pups to birth some.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Co-host/Advertiser]

And it's sparked this huge debate of how, you know, when they, when, when someone declares it a dire wolf was 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 a genetic purity marker? Like, like who gets to say that? That's what that is. And you and I had talked before about, even if you had, if you knew you had the complete animal, how do you account for the culture?

[Interviewer/Guest]

You know.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah, that's, that's the, to me, the whole thing. And yeah, we have talked about it, Steve, 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 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 is whatever their human handlers are exposing them to. You know, and the other thing about this, I mean this is a, as you and I both know and have talked about, this is a kind of a genetic experiment to see 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 these animals ultimately are dire wolves. They're. 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 direwolves probably had white coats, particularly thick white coats, and these animals have that. I think the next test I'm going to be interested in is to see exactly how big they get, because our perception, particularly from La Brea Tar pits, where there are just hundreds of direwolf skulls available from direwolves that were caught in the tar there, is that dire wolves were probably about 25, 30% 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 160, 165 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 it's a very fascinating.

[Co-host/Advertiser]

It's. It's been worth it just for the debate and 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 La Brea Tar pit.

[Dan Flores]

You did?

[Co-host/Advertiser]

And they have a display on a wall of 75 dire wolf skulls.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Co-host/Advertiser]

And I have a skull shelf in my house that was inspired by the. It's not lit the same way, but it was inspired.

[Dan Flores]

Inspired by that.

[Co-host/Advertiser]

Inspired by that. And I got in trouble on my first date because we went. You know, they play those movies on C Circle. Well, I'm sitting there and we come in and we're watch the end half of a movie, and I found myself explaining.

[Host/Advertiser]

So what we'll do is we'll watch.

[Co-host/Advertiser]

The end half and then it'll start over and we'll just watch up to where.

[Dan Flores]

Where you had started.

[Co-host/Advertiser]

She's like, oh, that.

[Host/Advertiser]

This is how.

[Dan Flores]

That.

[Co-host/Advertiser]

That's how this works. Oh, thank you for. Thank you for explaining. I was totally lost as to how.

[Host/Advertiser]

We were gonna see the whole movie.

[Co-host/Advertiser]

Thanks for helping me out. I just couldn't visualize how this was going to work.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah, well. Well, guys, thanks for all the great questions. This has been great fun, as always.

[Host/Advertiser]

Yep.

[Dan Flores]

All right.

[Lego Star Wars Advertiser]

Does anything go better than Lego and Star Wars? I don't think so. Kids will love becoming a part of the galactic action while playing out their favorite adventures like with Jango Fett Starship. I mean this LEGO set is fantastic. It features a detailed recreation of Jango Fett's starship with four stud shooters, a seismic charge dropping function and wings that rotate with gravity. Plus it has three Jango Fett with two blasters and a jetpack, Young Boba Fett and Llama Sue Perfect for endless play. Now for the big fans, there's Jango Fett's Firespray class Starship from the Ultimate Collector series. Packed with details and surprises for fans, this large scale set is perfect for anyone hunting for a mindful building escape. Plus you end up up with a fantastic display piece. You can build this while your little ones build the kid set. You'll be like Django and Boba building an adventure shop. Now for Star wars lego sets on lego.com or in lego retail stores.

[Julian Edelman]

This is Julian Edelman from Games With Names. Football is back. That means it's tailgate time and this season the only meat I'm going to grill is Deets and Watson. I'm loving the Black Angus Dietz dogs. They're flavor packed and you can tell they are made with the highest quality ingredients. Sundays just got a whole lot better. Visit deetsandwatson.com the right way to learn more about the Deets difference.

[Host/Advertiser]

Less tracking, more pack and Swacker the number one name in broadheads, the Swacker LRP is a patented insert system precision built for micro diameter aeroshafts that give you the most robust broadhead connection on the market. 2 times stronger than any 832 insert. Available for both 0.166 and 0.204 arrow shafts. Blade align technology creates consistency for each arrow and blade lock tech allows you to practice and hunt with the same broadhead.

[Co-host/Advertiser]

It's the most lethal arrow available.

[Host/Advertiser]

Get [e-mail] the official manufacturer of Swacker.