Creature Feature Crossover

access or absolutely, they say it's fine. They say it's fine. If you tell people that then you know, industrial sabotui or whatever. He said, it's cool. I love it, all right, everybody. I wouldn't have made that kind of aim, but but you heard Katie, so you know, there you go. We've now made a full throated defense of the Niger Delta Avengers. That is true. That is an upcoming episode. Chris, Um, Katie, what do you? What do you do? What do we? What are we? What are we? What are we? What

are we? What are We're all? Star? Dust Robert, Okay, well that sounds soothing. Actually, Well well, first, Katie of of of the Golden's is the host of Creature You right for some more news. You're the host of Creature feature. Jesus Sophie, you gotta remember these things. Um M, everything's always beful. What are we? What are we doing today? What do you got? What? What are what's happening? I mean, this is your podcast. But I thought, all right, fine,

it's my podcast. Now, welcome to it could happen. We are hosted by Katie. I thought we could talk. I thought we could talk about animals because I like animals. All right, you got a spooky thing about an animal for us? Yeah, I thought, because the theme of your podcast seems to be, you know, sort of the future and how things could get pretty fucky in the future, and I thought, there are some examples of things getting

fucky with animals in the current present. That seems to it could maybe be a bit of a crystal ball for things that could happen in the future with climate change. That is kind of spooky. All right, let's do it. Have you guys heard of the saiga antelope? I mean, I've heard of antelopes, and I've heard of the saiga, And I guess I'm not surprised that there's antelopes in the Saiga. Do me a quick favor and just google Siga antelope and just take a gander. Take them all

in as I I'll describe them to the audio. Oh wow, Yeah, they are kind of some of the cutest, dufiest little in the world. Little little they have the best little face. I know, it's weird. It looks like just too it's just a big nose. Yeah, it's just a big ridiculous nose. My god, that nose looks silly. They must be endangered because they look they look like they're terrible at staying alive.

Their their faces all nose. It's like someone's whole face was just a nose, like someone struck an ant eater to Like, Yeah, they look delicious. I'm just gonna say it. I would hunt them and eat them. They kind of like did it with Voldemort's nostrils in the Harry Potter movie. But like long, Yeah, they look ridiculous. Yes, they like

a Star Wars animal. Yea. Some of them they're patterning makes it look like they have tear drop tattoos under their eyes, which I think means they've all killed someone in prison. If I'm remembering go hard correctly. Yeah. Anyways, want are you going to tell something that is happening with them? Katie? Yes? Are they racist? Are these racist antelope? Katie, We're gonna milkshake duct these antelopes. Yeah, they're they're all um as far as I know, they're not too racist.

They have some problematic views on like, you know, gender abortion. Yeah, that's I mean, all antelope have really regressive attitudes towards women's reproductive health, I mean frustrating. Yeah, yeah, it's a but these guys look like Star Wars animals. To me, they kind of look like a Star Wars animal named like a grass honker or something. Yeah, they look extremely fake. It's looks like a guy you'd meet at the bar

where the Aliens played jizz. Yes, that type of music that Katie's doing is canonically and if you and if you are if you, if you are a musician who plays jiz, you are a jiz whaler. And the best thing about that is that I know all of the thought that George Lucas put to that was, Oh, someone asked what the type of music they played in the jazz Jazz is a real kind of music. Let me just put an eye in the vowel. Now, well, that's

gonna be the day for me. He didn't even put an apostrophe in which it could have it could have, it could have been, didn't even the effort wasn't there because okay, sorry no, I could talk about this for hours.

I just the differences between J. K. Rowling and and George Lucas as creators who both made very popular fiction franchises and want people to think they thought about them more than they did, is absolutely hysterical because J. K. Rowling does that by creating all these convoluted backstories, and George Lucas replaced the A and jazz with an eye and didn't realize that a thing. Right, what an incredible person. It is pretty good. Sorry, Katie, No, it's fine. It's fine.

So these Psyga antelope a k. A. Jiz whalers are found in the grasslands and semi deserts in Central Asia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. They actually used to have a much wider range, but because of all the Roberts out there wanting to taste their delicious, delicious meat, h hunting just that nose on a plate. Their population declined and it's now limited to a small territory. So yeah, so there's still enough for meat to eat a couple. No, Robert, if you

try to kill one, I'll kill you first. Siga antelope hunting, we have to we have to protect the jiz whalers. They look they look stupid as shit. It can't possibly be good at stuff. Actually, what that knows? I bet their senses are. They could do a lot of interesting things. Yeah, anybody, let Katie tell the story. You interpreting fox go, Sorry, we all got not so it's okay, it's I understand the excitement about these guys. Um. I do want to paint a mental picture for the audience just so they

get like why people are freaking out. So they have this elephant, like imagine a little antelope, and they're they're small. They're about two to three ft tall, about six pounds. Yeah, they're little babies. And it looks like you took like a cute little deer and just glued like a big

elephant nose to it. It's not as long as an elephant trunk, but it's sort of a like a It curls under like an elephant seal nose stuck to a little deer, and that snout is called a proboscis, And yeah, it's a they're kind of a they have sort of a light tan white coat. Uh, they can get really fluffy in the winter. Uh. They have these really huge tubular nostrils on that nose, and that gigantic honker helps them filter dirt as the huge herds sort of trample

on the ground and kick up dirt clouds um. And it can also act as an ac unit that cools the Saga antelopes blood. So as blood flows through it, you have this spacious chamber and it cools the blood and it recirculates. And then in the winter it can act as a space heater that warms the air before they breathe it in so ac heater. Yeah, filter system.

It's really a cool nose, which is why it was absolutely horrifying when entire herds of the Saga antelope started dropping dead on mass within like days of each other, just like a biblical plague. So there are photos. What's properly unbelievable. You're so embarrassing sometimes, Katie, I'm so sorry. No, it's it's it's fine. Um, I'm I mean, I don't know how else to sort of add levity to just the most adorable little antelope in the world just all

suddenly dying. Uh. There. So there are photos in Kazakhstans of in Kazakhstan of these fields just littered with these white lumps, and when you zoom in you realize they're all saga antelope corpses just covering the ground. It's pretty bone chilling. It kind of looks okay, this is a little bit. Uh. It kind of looks like a cult death, a mass cult death, like Jonestown antelope. Oh boy. I was gonna say, when you go grenade fishing, but yeah,

same kind of idea grenade fishing. Yeah, what does you drop a grenade in a lake and then it kills all the fish and they float to the top so you can Okay, I thought it was like you were fishing for like running around a field going like that a grenade. If you go fishing in a lake where people go grenade fishing, you may in fact catch a grenade. But but two grenades with one stone. Wow, kind of I'm having this image of bobbing for apples, but like above the apple yu with lakes in Iraq? Is it

because they've got grenades in them? Yeah? I don't really, that's how you fish. Yeah, okay, yeah, I'm still obsession looking at these pictures. Okay, so what what caused all this? This this nightmare plague that killed all of the all of the weird nos the gonzo antelope, right, the gonzo antelope. It was kind of a mystery. So in two hundred thousand siged died off in that year alone, and literally not that many, So I got that. Yeah, it was like the it wiped out the majority of the global

population because they were already endangered. Um. Yeah, they just like keeled over died without explanation, and so researchers were obviously horrified and confused and slightly curious and start that's left. Yeah yeah, so they're like a hundred thousand left. Um. And so they started investigating the mass deaths and they found that the cause was a bacterial infection of pastor Ella multosita type B bacteria, which is really catchy name um.

And it caused hemorrhagic septicemia um, which is a horrible I looked up the symptoms. It's like internal bleeding and just it's like the worst cold ever, but also with your organs bleeding inside, which doesn't sound great. It sounds and honestly looks captain trips, like the plague from Stephen King's The Stand that killed all of the people. Like just this horrible plague that makes everybody bleed out and drop where they're standing. Yeah, that's essentially what it happened.

What happens also with a lot of snot like a lot of ye that's also very captain trips. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean maybe that yeah yeah, so meat fun. So yeah. What is thought to have happened is that basically, this bacteria pastor Ella has often been found in siga antelope large noses. They're also found in other like a yellow noses that have big these big sort of proboscus noses, and it lives in there. But it's normally not a problem because the immune system is able to fight it

off fine and maintains his balance. But the climate, I don't know if you guys have heard, but climate is kind of getting weird, like that is something I've I've heard of, Yeah, learning about it. It may be it may be changing from what it used to be. A little bit. Yeah, it's called change of climate kind of on a global scale, everything getting slightly warmer, Yeah, usually

climate hottening climate. Because of climate hottening, this bacteria, it had much more ideal, uh, kind of of an environment to grow. So inside the beautiful proboscis of the antelope, you can imagine, it's moist, it's warm, it's great. It's

moister with fester inside the nose right exactly. And so when it gets more humid on the outside, more hot and humid, that nose increases in temperature as well, and it became the perfect incubator for hosting this bacteria such that it overwhelmed the antelopes immune system and literally they just started dropping like flies from this in action, like an entire herd dying within a couple of days. When when you first mentioned this, you're talking about how they

can use their nose as like an air conditioner. I was thinking like, oh, maybe maybe these animals will be like well adapt to climate change so they can stuff regulate. But no, of course not. Of course it's not a good story. Um Now, I think that's what's so creepy about climate change to me is there's like the obvious effects are things like more fire, we get real hot and we die because it's too hot. But things like oh, this means bacteria loves loves living life and like starts

eating us from the inside out. Like that's not a really I guess intuitive consequence of global warming, but it is one of the things that seems to be likely to happen. So it's really creepy. Well it's fun is when you started this and talked about like a whole herd of of of these antelopes dropping at once, I thought it was going to be like, oh, another one of those like horrible sulfur bubbles that killed like the cities where of animals in a matter of seconds because

a bunch of ice melted um. And I'm not sure which is creepier. Actually this is worse moment, Like they died in like horrible pain. Yeah, I don't think the sulfur wasn't painful, but yeah, but they're both horrifying. The sulfur is at least faster. They're both very frightening. And it's also both things that like oh yeah that could that could that could drop some people that could just jump right across. There's there's a couple of ways this

could go bad for us. This is the thing me and Robert was looking a little bit into to put together the first five scripted episodes of The Daily As we in a few books we read, there were there were there were sections, like large sections about how this is gonna basically just make plagues be a thing forever. Now, Yeah, this is gonna be hard for people to really get their heads around. But imagine a plague hit in in in the twenty onet century. How scary that would be

just really trying to get your head around that global plague. Yeah, people drop into frightening, you know. So the coronavirus on viruses, technically it's not a plague, right because it's not bati bacteria. It's yeah, it's viral. A lot of people a plague like it's it's it's both both both Like viral pathogens bacterial pathogens are with with globalization, can spread it much faster, right, And now with global warming there's gonna be more breeding

ground for literally new bacterias. And this is and with with stuff melting in the ice captain all the kind of stuff. There's just a lot of reasons to just assume that Yeah, we're just gonna kind of live with plugues constantly being a problem now, Like it's that's just the were there there. There never is going to be a post COVID nineteen world. It's just this forever. COVID was just the first plague that really got through the defenses that we're never going to hold up to the

damage we're doing to the climate. Like there were a couple of plagues beforehand that like we we were able to kind of tamp down on get a lit on, and COVID was just the system actually finally shattering and it's never gonna get fixed. And the leagues you're just gonna get play gear and uh, it'll be fun. But on the other side, on the upside, here's some mats. Okay, Yeah, on the upside, capitalism we are back. I've unfortunately I've got to the point where I'm scrolling through these pictures

where I've now found the mountain of dead animals. Yeah, it's real, fucking the stand ship. Yeah, it's a lot of them, a lot of them dead, just in giant pile. Like imagine the cutest Sesame street character, cuter than Snuffle Up a guess, just lying in heaps, and that big nose has to make him extra vulnerable to fucking horrible nose bacteria. That's when we were just talking about it's literally big nose. That's just what we said, Kate, you just explained that. I know. But it's so sad. It

is very sad. It's very sad. And there there's this is not an isolated case that will never happen again. Researchers warm that it's very likely stuff like this will keep happening with climate change, and they're warning that reindeer populations are at risk because reindeer actually also have a really even though it doesn't seem like they have a huge prick boss, because they have a very impressive nose.

It's very spacious. It also actually works like a little space heater and warms up the air as they breathe it in. It's pretty amazing. But those same characteristics that are so beneficial to the reindeer now could actually become very dangerous for them with climate change if this bacterial

growth happens. So we're looking at potential um, you know, risk to reindeer population, and there's also a lot of risk to farm animals as well, like for something similar have to happen where this bacteria can infect farm animals like cows and other types of ungulate farm animals. Uh. And so you know, even if people don't care about the adorable psycha antelope, which I guess would be just

psychopaths murders, you know. Uh, But like you know, we also have very important species like you know, reindeer that are keystone species and also you know our farm animals that you know, Yeah, they're very for a lot of people to basically how they live. Their lives are based around cultivating these animals and hunting and raising it. Yeah. Yeah, So I mean, in my opinion, every species, even if no matter how obscured it is, it is typically something

very important for humans. It's just it's sort of the like seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon. It's like you don't have to get too far away to realize that Evan Bacon, like his survival is really important to the planet um. Except instead of Kevin Bacon, it's like any animal. And that is basically all ye, all animals and all ecosystems, no matter even if you feel like they're not super important. The way our world works and how ecoistms work. They're

all incredibly intrinsic and reliant on each other. So even you know that's that we're seeing stuff about, like why don't we just like turn entire deserts into solar fields and be like, well, no, because the desert equisystem actually very like if they serves a very important purpose, Like you can't just be like, oh, deserts are too important, Like no, like they have an actual ecoistm that's actually

very important to the surrounding areas. We can't just bulldoze it and turn into a solar just sand garrison, which is coarse and irritating, and it gets everywhere, It's everywhere. Is that an actual quote from from episode two Attack of the Clones by hearing Christensen playing Anakin Skywalker the padawan with with the rat tail. Yeah? Classic that. Yeah, his rat tail. Amazing. The courage they used to have, the courage of two three. How could Pat May not?

How could she not want that? How could you resist? It's like that Ween song Every girl wants a guy with a rat tail. Yeah, I'm just assuming if that were a song it would be by Ween called it's called a like a love Lover. I think that's right. That's right. So what's up with these animals? Yeah, you want some more animals because I talked about how those animals mostly all died. Oh I'm not. I'm just thinking like, what's like, what's what like? Do you know, like what's

happened with them since they all dropped? Thousand of them left alive? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, they're not currently all dying of this bacterial infection. I think, like some of them are. They apparently outside of the dangers and I guess outside of the area where that's about the best you can say for any species. Some of them aren't in the danger area occurringly, but obviously that's going to change as

global warming progresses. So yeah, it's it's pretty grim. It's also I think, you know, obviously, when you think about these things, humans obviously don't have like these big snuffle off a guess noses, which is really sad because I'm imagining us with it, and we're we'd all be dead. We would all be dead, but really, which would be

better for the planet? So but we but we we would we would be way better at whaling jizz And honestly, I feel we would be whaling the hell out of some jizz one man, one can dream would be nose deep in a big old pilages. Oh wow, yeah, how would How does the Bible quantify jizz um cubits? Okay, that's what Noah said, but he wanted to get on the arc. Yeah, God's like you must two jis of every kind. Well, Noah was big into Now we're just

like drawing that it was ever about music. Alright, Sorry, Katie, No, that's all right, I asked, So yeah, I mean I thought another thing we could talk about is how animal folklore is really important to pay attention to and to kind of listen to as both information and warnings for the future. Um, because we often dismiss folklore as like, oh, you know, these are just spooky stories that we tell around the campfire. They're just legends, they don't mean anything.

We're especially dismissive, I think when it comes to indigenous peoples. It's like, oh, your folklore, Oh that's so cute and quaint.

But yeah, we we look at it as we we like really like infantilize it as like, oh, look at you primitive people still doing folklore, which is extremely extremely disrespectful and also like very naive about how things work when you look at how heavily engineered all of like the forests were in the entirety of the America's like from the Amazon of the up to the Pacific Northwest. It's a little like like the architect of a building comes in and says, hey, you can't knock out that

retaining wall. The building is gonna collapse and we're gonna be like, oh, Mr Architect with his magic walls, and then the building collapses on us. You know, there's there's a bunche of paintings, like there's like drawings from like this is like the early sixteen hundreds of of people like in North America, and and it will be drawings. It's all these European guys standing on a tree and what they're watching is like it's it's one of one of the I forget exactly what tried. This is one

of one of the people. Like they figured out how to have like a fire that's like it burns it like exactly, like like perfectly in this ring around the tree does not catch anything else inside of it, like and it's funny because it's like you look at this and it's like okay, like the people like, the people who are drawing this painting cannot do this, and it's like it's very clear that they're just like incredibly befuddled by this. But it's like, you know, it's it's it's

just sitting there. And then all the people who paint, who paint that, you like, all the European artists who like do this each like no, no, no, it's fine. We don't know how they're doing this fire control stuff. But we're Europeans. Everything we every ignoring everything other people say is gonna go fine and great, and we're not gonna like turn half the country into a dust bowl. What do they have to teach us? We figured out how to make boats that only kill half the people

on them, only half. I mean that, I mean that is a really good point. Uh. Controlled burns have been practiced by a number of civilizations for millennia, but when European settlers came and colonized North America were like controlled burns. But we want to sell the timber, and that sounds dangerous, so let us handle it. But yeah, this is all immortalized in the biographical song Timber Bye Bye pit Bull, which which which tells this story in in lyrical version,

please continue. And in uh and in uh Timberland boots and in Timberland boots. That's right. Every Timberland boot has a piece of the story. Yeah, and timberwolves. The I'm gonna say, a hockey team. Yes, the hockey team is yeah. Okay, Yeah, Sophie is shaking your head. I'm sorry, Sophie, Minnesota wolves are an I'm sorry, but yeah, I mean so in North America, especially in California. Uh, Indigenous American tribes practice

controlled burns for thousands and thousands of years. Uh. The europe Carrick and Hoopa tribes of California did controlled burns, which, in addition to preventing larger, more dangerous wildfires by getting grid of dead brush, it also promoted new growth of vegetation like really important plant species like oak and hazel. It even had unexpected effects like supporting the salmon population because as you did, these controlled burns created a block from the sun so that the ash clouds and then

that would cool down the temperatures of the streams. And I know what you're thinking that, Hey, to counter global warming, we should burn everything so that I cooled down. Um. So the problem with burning everything. Like these uncontrolled burns is they also kill living vegetation, and it's just like it burns everything in sight and leaves basically nothing, and

it burns off a huge amount of carbon stores. So the great thing about controlled burns is it very slowly burns off these carbon stores in this dead wood, and then it gives it time to re grow so that you recapture the carbon rather than than just like burning all this carbon at once, releasing it all at once, and then it's like trying to play catchup. It's like if you still like a little bit of milk on the table and you use a paper towel and wipe

it up, it works. But if you just like pour out the entire milk jug on the table, uh, you know, on like a sloppy Saturday, just pouring out that milk, it's like if paper towel is not gonna do anything. That's like trees and carbon. You know what I'm saying, Yes, yeah, I do, I do, I do, I do. Pick what you are putting down. They say, although I still think melk analogy, we should try a controlled burn on let's say Boston, see how it goes, right. Didn't care for it.

I didn't care for Boston. Don't see how we need it. Even North End, Yeah, I didn't care for it. M hm. They've got good Canoli's there, though, I'm sure they do. You know where else has good canolis? I don't because I don't care for Cannolis either. Okay, well, all right, that's uh. I'm actually living in Italy and so if they find out I've been on this podcast, I'm gonna get kicked out of the Oh you need to be yeah,

very careful. It's filled with Italians. They're everywhere. If you can get up to the Alps, there might be some Swiss nearby who can protect it. But you're in day in jurious territory. I didn't realize their Italians here. That's scary. Yeah, it's one of the main problems that Italy has. Yeah, so uh yeah. So but when basically um indigenous tribes had a pretty good system of controlled burns in California, and then when you know, colonizers came to North America,

we were like, hey, stop that. In fact, we're gonna make it illegal to do controlled burns because that seems dangerous. And they focused on fire suppression and protection of timber stores rather than you know, paying attention to the way people had been doing this for thousands and thousands of years and how it kind of worked. And so they just thought like, hey, if we just stopped fires from

ever happening, they'll never happen. But spoilers they just started happening still happen, and it's worse and they're out of control and they're big problems every year. And yeah, learned nothing, yep um. But another thing is that we could have learned about controlled burns much much earlier if we had decided to listen to the Aboriginal peoples in northern Australia.

UM about fire hawks. So, fire hawks are raptors, that is, like birds of prey who seemed to either accidentally or intentionally spread wildfire by picking up smoldering twigs and sticks from a burning area and dropping them elsewhere. And then once they start that fire, they watch for all the little scared mice and rodents and lizards and just feast upon the fleeing animals. It's extremely metal. It does sound

like that does sound very fun, yeah uh. And so research published in eighteen UH detailed about how three species of birds of prey in Australia seemed to do this. But of course this is not news because Aboriginal people's have no about this for thousands and thousands of years

and have documented this in their own folklore. There's uh even a ceremony called Yabada in which people act out birds carrying smoldering branches, which sounds amazing, but essentially they are teaching this uh sort of naturalist history of sorry of how they have seen these uh, these hawks, these

fire hawks carrying these burning sticks and distributing it. And if this, if we had listened to this, you know, earlier, we may have had more research on how you know, maybe these birds of prey have been terraforming the Australian out back for thousands and thousands of years and that's really cool and it may be really informative. But unfortunately we kind of really only decided to start researching in and those researchers started doing it because they listened to, uh,

these stories from the Aboriginal people. So yeah, yeah, I feel like everyone should. I feel like everyone should be more okay with understanding why folklore exists and what propose it serves. This is this, this is something I got into years ago because of the because of the Lower podcast, learning about just how folklore influences culture and politics and

a whole bunch of really interesting and weird ways. And that is something I wanted to talk about more because it's it's a thing, and folklore is different for us now in terms of how we have like a cultural stories, but it's it's it's still the same, it's still the same purpose and we just couldn't deny it in a

way that is kind of silly. Yep. Yeah, I think there's often this idea of there is a clear distinction between fact and folklore, and while it's true, like we can't necessary really just take folklore for at its exact word, because like it's sort of like a telephone game throughout years and years. Folklore is going to take on new shapes every generation. But we really should take it seriously as a part of very important data set of like

this is human observational history. Maybe some of it has been sort of uh turned into myth, but a lot of it could be genuine observation that people are relaying over many many generations, which I think is really important. Well, thank you Katie Golden for talking about those those very silly Gonzo things that are unfortunately dropping dead at the little Gonzo climate change genocide and then and then the other climate change issues are on folklore. Um where where

can people find you on the old internet interwebs? Yeah, I got a podcast. I don't know if you've heard about those. Uh, it's called Creature Feature. And I talk about stuff like this all the time about animals. It's not always about animals dying in horrible ways, but sometimes it is a good mix. You know, It's like sometimes animals being alive, sometimes animals being dead. Sometimes some animals making other animals dead and interesting way animals. Yeah, you

can never predict them. Uh. And you know, uh, you can find me on Twitter at Katie Golden. That's ka E T I E G O L D I n Uh. Yeah where I just you know, just posted on the twittering that to Creature Feature. Find Katie on Twitter and uh shoplift. Sure it could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media. A more pot cast from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can

find sources for it could happen here. Updated monthly at cool Zone Media dot com slash Sources. Thanks for listening.