Ep. 466: Direwolves and Ancient Hunting Dogs

This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listeningcast.

You can't predict anything.

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Ope, run camera here. I am now. Yanni's head is in the way of the I'm here.

That's all the matters. I'm gonna get to introductions in a minute, but first I got up. So you know, when you see airlines airports being like voted America's favorite airport, all that's a lie. Like the best airport in the world is the Ketchcan Airport. Ketch Can't Alaska small. You can get all the food you want to eat. It's got everything you need. The main thing that I liked about it was that and Ronnie's seen this in the

The plane, who do you imagine him?

But he's like, oh, you know, one thing I should probably grab is my brass dagger. So they had it and then now it's gone. And I asked him, I said, why is that gone? He says, well now, and then they go and donate all of this stuff and they'll donate it to the Boy Scouts. And I said, there's no way that the Boy Scouts is gonna give out

TSA's website addresses this.

It says slingshots carry on bags, no checked bags.

Yes.

Well, the thing I was pointing out to him, and when we were hashing this out is I was saying, it's not like it's it's not a wrist rocket. It's an old schooler. He spent two weeks shooting that slingshot off the deck of art thing, and he was barely clearing the water line.

Slingshots, by TSA categorization are the same as yo. Yo's not allowed in your carry on, but they are allowed in check bags because.

You're gonna garrett someone with a Yois Garrett? Mean? You know you're watching mobster movies in Peter You're you're the guy in the bag seat kills the guy in the front seat by strangled him.

I never heard it called garrett.

That's a term. Yeah, I like that. How do you not know that? I just don't.

That's gonna help you in a Future Trivia episode.

One more thing before we do our intros. This is this is highly unlikely one of my absolute favorite bands of all time, The Brian Jonestown Massacre is coming to town October sec and already hold my tickets for me and my wife. I'm thinking of you guys fish. There's probably no way you guys fish, but if you fish or anything, let me know. I will take you fishing while you're in town. Joy today, Bye, Where do we start? Yannis? Do them all up? Because I gotta look at some stuff.

Oh geez, I'm not gonna do a good job. I'm not prepped up for this episode. That well, you're gonna have to do the intros. Big boy, Okay. Brent Reeves is here today.

Yeah, you just hear because you like dogs and you're in town. It's just a happy coincidence. His wife, Alexis is here. How long you guys been married? I think twelve years?

She thinks twelve years. I knew you was going to ask this question. We're waiting on the lift at the hotel and she came. She was getting ready, and she walked into where I was sitting, and I said, now we've married, how long.

You know you asked me what year we were married?

Okay, whatever it was. From now on, just direct all the questions to Mike Atarney.

Uh, you're honest. You tell us, of course, Spencer Newhart, Ronnie Bam many time guests, Ronnie Bam are living our our expert on dogs that are living today and what they have going on. And then we have a dire wolf, an ancient dog expert. How do you like to classify yourself?

I mean that sounds good.

Really, I'll take it.

Sure, you know the first question I'm gonna ask you. I don't want you to answer it yet, but I want you to know. The first question I'm gonna ask you is, And I want you to think about this because you guys are gonna you're gonna nitpick this question. Who How long ago did someone have the first pet dog? And I'll define pet like a dog where the owner could at any given time account for where that dog was. I mean, I want you to mull that over. You got a good one lined up?

No?

Oh?

Really?

Like it's not it's not well known to science.

It's no, it's more in my category.

No, it's not in category. You tell me you're not gonna tell me the way that satisfies me. On what continent and in what is today's country, and in what year?

And they sent the Messegi's up to the Pharaohs.

They put the big old bells on there the pharaohs.

Someone had a dog, pet a pet dog way before that.

That's just one I could do.

You agree right? Don't answer? Yeah, Steve.

You also didn't mention her name.

Oh I'm sorry, Angela Perry. What are you tell me? Who are you affiliated with?

I'm a professor at Texas and University and I work in commercial cultural resource management commercial archaeology as well, helping people manage their heritage aka archaeology.

Oh, I got it. Do you interface with a frequent guest? We have David Meltzer who's he's at a different school, But you got interface ever on ancient old stuff.

I mean Texas A and M and S m U what we do?

Yeah, but you guys, you guys hate each other.

Neither one of us are from Texas, so.

We don't care in the same journals.

Oh yeah, we written papers together and I yeah, we wrote a paper about dogs coming to the Americas with people.

Oh yeah, how long you've been at Texas, A.

And M one year.

Where were we at before then?

The United Kingdom UK? Doing what archaeology?

Did you did you spend time at the Did you spend time at the Ancient DNA place in Oxford?

Yeah?

I work really closely with Gregor Larsen and the Ancient DNA group Oxford.

Do you work with Best Shapirol, she's been on the show.

Yeah. Yeah, Beth and I Best on the dire Wolf paper with us. We work together to try to get DNA out of dire wolves. Took a long time.

We did it such a little clique.

Oh yeah, I got one club.

I got one. You can't answer right now and it won't detract from because we won't get into it too much later. We had a big argument. Do you remember the Spencer? No, we had a big argument about what big argument. Spencer wasn't in it. Huh were there ever dire wolves? Oh?

Yeah, I was. I was the one who you know.

I got such a bone to pick with you, dude? Were there? But here? Was there ever dire wolves in Alaska?

North of the wall? You mean, and there we go?

What is that that that takes place in Alaska?

Well?

You know Arctic?

Uh?

Good question. We the real answer is we aren't sure. So there are a couple possible dire wolves. We have this issue though, that we have dire wolves, we have gray wolves. We also have something called the Bringian wolf now extinct wolf. All of them look very very similar morphologically, bones look very similar. So we have people like me zo archaeologists go through a lot of bones trying to figure out how someone called this a x y Z.

So you got to go digging around behind, you got to go digging around behind round. I think they all went to farms. It's like a puppy mass grave.

Was that the bobcat that they put like shell necks?

I had a necklace on it and everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I had a had a cool necklace. It had marine and fresh water pearls on it, and then it had they were carved like two bear canines, but they were like deer long bones, but they've been carved to look like bear canines, really strung up. We found it buried. The photos from the excavation in the seventies like have it laying out in a burial with the necklace clearly round. So they thought like, oh, it must be a dog, must be a puppy.

They took so someone had taken deer long bones and carved them to look like barri caneines.

Yes, and you were wanted to recognize it.

Like fake the earliest fake diamond.

I mean it's pretty I mean it's pretty cool. I mean they pulled it out. Listen what we do for zoo archaeology identifying you know, animal remains at archaeological sites. This is not This is a fairly new kind of category of archaeology. Before that, you take your bones that you found, you sent to a biologist or zoologist or something like that, or you just kind of rough it in the field. I'm an archaeologist. I don't know. It

Is it possible it was a domesticated bobcat?

I mean yeah, I think so, Little pet, I don't know.

You tell me, can you domesticate a bobcat?

Well, no, you can't. You can domesticate a bobcat. A you can't domesticate bobcat cat.

You can tame yet a bobcat not domesticated with the definition of domesticated.

Well from.

Dollars in Alaska? Real quick?

Wasn't there a declaration they wanted to hear the bone I have to pick with you.

Well a second, wasn't there a declaration made in twenty twenty that there were diar wolves found in Asia? Like, wouldn't that imply that they had to get there via Alaska?

There was a declaration made.

Okay, but it's not not accepted, not yet.

No, No, I mean the media jumps the gun. I'm sorry, go ahead, the media jumps the gun. Someone will come out with the paper to beat to say, hey, here's the thing that like a thing that would be warrant exploration, and they and then they come up with a headline humans in New World way before previously thought, and then you read it and you going, eh, I mean they got like a date off a thing that probably isn't valid, and they don't include all that in the headline.

Yeah, we're in the world of like sexy archaeology, right, So, dogs, DNA, peopling of the Americas, all these things get like hot topic headlines.

That's why you're here, you know, right exactly.

That's why I'm here. Diar wolves in Alaska, who knows. Dire wolves don't seem to like cold weather. They were hanging out a lot in lower latitudes near water. They're into Florida, they're into Texas, they're into southern California with tirees like they're a tires exactly. They're snowbirds. They're not. They don't seem to like the cold weather too much. So been hard to believe. You might have had some that like wandered aimlessly into somewhere north, but they're not

So in Krin's words, Angela Perry, you might pronounce that correct, Yeah, is well Krinn messed up. It'd be an archaeologist Krin. Angela Perry is in Krin's words. Archaeologist, Oh, she corrected it is an archaeologist and professor at Texas A and M.

Her.

Area's expertise include environmental archaeology, got it, zoe archaeology, got it, parasitology. First time ever heard that word? I got it, palaeo ecology, got it. Hunter gathers domestication, adaptation and candids. Also, Ronnie Bame hosts the Honting Dog podcast. Brent Reeves hosts This Country Life on the met Eater Network and often hunts with dogs. We're gonna come back to all that in a minute. Another invitation.

Yeah right, yeah, I'm an inspiring dog owner.

Really, this is a noe doubt and I'm gonna hit you up on Instagram too. The Butcher of hoy Lake a golfer, so Barons. Here's the headline from Baron's The Butcher of hoy Lake stays patient as he hunts British Open Crown. So there's a there's a golfer, real good at golfing. I see that he uh in all his interviews about golf, and he always talks about hunting. I want to have so I'd like to have you come on the podcast because I feel that golf is the

Real big golfing contest, like a big golfing tournament.

There are four majors, Steve, he won the wrong one because this is the only one held outside of the United States. Thus, the European media didn't take a liking to his very American hunting culture. Oh that's how they kind came.

Yeah, but they're like the you know they're king, they're king guys used to go hunting, for sure. The current ones the one I think the one that app the one that like, the one that abs gone to do America. I think he used. Yeah, he used to hunt, and I think the one that stayed put used to do it. Yeah.

If you'd go to Brian's Instagram, you wouldn't even know he was a golfer. He looks like a plain old hunter.

Oh really, God, please come on the show. Did he come on the show? Krin, You're gonna reach out to him.

You're going to reach out to him.

I can't wait to have him on the show. Um, it's what else is in here? And that's interesting? That's not interesting? Now that it's not interesting, it's all interesting, Crin. It's just I'm just trying to be cognizant of time, and to be honesty, I didn't look at everything that was interesting in the right frame of reference. Oh why did you scratch out why astrology is stupid?

Because I didn't think that.

That was the most interesting thing.

I didn't think that the explanation was.

Like, but that great explanation. So guy right saying he knows that I hate astrology, and I think I've talked about making my own twelve signs? Have I told you about that? Like instead of looking up your sign, I'll make up twelve. That'd be like your dad was a drunk and beat you, so you look it up and

The bar shadows from the window are your first clue that you're dreaming?

Uh?

All right, getting on now, Krein, When do you imagine that we plugged Roundie's project?

I was gonna say a little bit later on.

Okay, So We're gonna dig right in. Can we save all that stuff? Though? Yeah, normally this had all happen behind the scenes, but feel so cranky about his video that we can't be behind the scenes anymore.

Sausage is getting made.

We're seeing it. Okay, all right, let's dig in. Now. Have you thought about what my question?

Which one?

Okay?

And this that's a question that's going to require you to is a question that's going to require you to define a bunch of points.

Mm hmm.

We lately. When I say lately, I mean in recent years, you see headline after headline after headline as dogs become more popular and more treat people treat dogs more like people. People are infatuated with dogs. You see more and more headlines sort of speculating on when the what is the genesis of dog ownership, What is the genesis of the pet dog? Who first domesticated the dog? When did they

Generous of you set those questions up for us? Okay, Well, good questions. I think that where we're at in people who are into a dogs is probably that we are we are moving away from just like Neanderthals. You probably had like Meton and Dave talking about this and when they were on before. Are we previously thought like, oh, Neanderthals are these like kind of brutish people who can't figure anything out. More learning that they're doing all these

Breedy meaning I'm going to take this one which is great, yeah, put it with this one which is great, yeah, and hopefully continue this this yeah, continue this like set of behaviors or whatever.

Right, So brings tricky, right, because it not only means you have to put things together, but you have to keep things apart. Right, So you have some dogs that you're like, Nope, don't want them, not those aren't the good ones. We don't want them breeding with the ones who are good at this. So it takes some forethought, takes some planning, take some ways to keep them apart

And this is rock art.

It's rock art, right. And so what's interesting as well, if you're interested in hunting and how people are using dogs, is that these are two different locations as well. So you have one site that's kind of an oasis area where you clearly are gonna have animals that are coming up to drink and eat and they're gonna be trying to ambush prey at a watering hole. And then you have another location where you also have dog hunting rock art.

Your hand gesture for kill very violent. She stabbed with stabbed with both hands at once.

This is what we're doing, right, So.

She's the first criminal astrological.

So what's interesting about that rocker is that, yeah, we have leashes, so they're clearly controlling dogs.

But what you're going to get to when the rock art was made.

Yes, so rock art hard to date, but pre Neolithic, so before the arrival of agriculture, so probably nine to ten thousand years ago, eight thousand years ago something.

They were leashed dogs, leashed.

Dogs, leash dogs. What's interesting about this that we notice is that they're depicting in some places tons of like twenty thirty forty dogs, groups of dogs with very specific patterning and very specific like morphotypes of the dogs. So it almost appears as if they're depicting individual dogs that are like known to them, you know, they're not just drawing dog, dog, dog that, Oh, this one has spots here, this one has a pattern on its chest, here, this

You read a lot into this.

It was my PhD, So maybe I am reading a lot into it. But I mean they're depicting dogs very specifically right in some interesting ways. So I would say probably by that time there's some effort to you know, control dogs, train dogs, breed dogs, do some some kind of like and does that lead to a pet? Is that a pet?

No?

Dogs are interesting because they're kind of like a Swiss army knife of tools, right, So my interest in dogs is dogs is technology. Right, They're the first biotechnology. If we think about all the things that we do with animals these days in terms of technology, dogs are where all of that started. Before dogs we dead to everything ourselves. We had to figure out how to hunt, We had to figure out how to track things. We had to

Dog is technology, right, are you hip to the eye to the theory? I'm sure you've heard it that dogs perhaps self domesticated, meaning here you have these these roving bands of hunters or these migratory bands of hunters, and they leave a lot of waste, gut piles, carcasses, and dogs are just kind of glued to them.

Yeah right, yeah.

And over time like that as a possible explanation for how it came to be, and it wasn't bad to have them around. They would alert the you know you to the presence of things, and maybe that helps explain how it came to be that these two species, yeah, develop some sort of symbiosis.

I mean, I think this is probably the kind of going theory at the moment. It used to be probably we thought, oh, taking cute wolf pups or something like that was probably how it happened. But this is unlikely. It's hard for us to think through the process of domestication with dogs. They're the first domesticated anything, first domesticated animal, plant, anything, first concept of domestication is dogs. So prior to dog domestication, we have no concept of what kind of a domestic sphere, plant,

And I think that's that's a cool point. I never thought about that, how they had no plants yet, No, not so, Yeah, they were like, I'm gonna do with this raccoon like we did with our dog.

But it's a.

Domino effect after that. Right after the first thing is domesticated, then they're like, oh shit, look at all these things out here. But horses, cows, goats, sheep, donkey. I mean, then they just go for it right. Then after that, it's just a slew of animals that are domesticated one after the other, mostly livestock animals, but also domesticating a dangerous carnivore like that. That's not intentional, right, Why are

Though, well, how how many? How many I was gonna say how many canines or do we have globally? But that's not very helpful because then you get into like kit foxes and right, how many if you look, so there's an African wild dog, right and you have what's that one in in Australia.

Those are domesticated, right, but they can live without people?

Yeah, so dingoes. So dingoes are domesticated dogs that arrive with the first peoples in Australia and.

Then oh okay, so they arrived with people.

They arrive and then they're like, we're out of here. They head off to the outback or wherever in Australia. So they are far dogs in many ways. But this is a debate.

But they're a wolf, yeah, I mean, I mean sorry, they are Okay, they're originally from a wolf, right.

Weirdly dingos are classifieds like vulnerable or threatened. Strikes me strange.

It's an interesting debate in Australia right now about dingoes that you know, some people would like to classify them as a pest species. They're just a dog that's gone feral. They're feral dogs. They're destroying everything. But others say, like, maybe they are a dog, a domesticated dog, but they've been in many ways rewilded. They've been alone for thousands and thousands of years, and they effectively act as a wild animal.

Yeah, because the ancestral Australians arrived there forty thousand.

Years ago, right, they would have not arrived forty thousand years ago, they would have been there I think five thousand years the.

Dog, Yeah, the dog dogs later wave a later.

Wave of people. So, but you know, five thousand years kind of hanging out on their own. Also, the New Guinea singing dog very closely related to dingoes in New Guinea, totally totally isolated, domesticated dog, but has been isolated alone for thousands and thousands of functions as a wild animal. Is a domesticated dog functions as a wild animal?

When you did anyone, I'm trying to go back real deep here for a minute, and then I'm gonna jump away into the future. When in the in the during the African diaspora, was anybody packing dogs?

No, no, no, no, we don't have So the paper that I wrote, Dave Meltzer proposed that domestication of dogs probably happened in Siberia around twenty three thousand years ago. What we're always missing. When I'm like laying in bed at night as an archaeologist thinking about dogs, what I think about is like, why, right, we're hanging out with wolves for tens of thousands of years the landscape hunting alongside them, predators just like us, daylight hunters who form

We're calling us daylight hunters.

I mean, you could be a nighttime hunter if you want.

But that's what Yeah, Okay, I just got I didn't know if you're talking about you're talking about so humans being like daylight pack.

Hunters, very similar to wolves. Right, we have a similar social structure, we take care of each other as young. We're very similar to wolves and lots of ways, and we would have seen and known wolves on the landscape for tens of thousands of years prior to domestication. So the question is why, now? What what drives domestication to occur?

Can I point out that I'm quite envious of those people. They got to hunt the woodly rhinoceros right exactly. So they're up there, which is just if you're going to do something cool, that's about the epitome of coolness.

So they're up there with these populations of animals who are also up there in this kind of refugium, but also wolves. Wolves are kind of isolated up there with them as well, so they become less mobile in this kind of smaller area than they're used to, And something like that has to be the driver. There has to

Scraps, right, competitors too, wouldn't.

They, right?

Yeah, yeah, I mean it's much easy.

One of them scavenged off the other and figured it out. Yeah, right.

And so you know people in Alaska right now, lots of parts of the world, Russia deal with us all the time, right, So there are dangerous predators who hang out. Bears are around, lots of village sce. People don't run them off anymore. They just learn to live alongside. They're going through the trash. They're not really bothering anyone. They're just doing their thing. Humans like, as long as they

How long would something like that take?

I mean, would only take a few generations, right to get wolves that have never hunted before?

Yeah? Not Yeah, well, how did it backfill? See, I thought the answer is gonna be different because you're talking about these these pre agriculture cave art or rock art. Is it is it? Petro? What the hell? Witch is witch?

Petro?

And pictol which pitographs or petroglyphs pictographs Aret, that's a chiseling noise. Yeah, and this is petroglyphs. So it backfilled. It went in reverse, meaning humans were in Saudi Arabia long before they were in Siberia. And if the technology did I just say, yeah, humans were in Saudi Arabia long before they were in Siberia. So if the technology emerged in Siberia, it's somehow also yeah, yeah, so like it transferred. Yeah, not just the direction that people were that some people were.

Flowing, it would have dispersed. So if we're right about Siberia, you have dogs essentially being domesticated there on their own accord. And then once the lgm's kind of nasty climatic thing simmers down and we get into the Holo scene, then people disperse. So the ancestors of Native Americans they make their way across the Beringian land Bridge into the Americas. But also that population disperses back down into the rest of Eurasia and Arabia and everywhere else across the world.

When those first Americans, whenever I talk about BRINGI hoards like to point this out, is that people no one and maybe you'll disagree, no one in Siberia woke up one day and said, fred, let's go to America. Okay. They hadn't been there, they didn't know what was there. And I feel that the generations of generations of humans would have lived and died in what is now the Bearing Sea. Yep, right, you were not. You were moving along, and you know some day you go like, let's go

Mass six hundred miles wide, which is as Montana.

Yeah, so be that that you would have people who were born, You would have had people born and died on this chunk of ground that's underwater now in the shallow sea. So if you have a domestication event in Siberia. By the time people get to what is now Alaska, Yep, are their dogs still are? Are Are there dogs still making love to the new wolves they're finding in Alaska? Like?

Global wolf you are.

So we like to say domestication is process, not an event, because domestication also starts, stops, has dead ends, maybe started up in other places and then petered out. No, it's not working. Taming these wolves not working out for us, and then that that kind of lineage of tamed wolves semi possibly domesticated dogs kind of you know Peter's off, these are the ones that worked.

So when you let's let's say you get to the point where we'll just do there's two So there's two things I'd like you to get into to help try to explain. Eventually you have across north So so you have the first Americans come in and they very quickly just explode southward. And then later you have this wave of people who were possibly more Japanese illusion and they exploited like marine resources and had composite toolkits for harvesting whales and shit, and they come across the north of

No where dogs go, people go, So anywhere people went in America's dogs are going right. And eventually, just like humans, these groups of dogs breed only with each other, and eventually you get independent lineages of dogs that are very different.

Bringing for characteristics, right, characteristics in traits.

Right, Yeah, so you know up north they need dogs that are pulling sleds and have a certain physiology and have certain types of foot pads that are good for pulling and certain types of oxygen intake at higher altitudes,

Right?

So, so you have these dogs being cold and cold and cold and cold. We're working on a paper now, cold cold cold, cold, cold cold.

Pin which you know Danny. We're just up at the fish shack and Danny was telling me he saw or someone was selling firewood in Alaska. I can't he what part where he was, but someone was selling firewood and kindling were they just cut to it. It's spelled k I n l I n kim, which says killing. They're just like, I'm like, you know what, I'm not getting the d involved anymore. D's out Kinlin. That's South Alaska. G Yeah, he says it's k I N l I N.

Cold cold cold, Yeah, I mean, you know.

I mean, I honestly think somebody should explain cold because I bet you a lot of people don't really know.

Go ahead, are you volunteering, Well, tell us you're the archaeologist.

But I know more about culling. Probably it's the process of taking something that's not desirable and killing it as it and usually in its infant stage. You don't usually wait till they're find out if they're two years old and they're practical to use. That process has been done with domestic dogs for years because you could see if you're looking for a standard size or a standard coat, and you'll see puppy differences and be like, oh wow, that one's tiny.

You know that just because it's a resource thing, right, It's like.

We're only going to have the feet eight of them if everything works out right. And that one that's really big. That reminds me of the dog that the neighbor had from twenty years ago, the one that was killing things. Big ones out. So they try to keep it to a standard basically, And I'm sure they did that back

Yeah, you know.

Uh.

In France's Apartment's the Oregon Trail. So there's a historian named France's Apartment and he wrote one of the He wrote what would become one of the early definitive histories of the French and Indian War. He had, you know, what was the disease that you send everybody out west? The doctors has head like go to an arid climate,

Like the first house dog.

Yeah, which, like so it paints a picture, right, I mean you have it's like it's it's not a huge space, but you're giving that space as litter of puppies, which demonstrates this level of familiarity and care. But here's Francis Parton. He's a he's a guest. A woman goes over sorts through that little collection of puppies that is inside the teepee, thumps one in the head and cooks it for him. So it's like this real you know what I mean. It's just it's it's like this real collision of two.

I mean, some of the sites that I was working on for my when I was writing my dissertation were super interesting because you have clearly hunting camps together, sites where you have elaborate burials of dogs which must be hunting dogs, are bearing them with hunting implements and red deer antlers and very elaborate points and things like that, and with covered with red ochre and really in these like very elaborate burials, it looks just like a human burial.

Right.

So there you clearly have these like camp, same camp, same camp. So you have dogs that are you know, and we probably have that a version of that, we're

Right when you're talking about you. Yeah, okay, so tell me about this now.

So part of my PhD where I was in Japan working with hunters and hunters in Japan trying to see how they use their dogs to bar there in some

Right, got it?

We're humans. We're not usually tracking a white tailed deer through a dark dense forest.

Can I throw something into that?

You tell me?

I think that you're also starting to see that they've had that your people are living in encountering animals that have had more experience with humans, right, Yeah, I mean I've brought this up before, but there was a time when there was the first person. I don't know who he was, I'd love to meet him. There was the first person that ever saw a rattlesnake, and that person had lived hundreds of generations in the absence of venomous

But we're also dealing with that.

Right.

So, generations before you were Macedon hunters on open planes. Every technology you built was for that. Everything you've taught generations after you is for how you go hunt a macedon on an open plane. Now you have dense forests coming in quickly, pray species are changing. They're becoming these kind of mezso prey species, smaller, medium sized prices. Is very very quick and moving through a dense forest. That takes a different type of hunting, different types of tools,

I had no idea they hunted boars with dogs in Japan. Yeah, so what happened when you went? How did it go?

I mean the dogs? The dogs do most of it, right, Yeah, I mean so it was interesting. I love debates about about hunting with dogs, modern hunting with dogs, because when I talk to hunters who don't use dogs, not for like birding or something like that, but hunting deer, boar or something like that, they say, there's no sport to it hunting with dogs. Sheeting, right, it's too easy. It's too easy. If your hunter gather ten thousand years ago. It's exactly what you want you want it to be.

But even out, I mean, this is a subject for a different thing.

I would love.

I would love the debate with one of these people. How it's not easy, because the thing I always like to bring out to people is if you could measure hunting knowledge and like bits the way you might measure information in your computer in a drive to successfully use dogs, meaning selecting, breeding, caring for training, someone who can effectively use a dog to get a big game animal. It holds more bits of holds vastly more bits of information in their head than is required to shoot a deer

I debate this a lot with a colleague of mine, Jeremy Coster. He's a professor at Cincinnati and he works with indigenous mosquito on my Younga people hunting in Nicaragua and Jeremy Coster mosquito in Myyungna. So in Nicaragua where they're they're horticulturalists, but they still the primary meat is coming from subsistence hunting in these like neotropical forests, pretty pretty dense kind of tropical forests, and so we debate a lot about they use hunting dogs there. Their dogs

Right, John, he's got it narrow down to one thing.

Well, I'm trying to truest to chase mountain lions and bobcats, raccoons.

All three things. Never mind, he's got narrowed down three things.

But there has been a lot of narrowing down, you know, a lot of teaching him what not to chase.

Right, And how much time does that take? Kind of effort does it take.

We're not done. We're three years in roughly. Yeah, lots of time.

This is the debate of like, as an ancient hunter gatherer, spending three years training a dog. Probably not. It's probably a game of nope, nope, nope, Oh, this one's all right, all right.

He gets the red ocre the red, Yeah, exactly exactly.

So you know, this is the this is the bait we have. Do we breed the good one with another good one from the village next door, produce some good pups. Then you go from there. That litter produces eight pups. Of those eight pups, six of them duds, two of them.

All right, I need to I want to just really quickly get back to this Japanese thing. How many how many bores did you guys get?

We got? Well we went out for weeks, so.

Oh so you're really putting some time into it.

Yeah.

Yeah, we're tracking. We had GPS callers on the dogs trying to track, like where they went, how long it took them.

They have chase dogs and catch dogs.

The chase dogs were the catch dogs there.

So they track it and hold it down.

Yeah, track and hold. They have the full vests and everything. Though those boar aren't messing around.

So then they come in and kill with a knife.

Yeah.

I mean so basically this is what we did. We get to the edge of the forest, right, super dense, and I'm thinking, how we look for the tree that has you know, the rubbing on it, Like, okay, there there's somewhere. Dogs sniffs the tree looks at us. All right, we'll go he's got the scent. There they go, tracking them on GPS callers, where are they going? You can hear them, they're they're barking to each other, tracking each other where they're going. You can you can hear them

Go go.

And then you're just like, all right, here's where the humans step in and we do the real hard work, right we so we track them down and then kill them. Right, But this is an interest.

So did you take a real like into that or was just work for you?

I mean, it's it's fun, right, It's interesting to see the process. I'm an oargist. I see the dead animals on the ground, right, I need to know how does this work in reality? How you know? What are I try to think through? How what are the places that things go wrong? Where does the path split in a hunt? Where a choice could go this way or this way? You know, a lot of people in archaeology talk about hunter choice, hunter prey choice, and what we decide to do,

Yeah, that's a good point. You might find tune it. You might find tune it on species, but it's pretty hard to find tune it on. Go get me a big.

Male, Yeah, go get the big one.

Go ahead.

Have you ever found any crossover of ancient cultures that used falcons and dogs.

Yeah, so I worked in Kazakhstan. In Kazakhstan, they're using birds of prey, dogs and horses. It's a three prong approach, right.

And how old do you think that? Like three prong approach.

Is pretty old? I mean horse domestication. Trying to track down right now, exactly when horse domestication happened in Central Asia somewhere most likely, but yeah, thousands and thousands of years ago. So it was interesting in Kazakhstan. Problem for me is an archaeologist to use his ancient DNA.

You know.

When I was in Kazakhstan, I would talk to the local people who are still hunting with falcons and horses and dogs. And I was in a tiny, tiny little museum in the middle of nowhere, and I saw this picture of hunters and they had their horses, they had their falcons, and they had their dogs, and they had two wolf pups. So Kazakhstan has one of the largest wolf populations in the world. You don't really think about

Were with, and then the painting, the wolf puffs looked different than the dogs.

Yeah, they're clearly wolf. I mean it's a photo. It was a it was a black white photo. So they had these two live wolf pups that they'd tracked. They'd been on horses with their falcons and their dogs and they'd tracked these two wolf puffs and they caught them live, right, And so I said to them what are they why?

Why?

At first, well, why are they going after wolves? And what are they going to do with them live? I said, Oh, they'll breed them to their dogs.

Oh, put a little extra pap in them.

And I was like, I was like, what are they tell me more? And I said, well, you breed your dogs with wolves to fight off the wolves. You know, I'm an archaeologist though, and I'm thinking, you know, we study ancient DNA try to figure out, you know, the genetics of dogs, and I'm.

Thinking, what night, Yeah, like the fag that is still happening.

Right, No, it's still happening. It's happening all the time.

They're creating all kinds of noise.

Oh yeah, they're introducing like local wolf genetics into dogs and this happens. Ever, happens all over the place. Right. So there's a dog breed call a sar loose that genetically looks like an ancient dog. I love talking about people about ancient breeds, ancient dogs and why they look ancient. And this looks like an ancient dog, but it's not.

At it, and you're looking at I think even genetically.

Genetically because it's genetics. Are a wolf wolf genetics?

Right? And so it turned up that bone and a hole in the ground, It would have threw you off.

Bad news, badness, right, So you might get a dog that looks ancient. Oh man, this is ancient.

When you say it looks ancient, you're talking about what you see in the DNA.

Like genetically, but also morphologically, I mean, because a dog that has recent ancestry of a wolf is gonna morphologically look probably a lot like a wolf. But you know, we we think what happened with dogs and the reason why no one can sort out your question of like why, when, how, where when did this all happen? It's probably because dogs, if they're domesticated in somewhere like Siberia, they're coming back down. They're coming back down with human populations into Eurasia via

And they were some fashion esteemed or cherished because they had a proper burial.

They had proper burials, are probably being used for hunting. But like, I don't know much about what a koid how you live with the koi dog, but maybe you guys you know about koy dogs.

I kid yesterday and he was telling me all about what you need to do if you want to have a pet coyote.

Okay, right, exactly.

So, which presumably he learned on YouTube.

Catch a Crayfish.

Tell me like all the ins and outs of having pet kyotes, And I was just kind of have listened to what he was telling.

Me, I gotta throw something in so Yanna. You might be familiar with the name Delmar Smith with dog training, maybe Brent. He's he's from Oklahoma, probably one of the most famous dog trainers horse person that you've ever met. And he had kyote pups around the farm when he was a kid. And I did an interview with him, I don't know, six seven years ago, and he just looks at me. He said, wrong, I can take kyle pup and teach him what your pointer knows. It's on audio.

You know.

There you go.

Before we move on, though, I it's one more question about Japan. What were those dogs like like will be to be similar to breedwise, so they were all.

Over the place. So we had some hardcore guys that had shiba you been you like local Japanese hunting dogs dog yaba in you So they got the little curly tail, they have a fox like kind of face dog. So Japan's interesting because they got all sorts of really interesting specialized dogs.

Can I I have a trivia question planned for Angela coming up.

I got a bone to pick with you.

Okay, say too much?

Can she talk about this when we get on the trivia show.

She's already given the answer to the bone.

Not not yet. But I'm worried. I'm worried she's approaching that territory. So I think we should just leave it until trivia.

Should I pick my bone with yeah?

Now or later, Tavia, if it's a trivia bone.

Trivia bone, okay. Oh you know what I did that? Uh, when we had that tent, say, on the parking lot, I met this family. Memerel's gonna tell you the story. I sent you that picture, that little mountain man trophy, and I said, I'll tell you later. I never told you. So there's this family and they do They've made their own trivia tournament out of your trivia show.

I'm worried about what you may have done, but carry on.

Well.

I ran up in the office and game one of the trivia game.

Yeah, a prototype that was not ready for the market. But that's okay. Now one's just out there in the world.

I said, listen, I'm gonna give this to you. Don't show anybody, especially anybody that works here. Uh huh oh, no, like five people came up to me. You gave that guy that trivia?

I'd heard from five people.

I told him very clearly, put in your bag. You don't show anybody.

Yes, and I had heard from five people that some family was walking around on the board game. I was like, well, that's not possible.

I show he went on to show everybody. I said that the show perfect.

I'll pick my bone and she will talk about her Japanese.

He's gonna continue his line. Question yep.

To answer your question, there are some local dogs and some European like bloodhound type dogs. So that's a Mexico.

That's all she can say for now.

Oh, because it's right, because the bone, the.

She may just give it away to everyone in the room. It would be at your advantage to just wait about an hour.

Got it.

There's a Scottish woman that has an album called Bones. You have thrown me in blood I have spilled, which we should work into the show. Okay, here here can we switch the wolves from it? But I know, so you're ancient dog, but that means categorically that you're interested in wolves. What is the term trying to get how to set this up when we now look at the wolf landscape. Okay, we talked about what we have, the Mexican gray wolf, right, and then that wolf ends at what highway?

Is it?

There's a highway that it ends at. It'd be like if a mule deer crosses, if a meal deer crosses the I five quarter or he becomes a Columbia blacktail in certain places, so he can go back and forth all day long. And there's if Ossiola turkey walks across a certain road, he becomes an eastern turkey. Right, And we have these little divisions, but this one actually has teeth because from a legal perspective in terms of how it's manageding like experimental species and danger species. There's a line,

I don't know where you're looking for.

But they were a continuous blank. Yeah, they were.

Like you think, like a monoculture of a Yeah, it was like that.

All you could later go in and make like these distinctions and these arbitrary lines at which they changed, but they were just all there, all interacting, all breeding, and you would just see different demonstrations different like pheno.

Tisenotypes or morphotypes. So you would not have ever gone anywhere and not seen wolves. If you're an ancient hunter gather, there would have been wolves everywhere, I think, and all these wolves can interbreed with each other. They're all canis sloopis of some of some description they had. Uh yeah, yeah, I mean, well, if you took a wolf from North America and you moved it to Eurasia, maybe they're all

Well you know who's brand new that I didn't know.

This, elk Yeah, yeah, yeah, ELK.

Like there could have been p people. I'm not sure what the latest is on this, but there could have been people that showed up here before elk.

Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, so we think that wolves didn't actually make it here. Wolves and ky didn't actually make it here until fairly recently as well. So probably wolves came over in the same time humans were making their way over there, which is why dire wolves.

Will get to dire So that was a wolf that was here before Canis lupus.

So dire wolves were probably the ancestor of dire wolves. Probably came into the Americas over a million years ago. Probably dire wolves evolved in the Americas somewhere, and then we're here by themselves, the only wolf hanging out for a very long time until gray wolves and dogs eventually show up on the scene. But by then they they were so removed from each other evolutionarily, they would not have been able to so we have.

So they weren't bred into they weren't bred into the gray wolf. No, they probably just blinked out. You think they blinked out because of being displaced by wolves and dogs, or you think they blinked out as part of the megafoneal extinctions, you know that took off the mammoths and macedons.

It's probably a combination of both. The I mean, there are a lot of mega predators that were in the America's they're no longer here. You know, we had American lion, American cheetah, short face bear, all the shimtar cats like all sorts of predators that are no longer here because their prey went. Yeah, tons of weird praise species that you know, most people don't. There are camels in America,

How big was a dire wolf like a dog species we'd recognize.

So a dire wolf isn't as big as we you know, game.

Style Game of Thrones to make some three four feet tall.

No, I wish. No, the average direwolf is probably about the size of like a big Arctic timberwolf.

Okay, that makes sense.

Yeah, you know, you don't know this. I was gonna say, did you know that me and my wife's first date was at LaBrea tarpis.

But you had I did not know that I'm here.

Well, no, hear me out. So I have a very nice I don't mean a brag school display at my house built into my wall. My first date with my wife, who went to Librea tar pits, and they have the wall of dire wolf skulls, and I said at that time, somedow, I'll build one of those into my house. You did it and then married her and built the school. Stick to my word. Score.

Yeah, can I tack onto this conversation? This this tattoo is the that is the cattle brand of the original owners of the Lebra guitar pit when I think it was called the Leroca Ranch because I also went there and I was so moved by like the dire wolf thing.

That was like I want something associated with that.

Yeah, yeah, Bray Tarpet's very cool. I mean they're very cool. I worked there several times, and one time when I was working there, I had this office that kind of looked out over the tar pits and I just watched. I was like one after the other animals, just adding adding to the.

Birds.

Birds mostly just landing and then just.

Ah, you're seriously.

Oh yeah, the tar pets are still taking victims.

But you know when it's crazy, that is, and I don't know how many hundred, one hundred and seventy five dire wolves have come out of there, well all that stuff, you think of it, it just be like a death like smell like death. But they're saying that as long as those pits have been going, I think it was that if you had an incident, meaning a baby, a baby mask mammoth gets stuck in the mud, a dire wolf goes out to scavenge on it, he gets stuck in the mud. A golden eagle lands on there, he gets

Never learn they never learned, It just kept going. I would just watch and yeah, we'll just land, and I thought.

Humans must have learned. Now, there's been one human ever found there. It was like an eighteen to twenty year old woman.

But she was thrown in she had a axe wound or yeah, I didn't know that she was thrown in there as a cover up.

Whoa, yeah, there's a dog in there, a.

Thousand year old crime.

She had an axe. Yeah, she had been had a blown into the head with an axe and somebody said, I don't know, I mean to stick her.

Yeah.

Humans love to throw like bog bodies. I just love to throw a dead body into into one of these things, bogs, tar pits.

Swampsh'd be addicting throwing things in there.

What happens?

Wow?

Yeah, still taking victims darts?

Oh?

Old it?

Did you just write that current eye forty?

I did?

I was right.

I was waiting to get away.

You should have celebrated my rightness.

I was you know I was going to get there. I forty in Arizona, New Mexico is the northern boundary of the Mexican gray Wolves.

I got two more dire wolf questions. All right, have you guys found where anybody was any butchered remains of dire wolves?

We're not sure that's the answer. So we we don't have a lot of sights where we have overlap between dire wolves and humans. The few sites that we have are in New Mexico and Arizona where we have butchery sites where humans have butchered a mammoth and we also have remains of dire wolves got it, but no obvious interaction.

Like no tools made from dire wolf.

Bones or no, no, nothing very specific like that. We think probably humans caught the tail end. Around twelve to thirteen thousand years ago is the time when a lot of those mega predators and the Americas start to go short face bear, saybergoth, cats, dire wolves, they all start to go out. So there may have been like a kind of hold out group in the Southwest that kind of held on for some period of time and then

And do you ever see are you ever running running genetic lines on anything living today or anything from okay, how to put this, So dire wolves twelve thousand years ago they were gone? Yeah, okay, do you ever see in anything living today or anything that died in the last ten thousand years? Where you're like, oh, somehow some dire wolves snuck in there. No it so it legit went, It's gone.

So we checked everything we think as possible dogs, coyotes, gray wolves, nothing has any kind of dire wolf in it, and dire wolves, and so dire wolves and gray wolves have a common ancestor about five point eight million years ago, but after that they diverged. So what was interesting was that we always assumed that dire wolves were just gray wolves, like they look nearly identical in their morphology, and you know, the people tarpets are the experts and dire wolves and

So just can't, can't can't really any of that stuff.

No, the tar just like destroys it. So I went on this like bonkers road trip where I just drove everywhere I could think of that might have dire wolf bones and collected.

I'm just knocked on the door.

A bunch of dire wolf samples, like Idaho Museum, Natural Street. Hey, you guys have dire wal I just went everywhere and tried to get as many as I could, and we managed to get five out of hundreds that we that we tested that we actually so we have two from American Falls, from Idaho, and then one from Ohio, one from Texas, I think, and another one from somewhere back east. So five rand ones, not Librea or anywhere famous that we know dire wolves from. And when we tested those,

But yeah, uh, are you Fami with the Grateful Dead.

I've become familiar with a lot of things that are tangential to dire Wolves.

You know where I'm going.

You know where I'm going with I do.

Yeah.

They have one good album, yeah, Reckoning.

Yeah that's it.

You think I don't care what Doug Darren plays in his car. They got one good album, Reckoning, which includes the song dire Wolf.

Yes, yeah, yeah, you.

Should license that film. We could play it during the podcast.

Yeah, sounds good.

When I talk about diar Wolves, a lot of things come up. Game of Thrones obviously.

Yeah, traffic and that kind of stuff, any kind I don't like any kind of new stuff that people know about, because then it's just I'm always afraid my brain will become like their brain.

We got to work backwards. Then you got Game of Thrones, and then you got D and D Dungeon Chaggins anyone.

Yeah, I'll talk about that. Guys in high school, we're into that dire Wolves.

There's like a Direwolf car dire wolves are part of that, and then you know grief. Those are kind of the touchstones of of diar Wals. Most people, though a lot of people had no idea dire wolf was a real animal. I thought it was a completely mythological like creature that was just made up for Game of Thrones or made up for dungeons and dragons, and I don't know it's real that it was a real animal. M Yeah, did you know? Did you all know that dire wolf was a real animal?

Yeah, dude from my first day?

Probably not in high school, I didn't, but yeah's.

Who's the ass on your necklace? What's that my kid? What's your kid's name?

Scot Oh, that's from the movie. Yeah, yeah, Mockingbird, Yellow Mockingbird.

It's a novel.

How many books do you knowed me to ready if I quote something?

In high school? Yeah?

You named? Are you familiar with the the somewhat misogynistic theory that Truman Capoti wrote that book?

No?

So yeah, I learned that in the movie Capoti.

That in there.

Yeah, supposedly the Dale character in the in the novel.

Does have a big pre publication record, and then it kind of dropped off the Face of the Earth, and when they line out what her influences, it's like Courtney Love all that all that great music by whole was when she was hanging out with Billy Corgan from Smashing Pumkins. That's another misogynistic music theory. And then so it's like that that wasn't actually her, it was Billy Corgan. And then that that Truman Capodi wrote to Kill a Mockingbird.

Should I rename my daughter now?

No? No, it's after the movie.

It's a movie too. It's a movie too.

Spencer, what do you what are you Dealey dallying around here? You got another question?

I was just making notes.

We could hit on this. I feel like the rotten meat fermentation topics are interesting.

You guys take.

Well it was just in the notes about the consumption of rotten meat. You want to speak to that?

Do you want to speak to that?

I can't speak if you could. Yeah, was it was it the wolves or the humans that were doing that?

So I think the idea behind this, this is still a kind of new idea that humans. You know, wolves do this. They cash somewhere, they kill something, they eat their fill, and then they'll they'll cash the meat in water or you know, on her snow or something like that, and come back to it, by which point it's you know,

Where they do all that that stuff for. Yeah, what's the word it combines like insects and.

Crime, Yeah, forensic entomology, Yeah, yeah, studying like when does a blowfly hat on a dead body or something like that. Yeah, so she was working there. She's a professor at Purdue now, but we were working on this idea of like we're trying to figure out why nitrogen values.

That'd be if I was a producer, I'd be taking notes right now about getting someone from the body farm on the show. Okay, ye forensic and to my forensic and just someone who like puts a person out and then a while later goes and checks on them.

Yeah, I mean it's it's interesting something.

Can you horin up?

Yeah?

Sure, I mean there are a couple of them. There's one in Texas. There are a couple kind of around where they're doing.

We want the person who's best.

Body farm. The one at Tennessee is kind of the the most well known one and.

Absolutely krin you can donate your body there for science and.

You can there's kind of consider.

No cure.

Yeah. Yeah, wasn't there a whole thing about uh one of the.

Lab the heads of the lab at was it.

Harvard or another university of a cadaver lab where they were actually selling off body parts.

No, I would mind picking one up experiment, Yeah, be like see that you know what that is right in my freezer? All right? Sorry, yeah, yeah, you go ahead with your line of questions.

I don't think I add a question that we're listening to. Angela explained about the body.

I mean, last I heard, they were they were full of and that they had their they were at max capacity of you know, the number of people that they could take on the head signed up. So many people want to donate, donate their bodies, and there's a pretty you know, an extensive process of paperwork that you need to do before, you know, because part of the work that they're doing at that lab is you know, being able to track things I have to do with knowing you know, kind of what your diet is and your

Are you familiar? I think this might have got debunked, but there was a site where they had they the way they interpreted this site at the time, was it someone had they had killed some mammoths, put those mammoths in a pond, and then to the intestines and packed them full of gravel and wove the gravel over. Wove the gravel filled in testines as weights. Oh okay, over the carcasses to hold them underwater. So the intestine rotted away.

Like in ans, I mean, I wouldn't be surprised. I think we think of ancient peoples as kind of like slow. No, right, No, of course not. They would have figured out all sorts of stuff like this, right, they would have figured out pretty.

Cool to think of that as like a new timey idea. What packing testines full of gravel and laying them over some meat. Yeah, I mean, if I got friends that none of us proposed that we do.

That, try it. I mean, next time you guys go out hunting, take take a carcass that has something left on it and put it, put it in a you know, a cold body of water, cover it with some gravelly intestines and see how long? Yeah, see how long it takes.

We've done that just to keep flies where it's not. It's kind of nasty the way it looks after a while. But between getting full of fly eggs and hot or putting it in the creek, we've opted to just stick in the creek.

How long did you leave it for?

Days? A couple days?

What was it like?

When it just looks like something that drowned. It gets bled out real bad, so it gets white. But I don't think if you PEPSI challenged it, I don't think you'd be able to taste the difference, to be honest with you, it just looks. It just looks off putting.

How long do you think you could leave it in the water.

Well, if you put it in, if you put it in the creek and that creek was running like a glacial stream where that thing's running forty to fifty degrees, I bet you put them there for weeks and it'd still be edible.

Try it, Yeah, as long as something else wasn't starting to eat on it. Yeah, but just cold glacial water in there, yeah, I guess colder, it is probably less bacteria and whatnot in there to eat it or actually.

In the case where we did it, that stuff was a glacier earlier that day, so.

It stayed really cool, real cold. Yeah.

Did you notice any trends with the average life span of domestic dogs thousands of years ago? Did it seem very different?

Not really? You know, we found lots of ten twelve year old dogs. Wow, ancient dogs, which is, you know, not that far off from now. I mean how old, dear guys.

Hunting dogs, I always say, twelve is an easy number.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's.

About right of active hunting and not necessarily the last year or two. But in some cases, you know, what is the.

Life cycle of like a hunting dog in terms of how long does it take to train, when's it get good, when's it kind of plateau?

And then when does it in the bird.

Dog world, I don't know in the hound world, Yanni, But in the bird dog world what I said, by three years, you know what you have third season, and of course that takes training to get there.

His die has been cast.

Right right, like he's but this way, he's not going to get better. He's not going to start pointing him forty yards away. And giving you more opportunity. Whatever he's developed over a couple of three seasons, there's your dog.

How long until you know? How long until you know what you got?

Usually you can tell about a year and a half, like you used to get one hunting season behind you, and you see potential and then you're just hoping to build on that. But sometimes it just never builds.

God, it just but you formed on strong. At a year and a half, you have a strong hunch.

Oh yeah yeah, And at three years you know, yeah, I got a dog right now that hunts behind me.

Jesus making sure.

I just can't bear to color. We lined up in North Dakota, Les.

Can take off the rear on he just against you pass one by.

We had five of us pushing this big state land and it's behind us. She's doing a nice job of going left to right, but she's behind us. So I think Trent said, well, how about if we turn around and walk backwards. So yeah, she's not gonna be a rock star but for the hound, gentleman.

But what a second, I wanted this, this this rear hunt dog. Well, so that kind of thing. There's no way you're going.

To that and I'll be honest with you. I know for a fact because I know who owned her and they and I got him from her. She did something very similar to that in her little puppy test before she was a year of age.

You're not going to crack that. No, you're not gonna say.

Listen, Oh you could over you could over handle her and call her around and call her around and call her around. I just let her hut. She hunts fine with one person, but with more than one person she decides to go left to right behind you. But how long is the hound head?

I think Frank could probably speak to it better than I can.

Well, it's with.

They have been bread so strong over the last fifty sixty years. You're lying the coon dogs, Yes, yeah, it's and you all the even you know, if you're pleasure hunting or your competition hunting, you're getting your dogs from the same place, all out of the same litters, and their bread for competition. So the breeding is to have a dog that's barking, quicker, that's tree and quicker for competition because in competition you don't necessarily have to see

But at a year, like you.

Were saying, a year and a year and a half, that's when most folks start deciding I'm going to keep this dog, or you know, maybe he's got some characteristics that I don't like that I'm that somebody else is okay with. And I'm not a competition hunter, so I'm just I'm just looking for when I cut the dog loose, that when he starts treeing, that he's he's looking at a looking at a coon. So what he does between the time I turn him loose and he treats a coon,

He's giving him a lot of warning, he's marking.

He's saying, I'm coming, you know, and that's no point tree with the whole exactly.

He's like Kevin Murphy.

I feel the need to quote Jerry Kloer. Jerry Klower said, when Brummy trees out on a coon, you don't have to worry about no possum or no wildcat. That's right, that's exactly.

How many prime years will you get then out of that?

Oh you can, you know, with proper care, and he gets carred for properly. You can hunt a dog, you know, seven eight, nine years old, and we hunt. I keep I keep him in shape, We hunt, you know, year round. His doghouse has an air conditioner in it.

I think that'll build up tolerance.

And a heater so it never gets hotter than seventy five degrees in there, colder than fifty five.

Hey, Steve, did you know that your hometown, my adopted hometown, is home of one of the most famous coon dog walker bereaeders in the history of the world. Oh yeah, the Giddings family, Chuck, Frank Kitttings, Frank Frank Gettings, Chuck. Really yeah, he had that.

Carl got his walkers and everything. Yep.

And his son, Chuck lives right next door to me. That log home next to me, that's Chuck Gettings house. Seriously, yeah, and his dad is in his eighties and he still runs coons every night, every night, every night.

So is that well, no, you can't because I thought it was the training season there, oh, Phil.

There is the season when it is closed. You're right, But any night that he could be out out that's good.

Heed.

In Arkansas, you can hunt, you know your you can hunt your round and you can take game. You can kill coons on private land year round and there's no limit on them. I don't kill very man coon scept in the wintertime when the when the fur is good, you know, I'll bring the fur home. But the you can still get out there and do it. And then you know, those dogs, there's the domestication of them. And a lot of people would think, or I used to think that it was you had to train a dog

A dog to get him to do something. But that's not the case.

No.

You know, every dog that I've ever owned, even labradors when I was training the labradors, they have an inherent desire to please you. And you just got to if you can't show that dog that you appreciate what he's doing and let him know that. When when whaling trees and he he when I cut him loose and he tracks, he barks on the trail and then he trees and I praise him. That's all that's that's his reward. His reward is not the coon in the tree, because those

He'd just be like, come on, let's get out of here.

I put I put a snap on a leash on him and lead him away and cut him loose again.

And it would be different for him. He'd be like, he's like, oh man, he rubs my ears real good when we do this.

Yeah, election is still gonna let him come in the house.

But most ancient people get the same feeling of just joyful pride that I got when I was in Arkansas and Mingus treated his first coon.

That doesn't.

I mean, let me tell you, I've seen some really elaborate, elaborate dog burials, ancient dog burials. There's one site in Sweden where big cemetery got humans in big cemetery, but humans in one location, young children in this kind of like middle ground location, and then a whole cemetery of dogs and some of those dog barrils. One of those dog barrels is the most like richly decorated, more than

The kill that raca the tree. It's like you get like a couple of seconds, I portion it out, I get what I want you.

This is the question of like how did that This is interesting to me of like how that process happens. That's brilliant where wolves released that control over the final

Go ahead.

Well, seventy but I would say easily seventy percent of the dogs that I hunt with now, if it's during kill season in the winter and we shoot a coon out, they'll They'll grab a hold of it and then that's it. I'll just turn and walk away and go look for another.

They just need a little the same way you think he's just going to tear the thing to shreds, but he gives it one little Yeah.

He gets his food from you. My kids have a red squirrel dog. It is an expert red squirrel hunter, and all she wants to do is she wants to know that they've been shot down. Out of the tree, won't eed it, no desire to pick it up.

She's treeing those resis.

Oh my god, Yeah, she trees them with a bark. Nope, that's the I said. If you could get that dog to bark, they got a follower. She'll hear if a pine squirrel cuts out, she's going to that pine squirrel and she will get and sit at the base of tree and stare at that squirrel. And if you find her, there's a squirrel there and she's sitting there staring at it. And when they shoot it down, she's just done.

Did you do any gun preparation for this or did it just work out?

No? They kept telling me how good she was at it, and I kind of didn't believe it. But it's it's true. Man. That dog is a That dog will get one squirrel after the other, after the other after the other. Right, because pine squirrels are so vocal and they have the achilles their achilles heel. I'm not saying every one of them does it, but when they're not happy with your presence, they oh so just keeps it going. There's always if you're in a good area, there's always two or.

Three of them.

Going, dude you And so she just goes to that one and she'll find out where it is and stare at it, and they'd act different. They'll when she treats them, they'll treat lower and out in the open and often sit there barking at her, not like they would with a person. Yeah, so they my kids clean up on them anyway, zero interest.

What's happened. Something's happened.

It wants to see them and wants to go out and be like, yep, that one's dead and that's it.

But they've like that last final step of like predator response partnership has like released to humans.

That's a great point. Why you'd go through all that trouble and then a thing that would once reward you and your pack with all this food. You'd go through all of that same trouble and in the end not get to be the one you get the scramps, not get to be the one that decides on allocation.

You do all the work, and then you're just like let go and then like back. Which is interesting when we have conversations with people.

Didn't happen till they made Kipple dry dog.

For But I mean, you know, people have cats who you know, those cats go out and they'll fend for themselves all day long.

But yeah, get a cat thust.

Dogs like they can chase they can.

Yeah, I can tell you a little something about cats as far as law enforcement goes. Anytime any kind of investigation where we had a death on a you know and unobserved death where someone old person or something, they had died in the house lands in their feeding on them, they had a cat. The cat to be eating them. Where what's it like to eat nose first? Yeah, that's where they'll start. And then you go in there with a dog and a dog will be starving to death, will be dead laying beside them.

They won't eat them, you know, cat will eat you for the shelter. Take your laugh, take your last breath, you know. I mean dogs on search.

This podcast all about dogs.

We play cat in the titles. Yeah, so like I'm thinking c a t apostrophe LLL right.

Like a parenthetical part of the title, like dogs are better.

I got one last question that weren't handed over to Ronnie. You're not interested in dogs, like you don't have a bunch of dogs.

I have dogs?

Oh you do? Okay, I thought you were saying that you just didn't you weren't into like actually having them.

No, I have dogs. I've always had dogs my parents.

Somehow in the pre chat I picked up that I didn't get that.

Yeah I have Westies.

Oh I just picked that up. Okay, I thought you were saying you were fixing to get into west.

I'm fixing to get into some new dogs. I'm fixing to some were I want like big livestock guarding dogs, you know, lives. That's what we're saying.

She goes.

Now I got to get I.

Have to get goats and sheep and property.

You know, you don't start with you start with like that jail.

This is what I this is. This is part of what I argue with some of my you know, archaeology colleagues about it is like, if you decide you're gonna you're gonna use dogs to hunt, right, and the dogs are like the primary decision makers. Then does all technology follow from using dogs to hunt? This is the other technology that you use then have to align with how you hunt with dogs.

You know, my guess would be and I don't know my guess would be with humans. It was that initially, it was that it was useful foreign activity already occurring, and not that they said. He if we had one of those, we would change how we go about this. Yeah, it was probably you know, when we try to drive all those things up into that box canyon, that would go even better. Yeah, well the dog.

Yeah, So the ethnography and the ethnic history when you read about hunting, I read a lot of like you know, modern ethnography, but historical ethnography about people who went and lived with indigenous groups somewhere and how they use dogs, and you hear similar stories over and over. There's always like a prize dog who's just the best, and everyone wants the puppies from that prize dog and like allows

That's what I was wrong.

Well, for certain animals, I think for some, like the most more dangerous animals. You hear this in like Arabia for example, like going after ibex, super dangerous and they get themselves up into like crevices and stuff that you're not going to go after them, but your dogs will. Got it, So praise spieces that you normally would be like not not.

It opened up opportunity, opportunity, we know. It backs you up on that. The last thing you're gonna do is catch a lion. Yeah, I mean you live, you could live a lifetime. I mean a mountain lion. Yeah, you live a lifetime and be like I spent my whole life in the mountains that I've seen two mountain lions.

Yeah.

So that opens up a thing that you just are not going to accomplish. Yeah, and it makes it possible. Yeah right, it's not like it so that that contradicts my earlier point. You're right, it's like you're not going to get one without it.

Yeah, you know, yeah, there are certain there are certain things. You also hear a lot of stories of we used to have to go out in five or ten person hunting groups. But now Phil Phil can go out by himself, This Phil or that Phil, any Phil, Phil can go out by himself with a group of five dogs and do what we used to have to take ten people. Now the other eight people can go and do something actually useful around the camp, or go somewhere else and

Me and Yanni interviewed a guy, do you remember his Yanni, a Chimane guy. He had to tell his story in Chimane to someone who spoke Spanish.

No, to someone that spoke correct, that spoke Timani and Spanish.

He told me someone who knows Chimani and Spanish, who then listened and told it, and then to a Spanish Spanish English speaker, and then we're getting to like third hand. It was a big story about hunting jaguars with a dog and a jaguar that had killed some of his dogs, and eventually getting a jaguar or after it killed his primary dog, Yeah, his main dog.

Yeah.

Yeah, So my colleague that I told you about before in Nicaragua, lots of jaguars where he is, and he says, you know, when he goes back, the percentage of dogs that are left from the year before is very low, and it's largely due to jaguars, but they're also using the dog. They're using the dogs as hunting dogs, but also is in many ways that kind of not bait. But if jaguars going to attack someone, then you'd rather attack your dog and attack you.

We were in a village they had lost at the time we were there, and it continued for a while. At the time we were there, they had in the last month or two, I camera the timing they had lost twenty four dogs to a jaguar, which they thought to be a single jaguar had killed twenty four dogs I camera as the last month or two, and it went on after we left, right.

But this is also the reason why when you ask people in a village like that, like how much time you spend training your dogs? How much time you're going to spend training a dog that like tomorrow could get killed by a ja So you rely on some level of like natural ability and instinct, which is probably also why hunting dogs can be really great there but also really frustrating because they don't have much training. You're just

That, they concentrate more on quantity.

Right with your dogs, do you guys? Are they trained by humans only or is it reliance on other dogs.

That's the two methods that that coon dogs use. But they're so independent now. That's when I was training in mine. I was training with a friend of mine. He had

Oh, because they got he's got to score. You don't want like a you don't want to tag along dog right.

Because because of who If he's second to the tree, then he's his points are or less.

But if he goes and does his own thing, he gets the same prioritize dog that doesn't like peers. That's more independent.

Yeah, And what is the like through rate? If you have a litter of six pups, how many of those six pups and the dogs you're talking about turn out to be.

There's a guy that had a the who's the grandfather of my dog? And that dog was like one of ten or twelve, and it was the rest of them are nothing, And this dog was an absolute world beater. They he bred him with another world beaten female, a whole litter of puppies that you would think would be dynamos. None of them are worth anything, bred them again the next time, and maybe three out of ten were world beaters.

So it's the same thing. So didn't Jerry Clark call you pretty? He did, so you're a pretty boy. Put him in the whole New life. Did he say it like how like say a clown like a like like a you know, like a creepy way like a grandpa. Okay, not like you know what I'm saying. No, like no, all right, Ronnie, take it away.

Uh Well, I just want to thank you for letting me come out to do a little advertising. Yep, you let me come out a couple of years ago and we released the Upland Institute the Pointing Dog Training series, which is done very well. And I do get notes from emails. Heard about you on Meat Eater podcast. Great

The case of your dog, in front of the dog in.

The one dog's case, right exactly.

So yeah, so Behind the Dog films what we're doing is we're trying to find let's say the top tier breeders of every breed in this country, and there's a lot of them.

Right.

We did one with a short hair a German short hair pointer breeder. We're working on editing one that we did with a Vima. I'm gonna do it right a or a weimer Reiner.

How it was supposed to go yea wema, yeah, and why Wagner group in the group.

Exactly exactly, And then of course, you know, a more difficult one will be And we found a labrador breeder, and there's so many labradors in this country. But what we're trying to do is find the breeders that put the most back into the breed god, from health testing

Don't give me the extremes, but what's happened to that price two to five twenty years ago has become two thousand.

That would be easy right in the middle, two thousand dollars.

There was an auction recently, like an outfitter auction down in New Mexico, a mule and hound auction. I don't know what the mules went for, but there were a couple of dogs that broke twenty thousand for lionhounds. Yeah, wow, dry ground line.

Yeah, that's every day in the coon hound world.

So that's what we're That's like kind of our Grail quest. We we want to find the top tier breeders and eventually even go down to Terry or colleagues. Got ways to go for you get there. We got but it gives me something to do. I'm retired, so I can just drive around the country.

Well, let me just chime in them out. So what I thought was that what one did was I looking I can't remember.

Were looking at the one about the Germany short hair breeders.

So so Ronnie's at a breeder right, kind of doing a podcast. Yeah, and they're but they're showing so there they have all these dogs running around different age classes, and just this is just one of the many things in here, right is they stand one up. Okay, they stand one up on a pedestal. What do you call that thing?

Just tap the platform.

They stand one up on a platform, and they say, when I'm when I'm looking at these, here's what I'm looking for, very specific.

The nose could this confirmation?

Yeah, it would stand this way, This should look like this. This should look like this. So even if you weren't at even if you weren't going to that breeder, let's say you can't afford it or whatever you could, you still watch it and you'd be like, oh, okay, so when I go look at pops, I'm trying to select the pop from my neighbor, from the dog pound whatever.

These are attributes that would be K nine attributes.

Yeah, they'd be like, you don't know, and like you said, you don't know yet how it's gonna turn out. Maybe, but these are attributes that would be signifiers of some of the things you might want to look for in early.

Selection, right, Yeah, and we will in some of the episodes. We'll get into it as deep as we did in the first one where we showed basically we took like a year old dog and then went backwards to a sixteen week old dog, then a twelve, then an eight, then a four, and what she did with these pups for confirmation, it's been done for decades. Another woman started this where they literally can pick the dog up by the by the under the collar and between the legs

Three cameras film that and the hunts and everything.

Right, And in that person's case, yeah, we hunted together that that prior season in North Dakota, so we use some of that footage when talking about how we met. You're actually watching our footage of our hunt in North.

Dakota, and you learn, Like in that case, when I watch, you learn, why is hunting with this kind of dog? How is that different than other kinds of dogs? Meaning what are some of the expectations if you think about a bird hunting dog, what are some of the expectations of this breed, what are some of the expectations of that breed.

Yeah, and I honestly, I think where the point I want to make to people is like a bird dog is pretty much a bird dog, just like a hound is pretty much a trailing hound. They have some that are a little better at big game, a little better at small game. But it's what the breeders put into it. It's the standards that they hold themselves to. And when

Of a trivia question. Man, Damn it.

Was Ronnie that yesterday. I even wrote it down in my notes that was going to use that in oh Fu.

Yeah, nobody would have got it right.

Where a tiebreaker, but you also said that nobody would get it right, so it might not be hard.

Was phenomenal tiebreaker material.

What I wanted to ask Angel is like, if you found, uh, there was a dire wolf or a wolf or whatever with bad teeth, that's an indication of probably too much generational breeding. Possibly, Yeah, because if you had a dire wolf skull, how many of those exist out there.

I don't even know. I'll tell you there's one hundred and seventy five of them.

Oh there's Would they have any malclusions in their mouth?

They do?

They would too, Yeah, they haveclusions, they're missing molers, they have all sorts of.

So all that is coming from that far back, I thought it was more of a last hundred years bringing.

Things from messing with them too much.

This is what we're trying to sort out right now, is that we think some of the things you're selecting for positively, like you know, a water dog, you want something with this type of coat, right, shoes, something that goes with this type of coat. But what trails along with it? The jeans that partner with that that you don't necessarily want but you're not thinking about. Come along for.

The ride like bad hips, come along for the ride.

I think we got to have you on an episode someday of Behind the Dog. Well, anyway, thank you, Steve. It's a It's all you have to do is go to behind Dog Films dot com.

Well, so how many when you launch? Like? How many? Tell me what ones you're gonna have done? Now?

Well, we have two completed. One of them was not a breeder specific, but it was a training video that we were shooting, and we really got into the weeds about how any good bird dog, especially duck dog obviously has to be comfortable with the water. Should just be another terrain to even your house dog.

Right, if you go, you don't need to coax it at the shoreline.

Dog on a walk and it won't cross the creek with you. Your kids aren't gonna let you finish the walk because the dog's like, well, but some dogs literally won't put a foot in water.

So I know. I went down with her friend to swim at the creek yesterday and her friends got her dog in a life jacket.

They don't need that.

They don't need that. I said to her, I said, did she got dog? He's a life jacket. She's oil. She'll sink.

That dog does not know how to swim.

Does he swim like vertical? Yeah, that's not good.

That's gonna wear all quick.

But to answer your question, we did one with a breeder in Michigan that breeds German short airs. Yeah, we have a training one about the water. We're editing one currently with the Wine Mariner breed. Got it, Uh, we're going to what we're going to do. A wire haired pointing griffin breeder, and then a labraader, and then a poodle point breeder. Got it, poodle pointers, Not think of poodle, it's pu d e l. It's a German breed. We're

And someday you might tackle the hounds. And oh absolutely.

In fact, if Frank Gettings could be alive for long enough, I mean he might. But you also have to have the person that's good on the microphone too, which sure I always remember, like you had the first show Wild Within and you did that moose hunt and I specifically asked you how come you didn't have the guy on camera with you very much? And he says he just, well, come on, no, all right, Well, I'm just saying you have to find the right not just the right breeder, but the right conversationalist.

Yeah.

They can be great at what they do, but they don't convey it. So you got so I that's my goal is to find the people that can convey their passion.

Sure, and then your area of expertise is birds.

You like stuff with others, right, everything, everything that flies.

Right.

But that's why I want to you know, like the hounds is going to be a tough one to do. You know, there there's houndsmen that don't follow any pedigree, like they'll just they'll breed another outside type of hound. There's what is there seven basic hounds m H five Yeah, saving seven. So if if Brent wanted to take his walk what is your reading tree and walker and he did it to Yanni's redbone or blue tech, that's the hound joke and they bring them together, they probably get

Yeah, you mean, like you you like a walkers, you're down on red bones and bluetooth anything else?

Right, not really, but only among friends, right, So the houndsman, Like for me, I'm gonna have to find the houndsman who probably has a ten generation pedigree on his dogs. And really collectively and consciously it's like no, no, no, her her, her grandma did the same thing. Literally stood into kennel, barked and made circles. And you'll see that follow in litters of dogs all of a sudden and briers like, oh my god, that's just like her great

Have to help got his dog from the dog.

Well, I'm not gonna go to the but you're meeting so many you know, houndsmen. There's got to be that houndsman out there that like knows that breed like the plots do like like like obviously I would go to Bob plot to learn about the plot hounds.

I didn't know. The plots are still the plots.

Yeah, the plots are the plots still yep from Johanna's plot.

Yeah, a lot of times they come like the Dickenson's or something over time, right, really still the plots patrilineal descent.

Well, obviously there's some you know, some coyotes and some other stuff probably happened.

There's something in that, there's something in the woodpile.

But for the most part, yes, yeah, like Clay would know all about Like Clay could lock me up with a bunch of good ones.

So behind the dog dot.

Com, behind the dog films dot.

Com, behind the dog films dot com.

I don't think we could get behind the dog for some reason.

Yeah, you look for u r ls.

There was behind the chicken, behind the horse, behind the dog, behind the cat, like we kick it.

U r L's getting hard to come by, man. That's why places now to make up words to be Hulu whatever. You just make up words because you can't check it because nothing checks out anymore, right.

Right, So, yeah, it's behind the dog films dot com and uh.

And and upland instu is still kicking an asswer No.

Oh yeah, yeah, now that that's a that's a complete four and a half hour training course. Yeah, yeah, still available these Oh yeah, it'll be available till the internet blows up, got or till we hit the little button in the background it says disabled. No, you can download it yourself. It's not downloadable. Otherwise you could just give it to your friend. Yeah, this is this is a pay system right now. We charged four ninety nine to watch it, and we're not sure if that's the model

Yeah, we did, we did. If you like dogs, you're gonna love it. There's a bunch of shots that dogs running around all over there and.

Some interesting conversation about that.

Well, yeah, behind the Dogfilms dot com. That's it all right, and and then and then tell folks how to find yourself there real quick? Is there a preferred way? Texas A and M Texas A and M.

Yeah.

Do you want people to write in with all kinds of things like, hey, I got this one dog.

I get a lot of interesting emails.

What's the thing you'd be most interested in hearing about if the museum had a dire wolf? Uh?

Yeah, well I get a lot of people asking me about dire wolves, are saying that they think they have dire wolf stuff at various museums.

What's the most annoying email you get? This will help people not email.

Like ancient alien dog.

You don't want those theories.

I'm listening to this show. Email is in an alien dog theory, Man.

Do you like Steve though and explain what the theory would be actually, So, I.

Get a lot of people saying that dogs are actually aliens that have come from the Dog Star Cirrus, and that that some genetic material has come out of the star arrived on Earth and that dogs have appeared from there. And I'm dumb for this is a thing. It's a thing. It must be like on the internet somewhere that the dog star is serious?

Is you know a Westy and then that star? It just makes more sense the star.

Yeah.

The writer Joan Didion speaks about this, and this is pre internet. The writer Joan Didion and slouching towards Bethlehem. She talks about how some people cope with how much information. There's so much information, and you you face a fork in the road where you are interested in the subject, let's say like geopolitics, dogs, whatever, economy, economics. You go like, Man, I could take the fork that would be to just to try to digest and understand all of this information.

Little fork dogs are aliens.

That's where you get That's where so many conspiracy theories come from. Is you're just it's it's like there's insurmountable amounts of information and you're like, yeah, that seems like a lot of work. Yeah, I'm buying this dog star deal, yes, because that is just easy and then only I know it.

Yeah, yeah, a lot of I get a lot of emails thought from dog people who are convinced they have it all figured out?

Like do you call them dog people?

Dog people?

You know?

Keeping keep emailing me, keep emailing me. I have some good theories in my inbox.

Okay, so she doesn't want to hear about dog stars, but she doesn't want to hear I'm interesting.

Give me every thing but dog stars. Yeah it.

Can you get me a dire wolf skull? Anyhow? Anyway, look at three D print?

You want?

Really you want? You want to take that? That's the best I can do? Yeah, yeah, I could.

Go in the backyard and dig up some skull.

We can just give you a wolf skull.

No, no, I want a three D. If I can get one, I'd like to have a three D of a of a dire wolf yeah, oh, heads up, speaking of that, we have Krin. You haven't seen it yet. Hunter Spencer's working on a big octopus holding the gaff. So it's an octopus. He's got a gaff and he's got some shrimp tucked under his arms. Do a t shirt run if you've listened to pussing the pot, which is also really good on search.

Dominate, So hind titty, listen to pot cattle, eat your nose whatever this one's.

Going search all right, Well, thank you for joining, Thank you for great man. Yeah, Krin, how long were you talking about? Get the real dog expert?

Like years?

Dogs hundred? Yeah, he already took his head he's done.

He's like, she doesn't know nothing about the blue shakes.

He took his headset off. He's done.

Any more funny than that, Come on.

It was a headset drop. All right, thanks everybody.

Oh r.

O seal rey sho like silver in the sun. Right right alone, sweetheart.

We don't beat this damn of course today, taking no HM and ride away. We're done beat this damned parsday, So take a new one and ride on.

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