Joe Rogan | Most People Have Never Been Around Actual Wildlife w/Steve Rinella

Flesh eaters. Yeah, they'll fuck up a dog. They're weird. You know, it's like one of the things, I think it points to a certain amount of sociopathy that I have, but when I hear about someone losing a cat or dog to wild creatures, I don't like, my initial instinct isn't to be sad. Mm. I see what you're saying. You're like, wow, that's part of the game. Because you kind of view, you sort of, I have this view that, yeah, I have this view of that sort of like settlement and development v. wildlife. Mm-hmm. It is a global problem, right? And one always wins. Like the destruction of wildlife habitat always wins. And then when you see it play out like that, in some ways you kind of like hope. Like Brian Kellan, who you know. Yep. Recently, you know, that kid got a young kid, it was like a nine or ten year old girl, got thrown up in the air. By a bison? Yeah, did you see that? Yeah. In Yellowstone? Yeah. And by no means is Cal hoped to see someone, you know, especially particularly a child, get hurt. But he's like, you know, they still got it. Yeah, you can't just close in on a bison. They apparently got within 15 yards of that thing, which is ridiculous. Yeah, I think I keep thinking about making a shirt that says, Yellowstone National Park, habituating wildlife since 1877. They do. It is weird. I've only been once. Well, I went once when I was a kid, but I went once recently with my family and it was very weird that you could take selfies with elk. These big herds of elk are so confident that people won't shoot them when they're in like the public tourism area, that they just go and hang out near the vending machine. I'm getting a Diet Coke and there's an elk like 30 yards away from me. It's so strange. That's a little bit in line with what I'm talking about when I talk about like that when I hear someone's dog got killed by a coyote. Yeah. Oh, you know, and again, man, I know that like, like my brother has this little dog he just loves and they're inseparable. If that dog got carried off by a great horned owl in a healthy great horned owl could carry this dog off. It's like a little shit and dog. I would feel real bad for him. So with that said, I do have this thing where you kind of root and I do feel sad when I see like in a place like Yellowstone. This is where it gets a little bit weird. When I see wild animals, especially animals that people hunt for, when I see that they've lost their fear of humans, some people would look and be like, Oh, this is like what naturally they should be like. Okay. So this is animals where they've had to give up their human that where they've lost their human fear because we've given them this wild place. I see old timey old timey Steve. That's a good dude. Joe Farinato calling me. He's a good guy. People see in like Yellowstone park atmosphere, you see where wildlife becomes habituated to humans and they feel like they're seeing something more natural, right? Because outside of human hunting, they all of a sudden don't have that feeling anymore. I look at that and I see that it's like, um, to me it feels like something's been subverted and something's wrong with that situation. Yeah, because it sort of depends on how fresh your perspective is because I mean, people have been hunting, uh, you know, people have been hunting in that area. I mean, at least 10,000 years. So then we take like a hundred year break and the animals become very accustomed to people. It's, it's shocking how quickly they can get it back. And, and oftentimes those same elk that live like the same elk that will spend their summer in that park will migrate out of there and go into national forest and on ranch land. And then they'll be where they can be hunted and they know they cross that line. So the same elk that some dude could basically walk up and touch there will just something in his head switches and he enters and they enter into a new mind space when they leave and they're still exposed to human predation. And if they wind you they'll bolt. Oh yeah. It's shocking how it's shocking to the greed of which they, the degree to which they can keep this together in their heads. And it's also pretty surprising how, how quickly they adapt. Like I would imagine if you were to open up, this would be pretty controversial idea, but I'll throw it out there. Let's say you were to open up hunting in Yellowstone national park. I think that it would probably be less than a year. I think like a season of fall hunting season would have them right back into the same mindset that all the other animals that live with human predation, their sort of attitude toward people. I think they'll very quickly get it back. It makes sense. But yeah, people going up and petting stuff. Again like referring to Cal, his idea is that like people have gotten to where they confuse national parks with amusement parks and they feel that the animals are like on rails. You know, they're on tracks. Yeah. And it's like they're programmed to do a certain thing, but it's still wild. It's one thing that I've discovered over the last seven years, thanks to you and thanks to you getting me hunting, is that most people have no idea what it's like to be around actual wildlife to sneak up to them. Most people have no idea about their sense of smell, like to see an animal wind you and then just fucking bounce to see that and to know that like you're dealing with some superhuman ability, impossible to imagine with the confines of your own biology what these animals can do. And when you're out amongst them and there's no cell phone service and it's just footprints and trekking your way through mountains, it's amazing. It's not Yellowstone. What Yellowstone is and what anything like that and zoos is the worst example, right? But when we think of animals, like people always tell me like, because I have a famous dog. I've run with him all the time and he's on my Instagram and it's like everybody loves him. He's the sweetest dog in the world. I love that dog. If you love dogs, how could you hunt animals? And I'm like, well, that's not, he's not an animal. He's a dog. He's a pet. He's a science project. An animal is a wolf. An animal is a deer. That's an animal. What a dog is, they don't survive outside of us. If you don't take care of them, they won't know what to do. They'll hope that the dog catcher comes and gets them and somebody rescues them. They're not wild animals. It's not. It almost has less to do with how they're raised and more to do with their ancestors. Their biology has changed. They've literally been bred to something different. They're a fucking science project. And you see my dog, he's got floppy ears. He's a sweetheart. Everybody who meets him, he drops through his back and he wants you to rub his belly. He's just the sweetest dog in the world. That is not a dog. I mean, it's not an animal. There's not an animal like that that would ever exist out in the wild. Because if he sees another dog, he's like, hello, are you my friend? He's not like checking to see if the thing's going to steal his food or rob him of his mates or kill his babies. Yeah, it's the result of a 20,000 or whatever year experimentation with the domestication of an animal. Yeah. So most people when they say they love animals, they don't even fucking know any. They don't even know what they are. They see the caged animals at the zoo. They see the animals on a rope that they take to the dog park. They think they know what an animal is. They don't even have any experience with it. We've been so domesticated and so isolated in cities. Most people, especially most people that have opinions on this shit, people that live in rural areas, I mean, you know that. You live in Bozeman and Bozeman is surrounded by these areas that are just fucking completely wild. I mean, if you're in Bozeman, you can drive an hour from your house and then you're around bears and deer and eagles. I mean, it's a completely wild place. People that are in those areas, people around Boise, Idaho, for example, they have a totally different idea. People in Wyoming have a totally different idea of what wildlife is versus somebody who lives in Santa Monica. Like there's a video that just somebody sent me today of a guy in Thousand Oaks is on his street and he's filming a fucking enormous mountain lion. I mean, it is huge. It's a big boy. It's like 150 pounds and they're in the car and they're looking at it through the window. And him and his son, it seems like, are filming this thing going, holy shit, look at this thing. It's right there in the street, a big ass cat. And he was saying that somebody was feeding it apparently and they're trying to figure out what... You want me to send it to you? I'll send it to you. But that's super rare. I mean, that's a real wild animal. It's super, super rare that anybody would have any kind of experience with one of these things. And most people that are talking about animals, they just really don't know what that even means. They're just saying it. Yeah, I think that there's developed a pretty big cultural division between people who... A pretty big cultural division between people who kind of live around and work around and deal with animals and people who view them or think of them as very other. A friend of mine who's a biologist... Oh, there you go. Yeah. No, no, I'm sending you another one. I sent it to you. It's from Thousand Oaks. I just sent it to you. A friend of mine... That's one though. That's a recent one too. Buddy Mine, who's a biologist with the Forest Service, a guy named Carl Malcolm, he might have heard on our show. He just sent me a paper that was about kids' attitudes to wildlife and it was comparing rural people's attitude and knowledge of wildlife for kids with urban and suburban attitudes about wildlife. You can see the input of media when you look at this thing because people who live in an urban or suburban environment, when they tell you the top of mind wildlife that they know about, it's non-native stuff. Like lions? Yeah, they're likely to know what's an animal, right? And an animal will be like, oh, it'd be like a giraffe, right? People who have a more rural or remote viewpoint are much more likely when they think of wildlife to think of things that they interact with and not like the things that are on your mobile above your crib when you're a little baby. It sort of points... And also, there's a slight tendency... I got to look at this more carefully, but there's a slight tendency to have negative feelings or things that are dangerous or bad the more urban you are in terms of native wildlife to more recognize it as like a negative or bad thing. And what they're pointing to is... Again, I want to look at this much more carefully and pardon me to the authors if I'm messing this up. I was just looking at it this morning. What they're pointing to is the stirrings of there being a greater acceptance of decreased biodiversity. Hmm. Meaning that you're kind of like okay with the bad things having gone and we're focused on like, what are animals? Well, animals would be like a giraffe and hippopotamus and the things that Disney tells me about and not like possums and raccoons, which are kind of gross.