Joe Rogan talks to Dan Flores about the spread of Coyotes

Hello freak bitches. How are you sir? I'm very good Joe. It's good to meet you man. Great to meet you and thank you very much for doing this. I've learned more about coyotes over the last couple of months reading your book and listening to your podcast with my good friend Steve Ranella which was amazing. Whoo what a crazy animal that is. You know I have coyotes all around my neighborhood and it became a very very close to me when I saw one of my chickens get captured by a coyote and I watched him hop the fence with a chicken in his mouth. Oh my god damn these motherfuckers. And just all around us. Especially I live in a fairly rural area around here about 40 minutes outside of LA so it's you know the nights are quiet and you hear them screaming in the night and I didn't know much about them until I started reading your book man. Yeah they're amazing animal. I mean I think there's not really another mammal aside from us that has a biography like these animals do and that's kind of one of the reasons I got fascinated with them. They were doing the same thing around me when I was a kid growing up in Louisiana. I mean and that's sort of the beginning of my getting captivated by these little small wolves because they were suddenly showing up in the bayous and swamps of Louisiana when I was 12, 13, 14 years old and as far as I knew this was an animal that was supposed to be in the deserts of the West and so that seemed to be something that you know commanded one's attention that this critter is appearing in places where you would never expect it and now of course everybody in the country is dealing with them. That is so fascinating that in our lifetime they have spread from the American Southwest to every single state in literally every single city in the country. Yeah that's true. And I just got a somebody sent me this yesterday that somewhere in Georgia they have some sort of a bounty on these wolves you know coyotes that's one thing a lot of people don't realize that a coyote is a wolf. Yeah it's a it's a separate species from gray wolves and red wolves but it's out of the North American wolf line. I mean coyotes are distinctively North American animals they come out of canid evolution that began here 5.3 million years ago. So yeah they're they're small wolves. Did I send you this Jamie? No you found it. Oh beautiful. This is the Georgia coyote challenge. Apparently they're offering some sort of bounty for each coyote killed. Now what's fascinating about this and one of the things that I learned from your book is that when a coyote yells when they're doing their call in the night they're essentially making roll call and when one of them doesn't respond the female generates more pups. Yeah it's it's one of the you know one of the many things that's probably happening when they're when they're howling. I mean they are taking a census basically of coyote populations in the area and the result of of that census can very well be it produces some sort of chemical or metabolic change in in the females the breeding females the alpha ones and they end up oftentimes having larger litters of pups which is why something like this you know I was just in South Carolina two weeks ago and there was a lot of conversation about this this Georgia bounty because in South Carolina it's another place where coyotes are fairly new. I've only been there in the last 20 or 25 years. They were arguing that you know and they had some pretty good science that coyotes are taking you know in some areas as many as 60% of the white-tailed deer fawns and so the hunters are screaming long and loud about this because it means it's getting harder to take a white tail. So South Carolina hasn't moved to the step that Georgia has of trying to impose some kind of bounty and encourage people to go out and shoot these animals to take them in any way they can but mostly shoot them but you know I think these states in the South and in the East have a lot to learn by the Western or from the Western experience because the truth is we've been trying to eradicate and I mean totally exterminate coyotes in the American West. We spent the years from about 1915 through about 1972 in an all-out war attempting to exterminate them and the only result of that as a result of their particular kinds of adaptations and their evolution in North America is that we spread them across the entire country. We not only spread them across the entire country I mean they're in every state they colonized their 49th state Delaware in 2010 so the only state they're not in is Hawaii just because they haven't stowed away and made it across the Pacific yet and you know I mean if they do you can imagine those endangered nae-naes on the Big Island are totally done for but they are not only in every single state in the Union except for Hawaii but they are 7,000 miles now north and south in North America from above the Arctic Circle all the way down to Central America and beginning to colonize into South America so the attempts to exterminate them I mean I can explain how this why this happens has to do with their evolution in the particular adaptations they have but the attempts to exterminate them or even to try to control their numbers almost always produces exactly the opposite effect so Georgia is going to end up with more coyotes than they've ever had before in their efforts to try to suppress their population it's not fascinating now it is