In this episode, Emily and Michelle invite listeners to engage with the oft maligned Coyote. Trickster in Native traditions, danger in rancher lore, nuisance in urban imaginations, the Coyote shows how the morethanhuman is differently understood but always experienced as present and even ubiquitous. The hosts then welcome the foremost authority on the history of Coyote, Dan Flores.
MB = Michelle K Berry
EW = Emily Wakild
DF= Dan Flores
EW: 0:00
Hello, my name is Michelle Berry. And I'm Emily Wakild, and we are your hosts for More Than: a Podcast. We're both historians, but before you push stop, let us explain what kind of history we study. We're both environmental historians.
MB: 0:18
Oh dear, Emily, I'm not sure that that makes us seem any more interesting. How about this instead? Basically, we tell stories about the past and try to make sure that our stories include animals, plants, bugs, dirt, weather, and the like. And we have created this podcast to convince you that history and even nature are more than you ever thought they were.
EW: 0:42
We also both live and work in the U.S. Mountain West. Think of the region connected by the Rocky Mountains, where we've spent most of our lives. We met in graduate school and we've been friends for almost 25 years. In this podcast, we bring you stories about different parts of the ecosystems that you can find throughout the U.S. Mountain West, from the Sonoran Desert, where Michelle lives, to the Northern Rockies, where I live.
MB: 1:06
These stories have fascinating historical components and connections to contemporary issues. In addition to hopefully showing you how much more history can be, we also call the podcast More Than, because unlike typical history, we're going to put the morethanhuman at the center of each episode.
EW: 1:25
We are convinced that once you hear about the power the more than human has had in the past, you will love history and nature even more than you do now.
MB: 1:38
Now, each of the topics we have chosen has many histories, so we're only picking a few to focus on in each episode. But for many of the episodes, we'll also have a special guest or two to tell us even more about that particular topic. Join us as we explore more than you could ever expect to in a podcast about the environment and history.
MB: 1:38
Welcome to this episode, Persisters, where we will be focusing on coyotes. You know, some of these topics that we're going to cover are not visible all the time, especially in Tucson, Arizona. I don't see a cottonwood tree just anywhere in Tucson in the middle of the city, but I do see coyotes regularly right in central Tucson where I live. And my neighborhood hosts anywhere from three to six individual coyotes year round. My dog, Chinle, and I used to see them a lot on our daily walks. And she was this 80-pound labareiner. At least that's what we were told and we could have a whole other conversation about that. But she would have these really interesting interactions with the coyotes. Their health seemed to vary, of course, when it was a particularly robust rain year. Their coats were fuller and they were chunkier. And other times they seemed really mangy and thin. And it was really interesting to watch their bodies adjust to the changing environment over time. Chinle only seemed to know she was distantly related to these neighbors and she would kind of pause and look at them. And if we saw three or four in a group, she's just like, hey, what's going on? Almost like she wanted to learn more about them. It was really cool. And certainly often when we see them, they sound just like Mark Twain described them in his book, Roughing It, right? He said that the coyote is a "long, slim, sick, and sorry looking skeleton." And I think that's how that sums up really well how some of our Sonoran Desert coyotes look to some people, but I don't think that's how they look to Chinle. And I think that's really kind of powerful. Our neighbors in Tucson, they joke that they feed the rodent population with our bird seeds. So therefore, they're contributing to the well-being and happiness of these coyotes. And you'll see people on the streets gathered in groups. We just saw the coyotes. And there's just this really interesting power of the coyote to get people talking and engaging, not just with the coyotes themselves, but with one another. They're a very ubiquitous animal and they're knowable. If you know what I mean, they're just knowable creatures.
EW: 4:30
Oh, absolutely, Michelle. I loved how you talked about the different senses through which we experience coyotes, hearing them and seeing them. And I'm sure Chinle was smelling them when she encountered them as well. And so all of these imprint on our memories. And I've had beautiful interactions here in Boise with coyotes, too. They're certainly not a Sonoran Desert-only animal. One of my favorite things is in Boise, I can run out my front door and within a mile be part of a system of trails that are interconnected on public lands and go for 150 contiguous miles. I can't run that far, but the trails are there to be able to do it. And I access this system of trails through Camel Back park. There, of course, are not camels in Boise, but the hill looks like a camel because it has a hump between it and it connects the sagebrush steppe on an interface with a much higher ecosystem of forests and mountains near the top. And one morning I was walking on Camel's Back and I saw this coyote peek out of her den just above one of my favorite trails. And you never would have noticed that den if my eyes hadn't been drawn to the movement as she came out. And literally right in front of me, she emerged and I watched her from on that trail. And this is a really busy city park, right? Bouncy houses and playgrounds and tennis courts and runners and bikers everywhere. And there she is, this amazing coyote hidden in plain sight. So I wonder what experience the coyotes have, literally in the middle of everything, but also almost unnoticed by the people that are there. When I saw her come out of her den I was not scared, because she was not this intimidating creature that threatened me, but it was more of this amazing place where we shared this instant experience. And undoubtedly, the creature was experiencing the park and those different worlds in really different ways than I was.
MB: 6:51
Yeah, that's really great that you mentioned how you felt in your interaction with her and that she made, quote, made you stop, that power of the more than human to make human beings take particular actions. And I think we see that throughout history. And one of the things that we're continually trying to do with our podcast is to think about the ways in which historical understandings contribute to enhance, expand our understandings of more than human beings. And the coyote is certainly a wonderful example of that, especially because our emotional reaction actions to Coyote and even Coyote's actual actions in the ecosystems. They're omnivores, so they'll eat all kinds of things. And so if they're preying on your livestock, you're probably going to react in a particular way. And so it's really fascinating to think about coyotes and how they, I don't want to use the term force, but that they allow for various kinds of human decision-making and they almost have a say in the ways in which we interact with them, which is really powerful and important.
EW: 8:04
Absolutely. And I think one of the ways that our experiences of coyotes are mediated is also who we're with, right? You were with Chinle, you were with your dog, which meant you and her experienced the coyotes together in a slightly different way. And maybe I would have reacted differently if I'd had a dog with me or one of my jogging partners, but I was by myself. And so all of those pieces, I think, have an interesting shaping factor on how we experience the more-than-human world around us.
MB: 8:38
Right, and I think what's really cool is that we can make choices as humans to understand those interactions through sort of a negative light, a positive light, and it brings to mind this wonderful piece of writing that I use in one of my classes, and I've been assigning it for years. My class is about the nature of gender, and the piece is written by Jenny Price, and it's an older piece, it's actually going on 20 years, which is just crazy, but it's really terrific, and it's timeless in many ways because... the title of it is "13 Ways of Seeing Nature in Los Angeles." And it's really just about that. It's about seeing nature in a place you think may not have what we traditionally understand nature to be, especially in an urban place. And a lot of like what we're talking about here with Boise and Tucson. And that Price's work has so much to contribute to how we think about the presence of coyote, how we interpret that presence and the presence of other kinds of more than human beings in our midst. And she she tells the story of an LA Times article, which goes just a little bit like what you're talking about, Em. And that is that there's this chihuahua named Zuzu and a coyote. And their unfortunate interaction is that Zuzu gets eaten by the coyote. And the casting director, the owner or the companion of Zuzu, is a casting director. And her husband warns bitterly in this article that coyotes are, quote, "urban terrorists." Of course, plenty of folks disagreed with that and saw Zuzu as the real terrorist invading the coyote's native range. But again, thinking about perspective and positionality when we think about how we interact with these kinds of beings in our midst is really powerful. And if Chinle was a Chihuahua, I might have had a little bit of a different or more nervous reaction to encountering some of these coyotes. But understanding, being able to step back and have perspective about historical interactions and the ways in which people choose to react to those historical interactions really can help expand our understandings of things like coyotes.
EW: 10:42
Absolutely. We frequently have reports of dogs or cats being snatched out of the foothills and never coming home. Lots of lampposts and streetlights have posters, you know, have you seen this dog or cat? And I suspect we know who has seen them, right, and where they have gone. Another interesting coyote-based novel of one of my favorites is set in Southern California, and it's by the novelist T.C. Boyle. It's called The Tortilla Curtain. And he also explores the intersection of people's lives with animals. A coyote jumps over the fence in the backyard of one of the main characters and steals the small dog outside of their backyard. And the private property lenses link through that story as well. I wonder how many dogs coyotes have been snacking on, not just in the literature, but in LA in the late 90s, plumping themselves up for sure.
MB: 11:42
Yeah, absolutely. And Price sees in these moralizing stories, right, that they're unhelpful, that we're just choosing to depict Coyote as evil or as an urban terrorist and Zuzu, the domesticated canine, as this innocent victim. And she thinks that it's not necessarily helpful to think in those ways. And we're at this point where, and this was even 20 years ago, where we need to rethink the stories that we tell about Coyote and really all kinds of nature to rethink the perspective with which we understand those historical interactions, and that hopefully that would lead to more achievable sustainability in our lives and our interactions with wildlife. And I would also add plant life. You know, we're sort of thinking about weeds, which we'll talk about in another episode. And that's a specific perspective to think about a plant as a weed. So Price says that we should move beyond this evil chihuahua moral. And I think that looking at Coyote's history with humanity is a way to do that. And the ways in which Coyote have evolved with human settlements and moved into different regions, which we'll hear about from our awesome guest for the day, is really powerful. And it belies that simple narrative of an urban terrorist.
EW: 13:02
I think one of the things that's happened to the coyote and that is useful to think about in terms that are relevant in our present moment is how resilient the coyote has been in the face of persecution. And those aren't maybe the terms that a biologist would use to describe how a coyote's life cadence works, but coyotes have learned to flourish in places they weren't ever expected to live. And they've had a biological response to some of the persecution that they have undergone. And one way that it's really easy to see female coyotes responding to persecution is by giving birth to larger litters, right? And this is a really interesting way of counteracting violence. So those aren't the terms that might... be used to you know, depict their reproductive cycles, but a historical way of accounting for the intergenerational trauma invoked on the species is to look at those big litters and see the ways that populations of coyotes can right themselves and be pushed one way or another, not just across urban or rural spaces, but also in these really hybrid environments. So the reproductive instinct means a coyote population might ebb and flow But that over time, they're continually really robust and resilient.
MB: 14:41
Yeah, that's, you know, it's so fascinating because in order to understand the biological situation of coyote, it's not as miraculous or awe-inspiring if you don't know some of the history, right? So the other thing that I think you and I are, we admit that we're nature lovers and that we have deep appreciation for the more than human around us. And I don't know that we would be that in awe of coyote if we didn't know some of the history of the ways in which they have been, and I love the word you're using, persecuted by the human species, right? We've tried really hard to get rid of coyote. We've tried hard to get rid of wolves and other large predators, mountain lions and all kinds of predators, specifically, I think, to protect domesticated livestock production. And most ubiquitously in the U.S. West, but I think across the United States. You know, by 1880, as early as 1880, we see the United States giving bounties to hunters, paying hunters to prey on coyotes and what they also deemed troublesome predators. And that killing only intensified in the 20th century. I think we think, oh... you know, in the 19th century, all of that killing surely stopped because we become, the world itself becomes less "wild", the range becomes tamed. I mean, there's these kind of these cultural memories that I think we have a tendency to share that aren't necessarily accurate. And this is a really good case of that because in the 20th century, the killing of coyotes just intensified. We have reports that from 1937 to 1981, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service paid bounty hunters to scalp 3.6 million coyotes. From 1937 to 1981, 3.6 million coyotes. So popular mainstream depictions of coyote are usually depicted as threats to little Zuzu. But I think that history shows us that they're more than threats they are also victims.
EW: 16:39
And part of what's so interesting about the kind of aggressive attempt at control you just used is the word scalp, right? The idea of treating the coyote body as something that can be denigrated in that way, right? Desecrated. And that has so much meaning and baggage in its collective imprint as much as the numerical statistics that you gave us there. Another piece, though, about the power of the more than human in that equation is the deep past of the coyote. So coyotes have been... in what's now the United States long before it existed as a nation or even a concept. In fact, the origin of the name coyote is from a Nahuatl word, and Nahuatl was the language that the peoples of central Mexico commonly called Aztec or Mexica used. And that word coyote is part of a whole series of animal nouns that exist in Nahuatl that end in the T-L and become changed by the Spanish and then integrated into the English language. So for example, āhuacatl for avocado is another term that the Spanish borrowed from Nahuatl to describe an amazing American plant and then entered into the English language in this way. And so this interesting passage of a native word through the cultural medium of language into Spanish and then English speaks to its ubiquity and its uniqueness in the American setting.
MB: 18:20
I think sometimes folks maybe listening don't necessarily even consider the ways in which language is historical too. And it shifts over time in a variety of settings, which you're just pointing out, which is so cool. I think cultural understandings of coyote are... also at play with what we're talking about here, right? So, and Coyote's around and as a cultural historian of the United States, I think it's always fun to look where in "popular culture" or "mainstream culture", the more than human shows up. And this leads me to think about Wiley Coyote, the cartoon that's created in 1949 and is kind of inspired by that Twain depiction. The guy that creates it is Chuck Jones at Looney Tunes. And he depicts Coyote, Wiley, as just ridiculous. He's constantly being foiled by the clever roadrunner. It's such a ubiquitous thing to think about coyote as more than a threat he's also this almost this kind of buffoon in popular culture in many ways and I think that's kind of interesting to think about where he shows up culturally in popular culture over time.
EW: 19:33
Absolutely. I agree with you completely there, because the persistence of the coyote narrative or the coyote character raises this other question about our society, which is who belongs, right? And where does the coyote belong? Does it belong only as someone on the outside? Or is it in fact sort of native to a particular region or place or a central story or narrative? We just talked about how the coyote's name comes from further south, right? It comes from Mexico, and then it travels up north. And then we have the Disney portrayal of Wile E. Coyote in the desert. But coyotes go from the Appalachians. And they're and they're expanding. In fact, they're an American animal that has co-evolved into new ecosystems. In fact, perhaps one of the only that is headed towards South America and expanding its habitat rather than shrinking. And that's a really important and powerful story for our time to think about coyotes having summertime in the Arctic and plucking pizza from South America....
MB: 20:53
Plucking pizza. It's about lunchtime, and I'm kind of starving, so I'd like to pluck a pizza right now, to be honest. Yeah, we could keep going on and on, but we are not the absolute experts on coyotes, so we are thrilled to welcome to the podcast someone who is, and we want to transition into having a wonderful conversation with Dan Flores
MB
Woo-hoo!
And Dan originally hails from Louisiana and now lives part-time in Arizona and part-time outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is the A.B. Hammond Professor Emeritus of History of the American West at the University of Montana, Missoula, not a bad place to live for a chunk of time. He is the author of 10 books, and his writing has appeared all over the place, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and Emily and I both are fangirling a little bit because we have long taught Dan's work and benefited from his variety of topics. Most recently, his book, Coyote America: a natural and supernatural history was published in 2016. So welcome, Dan. Thanks for joining us.
DF: 22:12
It's my pleasure, guys. Thanks for having me on on your first podcast. And that's kind of exciting. It's kind of exciting to be virginal...
EW: 22:24
Indeed, indeed. So I'm curious if you could tell us a little bit about what made you decide to write a whole book about coyote? What was your sort of thought process and how did you take that project on?
DF: 22:40
Yeah, that's a good question. You know, I've had other people ask me that question. A book about coyotes? Are you serious? Yes, I'm completely serious. And one of the reasons I'm serious about coyotes is because I have, especially since retiring from the University of Montana, 10 years ago, I've been writing books about animals, about North America's wild indigenous creatures in particular. I wrote a book called American Serengeti about the animals of the Great Plains. And then most recently, just a little more than a year ago, I wrote a book called Wild New World, which is kind of a big story look at the relationship between humans and North American wild animals. And after doing all that, I'm still convinced that the coyote is probably the most intriguing animal on the continent. And I say that for a reason. I mean, for one thing, this is an animal whose history goes back more than five million years in North America. It comes from a family, the Canadae family, that evolved in North America five and a half million years ago. So it's a creature that's been around here for a very, very long time. I often joke with people that if you want to know something about being an American, you should study the coyote story because it's about as American as you can get. It's an animal that also survived the Pleistocene extinctions 10,000 years ago when so many other creatures were unable to do so and sort of has existed in its present form for the last 10,000 years. And it became became a kind of a, not only a semi-deity for native people here as far back as 10,000 years or so, but it's kind of served as a stand-in avatar for humans, not only in that form, but even down to the present, where it's done that for West Coast counterculture literary types like Gary Snyder and Peter Coyote, and of course then the Roadrunner Coyotes. Coyote cartoons. Wile E. Coyote is sort of a stand-in avatar for us. So it's this animal that is not only a stand-in for humans through much of its history, it's actually the oldest literary character in North American history. Those coyote stories by Native people probably go back at least 10,000 or so years. And then sort of the last thing about the coyote story that made me want to tell it was the the fact that it kind of stands as a symbol for how old worlders, Europeans in particular, reacted to North American wildlife when we got here, which was often in an effort to replicate the old world approach to predators and big animals, which was an effort to try to wipe them out And to do so before one ever did any kind of science to figure out what role they played in American ecology. And so... I mean, there were animals like passenger pigeons and Carolina parakeets and great auks that didn't survive that. And bison and wolves barely did. But coyotes did so remarkably well. And that, of course, means that they stand in a distinct way in the story of North American wildlife. No matter what we did to them, we couldn't really wipe them out. And so that kind of story, I would say, seemed to me to be worthy of a book for this animal. And I I guess I'll also add this one other thing. At the time when I was considering writing Coyote America, I was making the transition from writing for university presses to trade presses in New York, and my agent and I pretty much decided that a book about coyotes, particularly this animal that was spreading across America and so many Americans were encountering for the first time without really knowing what in the world to think about it, that this was probably the right book to take to New York. and try to sell to a New York press. And I think we proved to be kind of savvy in that assessment.
MB: 27:15
Yeah, that's a really good point. What I love about the book and just a lot of what your work does is to historicize our environment, the animals, and put it in conversation with human history, which is, of course, the essence of really good environmental history. But you have a tendency to center the animals and give them, for lack of a better word, agency, right? Power, an ability to affect human decisions and lives and what have you. And that's really, I think, really powerful and unique because I think we're so used to having anthropocentric approaches to these sorts of things we opened up this podcast episode with talking a little bit about our own encounters with coyotes because we both live in places where I live in Tucson and they're, you know, literally I could probably turn and look out my window and they might be wandering down my street and I live a mile from the university. So we talked a little bit about our personal encounters because that's the other part of coyote is that they're around, they're not just out in "wilderness", but they live with us as urban wildlife and what have you. So we assume that maybe you've had some encounters with coyote and wondered if you wanted to share any of those encounters.
DF: 28:28
Well, I obviously have had a lot of encounters with coyotes, and probably one of the reasons I was fascinated with them was because when I was growing up in Louisiana in the 1960s, coyotes were first beginning to show up in the east and in the south. And so at the age of about 13 or 14 years old, I began encountering these animals for the first time. And like everyone else, I thought of coyotes as being animals of the western And suddenly, here they were in the bayous of Louisiana. And that was a really kind of startling discovery for me. As I relate in Coyote America, I wrote a letter as a 14-year-old to Louisiana Parks and Wildlife and telling them that I was seeing these animals. What I actually described, and this is another story I tell in the book, was being fascinated with the idea of maybe seeing something. something a big carnivore like this and going to a hardware store and buying a little dying rabbit call is essentially what it was a little wooden call and climbed up in somebody's deer stand and bleated on this call very inexpertly for a few minutes but evidently you didn't have to be much of an expert because within literally a minute this animal shows up comes loping directly toward And I'm sitting there sort of shaking like a leaf watching it because it was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. And I didn't know what it was. It looked like a wolf to me. And so I wrote this letter to Louisiana Parks and Wildlife and told them I thought I'd seen a wolf. And I got a response back a couple of weeks later saying, well, you might have seen a wolf. We think there may be still red wolves in Caddo Parish, but probably not. Probably what you saw was a coyote because coyotes are now starting to colonize in Louisiana. And I thought, wow, this is the most fascinating thing that I've ever experienced out in the woods and bayous of my home state. I mean, I've had a lot of encounters with coyotes of all kinds since, but that one is probably the one that really set me in motion towards ultimately writing a book about them. That's such a wonderful one.
MB: 30:59
What a great story. I can imagine you going, oh, my God, why did I blow on that call? What did I do? And
DF: 31:08
And can I climb higher in this tree? Yeah, that's right.
MB: 31:13
Can I outrun it? (laughter)
EW: 31:14
That's great. You also tell in the book a little bit about seeing coyotes outside of Santa Fe, which incidentally was where my childhood was. And so my parents were the 13th house in El Dorado, and we'd walk along the railroad tracks and see coyotes when we were putting pennies on there to get smashed, right? Or whatever other sort of childish thing that was out there. And they were always there, right? You could sort of count on them. And I remember thinking, oh, right, they live here too, right? It's also their neighborhood. And you have great stories about that in the book as well. But you told us before that coyotes are old or they're traditional to our landscape. They're also resilient in the face of newcomers and they're persistent in really unique ways. But one of the things we've been thinking a lot about is how coyotes are liminal, right? And they're on the edges and on the sides. They're not sort of central, but they're ubiquitous. Like we've all just said, you can kind of find them anywhere. So they're They're ever-present in modern life, not just in the Pleistocene, right? But they're also not, until your book, right, they're sort of not the center of the story. And we were wondering if you could talk a little bit about why that liminality is important for coyotes and for humans, too.
DF: 32:34
Well, I think... Coyotes, for one thing, have probably been present in human life in North America ever since humans have been here. And one of the reasons that I think that is not only a result of looking at some of the archaeology of places like Chaco Canyon National Park, for example, where coyote skeletal material is very widespread, but It's fairly clear that coyotes are drawn to humans. That's one of the reasons they're in our cities these days. There are other reasons, too, which I explain in Coyote America that have to do with our discovery in the 19th century that we needed to start adopting something called dog catchers and dog pounds in order to clear away a stray dog population in most American cities. And when we made that move, that opened cities up to coyotes being being able to enter our towns and cities. But coyotes are drawn to being around us, not especially because they're fascinated with us, but because human houses and towns generate a real bounty in their primary prey base, which is rodents. I mean, we just sort of, as we've gone around the world, we've carried mice and rats with us and coyotes are attracted to us by because of the bounty in those rodent populations that surround our towns and houses. So they've been living around us for a very, very long time. They know how to do it. They're very clever at doing it. And I think at one time in American history, in the Native American period of American history, coyotes certainly were not liminal. They were very much a focus of stories of coyotes. kind of an avatar stand-in, as I mentioned a few minutes ago. But in the last several hundred years, as old-worlders have taken over the continent, I think coyotes probably were pushed a bit to the margins in our thought processes because wolves and bigger predators tended to dominate the initial campaigns to try to wipe out what we viewed as threats to livestock. And it was only after we pretty successfully, by the 1920s, had managed to reduce wolf populations to just a few scattered animals in the lower 48 that the biological survey and its extermination program. And even pop culture began turning to coyotes and looking at them. You know, I mean, I write about Mark Twain's famous description of coyotes in roughing it, which probably was one of the things that brought coyotes to the larger attention of the world back in the 1870s. But it was a very unflattering portrayal. And so the initial reaction in the 1920s and 30s, when wolves were supposed to have bitten was to regard suddenly the coyote as the arch-predator of our time, and so we ended up inventing one poison after another to try to wipe them out. But what, of course, makes the coyote story so remarkable is that none of those efforts, despite their success on other creatures like wolves, worked against coyotes. And the reason they didn't work is because coyotes' evolutionary history had prepared them with a set of adaptations that made them especially resilient to persecution and harassment. That persecution and harassment had previously been carried out by gray wolves, but once humans replaced wolves as the primary persecutors of coyotes, the coyotes relied on these same strategies. And the one that I talked about a good bit in Coyote America, which has attracted a good bit of attention from readers, is one called fish infusion. And one of the reasons it's kind of an important adaptation to note is because there are only about 19 or 20 mammals in the world that have a fish infusion adaptation. And we humans happen to be one of the others of that group. But among coyotes, what it means is that they can live in fusion and In other words, they can live as packs and function very well as pack animals when they're not being harassed. But when they are pushed and harassed and persecuted, either by wolves or by humans, they go into a fishing mode where they break their packs apart and they tend to scatter in singles and pairs. And when they do that, they not only become much more difficult to take out, of course, but they begin to colonize and spread. And so, ironically, enough, the attempt to wipe out coyotes in the American West in the early 20th century was one of the primary factors that caused them to spread across North America east of the Mississippi River and into places like Louisiana where I first saw.
SPEAKER_01: 37:54
It's such a fascinating intersection of the biology of the animal and their adaptations and the ways it mirrors human society, right? And it makes it this amazing parable for resilience and the adaptability of that animal. And you give us that story so well about how there's a lesson for humans in the relationships that are there. Could you say a little bit more about that?
DF: 38:21
Sure. I've always thought that, at least since I started studying the coyote story and beginning to realize how they were stand-ins for human, particularly in native lore, and then encountering, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, instances in modern American culture where coyotes sort of, or a coyote in the case of Wile E. Coyote, functions in the same way in the cartoons. But what I think the coyote attracted human attention for in the first place was the fact that it not only survived, but it survived by its wits. It was not in the Pleistocene, for example, by any means the largest animal, not the largest predator. There were dire wolves and gray wolves and saber-toothed cats. And yet all of those, with the exception of gray wolves, dire wolves and saber-toothed cats and hunting hyenas all became extinct. And humans were on the scene to observe that here is this small version of a wolf that clearly survives. And it seems to do so not because of brawn, not because it's a superior hunter, but because it is really intelligent. And that's what a lot of the stories about humans coyote and native lore are about. They're about not only its intelligence, but of course, many of those stories are also about the fact that the coyote represents the full suite of human nature, not only the positive elements of our nature, but also some of the more humorous ones, I suppose, gluttony and lust and so forth. And coyote plays all those roles in that story. So coyote functions as this kind of teacher and one of the primary lessons to me is surviving by being smart and paying attention to the world now we can't obviously say that humans always do that but it's probably one of the things that has enabled us to get where we are today is that like coyotes it's not been the fact that we are the biggest and brawniest creatures on the planet but we're also smart and we apply that intelligence to our survival. And that, of course, is one of the lessons that I draw at the end of the book. Because we're confronting a future that looks as if it's going to be problematic for many parts of the world, it's going to, once again, require our intelligence in order to be able to successfully navigate a future that sometimes looks a little bleak.
MB: 41:13
I've been struck because this is what you just made me think about the fact that there are so many lessons that we can take from the more than human world and we don't always. And in fact, I've recently had opportunities to engage with a variety of scholars and researchers and what have you who are ostensibly working on environmental topics, right? And it's very strange to me how little they focus on than anything but humans. And so I'm wondering how can we get a Western oriented culture to begin to think about the lessons that the more than human have to share with us and to tell us and how can we get us as a society. I mean, hopefully people will listen to our podcast and read books like your book and what have you. But I mean, I even find it in like environmental science where the science is really about focused on human and human communities and what it can, how it can benefit the human with very little regard for the rest of the ecosystem and for the more than human. And I keep running into it and I'm constantly thinking, taken aback by it because you would think those kinds of folks would really be thinking more holistically and if not centering the more than human, at least very aware of its importance in their research and in the projects that they're trying to do and what have you. So I'm just wondering if there's a way for us to increasingly think about coyote as kin, coyote as, and not just coyote, but all the more than human, the power of the ant, the power of the peregrine falcons to tell us what was the owl's name in New York City recently. Emily always talks about how fascinated people are by animals. And yet we have this tendency to be so anthropocentric. So I'm wondering if you have any wisdom for how we can work toward convincing folks to become just much more aware of the more-than-human and the lessons that they have to tell us and the importance that they play in our lives, in human lives?
DF: 43:23
Yeah, that's a terrific question. And it's obviously an important question, too. And interestingly, it's one that I take up quite a bit in the new book Wild New World. And you have to sort of start from... the awareness that we're a self-absorbed species, and it's part of our cross to bear to a certain extent as a legacy of our old world religions and philosophies, which have tended to teach us that we're exceptional to everything else. I mean, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, humans are the only creatures in the world that are made in the image of a deity and have souls. And that's actually, I tell a story about that. It's my oldest memory of being a four-year-old and losing my first little companion animal. And as my mom and I buried it in the backyard, I said to her, so mom, I at least get to have Chicky. It was a little chicken. I at least get to have chicky in heaven, don't I? And she sort of channeled the standard old world philosophical and religious point of view when she said well no honey chickens don't go to heaven you have a soul you're made in the image of god you'll go to heaven and have an everlasting life but animals don't do that and so we kind of come at the whole perspective of our relationship with the rest of the living world as we're exceptional we're the culmination of evolution everything else is just sort of somewhere out in the margins and only barely worth noticing and one of the reasons I've written books like Coyote America and like Wild New World in particular, where, as I said, I take on this particular subject, is I'm trying to get readers of those books to take other creatures more seriously, to stop being quite so self-absorbed. As the British ecologist Melanie Challenger said in a book of hers three or four years ago, the world today is run by an animal that doesn't think it's an animal. And that's kind of the sum of the whole problem that we're facing here. We've tended to think of ourselves as exceptional and not part of the whole evolutionary river that has produced life on Earth. And I think one way of thinking about the reason that is, is that we've had the inertia of many thousands of years of thinking that way and of course we've tended to discount indigenous ideas of kinship between humans and other animals as some sort of superstitious approach to the world and one other way to think of it is that Charles Darwin provided the scientific evidence for that indigenous perspective that humans are kin to everything else only 163 years ago so while we've had the inertia thousands of years of thinking we're exceptional, we've only had about a century and a half of understanding who we actually are. And it seems to me the faster we deal with who we really are, the better we're going to position ourselves vis-a-vis all the other creatures around us and just sort of coming to terms with who humans are and what kind of earth we're creating.
MB: 47:12
Yeah exactly. Yeah, that. Yeah, that's great. Oh my gosh. Emily, any other questions? Oh man, amazing, Dan. Thank you so much for all your thinking. And it just dovetails so perfectly with kind of a lot of the things we were talking about in this episode and just what we want to, what we're hoping this episode does for people is to make them think about the ways in which humans are more than we maybe have thought that we are over time.
EW: 47:40
Absolutely. And that last piece of conversation really had me thinking about this, like this difficulty with getting people to think about how the indigenous traditions of wholeness are just such a difficult fit with kind of modern life. So like stewardship, for example, doesn't have a good translation into Spanish, and it doesn't have a good parallel into sort of indigenous traditional knowledge, right? Because you're no more the steward of your mother than you are the steward of the earth, right? You're one and of it. You're not necessarily in charge of it, right? And I find it quite easy to get colleagues or students to think about stewardship. Oh, yes, we take care of it better. But that's not the worldview that allows people to be part of this larger, beautiful, as you said, sort of river of life.
DF: 48:47
Well, I think obviously that I'm championing a position that's at this point in our human story is kind of, at least in the Western story, is a minority position. But I think it's growing. I think there are more and more people. I mean, I'm certainly encouraged by the number of people who have read my work and gotten in touch with me in various ways to let me know they were moved or that they found that it agreed with their own perspectives. And so I think it's a growing movement. I just think we're finding ourselves sort of back towards the beginning of this kind of new way of understanding the human story and who we are with respect to the rest of life on Earth. So my perspective is one of optimism. I think it's going to get better. I think we're going to, uh, more and more, uh, come to terms with the real human story, but, uh, that's been an obstacle that we've struggled with. And, uh, in writing books like coyote, America, American Serengeti, and, and recently while new world, I mean, I've, I've, uh, sort of forced myself to confront this head on. And it's been a very sobering thing. I mean, some of the stories that I have to tell in Wild New World, stories that I know most Americans don't know anything about. Most Americans have some passing familiarity with, okay, once there were millions of buffalo and then there were only a few. But hardly anyone knows many of these other stories and about the sense of biological and genetic diversity that we destroyed when we got here because we didn't understand this fundamental thing that we've been talking about in the last few minutes. So it's a way, coming to terms with who we are, is a way of creating a much more positive future and not just for the other wild things on the planet, but for us as well.
EW: 51:04
Your optimism is encouraging. Thank you. But I think, you know, there's a wide front out there to navigate. And dear readers, if you haven't picked up Coyote America or Wild New World or Horizontal Yellow or any of Dan's other books, please do. They're so great.
MB: 51:23
They're worth every minute of your time to read or to listen. Of course, the audio book thing, right? So many of my students are really into the audio book thing. So listen or read! All right. Well, thank you, Dan, for joining us. Emily, you have to run off and do another part of your job. So we will say goodbye for now, but hopefully here's to coyotes and being wily.
DF: 51:47
Absolutely. Thanks so much. It's been a great pleasure to be with you.
EW: 51:51
Thank you so much, Dan. Really appreciate it.
MB:
And that's it for this episode of More Than: A Podcast. We hope you've loved what you've learned and we hope it's made you think a little bit differently about nature and about history. We hope you've learned more about the world around you and the histories and stories that make up those places and those more than human beings who are so important to our historical past. We want to thank our guests and our amazing producer, Ruxandra Guidi. We'd also like to give credit to Jason Shaw, who composed our music, Back to the Woods. We'd also like to cite our sound effects from the BBC, and we'll give more specific citation information on our website. There, you can also find sources that we've used and links to other interesting stories to continue your learning. So go check out morethanapodcast.earth. If you'd like to, please leave a review about this podcast and be sure to tune in next time for the next episode of More Than: A Podcast.