#942 - Dan Flores

Joe Rogan (0:02)

Three, two, boom, we're live. How are you, sir?

Dan Flores (0:09)

I'm very good, Joe. It's good to meet you, man.

Joe Rogan (0:11)

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 Rinello, which was amazing.

What a crazy animal that is. You know, I have coyotes all around my neighborhood, and it became 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. I'm like, 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 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, Dan.

Dan Flores (0:56)

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 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.

Joe Rogan (1:52)

That is so fascinating that in our lifetime, they have spread from the American Southwest to every single state and literally every single city in the country.

Dan Flores (2:01)

Yeah, that's true.

Joe Rogan (2:03)

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.

Dan Flores (2:17)

Yeah, 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 small wolves.

Joe Rogan (2:38)

Did I send you this, Jimmy?

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.

Dan Flores (3:04)

Yeah, it's one of the many things that's probably happening when they're howling. They are taking a census, basically, of coyote populations in the area, and the result of that census can very well be. It produces some sort of chemical or metabolic change 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 Georgia bounty, because in South Carolina, it's another place where coyotes are fairly new, have 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 whitetail deer fawns. And so the hunters are screaming long and loud about this because it means it's getting harder to take a whitetail.

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.