#954 - Justin Brown

Joe Rogan (0:03)

Five, four, three, two, one.

And we're live with Justin Brown. Justin, first of all, I'm very upset to give you such a small badge. What's up with that?

Justin Brown (0:14)

Yeah, no, it's nice and tiny there. Not law enforcement, so.

Joe Rogan (0:17)

It seems like you should have, like, you've, there's some badge there, there's some enforcement, right?

Justin Brown (0:22)

It sure looks like it, doesn't it? But yeah, no law enforcement on my end, just the biologists.

Joe Rogan (0:27)

Well, listen, man, I've read about your work in an online article. I don't remember where it was, but about coyotes in the urban area all around Los Angeles. And I've been fascinated by this since I moved to LA. The first time I saw a coyote was in 1994 when I first moved here.

I was in Burbank and I had an apartment in what, you know, those, they have those pre-furnished Oakwoods Gardens apartment on Olive Street. You know where that is?

Justin Brown (0:54)

Not off the top of my head, but...

Joe Rogan (0:55)

It's where people always, when they transition to LA, they get one of these pre-furnished apartments, you know.

Anyway, I'm driving up Olive and I saw these coyotes. And it was the first time I'd ever seen a coyote. And I was like, this is crazy. Like, this is in Burbank. This is in a residential area. And they were just hanging out. And I pulled over and I stopped and I rolled down the window and I was staring at them, and they're staring at me and they didn't give a shit about me. They were so calm and they didn't run.

And I just remember thinking, this is so strange. These are like wild dogs that live like right amongst us. And then from then on, I've had some encounters. I had a coyote steal a chicken from my yard. I watched him hop the fence with a chicken in his mouth. I've had quite a few encounters with coyotes, but I'm absolutely fascinated by them.

Justin Brown (1:45)

I mean, they've been amazing. I've been working with them now for almost 15 years.

Actually, a little bit more than that now. And I've seen them do some amazing things. I mean, they're able to live in some of the most urban environments we can imagine. I mean, I'm tracking them right next to, I don't know if you know where the West Lake neighborhood is in downtown LA, but I had a coyote running that neighborhood, which when I first drove through there, so I worked in Chicago for a long time. We were tracking coyotes in some incredibly urban areas there, like right along Lakeshore Drive in Chicago.

But in Chicago, there's some green spots where when you get down in LA, there's not a lot of open spots. There's some little vacant lots and stuff.

But I tracked this coyote for about nine months down there in that area, and she was just amazing. She was running the streets. She came to hang out in these little vacant lots. And what was even more amazing is that no one was really complaining about her. We actually talked to people in some of the housing stuff. They were actually fascinated to see them versus being like, they're in my backyard. What are they doing?

Joe Rogan (2:35)

Well, people have always had a weird relationship with coyotes. I had Dan Flores on the podcast last month, who's the author of Coyote America.

And he's a wildlife historian and has just some amazing insight into the relationship the coyotes had way back with the Native Americans. They thought they were gods in a lot of ways.

Justin Brown (2:56)

Yeah, I actually listened to your podcast with Dan. It was great. Dan's got some pretty interesting facts just in his book in general, things I didn't actually know about before. It's kind of nice to have a historian tie in some of the facts. I get asked lots of questions about where the coyotes came from, how they're moving around.

And so it's nice to have something like Dan's book to kind of reference people to.

Joe Rogan (3:15)

I think most people in the downtown LA probably welcome something like a coyote because it's kind of cool, you know, to have this thing like hanging around you, as long as you don't have a dog or a cat that it snatches.

Justin Brown (3:25)

Yeah, and that's definitely the case. A lot of people think it's cool, but they do cause problems.

I'm actually dealing with one in the Silver Lake neighborhood that keeps going up to people walking their dogs and trying to, it's got a den in somebody's backyard, it's actually denning under their deck, so the deck's open, and she put our seven pups underneath this den.