All right, breaking with patterns here. This is still one of my picks, but instead of a movie, it is a series of books. And I could think of no one better to talk about this with than with my wife, the wonderful Ariel. So join me and her for the Alpha Wolves of yellowstone by Rick McIntyre. This will be fun. Live from the bedroom.

I know it feels really intimate. Well, it's like we can pretend we're camping in Yellowstone.

I was like, I needed a smaller room. That wouldn't be so echoey. But if I went into my office, I thought the dogs were going to be a complete nightmare.

Oh, you bet they would.

Also, my 3D printer is going right now.

Yeah, the entourage likes to follow me, and we have a noisy pack.

Yeah, they don't always follow just you, but if both of us are in that room.

Oh, there's no way they'd be outside that room.

No, it's no good. So I guess you have technically been on the show before, so we don't really need to do all that much introduction, but if people. All right, so if anybody needs to be reminded, this is where we're joined today by Ariel, who is my partner and wife and the person who I live with all the time and who I can sometimes make read books.

Although in this case, I made you read these books.

Kind of. You.

Well, it started with a podcast.

Yeah, you made me listen to a podcast episode. And then you're like, you should read the book. And I read all the books. And then I was like, well, now you have to read the books because you hadn't. You didn't start off ahead of me.

Yeah, I think you're right. You read the books before I did.

Yeah. Here, I'm going to adjust this a little bit. It's going to point up like that.

Okay, there we go. It's starting. It was higher. And then it's been like.

Yeah, it's. You can only crank down on that so much. Right. We could move it if we need.

To, but my microphone has erectile dysfunction.

Well, it's because we're podcasting from our bed.

The pressure's on.

Yeah. Of all of the available podcast recording locations, this was probably the best, but it is a bit weird. So if there's a bit of jank, no apologies, because fuck you guys.

We live here.

Yeah. So we are here to talk. We're here today to talk about. Does this have an official series name? I think it does.

Oh, and I'm rich. Rick McIntyre.

Rick McIntyre is the author. I'm gonna see if I can get this correct because I was messing with.

This and I think it's my fault.

Oh, okay. Yeah, you have to really, like, really crank down on it. All right, let me check my Libby app.

Shout out to Libby. For those of you who don't know, this is a psa. It is an app that collaborates with many public libraries across the U.S. i don't know about other countries, but you can check out ebooks and audiobooks on your phone or tablet and it automatically returns them for you.

Yeah, it's great.

It's a win, win, win.

And you should know that any kind of numbers that you like, any usage of a local library helps them justify their existence and funding.

So support your local library.

Even going out in Libby and getting an audiobook or getting a regular book via them helps them stay in business. Yeah.

Even if you forget to read it, if you checked it out, it's still good for them. So just check out a bunch of books.

Yeah, libraries are fucking fantastic. So this is the Alpha Wolves of Yellowstone is what the series is called, actually. Oh, the Alpha W. So we're gonna. I mean, we're gonna cover all four of them that have been released so far. That is the rise of Wolf 8, the reign of Wolf 21, the redemption of Wolf 302, and the Alpha Female Wolf.

Yes.

So this backstory for these books is that in 1926, I believe it was, the last wolf was shot in Yellowstone.

The last wolf native to Yellowstone was shot there.

Yes, the last one that existed there. Right. So they had exterminated all of the wolves. There were still coyotes and some other. And bears. There were still other predators, but specifically the lupus Lupus, the American timber grey wolf had been exterminated from this area. And in fact, that was part of a much larger extermination effort that went through basically, not all of. But a vast majority of the United States.

Yeah. They even implemented biological warfare on the wolves. Releasing. Was it mange?

Yeah, mange, yeah.

To try to kill them. It's absolutely brutal and sad story.

And so wolves were basically pushed back up into Canada and Alaska. In 1995, an effort finally came to fruition to return wolves to Yellowstone. A bunch of biologists and naturalists were like, hey, you know what? We kind of fucked up the ecosystem by removing the peak predator.

Yeah. And he addresses it in the Alpha Female Wolf, the most recent book that he released as of today. But he talks about one of the guys who helped exterminate the wolves sort of immediately was like, oh, no, what have we done.

And so for the purposes of our narrative, we start in 1985 with these reintroduction of some Canadian wolves that were captured in various parts of the Canadian Rockies and released in Yellowstone.

Yeah, but they captured a couple packs. Right?

They were family groups as best they could.

Yes, yes. They weren't necessarily wolves that didn't know each other. They tried to keep wolves that knew each other kind of together.

Right. But there were some exceptions. Yes. So they did the best they could, but they took. They grabbed a couple of as much of a pack as they could and they shoved a couple of lone wolves in there as well. For like, there was a group that didn't have an alpha male, for example.

You guys figure it out.

Yeah. So they brought them down to Yellowstone and there was a particular. I don't know what his official title was beforehand. He was a park ranger in. For a while he was in Denali national park in Alaska. And for a while he was like at Big Bend and some other desert parks. A guy named Rick McIntyre who, when he was in Denali, had observed bears and wolves specifically, and really fell in love with wolves, apparently. And when this reintroduction process started, sort of made it his life's mission to just go watch wolves as much as possible.

Mission accomplished.

Which he fucking followed through with.

Nailed it.

Yeah. So he moved to Yellowstone, got a job working as a park ranger in Yellowstone, and then convinced them to make up a position for him so that he could spend all of his time watching wolves and then sitting out at roadsides with a spotter scope. The wolf ambassador, just showing people wolves. Like, here, come up to my spotterscope and look through this hole and you can see like through a telescope basically.

At wild wolves, which actually, I'm glad he convinced them to do it because it was a wildly successful program and so many people have fallen in love with wolves because of him.

And so he, over the course of these books, Rick McIntyre occasionally mentions that, like, okay, this was my 300th day in a row going out to watch wolves. Oh, this was my 3,000th day. Oh, this was my 5,000th day. Oh, I beat. What was it? Hank Aaron's record, like, awesome baseball player, a number of consecutive days. He beat that in consecutive day. Or that guy was consecutive games played. He beat it in consecutive days and then he doubled it. And like the guy like, literally like without a break for 15 years, during.

One stretch out there every day, waking.

Up at like the crack of dawn 4 or 5am some days to go out, taking a break in the middle of the day, because this is northern.

Latitudes, the sun comes up early in the summer.

Yeah, yeah. So it's entirely possible that no person in the history of humanity has seen wolves as much as this guy has.

Quite possible, yeah.

Like it would have to be an extraordinary circumstance for someone to have spent more concentrated effort observing wolves in the wild than Rick McIntyre. And then he has decided to write a series of books, each one broadly focusing on a single wolf. The start is with the first generation of introduced wolves, with the rise of Wolf 8, then following on that one to the Druid pack for two.

The next generation.

Well, yeah, for a couple of generations. And that's the next two books, Reign of Wolf 21 and the Redemption of 302. And then the final one was the alpha female wolf. This one's the least targeted, I would say.

Yeah. He sort of goes over all the alpha female wolves that he's seen.

Kind of how they behave, kind of. He is nominally following a wolf known as the 06 female, which was possibly the most famous wolf during her lifetime. They called her a rock star. Apparently she had a. Because of the location of her denning area and their range, she was quite close to where he was observing a lot of the time. And she was also, as I gather it, less afraid of people in terms of just like she didn't avoid crowds, like she didn't come up and approach people, but she tended to show up when there were still crowds around that way that some other ones wouldn't. So lots of people got to see this wolf in.

Super charismatic, super charismatic, badass.

And for tragic reasons ends up in the news, which causes a lot of changes in legislation. Yeah. So very, very famous. But that particular book he spends a little bit more time talking about some stuff on either side of her story, the beginning and the end, in a way that he didn't with the other one. So it feels possibly the least focused of the series. This. What's the easiest way to sum up what it's like to listen to the.

Story of Rick McIntyre talking a lot like. Well, especially the first book. It's a lot like field notes because he talks about like, you know, today I went to this location and I saw, you know, these wolves and they're like, you know, 8:12 or, you know, they all have numbers.

Yes.

And only they try to have at least two wolves collared per pack.

Yes.

And that it's so cool to kind of see the evolution of the collars because initially all they do is beep and if the wolf stays in one location for more than four hours, then it beeps at twice the rate.

And they call that a mortality sickle.

Exactly. And so it's one of those things. And now it's like, oh, now they have GPS and so they can like look and be like, it's over here. They don't have to just, you know, go by helicopter and look around. Although, did you catch that? The two helicopter pilots hook up and get.

No, I missed that.

I thought that was so sweet. It made me so happy.

So. So yeah, we touched on all of the wolves. He's very stringent about, for the most part, only using the numbers for the wolves. This is. That's both a blessing and a curse. I think it lends a lot of authoritative scientific quality to his writing because he. This is the thing that they do to not induce bias in themselves. Right.

They're being objective.

They're being objective. It's just like the first wolf collared gets. Right. I have to say that works really well in the first couple of books. When we're in first single and then double digits. And the further that we go into the books and I'm dealing. I am personally hearing him say the guy who reads the audiobook reading out three digit numbers. And I'm like, okay, I can't remember who's who at certain points. I do know a couple of the three digit ones, but it gets harder. But you do. He centers at least the first three very strongly on particular individuals. So in the case of the first book, it's Wolf 8, which is one of the original ones. Brought down. Wolf 21, I think. I don't know if he had been born or not when he was brought in.

I think he was. I think he was a. He was a puppy.

Yeah. He might have either been born in Yellowstone or he was very, very young, less than a year when he was brought in. And we get to watch him through the course of his life.

We get to see him grow up.

We get to see him grow up. And then we start to see a little bit of the next one in his story because there's an overlap there with those two. And then the last one is. Or not the last one. The third of the three of the trilogy of alpha male books is about 302. Who is. Was very charismatic at the time. We're gonna have to talk about 302 a little bit. Okay, so. And then the last one is where he talks about the 06 female. Like I said, it's very. You get A really strong sense of, especially those three alpha males. You get a really strong sense of a character out of these. Obviously that is an sort of an editorial decision coming from Rick McIntyre. He is telling a story, he's constructing a narrative, but he's doing it from somebody who has observed these animals more than anyone alive certainly. And he does also spends because he is part of this community of wolf watchers and he obviously works at Yellowstone and works with people who are doing, you know, stringent research. Lots of times he mentions aside, he's like, I called up a behavioral scientist and asked them about this particular behavior and they gave me some explanation, some insight from their research. So he's not just sitting out. He's not a wild man in the woods making up his own stories. He is grounding this in his own observations and in the observations of scientists and research that's been done.

And he collaborates with lots of people.

So I feel like he. If you're going to get the most accurate, like far more even than like when you watch something like Planet Earth or another Attenborough documentary where they have to construct a narrative, I feel like peeking behind the scenes of those. They are really constructing a narrative out of the shots they get because they don't get to. They don't necessarily get to watch all of a single hunt by a lion, for example. Right. So they really are cutting highlight reel.

And cut something together.

And they will cut things together in a way that is true to the, to the overall.

But it might not be what happened that day exactly.

You might be seeing like four different hunts cut together into a single narrative. Which works to educate the public, but definitely feels a little bit. It's not as.

I would contrast this more with. I love Jane Goodall, but she has since said that she sort of regrets the way she sort of anthropomorphized the chimps that she worked with, like giving them names like, you know, David and stuff like that. And also just like she's like, maybe we shouldn't have fed the chimps when they were, you know, having or snuggle the babies. You know, it's like, this is not like that. This is. He is strictly from a pretty far distance. He's not even close to them.

Yeah, no, he is observing them through, he says a spotter scope. But if you don't know what that is, think telescope. Basically. Like, this is a. This is a high power magnification device that he's seeing from a distance.

The wolves probably, like, if they know he's There.

I'm sure they know he's there, but they're not.

He's not watching him super closely because he's very far away.

And they talk a lot about how, like, if an animal, any of the animals gets too acclimated to humans, they have a like, escalating series of things that they will do in order to try to like, induce them to be like, to avoid humans. Yes. Because it's super dangerous for them.

Yeah.

And for both. Right?

Yes. If the wolves show that they have sort of a two strikes thing where like if.

Well, before they even get to strikes, like if they start getting close to humans first they wave their arms and be like, run away, get away. Then they will. They use firecrackers. Eventually.

Loud noises. Yeah.

And then it becomes a thing where, like, if they talk about this a little bit more with the bears, where if they start going in and interacting with campsites or vehicles or things like that.

Getting people's food from the trash.

Exactly. Then they roll.

If people are giving them food, then that is a. Yeah, that's tragic. Don't feed the wild animals.

Don't feed it. Yeah. So to come back to what I was saying is you do get a very clear. He's obviously constructing. He is anthropizing these animals to a certain extent. But I feel like you definitely get the impression that he's doing it sort of the bare minimum that he can in order to construct a narrative. Yes.

It's very like. And then I saw a raised leg urination and she followed up with a squat urination over it. And he's like, this means he'll translate what he. To what it means in wolf language.

He also is very clear about when he is drawing a conclusion for the sake of a story. He always caveats it in language of. I felt that this meant that.

Or I like to think.

I like to think that this was the case, not this is what was going on. He's very careful about when he is talking. If he feels like he's talking out of turn.

Because we can't know.

Because we can't know. So let's. We're gonna have to. This is not a. I feel like spoilers is not a thing you can do here because these are like this.

Read the books, people.

For sure. Read the books. If there's only. If you don't want to listen to anything else of the rest of however long this podcast ends up being, we are recording. Right? Yeah. Yeah, okay. Sorry. I'm nervous because it's a weird. It's a weird setup I haven't done. I haven't used this guy in like 5 years. So read the books. They are really, really good. I got all of them on Libby except for Alpha Female, which I think is on there now.

It depends on what your local library has.

Yeah, but like, just do it. Just do it. They're so good. At least read. At least read the first one, rise of Wolf 8. I don't think you can jump straight into 21, which I think is the one that is the best. But. But Rise of Wolf 8 is so good on its own that if you like. It's not.

If you read rise of Wolf 8 and you're like, oh, yeah, that was good. You're definitely gonna want to read.

You're gonna want to read all of them at that point.

Wolf 21.

And if you don't get caught up in rise of Wolf 8, then I don't want to know you. But also probably. It's okay. You probably wouldn't like the rest of them.

Yeah, yeah. If you find out you don't like it after the first book. Yeah, they're not for you.

So the story. We're going to have to talk about the actual stories of these wolves because I'm sure the policy is always that with one exception, which is already in this season, this can be your preparatory thing where you can come in and listen to us talk about it and then you can go experience it for yourself. So we will give you a broad. Because we're going to have to give you some context if you haven't already read these books. So the Rise of Wolf 8 follows Wolf 8, who is one of the very first generation of wolves brought into Yellowstone. They originally brought in two packs and they had them in two pens. And that's how the.

Yeah, they put them in acclimatization pens first.

Right.

So they're like, you're stuck in this more limited area so that they don't just run off.

Right, right. So they get used to the area. And then. So they were in there for like a couple of weeks or months, I think it was. It wasn't that long. It was. It was not like a whole year.

And then the alpha male.

Okay, so wolf, I want to give. Because it's about Wolf 8 and Wolf 8 was of the. There was two ones and one was the Rosie Creek pack. And that's the one that we're talking. That's where 21 was. But Wolf 8 was from the other pen, which I do not remember the name of off the top of my head, I don't either, which is not super important. That pack does not last.

Is it named after the leaf hold?

No.

Was it the Leopold Pact?

No, because they didn't get named. I don't think they got named that urgently. It's fine. That's not super important. He was part of a different pack. He was a yearling when he was first brought in. So he was less than 2 years old, but not a puppy anymore. So they let all these wolves out of their pens after being acclimated. So he's running around. But one thing to know about the way wolf packs work is that at a certain age the wolves go and go, okay, I'm done with the family for a while. I'm gonna go start off on my own. He might have been too. Anyway, he was young enough that he was about to go do that, so he.

I thought he was just one, I.

Can'T quite remember, but he was very young. He was not young, but he was the. He was not the alpha of his own pack.

Right.

But he starts going out. Oh, and he was importantly the smallest of the wolves in his group. He was a scrawny little boy.

They weren't expecting him to survive. Wait, wasn't he. Oh, he had a couple brothers that were fighting over a scrap of meat and.

Well, yeah, he got beat up in the pen a lot is what they were. What they were observing.

Well, I remember a story and tell me if this, I'm thinking the wrong wolf, but they were just puppies and they were fighting over a scrap of meat and a bear came up and the other two, like, it was clear the bear was gaining on him, so.

Oh, yeah.

And turns around and like sort of tells off a bear. The bear was so surprised it worked.

And Rick McIntyre happened to observe this when nobody. When none of the wolves even saw.

It other than Wolfe. Yeah, yeah, it was just him and Wolf8. It was their little. And the bear, I guess. And the bear.

Yeah, you're right. That is. That was wolf 8. Yeah, I think it was. I think it was a yearling at that point.

Yeah, he was a little guy.

Yeah, he was a little guy.

Yeah.

So the, part of the. So this is. This is the first year that they're having. They have wolves in Yellowstone. The other pack, the one that he was not part of was the Rosie Creek pack. And that was. I do not remember any of the other numbers, but they had like Wolf 9, I think was the alpha female of that group and they had. They brought in. They did not have an alpha male at the time when they were first brought in. They brought in a second guy, a second wolf.

Oh. And he had pups with her.

And he had. Yes. And then she was a young mother to these like baby, baby pups. And he was shot illegally outside the park. So, like. And this is like the first year that like, wolves are back in Yellowstone. Yes.

Let them out of the pen. And they were like, oh, crap.

And he basically, like, immediately. Sorry. So he like immediately goes outside the park and gets shot.

Yes.

And so they've got like a new mother who has a bunch of her own little pups. Well, she doesn't have any siblings at that time.

No one to help her hunt.

No one to help her hunt. And young wolves can't regulate their temperature, so they can't be left alone for very long. So they're like, oh, crap. One of our initial packs is going to die in the first year. So they make the elective decision to put the pack back in the holding pen. And instead through the course of the winter they were going to feed them animal meat and stuff that they could get. And so they have to gather up all of the. All of the Rosy Creek pack and shove them back in. And so there's like a three or four or five month period where the Rosy Creek pack is back in the holding pen. But the other wolves, the other. The other pack name, which I cannot remember, are free, including Wolf 21. And during this period of.

Wolf 8.

Wolf 8. Excuse me. During this period of time, Wolf 8 discovers the pack within the holding pen. In the holding pen. And I believe, if I remember correctly, a couple of the puppies from that pack had gotten out of the pen but were kind of hanging around outside.

Of it, and he sort of corrals them.

So he makes friends with them, basically.

Yes. Yeah. And didn't he eventually get into the pen too?

No, I think he was just hanging around the whole time. However, we will jump forward a little bit because this is Rick McIntyre helps them feed the animals in or helps them feed animals to the Rosy Creek pack. And this is his first encounter with Wolf21, who's a little. I mean, he's a puppy, but he's a big puppy and already exhibiting the thing of like, okay, I'm gonna put myself between you and the rest of my family because I'm a puppy, but somebody's gotta be.

He's scrappy doo.

Yep. Well, except big.

Yeah. Well, yeah, but he was.

Except big a puppy. Yeah. So what happens is that when they finally let the Rosie Creek back out of their pen. Wolf8 moves in and has already gotten himself to all the puppies and so just moves in and becomes the new alpha of this pack. So in the course of doing that, he adopts all of these young puppies and interestingly, I never had, Never heard either way. But in lots of, lots of other social mammals, when a new male comes into a established family, the first thing they do is kill all of the babies. Because they want their babies, they want to breed females.

They don't want competition. Yeah.

And that is apparently just not how wolves work. No wolves. The number of times that a new alpha male comes in and spends a year raising the previous male's puppies is just super normal.

Well, and it's sort of what, what it comes down to. And Rick McIntyre says this in every book, but especially in the alpha female wolf, he talks about how the females are really the runners of the pack. And so as an incoming male, you would want to ingratiate yourself to the female by being in good with her kids.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So it's, it's one of those things where it's like. It's not like the way the lions or the bears do it, you know?

Yeah, yeah. Where like. Yeah, you really do have. The alpha male has to come in and sort of toe the line a little bit.

Exactly. And he also talks about how he's never seen any male wolf, like, beat up a female. Like, they, like, you can tell they have, you know, spats, but there's never physical violence between them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so Wolf8 comes in, he raises the first generation of adoptees, including Wolf21, who we'll talk about further later. And Rick McIntyre, he comes in and he's a good alpha. He hunts. He's a very successful alpha male. He has several generations of puppies. I think he lives to be like seven or eight.

I want to say eight, but I'm not sure.

And through that time, he is not a big, strong male. He's a small guy, kind of a wily guy. And interestingly, Rick McIntyre says he never, in all of his observations, he has no evidence that Wolf8 ever killed a rival.

That's right.

Yes.

He would always, like, once he defeated a rival, he'd sort of like, sort of like gentleman's duel.

Yeah. Like once they were beat up, he'd.

Let them go at first blood, you're over kind of thing.

And in fact, so the, that's jumping ahead a little bit because the. I think it's like on the second year they bring in the next set of wolves. So again they had gone up to one part of the Canadian Rockies. They go to a second part of the Canadian Rockies.

I thought they went to Michigan.

I think they're all from the Canadian Rockies. I'm. Because they're bringing them south into the American Rockies which are part of the same thing. There is a wolf reserve in Canada just outside of Michigan. It's an island. We had a whole discussion about it and maybe that's what you're thinking of. But so anyway, they bring in another set. Now in that set of two packs there's like this legendarily big wolf. No, wait, the legendary big wolf is that we were talking about the one who destroyed his cage. That's 21's dad, that's the one who ended up getting shot. They bring that. Wait, listen, next year they bring in another set of wolves and one of them happens to be an incredibly aggressive pack of wolves. They get settled in, their holding pin is at Druid Peak. So they end up being called the Druid Pack. So one thing that is interesting is they always kind of name them after a location that they're, that they're located at with a couple of exceptions who are named after people. So you end up with him discussing the Rosie Creek pack versus the Druids versus the Blacktails versus the Molly versus the Mollies. Yeah, so you do kind of follow these sort of families over time. And so the Druid pack comes in and they are like very aggressive. They're a big pack, they've got big members and they are an immediate threat to the Rosy Creek pack which is where Wolf 8 is. And this is with Young 21. With Young 21. But like not, I mean he's kind of on his, a little bit on his own at that point. They have, they have yearlings and stuff. And this is when Rick McIntyre sees Little Eight fight the druid alpha male at one point and beat the crap out of him and not kill him and send him with his tail packing. And like we're talking about like a, I don't know, like a 30 or 40 pound difference, like a massive. The way underdog McIntyre was like he.

Thoroughly expected Wolf8 to get killed. You know, this was not a fair fight. But Wolf, Wolf 8 prevailed.

Wolf 8 prevailed.

And not only that he let the rival go.

Yes. And the, in fact the he was talking about this could be in part because Wolf8 had had so much experience fighting wolves bigger than him because he had been Beat up by his brothers for so long. But he also had a certain amount of compassion for the losers. For the losers. So he never killed a rival. Within a year or two of the Druid peak pack coming in, they lose their alpha male too. I do not remember if that was from illegal hunting or not. I think that one was. He got killed by an elk. I think he got killed by an elk.

Hunting is dangerous.

Hunting for wolves is very dangerous. They are, at least in Yellowstone. Their primary prey is elk. And wolves are an adult wolf. Female wolf's about 100 pounds. An adult male is about 120 on average. There's some variation in there. Yeah. A full grown elk is like 300 or 400 pounds. And the next option after an elk is a bison which are like a thousand pounds. So it is very dangerous. So they often get killed during their own hunts. But. So the Druid alpha male gets killed and Wolf8's adopted son, 21 moves over to the Druid pack and becomes their new alpha male. And there's tension, but the two of them seem to find an understanding. There's a whole thing about Rick McIntyre eventually sees a confrontation between the two of them. And 21 sort of deftly maneuvers things such that he doesn't end up having to fight Wolf8.

He makes it into a non confrontation.

Yeah. And Wolf8 lives a long happy life, productive life. He ends up dying in a hunt. But you know, a successful job of being a wolf.

Yes. Better than anybody ever expected.

Yeah. And like, you know, like a real testament to what a small guy can do. And you know, and also the fact that he, you know, raised good sons and daughters, you know.

Yeah. Like 21 turned out to be like such like a, like, I don't know, he's kind of got Captain America vibes. Like I'm trying to think of like just like a big guy who's just super nice and ethical.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Yeah, it's interesting.

It likes to play with the puppies. That's one of those things, that biggest wolf letting the puppies like tackle him and like he'll roll over on his back for the puppies.

Right, right. So. So this is. Now we're getting into Wolf 21 territory. The right, the reign of Wolf 21. So 21 is the son of a legendarily big tough wolf that was the one that had. Was killed by illegal church.

Yeah. He like forced his way out of the pen.

Yeah, he broke his first pen. And then they like.

Because he was so huge, because he.

Was so big and strong. And Wolf 21 was his biological son and then raised by Wolf 8 who was.

So imagine a big guy who's raised by a nice. Yeah, nice. Who's the honey I shrunk the kids guy?

Rick Moranis.

Rick Moranis.

And it's. Okay. So you can tell that Rick McIntyre does have his influence. You can tell which ones he really likes. Yes, he really likes 21 and I do not blame him. I also really love 21.

I mean, like, what's not to like?

Wolf 21 is. Yeah. He describes him as like, he's a big. He also has a tendency not to kill rivals. I don't know that he has the same perfect record that Wolf8 does.

Right. But he, he learned a lot from.

Wolf8 and he spends far more of his time than you might expect playing with the puppies. He's a super, like, fun loving guy. And he comes into the Druid Peak Pack at the time their alpha female is, well, 40, who is a super hyper aggressive female.

She is so mean.

She's so mean. So this is also a thing that I did not expect. I kind of knew that wolves were matriarchal in terms of who runs things. But how aggressive the alpha female is is the determining factor about how aggressive the pack is because she calls the shots in a way that I think I didn't quite understand.

She's responsible for the culture of the family.

Yes. And so the Druid Peak Pack being a. Being a hyper, violent, very aggressive pack was pretty much 40 doing that. Does not. She is not an in group, out group kind of person or kind of wolf. She hates pretty much everybody or. Well, she asserts her dominance over brunette January, including her sisters and other fellow pack members. So we get a very fairly detailed explanation of like the first couple of years of the Druid Peak packs of what? 21 is part of the Druid Peak Pax livelihood where he's got. I think there's three breedable females in.

There at the time. 42, 40 and 30.

I do not know that yet.

Okay.

Less important on that.

Yeah, yeah. We don't know about the other ones.

I cannot remember. But there was three breed. And so. And like 40 went and like killed her sister's pups so that there was more resources for hers.

Yes.

Not like 100% certain, but like pretty certain.

Yeah. And like. And you can tell it's one of those things too where it's like some of this is editorializing, but it sounded like 21 really liked 42. The more subservient sister.

Yeah.

Because they would flirt. To hear him tell it, the amount.

Of time that I've seen dogs flirt.

So I believe him. He knows what he's saying.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, he's a guy who's observed wolves more than anybody else. You can kind of tell when they like each other. I believe him when he thinks they like each other.

Yeah, yeah. And he. He did mate with 40 also. He would breed all three females.

Yeah.

Which is they all three had puppies for multiple years in a row and consistently, like, they'd come out of the den and only 40 would have pups because they'd each. They'd all three have their own den sites.

Yes.

And then the other two females would leave the density. There were no pups, and they'd go into 40s and help feed her pups.

Right. And he also spends quite a bit of time talking about 42 and her behavior in, like, basically being the nice team builder in comparison to Forty's hyper aggression, where when Forty would attack another female, 42 would then go and like, you know, be with her and play with her and like, be nice and all that stuff. My wife is being distracted by dogs.

He's being really cute.

Anyway. So he then describes what seems to the narrative that he sort of constructs, although he does couch this in. I'm not entirely sure I know what happened, but he thinks that Rick McIntyre thinks that at some point 40 went after 42's pups. Again, this was in the middle of the denning season, so they've all. There's three females with puppies in different dens. He sees the tracking of 40 go over to 42's den and then a couple of days later finds 40 dead. And the narrative that he.

From injuries caused by wolves.

Yes. Because they do a postmortem after wolves, so they get a cause of death. And his narrative is that 42 finally fought back and she had allies on her side when she decided to fight back because she was more well liked because she wasn't such a heinous bitch. But like, so now. And this is the. This is like a V crowning moment for 42, who I think is. As much as I love 21, 42 is like, there's a reason why there's a statue of her at the visitor center. She. The last couple of years she's lost her pups because her sister came and murdered them. So when her sister comes in and she now has to kill her sister to protect her own pups, her Response is to then take her pups, her.

Newborn, to her sister's den.

She takes them to her sister's den and then also gets the other female to bring her pups to that same den and they raise all of them, including the ones of her little nieces and nephews.

It was really, it was well put. When Rick is explaining, like, he sees 42 and the other wolf going to the den where 40's pups are, and 40's gone now, and he's like, oh, they're gonna kill him. And then he's like, wait, there's a lot of pups. Oh, my gosh, it's all of them. It has to be.

And this has led to the following couple of breeding seasons. They are quite. I mean, if you measure an Alpha couple's effectiveness by the number of pups that they are able to keep alive through a season, like, I think they kept all of their pups alive through that season. Yeah, something very close to it. Like, they might have lost like one. So they had three full letters. This leads to the Druid Peak Pack being the largest recorded wolf pack of all time in all scenarios. We have never seen a larger pack of wolves.

To be fair, we haven't been doing this for very long.

I still.

But, like, no, it's huge.

It's huge. Yeah, no, I think that doesn't. I'm not saying that it's the biggest one that ever existed. I'm saying it's the one that we have the most that we have evidence for. But like, I mean, come on, like, that's a huge. Yeah, that's huge. And so over the course there's. So that's. I think that's like third or fourth year of 21 being the alpha there. So he's probably four or five at that point.

Yeah.

And so he lives to be like.

10, I want to say. And one of the oldest wolves.

Yeah, he lives an incredible amount of time as the alpha. The entire time. Has a huge genetic lineage related to.

So many wolves in Yellowstone.

There's a natural cycle to a successful wolf pack, which is like they had this huge boom of puppies. Well, like a wolf pack, you're not just all going to hang around with your parents there because they want to go off and they want to have their own children and they don't want.

To breed with their parents.

Yeah, they're not going to breed with. They don't breed with close relatives, presumably be able to tell by smell and all that stuff. So there's a diaspora that Happens out of the Druid Creek pack. And like five packs, like start up with various children of 40 and 21. And the other female whose number I will not. I will. I'll kick myself when I remember it eventually. So like, like fully like two thirds of the wolves in Yellowstone at this point are relatives of 21. Like by the end of his. Of his tenure, the Druid Peac has kind of drifted off a little bit in numbers. They. You know, because that's how things work. And then the end of his story is that 42 is killed by other wolves right at the end of their life. Of like a natural.

Like, she's old.

She's old. It happens. And so I'm reading this book. At the end, I'm getting to the end of this book. I am at work, which is a bad move because he's. Cause Rick Moran. You reminded me of Rick Moranis. And now I'm gonna fucking say Rick Moranis for the rest of this goddamn podcast. Rick McIntyre. Rick McIntyre describes where he's like. He like he just kind of sees the life go out of Wolf 21.

It's so sad.

It's so sad.

He continues to look for 42 for.

The rest of his life, which is only like.

Which is only a few months.

He only lives a couple more months. In this situation, it's normal for an alpha male to leave the pack because at this point all of the remaining females are relatives of his. So he has no. Like he cannot continue to. And wolves do not have menopause and. Or anything like that. Like humans do. So both males and females can produce pups until they die. Right. So he's. Normally they would leave and go off to find it doesn't seem to be exactly what he did. Brick McIntyre describes. They found Wolf 21's body at like one of the rendezvous points for the Druid Creek pack. Rendezvous points are places where they gather up the pack to go hunt in different places. And it was a place that he had like often observed the two of them hanging out. And like. So he paints.

So sad.

He paints a very touching picture of the end of 21's life. Going to a place that he knew that he. Where he had last seen 40, 42 and like. But like and dying. He did not die of dial and death. He died a peaceful.

Yeah, yeah.

Like and like you could not have like for a wild wolf, you could not have asked for a better life than what 21 got. Yeah. And like to. In terms of if you can. If you can look if you can look at a list of accomplishments that a wolf could have like 21 like nailed all. Yeah 21 and 42. I do not want to do diminish her effect on this Duke. She was incredibly important as well. I think that. So in terms of effectiveness, I think that reign of Wolf 21 is the one that fucking got me.

Oh yeah. It's such a compelling story.

Really really good and I. Yeah really really love that. So redemption of 302.

You have thoughts?

I know I do have. I have some thoughts. So 302 is a. I forget what he swear he started in. What, in what Was he one of the blacktails? No, blacktail hadn't formed by then. He was a Jasper. I don't know Ridge or Jasper Creek. Anyway, he's from a different.

I've read these books over the course of months so it's been a while.

Anyway it's not. He was so Wolf 302 was commonly called Casanova. He's actually the subject of a television documentary which I need to see called the Black Wolf.

Yes, we do need to watch that.

I need to get a hold of it is the thing. I haven't been able to get a hold of it yet. So he is a. It's okay.

So he's the sexiest wolf these ladies have ever seen.

He is very personal. There is something about Wolf 302. Well so like there's various like. Like strategies a male wolf might have. And what his seems to have been was that he's pretty much a lone wolf for the most of the time or he hangs around with a pack but he spends a lot of his time going to other packs looking for females that have. Want an opportunity to mate but have not got one.

Right. So females that might be like 2 years old but they're still their familial pack so they can't breed with the male there.

Right. Cause it's their dad. So like they're not gonna be. They're not gonna mate with their dad but they wanna. They have the instinct to mate so he comes around and they throw themselves at him. He seems to be very charming. What's funny is that he is both incredibly charming for female wolves but also apparently people like. People love him too because everybody seems to like whenever they hear his story, they love his story and they always. They always.

He's also kind of. I was charmed by how intelligent he was.

He is very intelligent.

McIntyre talks about how he's not afraid of roads the same way that other wolves are. Yes, and that he knows to look both ways before cross.

Yeah, he's a sly guy. I got. And maybe this is.

He figured out how was he the one who figured out how bridges work? He's like, oh, you can go over here and then you can be in this other place without having to walk through the river.

Yeah. So I got just the hint of an impression from Rick McIntyre that he got a little bit sick of how much people loved Wolf 302.

I think he might be onto something.

It's like it's one of those things like he is trying his darndest to be like, to be fair and also like to present a wolf that everybody seems to love in the best positive light and he's not. The thing is he doesn't dislike 302 but he is. I mean here's the thing. He's now written two books by the time that he gets to 302 and I do think that he has started to figure out how to craft a narrative a little bit better and he's calling this the redemption of 302. So the place where he starts in the first part of that book, I think it's possible that maybe he's crafting a narrative that is not representative of his actual feelings. He's just doing it to tell a good story. But you definitely get this impression of like Jesus fucking Christ, this guy. And everybody seems, everybody seems to love him because you know, he's charismatic. But yeah, so 302 spends the first part of his life sort of hanging around various wolf packs, including the Druid Peak pack. So he actually has run ins with 21 who has good reason to keep other males away from his family.

Yeah, basically 21's incentive is don't impregnate all my daughters because that's just more mouths to feed and that responsibility will fall on him.

Yes, well, and also in a general sense keeping non familial males away from your family is a good idea just because other wolves are dangerous. Like by far the greatest threat to a wolf is other wolves. Like the. As Rick McIntyre is going through the series and talking about whenever they find a dead wolf and it's like in determined cause of death was determined to be other wolves.

Like it's all, it's, it's very common.

Like I think 21 might be the only one. 21 and 8 are like the only ones I can think of off the top of my head who weren't. That's the way nature do so but what's interesting is that eventually the 21 is no longer the alpha of the Druid peak pack. The alpha position would in the narrative of the human kingdom world like if this was a king giving it over to his son. The sort of natural replacement for that is 532. Is that correct Limpy? Did I get the number right?

Is it 538?

No.

I'm not sure.

See this is the problem with when you get to the three digits is that like. I see.

And then there's my lab where we have like four digit numbers for all the mice preceded by a letter.

253.

253.

See I don't think I was. Yeah. Oh yeah. Because 500 that's much later.

Yeah.

So yeah. So 253 is one of 21 sons. He's a big guy but he gets injured quite early.

In a coyote trap.

Yeah, in a coyote trap. And so he's. He's got a limp. Doesn't seem to slow him down. Love love 233 or 253. He's a great. He's a great guy. He then. But the thing is he can't. He can't you realistically that's not the alpha because you have to have a foreign male come in.

Yeah you can't. He can't breed with his sisters and.

Or so and it doesn't work. That's just not how things. So he. I love. I love 235 or sorry 253. He like he ended up in like frickin Utah. Like he ran way he diaspora'd out and went far and found another wild wolf. Because at this point the reintroduction in Yellowstone has been successful and the wolves are moving out into other territories. And I think there were still some in the wild northern parts of the Rockies. So he found a female. Unfortunately his mate was killed by a hunter and he himself was. I think that might have been the coyote trap. I think he was injured because he got injured twice. Yeah he did and I think that was the coyote trap and I think the first one was just like on a hunter from a wolf fight or something like that. But he. And so they caught him, brought him back to Yellowstone and released him again. And he rejoins up with the Druid peak pack for a minute and then leaves again. And I cannot remember the fate of 253. I think he might have ended up getting shot. But he's a.

He's just tenacious.

Just a tenacious. Yeah. So 302 comes in and is Briefly the alpha of the Druid peak pack, but then leaves again after being the alpha.

Yeah. Doesn't somebody sort of scare him away? And he's. He's, like, really apprehensive about fighting. He's.

No. So he. He joins with, I think, a brother and he's briefly the alpha, but then his younger brother, who's a bit bigger than him. It's like, same family, different litter. It's like two years, like a year younger than him. They both join, which is not that uncommon for multiple outsider males. Males to join in. We'll see it again. And I think he just was like, oh, I'm not the alpha here. Or his brother is like, no, I'm gonna do it, and took over. And then he goes off and then he ends up joining yet another, like a third pack. I think he ends up in the end of his life with yet another one. And this is the point where Rick McIntyre starts to soften up to 302 because we see a change in his character where he spends more and more of his time dedicated to the pack as opposed to running around doing his own thing.

Yeah. And I don't know if that's entirely fair because Rick does point out that even though 302 impregnates these females in various different packs, he will sort of take it in turn to visit all the different packs on the sly to, like, check up on them.

But there's a difference between coming in and checking up on a female and, like, staying and bringing her food. And bringing her food every day. Yeah. And but like, as 302, when he finally finds his, like, final home in I cannot remember the name of the final pack, he. You see a temperament change where he starts to dedicate more of himself to the actual pack, which if Rick McIntyre has a thesis for what a wolf should be, it's like a member of the pack, right?

Yeah, he definitely. There's sort of. It's understated, but it's definitely there where he sort of talks about, like, the honor code of wolves, kind of.

Yeah.

Because he mentions honor quite a bit.

Yeah.

The other thing that I will say about 302 that I find admirable is Rick talks about how at some.302 is injured during a hunt. I think he gets, like, kicked in the head or something. And because like we said, hunting is dangerous and for the longest time he is afraid to even feed from a carcass.

Oh, yeah, that's right.

Because, like, if the carcass moves, he like, yelps. And like backs away. He's like trying to steal food from puppies.

Straight up ptsd.

Yeah, yeah. And so but he ultimately he overcomes it, which is like. Yeah, that's so hard for like a wild animal to do that by themselves. Like, I mean I work with dogs that have issues and with human intervention, it's even hard to get them past stuff. So for him to get past it by himself and still be so. And, you know, intelligent, it's really cool.

That falls into a greater thesis, which you can definitely see. The Rick McIntyre straight up states a bunch of times that one of the things he admires most about wolves is the fact that they never, ever, ever give up, that they are kind of universally as a species, very tenacious, incredibly tenacious and willing to, no matter how hard things get, to keep going forward and trying their hardest to survive and to be wolves. And that falls into that pattern. And then also he sort of finishes out at the end of his life 302 as not the alpha of an elderly beta of, of a pack where he spends most of his time hanging out with the, with the puppies and.

Like he's the babysitter.

That's also a thing that I think it gets my. That will. That redeems him a bit in my eyes. I think it also does in Rick McIntyre's too.

He.

That's one of his other like things that is he finds really important about wolves is when they like, care for the young and the amount of time and effort they.

It's one of the things that sets them apart from, you know, other animals is their social nature.

Yeah. So. And then we've got the alpha female wolf. It's interesting because this is a divergence because we've previously been following very clearly of like through line of 8 raised 21. 21 was the member, was the alpha of the Druid Peak pack. 302 had a large involvement with both 21 and that pack. So it was like we're following this stuff and then we like a little bit. I feel like Rick McIntyre kind of felt like he had to do a thing about 06 because he, like if you feel like when you start reading the female alpha wolf, which isn't even named after her, he just says the female alpha wolf that you could feel like him throwing the car into reverse so that he can back up and we can reestablish who this character even is.

And even more than that, he talks about the broader history of Yellowstone and the wolf extermination project and coyotes and the Natives that were displaced as well. Native peoples, I should say.

Yeah, well, and part of that is also just that straight up, 06 didn't live as long as his other examples. So there's a shorter. Well, there's just shorter narrative. So he had to fill. He had to put more context in. But I think also 06 is cool. She's very cool.

She was a lone wolf for years.

Yes. So and the.

The males would throw themselves at her and she had. She's like, I'm not gonna have any of that. She was like very much the Diana who. What's the Roman version? I mean, the Greek version. The Greek goddess.

Sorry, I'm blanking too.

Okay. Well, anyway, she's like, yeah, I'm not having any of these males and I'm just going to hunt myself. And even though she wasn't very big.

She was an incredibly successful hunter.

She was so good. Yeah.

So for the record, she is a granddaughter of 21. So she's part of this giant lineage. She's from a different pack, though. One of her mom had left the Druid Peak pack and then joined a different one. So you're right, she was a lone wolf for a number of years. She then started a new pack with a pair of brothers. This is where I'm getting the 500s. Five something. Five and five something.

Four. 755.

Oh, 755 and 754, yeah. And this is the. What's their name? What's their pack name?

I'm looking bit fine. No, that's offspring. Lamar Valley.

Yeah, the Lamar. Yeah, the Lamar Valley. Because Lamar Valley is the location where most. This is where Rick McIntyre is doing most of his observations is at Lamar Valley. And since this is where they're located, they get called that. So she's a successful alpha female for a number of years. And then unfortunately she and their. And the pack move into. Was it Montana?

I think Wyoming. Montana or Wyoming?

Wyoming. They got just outside the park. Just outside. Just outside the park. And first her alpha male is shot and then she returns and very possibly a look for him.

Yes.

And she herself is shot as the last wolf of that season.

Yeah, it's one of those sad things where it's like. It's like they only allow four wolves to be shot per season.

It was like eight or something like that. And she was number eight. Yeah.

And it's like. So by virtue of her getting shot, she sort of protected the rest of the pack well.

And that brought a huge amount of Wyoming attention to the, you know, Hunting laws and regulations around wolf hunting. And so they actually like closed the. One of the hunting zones in Montana based off of this and they changed the number of ones that can be taken a year off another one. So it was a big deal again. Yeah, I think that Rick McIntyre felt a little bit more obligated to do this one because she was incredibly famous during her time. So. But there was. There was less story there overall. So he also took this as an opportunity to spend a lot more time talking about the broader history. The broader history. And he actually backs up and spent a lot of time talking about 42, which I think is important. I think she almost gets more. Not more coverage. We get more. We got stuff that we didn't. It wasn't just rehashing stuff that we had already heard in reign of 21. He is giving us additional information, basically saying like a little bit saying like, I probably should have said this earlier, but like. And yeah, he also. We get a mention that she was. They made a statue of 42 in the visitor center at Yellowstone, which is really cool. So these. The reason why I wanted specifically to talk about these books was that it is with the common culture around the way people think wolves are and the way wolf packs work is. So trick was under the bed. We're about to have a dog fight. Could you actually maybe let them outside?

Okay, guys, let's take a brief.

Sorry, honey, you're a trooper. Okay, we're back.

You trim out the silence, right?

Maybe so. Yeah. So this, as audience members may notice, this is very different from everything else that got covered this season. Everything else was movies. It's all goofums and silly bad, often very bad movies. This is instead of. Instead I've brought on a nonfiction book about wolves, like a quadrilogy about wolves. So. But the reason I wanted to specifically talk about this is that I find with the way that we as a culture think about wolves and especially the way a large portion of our society thinks about how wolf packs and wolf hierarchies and social structures work, how they've.

Co opted some of the language and how they've co opted being the owl.

Alpha, beta and all this, it's very interesting to see the reality of what a wolf pack actually works like and how it's. I mean, famously, the original experiment that started the alpha, beta, omega designations was deeply flawed, incredibly flawed. It just basically grabbed a bunch of random ass wolves and shoved them in.

A pen like, hey, work it out. And it's like, ooh, that's not that's not how wolves do that.

And they're like, like the author of the paper has been like, I disavow this paper. It doesn't tell us anything. It's the worst. Don't listen to it. Like, retract all of the conclusions coming from it. It means nothing for how wolves actually are. If you're. Even if you were going to. Okay, let's. The fact that like people think, oh, well, this is how wolves are. This is how humans should be.

Yeah.

Is already a flawed assumption. But even if you were going to take that assumption as rote and say, let's work with that, here is a model for behavior. What can you actually learn from it? And then to have completely ignored the actual evidence of how these things truly be.

You're modeling over a fake. It's an imagination.

Can you stop him from doing that?

Hey, Ridge, we have our own pack issues.

Yeah. So I don't know how to do this, but I would love to see if I could get specifically the first two books. If I could get the Rise of Wolf 8 and the Reign of Wolf 21 into the hands of some people who've been red pilled in the manosphere. I'd be really.

We're calling it the Red Pill Pocket.

Yeah. Like when you put some cheese around a pill to try to get him to swallow it. Because it uses all of the same language that the sort of manosphere.

But the message is really positive.

Yeah. Like if you were to model your own behavior after 8 or 21 or 42 or 42. Well, but like you have, I mean, realistically, from the male. If we're going to give this to the manosphere, they're going to look at the alpha male, not the alpha.

You're right.

Please get out of here, dude. So, like. But the conclusions that you would draw from, like, what does it mean to be a good man? Like, is very much not at all the sort of alpha male mentality.

Not this Andrew Tate bullshit. Yes.

Because it's like Jordan Peterson, actual alpha wolves are just like good dads. And like they play with their children and listen to their wives and other people's children. Yeah.

Like, it's like, oh yeah, we can be good role models even if the kids aren't ours. You know, like, we can be good people and set a good example.

Yes. It's.

And it pays dividends down the line.

It does. I mean, like the. I mean, because even like in the example of Wolf8 who came in and raised another wolf's children for a couple of years. There were several years there where his adopted sons were helping him hunt and fend off rivals.

They were not biologically related because they.

Weren'T biologically related, but they were socially related. Like, he had raised them, he had played with them. They were strongly bonded. And so his success was contingent not on his own individual tenacity and strength, but his ability to build a functioning, healthy family.

Yeah.

And like, it's really interesting. It's fascinating. And I think, again, I know that the assumption of what lesson could we learn about humans from looking at wolves? But realistically looking at this narrative and saying, what can we learn from this narrative about what it means to be a good person.

Right. It reminds me of. There's another famous book. Let's see. I want to get this right. Oh, it's actually a film by Richard Dawkins, a BBC series called Nice Guys Finish first.

Oh, okay.

The thesis is basically the same. Like, by being socially a good person.

Yeah.

It actually benefits you and all those around you.

Yeah, I definitely think that. I mean, for anybody who the. I think it's very clarifying that the language that is used around, like, in the manosphere, in the. In the Alpha beta, I'm going to be a tough guy. I'm going to buy a Lamborghini and fuck the bitches. World is not based in reality.

Not in the fantasy.

Well, but no, it's not. Fantasy is even the wrong word because it's a. It's a construction built to sell a product to a particular individual, to a particular demographic.

Yes.

It's not even like a.

You're. Well, and I say fantasy. And it's insofar as, like, you tell a guy, like, oh, if I do xyz, I get abc.

Yes.

You know, I buy the Lamborghini, I wear these clothes. That means they'll like me. And then when they don't, then I'm an incel. You know, and so, because you're right, they are being sold a bill of goods.

Yeah.

But it's also like. Because it's something they want, you know?

Yeah. And that's. And that's the real thing of it is that you is. They have. They're you. They're couching a. What's the word? What's the way I want to phrase this? They. They look at you, go to a demographic and say, what's the thing that they want to hear? Which is that you aren't doing anything wrong. The world is just fucking you over and they're couching it in a language of like, that's the way that this works in the wild. Right? Like, it's natural. It's natural that you would be acting in this way and that you should be rewarded this way and that people are going to work this way. And if you can pull people back from that and say, like, no, that's not really the case. Here is an actual example that a lot of your language and modeling is.

Drawn from and it's totally opposite of what you're proposing.

Yes. And it's like, this is just not true at all. And it happens to also be a really compelling story on top of it.

Oh, yeah, it's riveting.

It is. Like, I will, I will, I will ding Rick McIntyre for the fact that I was having a hard time keeping the three digit names numbers straight. But the fact that like Wolf 21 is like a character name in my brain now, I am going to forever remember, like, qualities of this one particular wolf who lived in Yellowstone in The, in the 1990s and 2000s is an incredible testament to how this narrative hangs together. And I love, I mean, I put those two books specifically as like, one of my top, like, books of all time at this point.

Yeah, they're really good.

They are really good. Like, and again, it kind of counts as a historical novel. It's biology. You learn a lot of cool wolf facts. There's some, I mean, there's a little bit of weirdness in there. Like, there's a prominent location called Dead Puppy Hill, which gets mentioned a lot because it was the place where a bunch of wolves came in and killed a bunch of coyotes. And so there was a bunch of coyote puppies there. And so forevermore it's known as Dead Puppy Hill.

It's just pretty morbid.

It's pretty morbid. But you learn, I mean, he will just pause every once in a while and give you a good nature fact about, you know, he does some talking about how the reintroduction of wolves changes, like the fundamental ecology of Yellowstone down to, like, because when they removed the hunting pressure from wolves, elk go fucking hog wild.

They eat everything to the point that they're starving.

Right.

And the wolves. He does, he did a really good job. We didn't talk about it, about pointing out how, you know, wolves have a really good sense of smell. And so if there's a herd animal that has disease, typically, like tooth infections.

Yeah.

They can sniff that out and know that's who I should go for. Because you want to go for the slow moving.

Well, he's talking about, like, the, you know, because there's like a particularly fast wolf runs at I do not remember the exact number of bullet states like 30, 35 miles an hour. But like a healthy elk runs at like 38. So it's like they are. If you're, if you're going after the healthy ones then you're not going to catch them.

No.

Is basically how it works. So they have to be able to identify the ones that are sick and.

Diseased and it makes the herd healthier because then there's less contagion moving through.

The herd and then. But also does things like it changes where the elk hang out so they can no longer go into the low rise areas and just graze it to the ground. And graze it to the ground. They have to stay in the hills and the wooded areas. Yeah. And they have to move around. They can't like you know the number of willow saplings that don't get eaten because the elk love to eat the willow saplings. But that like physically changes how the like the terrain, the terrain works because more trees leads to less erosion which leads to like faster running rivers because they don't meander as much. And like they you know, don't out pressure the beavers who then build dams. And there's this. There's a huge knock on.

There's so many add on effects. It's amazing.

And like the. I do feel a little bit bad for the coyotes.

Yeah.

Because apparently before the reintroduction of wolves the coyote population in Yellowstone was the largest and most stable population of coyotes in the world. And then they got fucking decimated by the wolves coming in.

Wolves and coyotes don't get along.

They don't get along. But I do love the description of how like well it changed where the coyotes would hang out because they very quickly realized they needed to be on slopes because on flat terrain a wolf is faster than a coyote. But if a coyote and a wolf are on a slope, the coyote will run downhill until the wolf is up to speed and then they will quickly change direction and run uphill momentum. And because they are smaller and more agile they take off and the wolf fucking Yosemite Sams is way down the goes flying down the slope because they're bigger and heavier. And it's fascinating. You will learn a ton if you read these books just on the ecology of the Rocky Mountain wildlife that lives in and around Yellowstone. I think it's great. I would highly recommend this to just about everybody. I've been begging everyone I know to read these books. So that I could talk about them with someone.

Me too. Makes me, I feel bad. I finished the first book and I told Scott, I go, this really makes me want to move to the mountains and be a wildlife biologist. Which is kind of like what I originally wanted to do but didn't for, you know, logistical reasons. But I'm like, oh yeah, that would be amazing.

I mean, I got, I will absolutely give credit to Rick McIntyre for the, like, dogged determination of, like, him to just go out and observe.

Oh yeah, he talks about the 10,000 hours and he's like, oh yeah, I got that. And some.

I think he's at like 100,000 hours. The dude is a machine. Yeah.

And I mean like dawn to dusk.

I mean like, you gotta, you gotta credit a dude who just like figured out what he wanted to do and did it. Like. Yeah, I don't know anything else about, like, that's tenacity. Yeah, I don't know anything else about Rick McIntyre, but like, the fact that he was like, I am gonna watch wolves. That's my thing. I'm gonna do it. And he fucking did it. And like, did it as, as well or better than anyone has ever done it before. I mean, like, yeah. And just the amount of time that he's spent in the mountains watching these creatures in their, in their wild habitat is amazing and I think does allow him to, to have insight into the behaviors and lives of these, of these animals. So I'm. I'm sorry. So I'm, I am really impressed by these books and highly recommend them and I think they could be useful. So I think you should.

Yes. Check it out. And I was going to say if you like these books, and since apparently not a lot of nonfiction is discussed on this podcast, if you like these books, I also want to recommend the Evolution of Beauty by Richard O. Prum. It might be Prum. It's P R U M. And it's amazing. It's all about, you know, we talk about natural selection being Darwin's chief thing, but this book is focused more on sexual selection and mate selection, which dovetails with sort of what we've been talking about. And like, you know how 06 was like, didn't have time for anybody until she met like 755. 5 and 754. Yeah, that was cute.

Yeah, I heard the best, the briefest, the briefest summation of Darwin's theory possible, which is I figured out why there are animals. It's because you can't fuck if you're dead. I will give a recommendation that is within the lines of this, which is that if you don't want to immediately start in on reading a full book, there's an episode of. And I forget the name of the actual podcast. There's an npr. It's what it's coming out of. The same guys who did Radiolab, right?

Oh, I think it's Death, Sex and Money. Is that.

No, wait, I thought it had love in the title.

It did have love.

It will be in the. In the description link in the description. Yes. There is an episode of this one particular.

Less than an hour.

Yeah. Which is just basically a in miniature version of the story in greater detail. So I will link that. And this is the final episode of season three. So I don't know even what season four will look like if there will be one. But in that case, thank you for joining me for the last probably dozen hours of audio. I still have to edit most of it.

Thanks for having me on.

Yeah. And we'll catch you guys in the future. Bye.

It.