Pod Insights Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks Mountain Lion Attack - The California Cougar Kidnapper About this episode Two incredibly unlikely encounters with a mountain lion in California cause a major legal battle, heartbreaking injury, and a crisis of faith.
https://fishingclash.link/Tooth&Claw
~~
To advertise on the show, contact us!
~~
Tooth & Claw is brought to you by QCODE. Support the show and get access to an extensive library of exclusive episodes like this by supporting the show on Patreon or joining the Grizzly Club on Apple Podcasts.
For the latest updates on the show and all things wildlife, follow us at toothandclawpod.com and social:
Instagram: @ToothandClawPodcast
Twitter: @ToothandClawPod
Wes: @GrizKid
Jeff: @jefe_larson
Mike: @mikey3ds
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript 17,204 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:13 Jeff Larson? Welcome back to Tooth and Claw Podcast. We have our bear biologist Wes Larson. He's in his shed. He's happy. He's doing great. I'm his little brother Jeff Larson. And then I'm not going to call him our producer anymore. We have Mike Smith. He's just a co-host. He doesn't edit anymore. That's all Bill Paxton now.
0:32 Mike Smith? That's true.
0:33 Jeff Larson? So you lost your title of producer.
0:36 Mike Smith? You never did call me producer before. So it's like nothing will ever change.
0:39 Wes Larson? You're no longer a sound guy.
0:40 Mike Smith? Nothing has changed here.
0:41 Jeff Larson? You're no longer a sound guy. You're just comedic relief, just like me now.
0:47 Mike Smith? Ooh, I gotta find something else to contribute.
0:49 Wes Larson? Demoted. You're still beefy, though. You're still a beefy boy.
0:53 Jeff Larson? I don't even think he's beefy anymore.
0:55 Wes Larson? He's getting muscular. He's been getting beefed up.
0:58 Jeff Larson? You need a little beef to be beefy.
1:00 Wes Larson? He's got some beef still. Sure. I got some beef, but I don't think I'd still be, I don't think I'm a beefy boy yet.
1:06 Mike Smith? You got beef with anyone? Could you be beefy that way, maybe?
1:09 Wes Larson? Yeah, I got beef with people, but not anything serious.
1:13 Mike Smith? Jesse?
1:13 Wes Larson? No. Jesse's my number one.
1:15 Jeff Larson? You know what? Let's put a pin in that. Okay. I got some for like our new thing, the advice thing.
1:22 Wes Larson? Yeah, some nice advice.
1:23 Jeff Larson? Someone you might have some beef with in that later on.
1:26 Mike Smith? Okay. Okay. Great. Pinned.
1:29 Wes Larson? Well, you guys, we got a heck of a story today.
1:32 Jeff Larson? Really?
1:33 Wes Larson? Yeah, it's a bit of a catastrophe.
1:35 Jeff Larson? You haven't really done any good ones for a few years.
1:39 Mike Smith? Jeff, shut up. Wes, say the joke again.
1:42 Wes Larson? This story's a bit of a catastrophe.
1:45 Mike Smith? All right, Jeff, you can start talking now.
1:47 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:47 Jeff Larson? Oh, I was just saying, he hasn't had a good one for like years now.
1:51 Wes Larson? Well, Jeff, I'd be, I'd be lying to you if I said this was a bad story.
1:57 Jeff Larson? Well, great. I'm excited.
2:00 Mike Smith? Wow, Wes.
2:01 Jeff Larson? Well, what was that one? I didn't catch it either.
2:04 Wes Larson? Yeah, it's all right. You're just waiting for the next thing to say. No, so today.
2:08 Jeff Larson? Was it the lion thing?
2:09 Wes Larson? Yeah, it was.
2:12 Wes Larson? You probably know by the title of this episode, I'm guessing, but today we're going to talk about a mountain lion attack.
2:17 Jeff Larson? Oh, no, I was thinking African lion. So, yeah.
2:20 Wes Larson? Well, you don't, you haven't seen the title.
2:22 Jeff Larson? I didn't see the title. That's a good point.
2:25 Wes Larson? We tend to like feature animals repeatedly on this podcast, and I think the ones that we probably do the most are bears. There's a good reason for that. I'm a, I'm a bear biologist. Jeff has helped me a decent amount on bear.
2:37 Jeff Larson? I'm a bear expert.
2:38 Wes Larson? Yeah. And we live in the Rockies. There's lots of books on bear attacks, too. There's just a lot of information out there. I think next would probably be shark attacks. There's a lot of information about shark attacks.
2:51 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
2:51 Wes Larson? And then after that, it kind of goes to big cats usually. And mountain lions are one that we've covered. But there's a lot of stuff about mountain lions. There's a fair number of stories. And I think it's one that our listeners are probably the most afraid of. And I want to teach them why that's not always justified.
3:09 Jeff Larson? Are they the most fringe of the big cats?
3:11 Wes Larson? What do you mean?
3:12 Jeff Larson? Like a cheetah, if they qualify as a big cat.
3:15 Wes Larson? No, I would say cheetahs are more so. Isn't there some debate whether cheetahs actually are? Okay, yeah, we're gonna get into that. Pin, another pin. Before we do that, I do, I just brought up sharks and it reminded me of something. A while back, me and Jeff got, I think it was when we did our Jesse Arbogast, Arbogast episode, and we were talking about summer of the shark. We kind of got in a bit of a tiff and I said that 2024 was going to be an unremarkable year for shark attacks, even though it was billed as a summer of the shark where there's lots of attacks in the news. And I, I bet Jeff that 2023 would have more attacks than 2024.
3:55 Wes Larson? And I'll be honest, as we went through the year and I saw news stories, I started to feel very not confident about that.
4:02 Jeff Larson? There's a lot of sharks in the news for 2024.
4:04 Wes Larson? Yeah. And my bet, our bet was that the loser had to get a shark tattoo. And the source of information we wanted to use was the Florida Museum of Natural History's International Shark Attack File, which is kind of considered the gold standard when it comes to reporting shark attacks. So that.
4:19 Jeff Larson? Yeah, I don't know. New York Post, New York Post had some different.
4:25 Wes Larson? Yeah, if Florida Shark Attack Files is a gold standard, New York.
4:29 Jeff Larson? I was on BuzzFeed and I wasn't sure.
4:33 Wes Larson? All right. So the results are in for 2024. They usually come out around this time of year in February. And I'm just going to read the headline of this article. 2024 was an exceptionally calm year for shark bites.
4:45 Jeff Larson? Uh oh, Jeff.
4:45 Wes Larson? Worldwide, worldwide, there were only forty seven unprovoked attacks, down twenty two from the previous year, and well below the ten year average of seventy.
4:55 Mike Smith? Oh, you're getting a face tattoo of a shark, Jeff.
4:57 Wes Larson? So Jeff has to get a face tattoo of a shark.
5:00 Jeff Larson? Hmm. I'd make it look like a teardrop.
5:03 Wes Larson? Oh, that's cool.
5:04 Jeff Larson? Is that how you think that's, yeah? But the shark.
5:06 Wes Larson? And it was, it was less than twenty twenty three. Twenty twenty three, I looked into it and was significantly more, so.
5:12 Jeff Larson? Yeah, you beat me by like fifty attacks, right?
5:15 Wes Larson? Ah, somewhere close to that, but not that many. It was like thirty. But, um, you know, Jeff, I'll probably get a tattoo with you. I'll probably get a shark tattoo, too. Sounds fun.
5:23 Jeff Larson? Oh, nice.
5:24 Wes Larson? So, anyway.
5:25 Mike Smith? If you guys are getting one, then it kind of feels like I.
5:29 Wes Larson? You probably should, too. Yeah.
5:31 Mike Smith? All right, well.
5:32 Wes Larson? Okay. Well, let's get into our story for the day. I have a few different sources for this story. The main one that I used is this book called Cat Attacks. Um, it was written by Joe.
5:41 Jeff Larson? What's that about?
5:42 Wes Larson? Uh, cat attacks, all mountain lion attacks.
5:45 Jeff Larson? Yeah, but what's it about?
5:46 Wes Larson? What do you mean?
5:47 Mike Smith? He's, he's saying you can't.
5:48 Jeff Larson? I know the name of.
5:49 Mike Smith? You can't judge a book by its cover.
5:51 Wes Larson? I said it's about cat attacks, and then you asked it again.
5:55 Jeff Larson? Well, I, oh, I thought you were just saying the name of the book again.
5:58 Wes Larson? No, no, I was telling you what it was about, too.
6:01 Jeff Larson? Okay, I get it.
6:02 Wes Larson? This was written by Joe DeBrock and Dean Miller. It's a great book. I, I think there's some, some good science in here for the time, especially when it was published. I, I do think some of it is a little bit outdated, but I've enjoyed reading it. It was published in two thousand and one. And then I also used the book Out of the Lion's Den, which was written by Sue Matern. And then a lot of different articles I found on mainstream media. So those are my main sources. Okay, are you guys ready for it?
6:27 Jeff Larson? I'm excited.
6:28 Mike Smith? Use the Bible at all? Uh, we're bringing up the Bible again.
6:30 Wes Larson? Oh, the Bible's been brought up. We have to give ourselves lashings whenever we bring up the Bible.
6:36 Mike Smith? Yeah. I don't know, it's just like the most, probably the most famous lion den story ever. I guess it's not a lion attack.
6:43 Wes Larson? Or one of us has to rend our garments whenever we bring up the Bible.
6:47 Mike Smith? Mash our teeth.
6:48 Wes Larson? Yeah. Sue Small was in shock. She's staring at a spot in a small Santa Ana stream where seconds ago, her tiny five-year-old daughter Laura had been standing and playing happily in the shallow, cool water and giggling while she's trying to catch some tadpoles. Now her daughter's gone. She's completely gone and this creek is empty and quiet. It took Sue's brain a second to catch up and then she bent over and let out a primal, blood-curdling scream. All right. So the Small family had started that Sunday in really high spirits. It's a beautiful March morning in El Toro, California in 1986. And like a lot of people in Orange County, they decided to spend their day outside after going to church.
7:31 Jeff Larson? Having gone to a religious school, there was a lot of people from Orange County.
7:36 Wes Larson? Yes.
7:36 Jeff Larson? University.
7:38 Wes Larson? A lot of people in this community were headed to the nearby San Juan Capistrano Swallow Day Celebration. Mike, you went to something called Swallow Day once, didn't you?
7:47 Mike Smith? Yeah. It wasn't as fun as I thought it was gonna be. Named very inappropriately, in my opinion.
7:55 Wes Larson? Anyway, the Small's, the Small family decided that they would head into the Santa Ana Mountains following their church service. So if you're unaware of where the Santa Anas are, they're the mountain range that's essentially in between Los Angeles and San Diego. So they split like I-15 on one side and I-5 on the other side. For Sue Small, the mom of this family, religion was always a really big part of her life. Following high school in St. Louis, she joined an Order of Nuns and spent six years in the Sisterhood before finally leaving. And even though she left the nunnery year, the Sisterhood or whatever, she was still a faithful believer in the church, but she just realized nun life wasn't for her. She just wasn't.
8:34 Jeff Larson? She wasn't having none of that.
8:39 Wes Larson? That's pretty good. All right. So she moved to Orange County. She met her husband, Don, and they had two kids, David and Laura. And on that morning in March, March 23rd, 1986, little Laura was five and David was nine. When the family got out of church, they headed home, they got their hiking stuff together, and they headed on the short drive to the Ronald W. Casper's Wilderness Park. This place is far from an actual wilderness. The park had been a 7,600-acre cattle ranch that was later set aside as a natural area through which San Juan Creek also ran. But more, as more and more of these communities kind of took over the foothills and crept up alongside the park. These trails got a lot busier and it definitely became far less wild than it once was.
9:21 Wes Larson? In fact, when the small family got to the gate of the park that day, they were handed a trail map. And on this trail map, there's a warning about the most dangerous form of life in the park. What do you guys think that warning was for?
9:33 Jeff Larson? Rattlesnake.
9:34 Wes Larson? That would have been smart. Cougar. It was for poison oak. That was the only thing they warned them about that day as they went hiking. Wait a minute. Okay, nevermind. I thought you specified most dangerous animal, but that, that oak. I said form of life. You tricked us. You got them.
9:50 Jeff Larson? Yeah, but do you think trees have souls?
9:52 Wes Larson? I do. Yeah, probably. That's why I only give me. If I have a soul, I think a tree has a soul, but I don't know if I do.
10:01 Jeff Larson? You think like Jesus judges the trees when they die?
10:05 Wes Larson? I don't think Jesus judges anyone when they die.
10:08 Jeff Larson? They go to heaven or hell based on how good of a tree they were?
10:12 Wes Larson? No, I don't believe that.
10:13 Jeff Larson? I would think the poison oak would go to hell.
10:15 Wes Larson? I wouldn't. I would disagree with you, but that's an interesting theory. All right. So Sue, like most people that learn the only concern in a place is a plant, was probably pretty carefree as they started this hike. Little did she know that her small daughter, who was lagging behind the group as she checked out all the different flowers and bugs along the trail, had attracted the attention of a predator that was quite a bit more dangerous than just poison oak. And it was now quietly following the small family through the dense chaparral brush and oak woodland of the Santa Anas. No, the chaparral brush is going to hell. You know that, Wes. You have to admit at least. Chaparral, yeah, sure. I'll admit that. I do agree. You got me. All right. So the small family arrived at San Juan Creek,
10:59 Wes Larson? where Sue and Laura took off their shoes. And I'm saying small family, like their last name is small. I just want to stress that. Yeah.
11:06 Jeff Larson? But they all, they're also like a small family, right?
11:09 Wes Larson? Yeah.
11:09 Jeff Larson? Just her, her daughter.
11:11 Wes Larson? There's four of them. Yeah. There's actually eighteen children. Average sized family.
11:15 Jeff Larson? Huge family now it is.
11:17 Wes Larson? So they arrived at San Juan Creek, where Sue and Laura took off their shoes and started wading in this cool water of the creek. And Dawn and David got a little bored with the pace of the hike and they decided they're gonna head further up the canyon and let Sue and Laura play in the water for a bit. So Sue watches Laura in her little white shorts and blue flowered patterned tank top splash through the water as she smiled. And she told Laura to go over to the edge of the creek and look for tadpoles. And Laura grabbed a plastic cup and happily obeyed splashing through the water. For the predator in the bushes, its focus was now solely on the little girl. Two of the group, including the biggest one, had split off and left, and the overall risk had been lowered. They moved toward the edge of the brush and waited, and then in another big stroke of luck, the girl splashed through the water toward the predator in the shadows, and its
12:03 Wes Larson? muscles tensed, its tail flicked, and in the blink of an eye, it shot out into the stream. Sue hardly had time to even register the blur of the mountain lion as it shot toward her daughter. Her mind immediately thought, "Dog," but then it settled on the truth. It was a cougar. A cougar had her daughter, and it was now carrying her tiny, writhing body by the head of the abankment of the creek.
12:26 Jeff Larson? Oh, man.
12:27 Wes Larson? Sue had one second to watch in horror as Laura's tiny hands feebly struggled to pry open the jaws of the cat for herself, and then her daughter and the cougar both disappeared into the bushes. All right, the creek's now empty and quiet. Seconds later, the deep, primal scream of a mother who'd just watched her daughter potentially get killed by a wild animal erupts through the quiet canyon. And Dawn and David, the son and dad, who had left minutes earlier, heard Sue's screams, and they run back to where she's standing in the water and looking around frantically. And she immediately tells them that a mountain lion had gotten Laura and that she didn't know where they were, and then she ran back to the bank on the side of the creek where she'd last seen her daughter in the mouth of the cat. And Laura's tiny sneakers were laying on the edge of the water, and Sue could faintly
13:12 Wes Larson? hear the sound of her daughter groaning in the bushes. So she ran in the direction of the sound, and she, there was like cactus and all sorts of brush and stuff, and she didn't even register it. She just barreled through all this cactus. In fact, later, she would pick over 150 cactus spines out of her legs.
13:29 Jeff Larson? Oh, wow.
13:30 Wes Larson? But as she just ran into the brush, she almost falls on top of the cougar, which was now holding Laura by the neck. Her head was flopped over limply, and blood was already covering her arms as it streamed from her neck and her throat onto the ground.
13:43 Jeff Larson? Geez.
13:43 Wes Larson? And the cat stared at Sue, but it didn't flinch, and immediately she started screaming for help. And a pair of hikers that were nearby ran to her side, and one of the men said that he would run and grab a gun, I'm guessing probably in his car or something at the trailhead. The other man who I couldn't find this guy's name anywhere, even though he's a hero, even in like the books I read, I couldn't find his name. He was just described as a dark skinned slim man. He broke off a branch from a large manzanita bush and then yelling at the top of his lungs. He started swinging this branch at the mountain lion and trying to poke it in the eyes with the end of the stick. And this actually ended up being really effective. We told stories before, like the Shannon Parker story where they were slamming a rock on top of that mountain lion's head.
14:27 Wes Larson? They were doing everything they could to stop it and it didn't stop. This was effective in this case.
14:32 Mike Smith? It makes me think that instead of just kind of going for big brute force attacks, getting at a more sensitive part of the body might be a more effective way of getting an animal like that to disengage.
14:42 Wes Larson? I think in that story with Shannon though, you know, that, that lion we learned was like really malnourished. It wasn't doing well and it might have known kind of that if it let that kill go, it wasn't ever going to be able to survive. And this lion seemed to be like top of its game.
14:59 Mike Smith? Okay.
15:00 Jeff Larson? It seems like this lion maybe is realizing like, I made a mistake because I'm getting too much attention now.
15:07 Wes Larson? Right. And it doesn't need this kill to survive.
15:10 Jeff Larson? I'd also say, I think that stick he used.
15:13 Wes Larson? Yeah.
15:13 Jeff Larson? I think it's all probably went to heaven.
15:15 Wes Larson? That man's in need of.
15:16 Jeff Larson? Cause it also helped save her.
15:18 Wes Larson? Yeah.
15:18 Mike Smith? That raises an interesting question. If like the rest of the tree is bad, but that branch, because that branch is part of the tree.
15:25 Jeff Larson? Scripture in the Bible about that with the olive branches. You cut the bad ones.
15:30 Wes Larson? We really do bring up the Bible a lot. I wonder, I wonder if plants have their own savior, maybe, you know?
15:37 Mike Smith? Oh, yeah.
15:38 Wes Larson? Like a Jesus plant. All right. So anyway, this attack ended up being really effective. The cougar shot a paw out at this man and hissed, but it dropped Laura in the process. And the hiker kept pressure on this mountain lion and yelled to Sue, grab your baby and run. And this snapped her out of kind of a daze she was in and she grabbed Laura and started running. She sped down the trail. She almost ran straight into her husband, Don, and he immediately draped his jacket over Laura's tiny body and they together ran toward the trailhead. Their son, David, had been looking for a ranger and he had found one. So they ran into them and the ranger grabbed Laura and actually this hiker that had scared the mountain lion now joined up with them too and also helped with Laura getting her to safety. They took her to
16:23 Wes Larson? the jeep of this ranger that was waiting and they loaded her in. And I think they all kind of just knew that they didn't have time to wait for paramedics to come to them. They had to take her to paramedics. So they took her to like a little ranger station or something and then a helicopter came in and flew her to a hospital. And during all this time, there was a point where the ranger looked at Sue and said, "Don't worry, she'll be okay." And Sue did not believe him. She had seen what Laura looked like. Her face was mangled, her skull was crushed, and she was sure that her daughter was going to die. But little Laura didn't die. An eye surgeon, a neurosurgeon, a trauma expert, and a plastic surgeon worked on her for 14 hours straight in the hospital.
17:04 Wes Larson? Pretty much all of them agreed that it was the most traumatic head wounds they'd ever seen. Her skull had been mostly crushed and some of the bone shards had penetrated into her brain. A good chunk of the skull was completely missing. The back of her left eye had been torn open by one of the teeth of the cougar. It had kind of like got in behind her eye.
17:23 Jeff Larson? What the heck?
17:24 Wes Larson? Yeah, and it was so damaged that it couldn't be saved. They would use over 900 stitches to repair her head, face, and neck, and she would spend five weeks in the hospital. When she was finally able to go home, she still had no control over the right side of her body and she couldn't walk. She had a steel plate that had to be used to patch that hole in her skull, and she had to wear a helmet for a long time to protect the bones as they knitted back together. So pretty, pretty bad. I mean, as far as, as lion attacks, as mountain lion attacks go, this is a really devastating one.
17:55 Jeff Larson? Tough to, like, when you're growing so much at that age, I'm sure it messes a lot of stuff up.
18:01 Wes Larson? Yeah, your, your body suddenly has to, like, devote all those resources toward healing, not toward growing, you know? So it's, it's really rough. Okay, so we're gonna take a little break. This story is far from over, and we're gonna get into biology. So we've talked about this animal a number of times. So I do think if you want a real deep dive into mountain lion or cougar biology, go back to one of our earlier episodes. I mentioned Shannon Parker. There's that guy in Alberta who got attacked. I forget his name. We've done a few mountain lion episodes now, and we kind of did more of a deep dive into their biology on those episodes. But there are a few things that we're going to talk about again, and then a few new things specifically about mountain lions in California.
18:42 Wes Larson? All right. So their record setting in a few different ways. First of all, they have more names than any other animal with a reported 40 names or over 40 names just in English. And a lot of those names are really stupid. I don't know if all of them should count because a lot of them sound like one prospector was like, oh, that's the devil cat, you know, or something. Yeah, exactly. But anyway, they do. They do hold that title.
19:10 Jeff Larson? They do have the world record for that.
19:12 Wes Larson? Yes, it's in Guinness Book of World Records.
19:14 Mike Smith? Yeah, that's legit.
19:15 Wes Larson? They also have the largest distribution of any mammal in the Americas. You can find them all the way from Alaska down to Patagonia. So throughout pretty much all of North and South America, you'll find this animal. In North America, we often call them mountain lions or cougars. And in South America, they're typically called pumas.
19:33 Mike Smith? Is there one environment they prefer over all the others? Are they flourishing in one more than like the cold up in Alaska or something?
19:40 Wes Larson? Not really. I mean, before going to Patagonia, I would have told you, yeah, treed wooded areas are their favorite. But in Patagonia, they hunt in like open grassland. And they're doing really well down there. So they do pretty well in a variety of environments. They're pretty good.
19:56 Jeff Larson? If we like had to decide on just one name for him, what would you choose?
20:00 Wes Larson? Puma. Their scientific name is Puma concolor. I like the name Puma. I think it's really cool sounding. And that's what they're known throughout, you know, probably two thirds of their range. They're known as Puma. So I like Puma. How about you guys? What would you pick? I like mountain lion a lot, too.
20:15 Mike Smith? I don't know. I'm gonna have to look at that list real quick, but I think I agree with you. Puma's the coolest.
20:20 Jeff Larson? I feel like cougar is a good name, but it's been like used for so many other things now that it's like kind of a joke.
20:28 Wes Larson? Yeah.
20:28 Mike Smith? Ooh, this one's good. Mountain screamer? I'm seeing that on the list.
20:32 Wes Larson? Wait, don't, don't look at the list. Cause we're gonna play a game later.
20:35 Mike Smith? I just saw two or three, but I'm picking that one.
20:38 Wes Larson? So I, I think mountain lion's cool, but like these animals also live in lowland rainforest. You know, they also live in places where there are mountains. So I, I really like Puma.
20:47 Jeff Larson? I do like having lion in the name though, because you kind of forget that they, how much they look like lions.
20:54 Wes Larson? Yeah. For me, this has kind of become, I think, the most beautiful cat. And I know that's like a weird thing to say, cause you have jaguars and leopards and tigers and whatnot. But man, there's something about mountain lions.
21:06 Jeff Larson? Their cubs are so cute.
21:08 Wes Larson? I just think they're so strikingly beautiful. So.
21:11 Mike Smith? I think I actually, I see your logic, Jeff, but I think I might disagree. And I think I trivialize mountain lions as kind of just like a lesser version of the real lion, full stop kind of thing. But I can see where you're coming from with that, too.
21:26 Jeff Larson? Like, I think that's what they are.
21:27 Mike Smith? I know, but that just makes me think then they're just a less cool, lesser version of lions. So if you remove lion, they become their own cool individual thing. Puma. Puma's cool.
21:39 Wes Larson? I think, I think for me where lions hunt in prides and they scavenge a lot and they kind of are just get to eat whatever they want because they're top dog. I really like how tough mountain lions have to be. You know, they kill everything they have to eat. They're really good at it. They're so elusive. Just really love this animal. Okay. So a thing that we noted earlier is some people consider them small big cats. And some people say that they're big, small cats. I personally put them in the big cat category because they are on average, the fourth biggest cat in the world. After tigers, lions and jaguars. But the reason they're often not considered big cats is because they don't roar. And they're not in the genus Pantera, which are technically like the big cats.
22:23 Wes Larson? But I think you count them. I think this is
22:25 Jeff Larson? They scream.
22:26 Wes Larson? Big enough. They scream, but they don't roar. They don't have the, the specific physiology that allows roaring. So.
22:32 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
22:33 Wes Larson? That's kind of what a lot of people consider.
22:35 Jeff Larson? They're pretty loud, you know?
22:37 Wes Larson? For me, they're big cats. It's like a nearly headless Nick situation.
22:40 Jeff Larson? So are leopards like pretty widely regarded as a big cat?
22:44 Wes Larson? They are a big cat. Yes.
22:45 Jeff Larson? Interesting.
22:46 Wes Larson? By every metric.
22:47 Jeff Larson? On average, smaller than.
22:48 Wes Larson? Slightly smaller. They're about the same size, leopards and mountain lions. Yeah.
22:53 Jeff Larson? Cage match, who wins?
22:54 Wes Larson? Ah, that's a tough one. I don't know.
22:57 Jeff Larson? That's a fifty.
22:58 Wes Larson? I think, I think it's a fifty fifty. Yeah.
23:00 Jeff Larson? I'd probably bet on the leopard.
23:02 Wes Larson? Probably too. You whisper it. You're trying to keep that a secret by whispering. Like here, I got an inside tip. Mountain lions hear you.
23:09 Jeff Larson? I actually had a burp in my chest.
23:13 Wes Larson? If you've spent much time in the West, you know that every ski town has a brand that the locals are gonna wear before the rest of the country catches on. In Jackson Hole, that brand is Stio. Stio is designed and tested in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, right at the base of the Tetons by locals who ski, bike, climb, and fish there every day. I've spent a lot of time in Jackson Hole. I know that they deal with a lot of different weather there, a lot of different things. And so Stio really has to hold up in a ton of different environments. And they've been at it since 2011. Fifteen years in, it's the real gear that locals live in. It's made for the whole mountain day, beyond the summit, the first chair, the school run, dinner hour, the dog walk, when it's cold outside.
23:55 Wes Larson? It's just made for every moment of mountain life. And those are people that are living through Wyoming winters, so they really know warm. The hometown down jacket is 800 fill down, but it feels more like your favorite hoodie than it does a puffy. And for me, I am really excited about the men's Furnos Max Insulated Jacket. I'm constantly looking for a jacket that just ticks all the boxes, and this one really does. It's stretchy, it's breathable, it looks great, it keeps me super warm. It's just amazing. I just absolutely love this jacket. So ski season's almost here. Gear up now the way that the locals do. Go to stio.com/tooth for 20% off your order.
24:34 Wes Larson? That's S T I O dot com slash tooth. Stio dot com slash tooth. Stio, designed and tested in Jackson Hole.
24:44 Mike Smith? This episode is brought to you by Miracle Made. Your nighttime bedroom temperature has a huge impact on your sleep quality. If you wake up too hot or too cold, I highly recommend you check out Miracle Made's bed sheets. Miracle Made sheets are inspired by NASA and use silver infused fabrics that are temperature regulating, so you can sleep at the perfect temperature all night long. You know, if you're like me, sometimes you just have a sweaty night for no reason. It's a little hot, you don't know why. But that's never happened to me ever since I got Miracle Made sheets. Cause like I said, they're temperature regulating, they use silver infused fabrics, inspired by NASA. Those are some smart dudes over there, they know what they're doing. But not only that, they're self-cleaning. Since these sheets are infused with silver that prevent up to 99.7% of bacterial growth,
25:29 Mike Smith? it leaves them staying cleaner and fresher three times longer than other sheets. So just that alone, I mean, that by itself is a win. So upgrade your sleep this year. Go to trymiracle.com/tooth to try Miracle Made sheets today. And whether you're buying them for yourself or as a gift for a loved one, if you order today, you can save over 40%. And if you use our promo TOOTH at checkout, you'll get a free three-piece towel set and save another 20%. Miracle is so confident in their product, it's backed with a 30-day money-back guarantee. So if you aren't 100% satisfied, you'll get a free refund. Upgrade your sleep with Miracle Made. Go to trymiracle.com/tooth and use the code TOOTH to claim your free three-piece towel set and save over 40% off.
26:12 Mike Smith? Again, that's trymiracle.com/tooth to treat yourself. Thank you Miracle Made for sponsoring this episode. Alright, so one thing I did want to go over again is the way they dispatch prey. They have a wide variety of prey. So if they're catching something like a rabbit or something, they might not have to really, they could probably just crush it. But for stuff that's on the larger side, like deer or elk,
26:35 Wes Larson? They have a couple of pretty tried and true ways to bring something down. And that attack usually begins with the cougar slamming into the animal with enough force that it often knocks it to the ground where it's easier to kill. So that's a big part of their attack strategy is this element of surprise where they hit it hard enough that it tumbles to the ground and then it's a lot easier for it to keep it on the ground. They usually then either kill by biting into the throat and severing arteries and suffocating the animal, or like we've covered in the past, by wedging those teeth into the spaces between vertebrae and separating them. So really, the thing you don't ever want is a cougar around your neck area. That's like the worst, which is Jeff, that's one of your, your life. That's my check engine light. Don't ever let a cougar around your neck area.
27:21 Wes Larson? Oh, I thought you liked it when they choked you a little. But these methods of killing prey may get pretty quick compared to the other large North American predators. Like if I have to get killed by any of our large predators, I'm picking a mountain lion compared to like a wolf or a black bear, a grizzly bear. It'd be a mountain lion. They'll feed as much as possible and then they cover or cache whatever's left over so that they can return to the kill. So they'll kind of bury it in, in litter and whatnot and then come back to it. And then let's go over a brief history of mountain lions in California. First of all, something that I thought was crazy interesting that I didn't know, it's thought that Pleistocene extinctions caused the extirpation, which is kind of like the local extinction of mountain lions from North America.
28:04 Wes Larson? So they think in the Pleistocene age, after when some of those extinctions happened of that megafauna and whatnot, the cougars actually died out in North America. And then over the next few thousand years, it was repopulated from a founder population in South America. So over time, these cougars in South America repopulated North America, which I think is really cool. It's also what we'd see happen with jaguars if we gave them kind of the space to do it, which we're not, but that would happen again. In the 1700s, Jesuit priests in modern day Southern California and Baja Mexico offered a bounty of a bowl for any mountain lion that was killed by Native Americans. So Native Americans could bring them the carcass of a mountain lion and they'd give them a bowl in exchange.
28:49 Wes Larson? A bowl of what? A bowl of cereal. A big bowl of nothing. Yeah, a bowl of smallpox is probably what they're actually giving them.
28:58 Mike Smith? Messed up, dude. We shouldn't have given them smallpox like that.
29:01 Wes Larson? No.
29:02 Mike Smith? That's our bad.
29:03 Wes Larson? In 1907, during the war on predators of the early 1900s, California put up a bounty on mountain lions and would pay $20 for the body of any mountain lion killed in the state. That bounty would stay in place through 1963. During that time, 12,462 mountain lions would be killed and turned in for bounties. The state would pay over half a million dollars to the people bringing them in. This bounty program was stopped in 1963 and mountain lions were classified as a non-protected mammal.
29:32 Mike Smith? You think they're running out of bulls? That's why they stopped it?
29:37 Wes Larson? We simply cannot give out any more bulls.
29:40 Mike Smith? It's kind of like how cash money isn't represented by the gold in Fort Knox anymore. There's just not enough gold to back it.
29:48 Wes Larson? Just no more bulls.
29:51 Wes Larson? Alright, so when they were classified as a non-protected mammal, that pretty much removes any protection for them. If you're a non-protected mammal in the United States, you can just get shot as varmint. You know, you're allowed to just kill.
30:03 Jeff Larson? So they're not, even though there's not a bounty on them, they're still like not in good shape?
30:08 Wes Larson? Right. So there's no like financial imperative to kill them, but people can kill them if they want. It should be noted that this campaign against mountain lions throughout the country led to a huge drop in numbers. Some experts think that in the early to mid 1900s, we were down to less than a thousand mountain lions in the entire country.
30:28 Jeff Larson? Wow.
30:28 Wes Larson? I guess it was probably more than that, but I couldn't find any good sources online that said what the number was. But in 1969, California classified mountain lions as game animals, which means they could be hunted, but only within the limitations set by the state. So you'd have to get a permit and whatnot. There's probably quotas. The first season was in 1970. Thirty-five mountain lions were killed, and then the next year, eighty-three mountain lions were killed. So 1971, new legislation, and I think this is important, which was signed by Ronald Reagan, put a moratorium on the sport hunting of mountain lions in the state. The reason I think that's important is because the science showed that they couldn't sustain that hunt, and a Republican governor said, yes, let's
31:13 Wes Larson? listen to that science and put a moratorium on this. And I want to bring that up because we didn't use to kind of have the political environment that we have now. These kind of decisions used to be governed by science and rational thinking. And it's kind of weird to read these things back then and think there's no way those the counterparts to those people today would make these kind of decisions. Anyway, that law went into effect in March of 1972. The moratorium was actually lifted in 1986, but political pressure for mountain lion conservation groups stalled any hunts. And in 1990, Proposition 117 was passed, which outlawed the hunting of mountain lions in the state of California permanently. It designated mountain lions
31:58 Wes Larson? as a specifically protected mammal, a specially protected mammal, and it set aside $30 million a year for 30 years to go toward protecting crucial habitat for mountain lions throughout the state, which is amazing. This is a really cool conservation story. Since that time, California has been really progressive about legislation surrounding how the public and wildlife should respond to mountain lions or wildlife managers. They've done their best to tackle problems like use of rodenticide to kill some of their food sources. They installed wildlife crossing corridors above busy highways. And as we've mentioned, Jeff recently mentioned this, Los Angeles is one of the two places in the world where big cats live in a highly urbanized city, which is kind of cool. The other one's Mumbai, India, with leopards.
32:42 Mike Smith? It really is interesting how politics, even in when they think they're acting in the best interest of the people. Like recently, I shared a small story about how during the Great Leap Forward in China, Chairman Mao ordered the killing of all the sparrows. And that just the chain reaction that that caused ultimately resulted in a giant famine, even though they thought they were probably doing something like good and smart.
33:06 Wes Larson? Yeah.
33:06 Mike Smith? It's just, I don't know. I just wanted to echo your sentiments, Wes, I guess, that it's crazy that such an important and like fascinating piece of the world has become politicized to the point where like, we can't even agree on animals, you know?
33:21 Wes Larson? Totally. Well, and I do just want to say, like, on the flip side of that, there are like Really extreme environmental groups that also kind of co-opt their message and ignore science to get their kind of stuff passed. And I just think there needs to be a middle ground where we listen to scientists, we listen to public opinion, and we make decisions based on those things, not on emotion, not on, you know, any of your personal biases or needs, like, based on the science. Like, that's why people go to school. That's why people learn about this kind of thing. So, yeah, really quick, before we get back into the story, a really, really fast sum of attacks in California.
33:57 Jeff Larson? They don't, they don't teach science at school, though.
34:02 Wes Larson? They do teach science at school, but probably not for much longer. Not in the classes you got told to go to, Jeff.
34:10 Wes Larson? All right. So as far as attacks are concerned, since 1890 and the entire United States, there have been roughly 170 non-fatal mountain lion attacks and 32 fatalities. A bit less than 50 of those attacks occurred in California, including six of the fatalities. So just a little context for you. In just the last five years in the Indian state of Maharashtra, which is roughly two-thirds the size of California, 99 people were killed by leopards in the last five years. So three times more people killed in the last five years in one state of India than mountain lions killed in the entire US since 1890. And that's where we're taking a bunch of people that listen to us? It is.
34:56 Wes Larson? Have we told them that? Do they know these stats? There's some confounding stuff there, like, the population sizes in India are much larger. A lot of those people don't have the same access to shelter and safety. There's a lot of socioeconomic and demographic things that come into play with that. But that's still a really big difference. And a large part of that is because of the behavior of the animal.
35:18 Jeff Larson? That's what I was gonna say. They also have, like, a lot different mindsets towards humans, right?
35:23 Wes Larson? Yes.
35:24 Jeff Larson? Leopards will view us as a meal. A meal. A meal. A meal.
35:30 Mike Smith? Mule.
35:32 Wes Larson? They will and and mountain lions just really don't do that. We do have the occasional mountain lion that just kind of decides, you know what, I think I'm gonna try this out. But with leopards, it's more, it's much more common that they'll investigate us as prey.
35:45 Jeff Larson? Do you think if they like hung out with leopards for a few years, they'd start?
35:50 Wes Larson? Leopards are like, bruh, you are missing out on something good here.
35:56 Mike Smith? Is there a difference in the size of victim that each of the two will pursue? Will mountain lions usually target smaller, more vulnerable looking prey?
36:04 Wes Larson? That's pretty, that's pretty similar between
36:06 Mike Smith? Okay.
36:07 Wes Larson? The species, like the smaller and more vulnerable you look, vulnerable you look, the more likely either of these cats are gonna grab you. But mountain lions, there's not a real trend to their attacks because they're so rare and and there's so few of them that it's hard to really even kind of suss out any kind of trends. But they do attack children more often than they attack adults. That is one trend that we can say.
36:30 Jeff Larson? Do you think if America still had like a bunch of jaguars, it might be similar to that or not?
36:35 Wes Larson? I don't think so. Jaguars are really weird in that they like hardly ever attack people. It's just very, very rare, even in places where they live alongside people. And the theory behind that is maybe just that they evolved away from any kind of human interaction. And so there's just no, there's no context for them with us. They just don't see us as really anything but an annoyance. Whereas mountain lions evolved alongside indigenous peoples and whatnot.
37:04 Jeff Larson? They're just like, ah, humans burnt my home down again. I gotta relocate again.
37:09 Wes Larson? We'll get into that at some point. There's a, there's a really interesting book about jaguars that goes really in depth in that. Anyway.
37:15 Jeff Larson? Okay, cool.
37:16 Wes Larson? Okay, so a lot of the articles I read bring up the stat that you're a thousand times more likely to be struck by lightning than attacked by a mountain lion, which is true. I don't like the statistics because you can be struck by lightning anytime you go outside. And mountain lions, like your level of activity in the woods or wilderness areas will drastically change your chances of being attacked by a mountain lion.
37:41 Jeff Larson? I mean, a lot of people visit LA.
37:44 Wes Larson? That's true, but you're not gonna get attacked by one in LA. It's very unlikely. Yeah.
37:50 Jeff Larson? Tell that to the small family.
37:51 Wes Larson? They weren't in LA. They were in the San Yennas. No, I wouldn't consider that LA. All right.
37:57 Mike Smith? You could still tell them, though.
37:59 Wes Larson? You could. Okay. The Casper's Wilderness Park was closed not long after a male mountain lion was shot and killed about 400 yards from where Laura had been attacked. The county board of supervisors kept the park closed for about a month. They were told by wildlife biologists that another attack would be like being struck by lightning twice. But they did say, these biologists did say, and this is true, the only way to make this place completely safe is to kill every single mountain lion in the park, which no one wants to do. So it was reopened a month later with a bunch of new warning signs and kind of cautions put into place.
38:34 Mike Smith? Wouldn't it be like getting struck by lightning a thousand times?
38:37 Wes Larson? Yeah, it'd be, yeah, I don't even know what the, yeah. All right. So in the wake of the attack.
38:44 Jeff Larson? That'd be so unlucky.
38:47 Mike Smith? Which would you pick? Getting attacked by one cougar, getting struck a thousand times? It's basically the same thing. Well, that's not what that stats say.
38:55 Jeff Larson? Maybe a thousand times, because then I got the world record.
38:58 Wes Larson? I think that would be the case if you, if the same person were to be attacked by a mountain lion twice, they're just saying like another attack on any person. But yes, I get what you're saying.
39:10 Jeff Larson? Has anyone ever been attacked two separate times by mountain lions?
39:14 Wes Larson? Not that I know of.
39:15 Jeff Larson? Yeah. And no one's been struck by a thousand different lightning.
39:19 Wes Larson? Not that I know of. Maybe Nikolai Tesla. All right.
39:23 Mike Smith? That's a good guess.
39:24 Wes Larson? If, in the wake of the attack, the small family started to do some digging and they learned about some encounters with mountain lions that had happened right before Laura's attack in the same area. And they felt as though Orange County and the California Department of Fish and Game had been negligent about posting warnings and signage following those incidents. And they decided to file suit and sue both the department and Orange County. And just two weeks after they filed that suit, lightning struck twice. Or maybe a thousand times, depending on.
39:57 Wes Larson? All right. So Tim Mellon was happy to have some fresh air in his lungs as he hiked through Casper's Wilderness Park with his family and his sister's family. As he walked, he touched the knife that was strapped to his side reassuringly. You see, Tim fancied himself, yeah, and he fancied himself something of an outdoorsman. For him, the stop in Southern California was temporary. He and his brother-in-law Bill were working construction jobs and they're saving enough money to be able to build their dream homes up in the mountains. Far from the hustle of Southern California, and touching that knife on his hip was a way for him to kind of feel connected to that dream of outdoor living. Jeff, you're constantly touching your knife.
40:35 Jeff Larson? I got knives all over the place.
40:37 Wes Larson? Yeah.
40:38 Mike Smith? Is that a euphemism?
40:39 Wes Larson? It's not, but you know, episode full of them, it definitely could be. The two families had parked their cars at the trailhead and now they're walking up a trail that was lined with thick brush, cactus, and oak trees. There were a lot of kids between the two families. They'd formed kind of a small pack as they ran up the trail ahead of the adults. Tim's six-year-old son, Justin, was kind of lagging behind. He's a little blonde boy. He's just learning to tie his shoes and they'd come untied and he's struggling to get them back on. So Justin, or Tim actually stopped and waited with Justin. Tim's the dad, Justin's the son, and he helped him tie his shoes. And then the little boy sprinted to catch up with the other kids who'd rounded a bend up ahead. Tim caught up with the other
41:22 Wes Larson? adults and they watched as the kids disappeared around another curve. And then suddenly screams from the kids filled the air. His daughter Amy came rutting around the corner with the other kids behind her, all of them still screaming and in a total panic. And Tim immediately noticed that Justin wasn't with the other kids and he started sprinting up the trail. His first thought was that some sexual predator or pervert might have grabbed his son. And he clenched his fist as he rounded the corner, but it was a very different kind of predator that had grabbed little Justin.
41:57 Mike Smith? Well, do we know the mountain lion's motives?
41:59 Wes Larson? We don't. And the way it was sitting on him might make you question too.
42:03 Jeff Larson? We know his motives. We can assume it wasn't sexually charged.
42:10 Wes Larson? Tim could clearly see a mountain lion straddling his son with each leg on either side of his head.
42:15 Jeff Larson? Shit.
42:23 Wes Larson? Oh, oh, man.
42:27 Wes Larson? Okay. Let's pull it back in. This is a sad story. The cat was biting into Justin's legs and helpless little boy screamed and pinwheeled his legs trying to get the cougar to stop biting him. Tim's frozen in place and he watches as Justin got free of the lion, only for it to adjust its grip and bite into his legs again, tearing away chunks of flesh. And that broke Tim's daze and he grabbed his knife and stepped toward the mountain lion. In response, the large cat bit Justin around his head and started dragging him off into the bushes. It had just started to enter these bushes when Tim raised his hand with the knife. And surprisingly, the mountain lion dropped Justin, but continued staring straight at Tim.
43:09 Wes Larson? With his eyes still locked on the cat, Tim reached down and picked up Justin's body and passed it to his wife, Ann, who was standing right behind him. And as he did this, he said the lion's eyes followed Justin's body the whole way, like it just was tracking him. But then, before the lion had any chance to do anything else, Bill, his brother-in-law, showed up and the two men started yelling and making themselves as big as possible. This tactic worked and the mountain lion stepped into the brush and disappeared. Ann was already rushing down with Justin down the trail. Tim and Bill caught up to her. Justin opened up his eyes and stared up at his dad and said, Dad, am I going to live? And Tim took a quick glance at him. His legs and part of his face looked like hamburger.
43:51 Wes Larson? He was covered in a lot of blood. He thought too much blood and he wasn't sure his son would survive the trip even to the hospital. But he looked at Justin and he said, Justin, you're going to live. That's a time it's acceptable to lie to someone, I would say. Yeah, yeah. That's definitely a white lie at that point. Like, I wouldn't be, I wouldn't judge him too hard for lying. I don't know, son. You sure look like hamburger right now.
44:14 Mike Smith? Yeah, when he passes through.
44:15 Wes Larson? A lot of blood.
44:16 Mike Smith? Passes the pearly gates and gets judged at the end of his life. God will catch him on that one.
44:21 Wes Larson? He's like, you lied. If it's the plant god, I don't think the plant god will care at all.
44:28 Jeff Larson? That's true.
44:28 Wes Larson? He'll be like, you sure cut your grass a lot. Didn't like that at all.
44:32 Jeff Larson? Ooh.
44:33 Wes Larson? All right. So, okay, at the Mission Viejo Trauma Center, doctors used over 500 stitches to piece Justin back together while Tim talked to the other kids to get the full story of what happened. And what had happened is when the kids ran ahead of the adults, Justin's shoe had come undone again. He was down on one knee trying to tie his laces when one of the kids yelled, "Mount line." Justin had just enough time to think that the other kids were messing with him when something hit him so hard that it knocked him out of his sneakers.
45:01 Jeff Larson? Oh, man.
45:02 Wes Larson? Like a cartoon, which is crazy.
45:04 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
45:05 Wes Larson? The kids went running and screaming and the cougar started biting and clawing Justin on his legs and head. And that's when Tim showed up. And there's actually a picture of the scene and you can see his two sneakers like on the ground where he left them behind. It's crazy.
45:19 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
45:19 Wes Larson? Okay, so before the family left the hospital, they were approached by legal representation. And by the end of the night, they had joined the lawsuit against the county and the California Department of Fish and Game. The lawsuit stated that the defendants, which is Orange County and the department, had failed to protect visitors to the park and that the rapid expansion of the county into the foothills had negatively affected cougar habitat and behavior. And in the meantime, even though biologists assured officials that two attacks was really just a crazy fluke, the park was closed for three months. When it reopened, there were serious restrictions about where kids could go and what they could do. Families with children weren't allowed to camp overnight and rangers had to write and post any report of any cougar sighting
46:04 Wes Larson? on a board that the public could see. And then visitors also had to sign a liability waiver before entering into this park.
46:10 Jeff Larson? Man.
46:11 Wes Larson? Just so you know, there was never another cougar attack in this park. They killed two cats, but there was never another one.
46:17 Jeff Larson? I feel like that could like backfire to where it would bring in more visitors, actually. Like I know that if we were seeing like cougar sighting updates, we'd be like, let's go.
46:29 Wes Larson? Yeah. If I suddenly learned that Paddy Canyon in Missoula, if people are seeing cougars every day, I'd grab my camera and go up there without a doubt. All right. So the trial proceeded. A lot of different witnesses were called, including rangers that testified that they knew about an abnormal amount of cougar activity right before the first attack. And the prosecutor showed a lot of footage of Laura before and after the attack and her loss of movement and whatnot. Really, the only thing the defense could do was argue that the county couldn't be held responsible for the actions of a wild animal. And ultimately, the jury did side with the Small and Mellon families. They awarded the Small family $2.1 million and the Melons got $100,000. And I think the reason the amounts were so different
47:13 Wes Larson? is because the second family, there were already like warnings posted and whatnot. There was definitely still some negligence, but they had more warning than the first family did. A really interesting tidbit as we wrap up. Both Justin and Laura, the two victims, grew up to be really sympathetic to the plight of mountain lions in California. They both seemed to understand that their attacks were the result of humans encroaching on cougar habitat, not the opposite. Laura is like a talented painter and she kind of painted about her feelings about mountain lions. Justin was like a football star in his high school. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, throughout their lives, they'd both been really vocal that this wasn't the mountain lion's fault, which is just so, I have so much respect for those people. I
47:58 Wes Larson? think it's so beautiful. Yeah, definitely. Sue, the mom, Laura's mom, really struggled with the trauma of seeing her daughter get attacked. And it immediately made her question her faith in God, because she didn't see how a loving God could allow something like that to happen, which I kind of struggle with because it's like, you know that terrible shit is happening to people all the time. So it's kind of like, I think you either just have to accept that like, if you believe in God, you have to accept that God allows terrible shit to happen. And if you don't, you don't. So it's kind of weird that that- They deserved it. They probably deserved it. I, no, I shouldn't judge, I shouldn't judge her, her like turn.
48:38 Jeff Larson? Like, I get what you're saying, but everyone lives in their own world. Like, you've got to have something affect you to really affect you.
48:45 Wes Larson? So she's the one that wrote, eloquently put, Jeff.
48:50 Wes Larson? She's the one that wrote Out of the Lion's Den, that book. And it's all about the attack and it's really well-written. I didn't include a lot of the details about the attack because it just would have taken too long. But it's a great book, but a huge percentage of this book is about her faith journey. And she ultimately became an atheist. She lost her faith in God because of this attack, which is kind of.
49:14 Jeff Larson? Wow, that is interesting.
49:17 Wes Larson? Okay.
49:17 Mike Smith? I mean, it's hard to judge any, especially a mother of a child. We're never gonna be able to experience that biological connection. So I don't blame someone in that position for feeling any sort of way.
49:28 Wes Larson? Totally.
49:29 Mike Smith? But I do, I loved hearing about the, the after-story of the two kids. Just like exiting an incredibly traumatic experience and finding healthy ways or finding success in the wake of it. I think that's really great.
49:41 Wes Larson? I will say too.
49:42 Mike Smith? Just go ahead.
49:43 Jeff Larson? I'd like to just like talk with the mom and explain to her like animals used to be nice until Eve ate the fruit.
49:51 Wes Larson? Right.
49:52 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
49:53 Wes Larson? Yeah, this isn't God's fault. This is Eve's fault.
49:56 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
49:58 Wes Larson? Man, this should be Tooth and Claw Bible Study is what this should be called.
50:03 Mike Smith? I love that Eve ate that fruit. Thanks so much, Eve. We wouldn't be here without you. What kind of affect did affected her with?
50:09 Wes Larson? Yeah. A quick thing, I just want to mention this for people that are, I think, for whatever reason, mountain lions and cougars have just earned this reputation of being the scariest animal out there for people in North America. Especially people that don't live around grizzly bears. They just really don't like attacking us. I have a friend, Jeff Worth, who's a listener, is a good, really good person. He's doing a study right now with trail cameras on mountain lions. And he is out there every day getting as close as possible to where these mountain lions have been to set up trail cameras. I mean, literally following right behind them and he never has any kind of incidents.
50:49 Wes Larson? And he does carry bear spray, he's prepared, but like this is an animal that wants to get away from us 999,000 times out of a million, you know? Anyway.
51:00 Jeff Larson? We better, we better hope that Jeff never does anything really bad in the future and someone can clip that.
51:07 Wes Larson? Yeah.
51:07 Jeff Larson? Where he's a great guy.
51:09 Mike Smith? Really good person.
51:13 Mike Smith? For someone like you, Wes, who's worked in the park service industry, I don't know exactly how you would label yourself, someone who has worked in parks and dealt with animal
51:22 Jeff Larson? Wildlife in parks, yes.
51:23 Mike Smith? Yeah. What is your opinion on the lawsuit that took place? Do you think that was justified? Do you think it was the right thing to happen?
51:30 Wes Larson? I'm glad we're talking about this. I have, I have a hard time with this one because I kind of see both camps. I see why you would feel upset if you went somewhere like that and the only thing you were warned about is poison oak. But then I also just think anytime you go in a wild space, part of what makes it wild is that you kind of have to do your research. You kind of have to learn about potential threats and be prepared for those threats. I think sometimes we are overly safe and it removes some of the thrill of life out of things. And so for me, had I been a jury member, I probably would have sided with the, the county and the department, but I don't blame the jury members for siding
52:12 Wes Larson? with these families. I do think it's on responsible wildlife managers do need to tell people when there's potentially dangerous wildlife in a, in a place. I also think just responsible outdoor recreation, you kind of need to be aware of that on your own, you know? So it's hard. That's a hard one. Yeah. What do you guys think?
52:32 Jeff Larson? I do think if there was like a mountain lion sign, the parents very possibly could have not let their small children get that far away from them.
52:42 Wes Larson? Yeah. And someone had been charged by a mountain lion like days before. So.
52:46 Jeff Larson? Yeah. So I do think it's like, I don't know, it's a little bit too close to civilization, I think, to just say like, you're out in the wild. So like, it's your own fault. So I think they should have had signs.
52:59 Mike Smith? Yeah, for sure. I think also, I don't know, I, I think even if the penalty, if you want to call it that on the, the civil side of things, might appear to be a little harsh, like $2 million, it's a lot of money, but you know, massively affected lives, maybe that's fair. And also, it does result in more protection for people. And that's, this is coming from my perspective. I'm not an expert in any of these kinds of things, but I, I think that ultimately more good came out of it than quote unquote, bad.
53:28 Wes Larson? Yeah.
53:29 Jeff Larson? Well, and like those lawyers had to work really hard too. Like. What, when Jimmy?
53:36 Mike Smith? Gotta think of the lawyers.
53:37 Jeff Larson? Was it Jimmy who got attacked in the second one?
53:39 Mike Smith? Justin.
53:40 Wes Larson? Justin.
53:40 Jeff Larson? Justin. When Justin got attacked, they were on it. They were like talking to him that same day. Like, hey, you have a case on your hands.
53:47 Wes Larson? They're just hanging out.
53:48 Jeff Larson? Like, these lawyers deserve to get paid a lot of that $2 million as well, you know?
53:54 Wes Larson? I'm sure they, I'm sure they, they got a lot of it. Yeah. You know what? We're gonna get into more of this when we do the story of the only fatal black bear attack in Utah that also resulted in a lawsuit. Uh, Tom was an expert witness on that lawsuit, so we're gonna talk to him again, which will be fun. But I, I think there, you know, we've talked about this a lot. This is why they have to kill black bears or, or whatever that display behavior that's, that's abnormal. Because it presents such a liability now for wildlife agencies that if they leave that animal out there, then they risk the, they risk being sued and losing millions of dollars that can typically go toward conservation. So I, I think it's tricky, but I'm, I don't know.
54:37 Wes Larson? I don't really know. I don't have a great answer for you, but I probably would have ruled on the side of the defendants.
54:42 Mike Smith? You're making me think, Jeff, maybe there's some kind of collusion we can look into. Because lawyers and cougars have mutually beneficial kind of products they can offer to each other. If the lawyer just sets a cougar up with a small child, the lawyer all of a sudden can have a lawsuit. So I don't know, there's some...
55:00 Jeff Larson? Maybe the lawyers were like...
55:02 Mike Smith? Conflict of interest there.
55:03 Jeff Larson? Like leaving chunks of meat out in the area so there'd be more mountain lions in the area.
55:09 Mike Smith? Exactly.
55:10 Wes Larson? There's just one lawyer that's on mountain lion duty, just constantly looking for someone to... Just like, ah, yeah, let your son tie his shoes on his own. He's fine.
55:20 Jeff Larson? He like gave him shoelaces that don't stay tied somehow.
55:24 Wes Larson? Just buttered up his shoelaces. Painted his back with like deer blood as he walked away. All right.
55:32 Speaker 03 The Quarter Pounder with Cheese is made with 100% fresh beef, cooked when you order it. Then comes the melted cheese, the slivered onions, the pickles, the ketchup, and the mustard. Add hot crispy fries and an ice cold Coke, all for $8. And if things go well, one loose fry at the bottom of the bag. The Quarter Pounder with Cheese meal, now $8. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba.
56:02 Wes Larson? This episode is brought to you by Fishing Clash. If you're anything like me, you really love fishing. I spend a lot of the time in the summer fly fishing. Jeff really loves it too. But in the winter, I don't really do it. I don't love standing out in the river in the cold, and I still get that itch to do some fishing. And that's why I've loved Fishing Clash so much. Fishing Clash is a mobile game for fishing enthusiasts. It lets you enjoy the sport anytime, anywhere. And I've played a lot of fishing games, and this is easily my favorite. And it makes sense because they're the official partner of Major League Fishing, and they sponsor the Angler of the Year Award. And it brings the sport of fishing right to your fingertips. It's fast-paced, competitive fishing, or you can just kind of do a relaxed, fun fishing excursion.
56:46 Wes Larson? You can battle in 1v1 duels and tournaments. You can create a clan. It's really, really fun. There's even global championships. And every single catch matters. So it's really good that you get good at the reflexes and the strategy of the whole thing. There's no worms, no tangled lines. You don't have to deal with smelly bait, or in my case, a ton of different flies you might have to tie on. You just get to compete against others or with your friend and family and do a lot of fishing. It's really fun. One thing that I really like is there's lots of different locations with diverse fish species. They've really replicated these different fisheries extremely well. And it's really fun to see the different types of fish that you can catch. Some of them are so big that you need a forklift to carry them. And you guys know I've got problems with overfishing.
57:31 Wes Larson? So this is a great way to get your fishing fix without actually killing any fish, which is amazing. So you can create your fishing clan, invite your friends, and compete together. Use the gift code TOOTH to get a $20 welcome bonus and start your journey with an edge. Again, use the code TOOTH, that's T-O-O-T-H, in the game's menu to get an exclusive $20 bonus. Just open Fishing Clash, head to the menu, enter the code, and start reeling in the rewards. Okay, let's get into our catagories.
58:04 Jeff Larson? I wanted to say with the stories too.
58:07 Wes Larson? Okay.
58:10 Wes Larson? Man, Jeff keeps killing my jokes.
58:14 Jeff Larson? You've done categories.
58:16 Wes Larson? I know.
58:19 Wes Larson? That's fair.
58:20 Jeff Larson? But yeah, I just want to say like, we had fun with those stories, but I, we tried to like, stop laughing once you started telling the story because it is actually really sad that these kids got attacked by animals. I just want to say like, sorry if we were like a little irreverent at the start of your stories because those were like two really intense stories.
58:42 Wes Larson? Pretty traumatic.
58:42 Jeff Larson? Are very traumatic and like whenever you're dealing with little kids, it's not funny, Mike.
58:48 Mike Smith? No, it's not.
58:49 Wes Larson? Shut up, Mike.
58:51 Mike Smith? No, I do, I want to add on to that and just say that there's nothing I like more when Wes is telling a story than to hear when a victim of an attack makes it out alive. So.
59:01 Wes Larson? Yeah.
59:01 Mike Smith? I'm just super happy that it seems like all ended well.
59:05 Wes Larson? And to be honest, like this is maybe going to be a little bit too much. I, I think over the, you know, four or five years that we've done this now, I kind of expected myself to become more jaded as we did these stories and I'm finding the opposite is true and more and more I get emotional as I'm researching these. And this one did that to me. Like as I read Sue's statements especially, I got like choked up and I had to take a break thinking of the trauma that it inflicted on her and her daughter and every, it just was, it's a lot. It's a lot to, to deal with and our heart definitely goes out to these people and to any victims from these stories.
59:43 Mike Smith? Definitely.
59:44 Wes Larson? Okay, categories. Sorry, I won't make the category joke anymore. I'm done, Jeff.
59:48 Jeff Larson? You said the exact same thing.
59:50 Wes Larson? What do you mean?
59:52 Jeff Larson? You said categories again. What are you talking about?
59:56 Wes Larson? Well, I'm not making the joke this time. Okay. We're gonna do your favorite eighties movie or show that's set in California. So this can either be an actual show or movie from the eighties, or it can be a more recent one that's just set in the eighties in California.
1:00:15 Jeff Larson? Hmm, okay. Yeah, I had a hard time with this one because I had so many choices in the nineties. I felt like nineties is peak LA for me.
1:00:24 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:00:25 Jeff Larson? So I'm gonna go with The Karate Kid. Just a fantastic movie set in LA. I had no idea LA was like so into karate, but pretty much like all the high school, like the cool kids are in karate, I guess. And the whole town goes to this big tournament every year. And apparently it's still going. There's like Cobra Kai is back in LA, so I don't know.
1:00:51 Wes Larson? All right, good pick. Mike, what do you got?
1:00:54 Mike Smith? Uh, I'm gonna go with Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. It's just barely by the skin of its teeth, a nineteen eighty-nine film. San Dimas High School Football Rules, of course. I know it mostly takes place in other locations, but I justify it by saying that the current time in which they are living, Bill and Ted themselves, is California. That's the best movie.
1:01:16 Wes Larson? It is such a great movie. You're actually, you're Bill. Oh, wait, no, Bill is Keanu, right? Yeah. You're Bill in my phone, Mike. Oh, you're right. You're Ted in my phone. Your avatar photo is Ted.
1:01:29 Jeff Larson? Young Theodore has a lot of LA movies.
1:01:33 Wes Larson? He does, yeah.
1:01:34 Jeff Larson? Like Point Break, Speed, Bill and Ted.
1:01:37 Wes Larson? I'm gonna pick The Lost Boys, which I know is more like Santa Cruz area. It's not so much Southern California, still California, though. And for me, it stands out as like one of the most kind of quintessentially late eighties movies. It's just like really super eighties. So.
1:01:54 Jeff Larson? We should probably shout out Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Isn't that set for the eighties?
1:01:59 Wes Larson? It's like the sixties. The sixties. Yeah, just twenty years.
1:02:02 Jeff Larson? One that was like so close for me, but like when I think LA, I think of a lot of Mexican and Latin culture and Blood in Blood out is like a really popular movie in that culture. And I love that movie. Sangre por sangre.
1:02:18 Wes Larson? I've never seen it.
1:02:19 Jeff Larson? Really? It's a good.
1:02:20 Wes Larson? Yeah. That's one that Shay Serrano. Yeah, I know that he's always talking about it. Yeah.
1:02:24 Jeff Larson? You need to watch it.
1:02:25 Wes Larson? Okay, I will. All right. Our next category is one I created specifically for this episode. It's called Pin the Name on the Cougar. I am going to give you guys a list of names and you, you're going to go one at a time and you're going to tell me if you think that's a real name or a fake name that's been assigned to mountain lions, to Puma Conga. And I got this, my source for these names is the book, The Cougar or Mountain Lion by C.T. Barnes, which was published in 1960. So we'll go ahead and you know, I don't, I probably was going to attach a dollar amount to each of these, but I'm just going to donate a hundred dollars to the Cougar Conservancy, which is a nonprofit that my friend started and has
1:03:07 Wes Larson? done some great work for, for mountain lions in Southern California. So regardless of the outcome, that's what's getting donated.
1:03:14 Mike Smith? The rich get richer, huh? All right.
1:03:16 Wes Larson? All right. So who wants to go first? Mike, your name that you have to say is real or fake is Tony Leeper.
1:03:28 Mike Smith? Ooh, I'm going to say that is indeed a name that's been ascribed to them. You've used.
1:03:33 Wes Larson? Wrong!
1:03:33 Jeff Larson? Dang it.
1:03:35 Wes Larson? That's one I made up, not a real name for mountain lions or figures.
1:03:38 Jeff Larson? Making that one up.
1:03:40 Wes Larson? All right, Jeff, Catamount.
1:03:43 Mike Smith? I hate you, Wes.
1:03:46 Jeff Larson? I'm going to go with you made it up.
1:03:48 Wes Larson? Wrong! That's a real one.
1:03:50 Mike Smith? Shoot.
1:03:51 Wes Larson? Mike, Screamer.
1:03:54 Mike Smith? Uh, well, so I did cheat. I cheated and looked up mountain screamer and that is one. But just screamer? I don't think so.
1:04:01 Wes Larson? Uh, I, I think both of them. Okay. Well, you're wrong then. It is true. Yeah.
1:04:06 Mike Smith? Dang it.
1:04:07 Wes Larson? Both, both of those are names that they've been called. Okay. Jeff, Cali Whomper.
1:04:12 Jeff Larson? You had to have made that up.
1:04:14 Wes Larson? I made that one up. Correct. Ding ding ding ding ding. Mike, Red Tiger.
1:04:21 Mike Smith? Um, yeah, you, that one's real.
1:04:25 Wes Larson? Ding ding ding ding ding.
1:04:27 Jeff Larson? Yes.
1:04:27 Wes Larson? Jeff.
1:04:27 Jeff Larson? Tigers are more red than mountain lions.
1:04:29 Wes Larson? Well, that's, they got called, someone called him the Red Tiger. Jeff, Pixewani Panther.
1:04:37 Jeff Larson? Oh, you made that up?
1:04:39 Wes Larson? Correct. I made that up. All right. Mike, Bender.
1:04:45 Mike Smith? What? Uh, no.
1:04:46 Wes Larson? Bender.
1:04:46 Mike Smith? Yeah. No, that's, yeah, that one's real, actually. That's weird. That's a weird one to have made up.
1:04:51 Wes Larson? It is real. Correct.
1:04:52 Mike Smith? Okay.
1:04:53 Wes Larson? Jeff, Painter.
1:04:56 Jeff Larson? Uh, that's real.
1:04:58 Wes Larson? Real. Correct. Mike, Sneak Cat.
1:05:05 Mike Smith? I wanted to be real so bad, but it's not. It's fake.
1:05:09 Wes Larson? It's real.
1:05:10 Mike Smith? No way. That's awesome. I'm glad it is.
1:05:13 Wes Larson? Jeff, Mountain Demon.
1:05:16 Jeff Larson? You made that up.
1:05:17 Wes Larson? Ah, it's real. All right. Mike, Dog Destroyer.
1:05:23 Mike Smith? No way that's real. That, I wanted to be real so bad. It's not though. It's fake.
1:05:29 Wes Larson? Ding ding ding. I made that one up. Jeff, Old Man McGee's Kitty Cat Surprise.
1:05:37 Jeff Larson? Uh, I think that one's real.
1:05:39 Wes Larson? Uh, that one's made up.
1:05:40 Mike Smith? No.
1:05:42 Wes Larson? All right. Ah, okay. That's, that's it for that game, but there are a lot of crazy names on that list. Some of them I'm guessing were used like once by some dude, but anyway, all right, let's do a quick, what would Mike and Jeff do?
1:05:56 Mike Smith? You know what, Wes? I'll match you. I'll throw some money over to the big cat, whatever the hell it's called.
1:06:01 Wes Larson? $200 to Cougar Conservancy. Perfect. What would Mike and Jeff do? So I'm going to put you in Tim Mellon shoes. You've rounded a corner. There's a cat sitting on your six-year-old son. What are you doing?
1:06:15 Jeff Larson? Sure. I'm going to choose something else.
1:06:19 Wes Larson? Perfect.
1:06:20 Jeff Larson? That I feel like people who own a gun just feel like they need their gun in every situation they can possibly put it into.
1:06:28 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:06:28 Jeff Larson? So like, if I was that one hiker who came over to help, I wouldn't leave the little girl to go get a gun.
1:06:37 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:06:37 Jeff Larson? I would just stick and help my friend.
1:06:40 Wes Larson? Got it. Yeah.
1:06:41 Jeff Larson? You can't like go back to your car if you're in that situation to go get your gun.
1:06:47 Wes Larson? True, especially, it seemed like they were a fair distance.
1:06:50 Jeff Larson? Like coming from a gun guy, you just got guns on your mind all the time. So like,
1:06:55 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:06:56 Jeff Larson? there's not a lot of opportunities where you can use your gun.
1:07:00 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:07:01 Jeff Larson? But you gotta just realize like, oh, wait, this little girl has a mountain lion biting her neck right now. I probably don't have a lot of time.
1:07:09 Wes Larson? Do you think while he was running to his car, he's just like, I gotta use my gun. I get to use my gun.
1:07:15 Jeff Larson? He's like, I hope it's still attacking her once I get back.
1:07:19 Wes Larson? I will. I do want to bring up, I want to bring up Cindy Perlin, who was the mom that saved her kids from the mountain lion in Alberta, I believe, or maybe it was British Columbia. And she, she, yeah, she wrestled that, that mountain lion for an hour before someone showed up with a gun and, and finally killed it. So I will say, there is the chance that you can still go get a gun and help. But I agree with you, Jeff. I think that guy should have stayed and helped.
1:07:46 Jeff Larson? Three adults, you need to get the lion off of the ground.
1:07:48 Wes Larson? Right. And you can do it with three people. Yeah. All right. Mike?
1:07:52 Mike Smith? For Tim, so I, maybe he did this. You may have just not included this detail, but I always like it. It's really intimidating. I think the mountain lion would have been scared off if he had licked his knife that he was holding, because that's the move that like, or like cut his own hand.
1:08:07 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:08:07 Mike Smith? That's good intimidation factor.
1:08:09 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:08:09 Mike Smith? I'm guessing he probably did that, though.
1:08:11 Wes Larson? Uh, yeah, I'm sure he did.
1:08:13 Jeff Larson? Would get stopped the attack too, because all animals are drawn in by blood, the scent of blood, they can't resist it.
1:08:20 Wes Larson? Hmm.
1:08:20 Jeff Larson? So like if he dripped his blood on the ground, the cat like wouldn't be able to resist that.
1:08:25 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:08:25 Mike Smith? But then you're in danger of a shark attack.
1:08:27 Wes Larson? Would come in. Yeah.
1:08:28 Mike Smith? That's a good point. I do want to say, it sounds like Tim and then later on, his friend or whoever it was that came in, they did a good job. They, he, they did, they got all big, they scared it off. Uh, it was effective.
1:08:39 Wes Larson? And so, and so did, so did Sue and these hikers that helped her. Like everyone. Kind of did the right thing here. And so I do want to get into that.
1:08:47 Jeff Larson? Really, the only thing Tim should have done better is double knot the shoelace.
1:08:52 Wes Larson? Velcro.
1:08:53 Jeff Larson? You gotta double knot.
1:08:55 Wes Larson? To that point, I do think when Justin bent over to tie his shoes, that probably was the cue for this mountain lion to rush in.
1:09:02 Jeff Larson? Like he lost all credibility of any size.
1:09:05 Wes Larson? He made himself smaller. He wasn't looking around. That's like, like for a mountain lion that's hunting a deer or something, when it puts its head down to start feeding, that's like go time for them. So I do think that was probably what triggered that. But what you actually should do, first of all, as far as avoiding these kinds of things, you want to avoid hiking, biking, or jogging alone in prime mountain lion habitat. I'm not saying you can't do it, but I'm just saying you do up that risk a little bit when you go out alone. Especially in the early morning or evening, because these are a highly crepuscular animal, meaning their activity tends to be heightened in the mornings and the evenings.
1:09:43 Wes Larson? If you see a cougar while you're out and it doesn't run away, you want to be pretty aggressive. You want to get loud, make yourself look big, gather together in a group, pick up any children that might be on the ground, and don't back away unless the cougar leaves that area. You want to kind of keep your ground and just be as loud and as aggressive as possible. You can pick up or throw things, but you don't want to bend all the way over to do that. So if you can grab something that's like kind of on level with you to throw at it, great, like a tree branch or something. But again, if you bend over and kind of aren't looking at it anymore, that might trigger it to come in. Bear spray works great on these animals, so it's a great deterrent if you're in cougar country.
1:10:27 Wes Larson? And the main, the number one most important thing with this animal, if you're in an encounter, what do you guys think that is? What shouldn't you do? Over everything.
1:10:36 Jeff Larson? Run away.
1:10:37 Wes Larson? Run. Don't run from them. That triggers that predatory response. It's a good chance it'll chase you.
1:10:44 Jeff Larson? I will say too, just that first story, you know, I'm all for like letting kids have freedom and like explore the outdoors, but also like if you're in a really dry area, they're playing in like a water source. And there's like bushes right by that water source. That is kind of like a little bit of a situation. I guess you just gotta be more careful of maybe.
1:11:08 Wes Larson? And you, you bring up a good point. In water limited areas, that's where prey is going to congregate. That's where deer are going to come in and, and these predators know that they're going to kind of hang out in places where they're more likely to see prey. So you do have to think about those kinds of things. If you are actually attacked by one of these animals, you do want to fight back as hard as you can. While doing your best to protect your neck and your throat, because that is what they're ultimately going to go for.
1:11:34 Jeff Larson? What move would you recommend?
1:11:36 Wes Larson? Just like this. Fight them like this.
1:11:40 Jeff Larson? Maybe elbow drop then.
1:11:41 Wes Larson? No, but if, if you like had a backpack on, maybe like hoist it up over your neck. As you're making yourself loud and whatnot, do whatever you can. If it's actually engaging with you, just try and keep it away from your neck as much as you possibly can. But what I recommend is bear spray.
1:11:57 Mike Smith? People that run around in trench coats flashing people, they have a pretty good advantage if they ever get into it with a mountain lion.
1:12:03 Wes Larson? They got that trench coat collar.
1:12:05 Mike Smith? Yeah, open the trench coat.
1:12:06 Wes Larson? Oh, yeah. Yeah. You can't open your jacket or whatever to look bigger.
1:12:09 Mike Smith? Like one of those frill lizards or whatever.
1:12:11 Wes Larson? Yeah. I mean, these, these are animals that can take down an elk. So you can make yourself look pretty big and it still might not deter it. I think more so than just being big, it's aggression, you know, it's being, letting it know that you see it and that you're not happy that it's there. Okay.
1:12:29 Mike Smith? That'd be hard for you. You'd be like trying to pretend you're not happy to see it, but.
1:12:33 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:12:34 Mike Smith? Inside you really are.
1:12:37 Mike Smith? Smiling.
1:12:38 Wes Larson? All right. We're gonna go on to our new category, Some Nice Advice Would Suffice. We got some advice requested from a listener, Jeff?
1:12:47 Jeff Larson? Yeah, we got, we got some good ones. Thank you for emailing us. If you have any like wildlife encounters, or just want advice from the boys, email us at [email protected] .
1:13:01 Wes Larson? Yes.
1:13:01 Jeff Larson? And if Cindy tells you you're in the wrong place, just know you're in the right place.
1:13:06 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:13:09 Jeff Larson? Alright.
1:13:09 Wes Larson? Thanks for all your help Cindy.
1:13:11 Jeff Larson? Thank you Cindy, you've been amazing. I shouldn't be teasing you. This is from Aaron F. "Hi guys, I know you aren't parents, but I'm curious on your take here anyway. My 3rd grader's science teacher shows the kids Coyote Peterson videos every day, every single class. They don't do reading, assignments, quizzes, experiments, nothing but old Coyote P. They don't even discuss the videos after, other than like, hee hee, that was cool, bro. Should I complain? From a, from a scientific perspective, are these videos like, really bad?
1:13:51 Jeff Larson? So, I mean Coyote Peterson follows, follows the podcast, we don't know if he's ever listened.
1:13:58 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:13:59 Jeff Larson? But Wes, you got, you got, what are your thoughts here?
1:14:02 Wes Larson? Yeah, I-
1:14:03 Jeff Larson? You got beef?
1:14:04 Wes Larson? I don't. I'm not gonna say that I have beef with Coyote Peterson. I don't feel that way at all. I, I've mentioned before that I don't like videos where people stress out wildlife just to get views and monetize them. But, the same time, I do think there is an educational component to a lot of those videos. I do think, in his videos, he teaches a lot of facts about wildlife. But in my opinion, and I'm not a teacher, but in my opinion, that's the kind of- Wildlife entertainment, the kids are gonna access on their own, that they can go to YouTube as kind of like a more supplementary thing in their own time and access that sort of thing. And I don't think it's bad to show that in class every once in a while, but to solely rely
1:14:48 Wes Larson? on that feels very shallow to me. That's how I feel.
1:14:52 Mike Smith? I think especially you can turn it into a good learning experience if you at least talk about it, you know, but it sounds like that's not happening at all. So, I don't know. If I put myself in the place of a parent, I would talk to somebody about that. I wouldn't be, you know, I wouldn't burn the house down or anything, but.
1:15:10 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:15:11 Jeff Larson? I haven't watched a lot of Coyote P. I do think he like gives some animal facts that are true and stuff, though.
1:15:18 Wes Larson? Sure, for sure he does.
1:15:19 Jeff Larson? My advice would be, don't, don't complain about it. Just maybe like add to it when you can.
1:15:26 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:15:27 Jeff Larson? But, I don't know.
1:15:28 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:15:28 Jeff Larson? Steve Irwin probably
1:15:30 Wes Larson? I was about to say.
1:15:31 Jeff Larson? in retrospect, wasn't the best example for how to interact.
1:15:35 Wes Larson? I was gonna say the exact same thing. Yeah.
1:15:37 Jeff Larson? But freaking look at Wes. He knows so much and he learned a lot from Irwin.
1:15:42 Wes Larson? Yeah. Irwin was one of my, I mean, he was one of my like role models and heroes. Like, he inspired me. And I do think people like Coyote Peterson serves that for a lot of the newer generation. But I do think it's still, a lot of it is pop science. Like, a lot of it is just kind of very surface level things that you're learning, like facts about animals, but you're not learning about the systems. You're not learning about the, kind of the undercurrent of science. And that's what teachers are for. They should be teaching those kind of more weighted, interesting kind of fundamentals. And you're not getting that from YouTube pop scientists. You're just not. You know, like you need, you need
1:16:24 Wes Larson? a dedicated teacher that's teaching you those sort of things. So I just would say that school and teachers are really important and I hope they are actually teaching kids.
1:16:35 Jeff Larson? All right.
1:16:36 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:16:36 Jeff Larson? Well, that's it for listener advice. It's fun. Thank you, Anne.
1:16:40 Wes Larson? Yeah, for right. Some nice, some nice advice would suffice is the name of that category. All right.
1:16:45 Mike Smith? Got to call it that, Jeff.
1:16:47 Jeff Larson? My bad.
1:16:48 Wes Larson? Jeff, do you have any listener questions for us?
1:16:50 Jeff Larson? I do. So I don't know. I was just trying to theme the listener questions recently and I themed this one. Tooth and claw listener questions about reproduction.
1:17:03 Wes Larson? Okay.
1:17:04 Jeff Larson? So G. Chud asks, do all marsupials do the weird jelly bean baby birth thing or is it just kangaroos?
1:17:13 Wes Larson? I think they all do it.
1:17:15 Jeff Larson? I know koalas do it.
1:17:17 Wes Larson? Yeah, but I'm not sure, but I'm, I think they all do it.
1:17:20 Jeff Larson? And they all have like pouches that they raise their babies in, right?
1:17:24 Wes Larson? Yeah, I'm pretty sure they all have pouches too. I think those are like both kind of what make a marsupial or marsupial. Don't take that as like as gospel, but I'm pretty sure that's it.
1:17:35 Jeff Larson? Rebecca J. Henderson, what's the most interesting example of sexual dimorphism in nature you've heard of?
1:17:43 Wes Larson? Hmm. The ones that are always really interesting to me is when the female has like really elaborate coloring or some like crazy courtship thing and the male is really drab because it's usually the opposite. I'm trying to think of a good example of that and I'm not coming up with one, but I know they're out there. Because it's usually the opposite.
1:18:03 Jeff Larson? Yeah. So it's like interesting to you that the female wants to get some.
1:18:08 Wes Larson? More that, yeah, the female's like the one that's more kind of in charge of, or has the role of trying to convince the male to.
1:18:16 Mike Smith? Initiate.
1:18:17 Jeff Larson? It's interesting in the emu episode that like the females just kind of hatch their legs or their eggs and they're just gone.
1:18:25 Wes Larson? That's actually a good example of what I was just saying. Emus do that. The females are responsible for a lot of courtship. Yeah.
1:18:32 Mike Smith? I like the queen bee situation too. I just think that's a really interesting hierarchy in the, in their little ecosystem.
1:18:39 Wes Larson? Some sexual dimorphism there, some pretty extreme sexual dimorphism.
1:18:42 Mike Smith? They're all huge and the dudes are little beta, beta males.
1:18:47 Jeff Larson? What's like the biggest contrast of like male to female size? It's probably like a spider or something, right? Where they're like three times bigger.
1:18:56 Wes Larson? Probably some kind of insect. Yeah.
1:18:59 Jeff Larson? Yeah, I like black widows where the females are just bosses.
1:19:05 Jeff Larson? Actually, my, mine would probably be lions, though. I just think lions just seem like two different animals, the males and females, like, it feels like they're not the same species. The male lions just seem so different, and I think it's cool.
1:19:19 Wes Larson? Yeah, for me, I, you see that the most in birds. When you see like Birds of Paradise, and the male have these like, the males have these crazy feathers and like wild coloration, and the female will just kind of be a little nondescript brown bird.
1:19:33 Jeff Larson? Alright, so it was Valentine's Day yesterday. Jgab94 asks, if you were a bear, how would you pick up a girl? I don't know if Valentine's Day matters. I don't know why I said that, but...
1:19:45 Mike Smith? I can kind of see where you're going with it, though.
1:19:47 Jeff Larson? You think it's still like romantic to have like chocolate bears, if you're a bear?
1:19:52 Wes Larson? Yeah, sure. We eat probably lots of little human shaped things, sometimes.
1:19:56 Jeff Larson? Do we?
1:19:57 Wes Larson? I don't know.
1:19:57 Mike Smith? Do?
1:19:58 Wes Larson? It's most of it.
1:19:59 Mike Smith? Trying to think of any.
1:20:00 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:20:01 Jeff Larson? Sour Patch Kids.
1:20:03 Mike Smith? There you go. That's a good one.
1:20:04 Wes Larson? And those are kids. That's fucked up.
1:20:06 Mike Smith? Yeah.
1:20:08 Wes Larson? I think I'd just, I'd bring her a bunch of huckleberries because I love when someone gives me fresh huckleberries as a human, so I can't imagine for a bear how good that must feel. So, that's what I would, I would do.
1:20:21 Jeff Larson? Yeah, I think I'm going Sour Patch Kids. Like, instead of gummy bears, you just give them some Sour Patch Kids.
1:20:27 Wes Larson? I like that.
1:20:27 Mike Smith? Learning about how bears do that girding around trees, they like rip off all the bark. I would do that, and then I'd like scratch our initials inside of a heart together on every single tree that I killed.
1:20:38 Wes Larson? I like it.
1:20:39 Mike Smith? Okay. Just so destructive.
1:20:41 Wes Larson? You're going to tree hell if you do that.
1:20:43 Mike Smith? I know.
1:20:43 Jeff Larson? This is, this is an interesting one. I don't know if you'll be able to answer it, but I wanted to see if you have any takes on it. And I think there'll be more for you, Wes. Kim Hoffey asks, if you had to be pregnant and give birth, what animal's reproductive experience would you pick? So like, what animal do you think has like, an easy, I guess, or just like the birth you would want to be able to do?
1:21:10 Wes Larson? Yeah, I feel like the easiest are are egg layers.
1:21:13 Jeff Larson? Laying eggs doesn't seem too bad.
1:21:15 Wes Larson? Right, cuz and most of them.
1:21:16 Jeff Larson? Like a huge egg or a tiny egg?
1:21:19 Wes Larson? A tiny egg. I mean, most like a fish, you know, I want to be a female salmon.
1:21:23 Jeff Larson? Oh, yeah.
1:21:24 Wes Larson? Squirt all my eggs out and swim away and don't have to worry about them ever again.
1:21:29 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
1:21:29 Wes Larson? Like, that's easily the easiest. But if you're talking about like mammals.
1:21:33 Jeff Larson? Cuz you guys swim around bears to go do it.
1:21:35 Wes Larson? Yeah, yeah, fair enough.
1:21:37 Jeff Larson? That decays you.
1:21:38 Wes Larson? But as far as like the giving birth part of it. But if we're talking about mammals, I'd probably pick most ungulates kind of just poop out their baby. And then like, you know, it's already like walking and kind of mobile and stuff. And the way that their bodies are are designed, it's pretty easy for them just to give birth. You know, it's not like where humans have our femurs aren't the right size and the birth canal is too small and everything. Ungulates don't have that. And I know, I know I said poop out your baby, everyone, and I know that's not what it actually is. I was just joking, but that that'd probably be my pick for mammals.
1:22:15 Mike Smith? I'd do a whale, probably cuz they just what blast them out of their blowhole. It's pretty simple, I think.
1:22:21 Wes Larson? It's not what they do. Marsupials are a good one, too.
1:22:25 Jeff Larson? Hmm, a giraffe, you like don't even need to lay down.
1:22:28 Wes Larson? Yeah, you just drop them. Exactly. That's what I'm saying. Ungulates just like drop their kids and then they're walking. Yeah.
1:22:36 Jeff Larson? I mean, orangutans, too. I just like it because you kind of get like a cute little buddy for like the next 10 years.
1:22:42 Wes Larson? Yeah, eight years, I think. So I got a couple from our patrons just because, you know, they're our writer dies and we want to do them, do them the best we possibly can. That didn't make a lot of sense.
1:22:55 Jeff Larson? I don't want to do them at all. Well, actually, I do want my guys.
1:22:59 Mike Smith? Yeah, we don't want to make any blanket statements.
1:23:02 Wes Larson? My mom, our mom's been categorizing this for us and she forgot to put the name on this one. So nevermind, I'm just gonna do two.
1:23:09 Jeff Larson? Shots fired at mom.
1:23:10 Wes Larson? We'll come, we'll come back.
1:23:11 Jeff Larson? We're getting some tax.
1:23:13 Wes Larson? She's, she's doing a great job. She really is. She's helping us out so much. Our, our messages have gotten to a point where we can't do them on our own. So if you ever have a message that's like, needs to be answered by one of us specifically, let her know that. But for the most part, okay. So Max from Australia says, if you could only listen to music from one decade for the rest of your life, which one are you picking?
1:23:37 Mike Smith? Ooh, 90s.
1:23:39 Wes Larson? Nineties for me too. It's an easy pick.
1:23:41 Mike Smith? Yeah, pretty easy for me.
1:23:43 Jeff Larson? I'm gonna go out on a limb.
1:23:45 Wes Larson? Okay.
1:23:45 Jeff Larson? I'm gonna say the 2040s.
1:23:49 Wes Larson? You're skipping ahead. Okay.
1:23:54 Jeff Larson? I think the best is ahead of us.
1:23:56 Wes Larson? All right. Interesting pick. Uh, this one's from Bella. Bella says, are you guys excited for the new Paddington movie? And do you think he'll meet a spectacled bear? Before we get into whether or not we're excited about it, technically Paddington is a spectacled bear, because that's the only bear species that exists in South America. So, yes, I do think he'll meet one because he is one, but.
1:24:19 Jeff Larson? Well, I think she's saying that.
1:24:22 Wes Larson? No, she said, do you think he'll meet a spectacled bear?
1:24:25 Jeff Larson? Right, but I think she knows that he's spectacled because she knows that he's from Peru. She's just wondering, shouting out her knowledge there.
1:24:32 Wes Larson? Sure. Yeah, I'm not trying to, yeah, I'm not trying to.
1:24:36 Mike Smith? I wasn't really listening. I have no input.
1:24:39 Wes Larson? Are you excited for the new Paddington movie though, Mike?
1:24:42 Mike Smith? Yeah, sure. It sounds, I mean, it looks real fun. And I have recently watched the first two for the first time and had.
1:24:48 Jeff Larson? Oh, really?
1:24:48 Mike Smith? An overwhelmingly positive experience. So, anyone who's put it off for as long as I did, for whatever reason, get on it.
1:24:55 Jeff Larson? Did you like the second more than the first?
1:24:58 Mike Smith? I think I did. Yeah, very slightly. Yeah, I thought the first was just like so cozy and comfy and fun too, though.
1:25:05 Jeff Larson? No, they're great. I don't know. I was a little nervous when the preview came out, but I think I'm always like skeptical, like, it just doesn't seem like movies I'm gonna like. I'm just like, oh, they got lucky twice, but I don't care. This isn't my type of movie. And then every time I just end up freaking loving that bear.
1:25:24 Wes Larson? Right. Yeah, I'm excited for it. It's not the same director as the other two. And he's the one that directed like the new Wonka movie and stuff. And he just, I think he just has like a really good flair for making really whimsical, fun movies. So I'm less excited than I would be if he was attached, but I'm still gonna go see it. So. All right. Um, yeah, let's just go with those two for now. Uh, we'll definitely, at some point, I think I'll do, all three of us can do an episode where we just answer a bunch of patron questions because we do have them building up a little bit.
1:25:56 Jeff Larson? Sure.
1:25:57 Wes Larson? All right. Uh, let's get on to our conservation corner real quick. So there's probably between 3,200 and 4,500 mountain lions in California. That makes it one of the states that has the highest population. That's about what probably Montana has. Oregon likely has a little bit more. Um, there's a few other states that are kind of in that, that range. Utah has about 1,500 is what they think. The main threats to the ones currently living in California, we're going to talk about California specifically, are loss of habitat from human expansion, habitat fragmentation, which is a big one, because if you have these isolated populations of mountain lions, there's no gene flow, and they're really susceptible to disease,
1:26:39 Wes Larson? which is another big problem for them, especially with bird flu becoming more and more common. It does affect mountain lions. There's been mountain lions that have died from bird flu. So we are a little bit worried about that. Illegal killings and rodenticides are a few other threats that face them. So there, there's, there are a species of least concern right now for the IUCN, but in some of these states, they do have special protection because they are under threat from so many different things. And I think they deserve it.
1:27:08 Jeff Larson? They're really close. They got like really close recently to pretty much dying out of Florida, right? The Florida panther.
1:27:16 Wes Larson? So they are on the endangered species act, on the endangered species list in Florida. And then the eastern cougar was declared extinct a number of years ago. That's just, that's the same animal. It was just the eastern variant of the western cougar. And right now, the only state in the east that has a viable population of mountain lions is in Florida. And they call them Florida Panthers down there. But they are expanding into some of those states again. So I do think we'll see them back in some of those states. But this is an animal that is under a lot of pressure. People don't like them. They're afraid of them. You shouldn't be. It's an amazing animal. It's one that's very afraid of us. We do far more harm to them than they could ever do to us. And they make the wild more wild. They
1:27:59 Wes Larson? make it more beautiful. And I just absolutely love them. All right. So let's give them our claws. It's ten claws for me. It's a minted ten claw animal.
1:28:08 Jeff Larson? Where'd you got them in your cat ranking?
1:28:10 Wes Larson? Currently, there are probably one or two. One?
1:28:13 Jeff Larson? Really?
1:28:14 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:28:14 Jeff Larson? Wow.
1:28:15 Wes Larson? Yeah. It's between them and Jaguars for one. Holy cow.
1:28:19 Jeff Larson? Yeah, I just love wild cats. I have such a hard time. I just feel like I want to give them more credit, but then.
1:28:25 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:28:26 Jeff Larson? I don't know. They are just as cool as any of the big cats, though. So I'll give them, I'm gonna give them nine claws. Cause there's at least five big cats I still have ranked ahead of them.
1:28:36 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:28:36 Jeff Larson? But I freaking love mountain lions.
1:28:38 Wes Larson? When I had one walk like right in front of me in Patagonia, it just, as it was hunting guanaco, it's what really what cemented them for me. Mike?
1:28:47 Mike Smith? Hmm, I'm gonna give them a real light, I'm stealing Fantano's little needle drop out of ten scale here. I'm gonna give them an eight, a light eight. Yeah, they're, they're awesome. They're really cool. Uh, on the whole spectrum of animals. They're beautiful. They're powerful, just really cool animals. But I like every other cat, I think, a lot more, uh, all of the bigger, other big cats.
1:29:09 Wes Larson? Okay.
1:29:10 Mike Smith? Substantially more, I think.
1:29:12 Wes Larson? Okay.
1:29:12 Jeff Larson? How would you rate, like, the scream they make compared to, like, other cat noises?
1:29:18 Wes Larson? It's pretty high for me. I think it's a really cool sound. Definitely higher than cheetahs just chirping like little birds.
1:29:23 Mike Smith? The chirp.
1:29:25 Jeff Larson? I like chirp.
1:29:26 Wes Larson? I do too. I love cheetahs, but you guys have made me feel like I don't like them. For the podcast.
1:29:33 Mike Smith? You're the one that left them off your top ten cats.
1:29:35 Wes Larson? I forgot them, man. I forgot them.
1:29:37 Jeff Larson? I, I think I like the scream more than like a cat that can only half roar. The lion roar is like so cool to me.
1:29:47 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:29:48 Jeff Larson? There you got it, damn.
1:29:49 Wes Larson? All right. Well, thanks, guys, for listening and thanks, as always, for supporting us, however you support us, whether it's just listening to the podcast. Or if you're a member of our Patreon community or Griz Club,
1:30:00 Jeff Larson? You bought merch.
1:30:02 Wes Larson? If you bought merch, however you've done it, it, we truly can't express how much we appreciate it. This changed all three of our lives. I feel like it's been such a amazing vessel for communicating wildlife knowledge. And, you know, as someone who's in research science for over 10 years, this is for me, feels like the most impactful thing I've been able to do for wildlife and that is all because of our listeners. So, thank you. It really means a lot to all three of us.
1:30:31 Jeff Larson? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I love my job and it's all because of you listeners.
1:30:36 Wes Larson? Yep, we love you.
1:30:37 Jeff Larson? Nothing more to add. Thanks.
1:30:39 Wes Larson? All right. Bye, guys.
1:30:40 Jeff Larson? See ya. Mike, you're not even gonna like edit this or anything now. You're just gonna go take a nap.
Previous Juliane of the Jungle Next Avian Air Force: Pigeons at War Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated