00:00:00 Speaker 1: My name is Clay Nukelem and I'm a seventh generation or Kansan. I'm a husband, a father, a hunter, a mule skinner, a writer. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm a person of faith. We're starting a new podcast here a meat eater, and I hope you'll follow along. I'm interested in that intersection of where tradition and contemporary life meet. On this podcast, we're gonna look back into history and find relevance for today. I like looking for insight and unlikely places, searching for relevance and things that have been forgotten. And I love telling the story of Americans who lived their life close to the land. This podcast is going to be an efficient listen with an engaging glance into history and an interesting guest where we'll explore unique people, unique topics, and unique stories. I hope that you'll follow along on the air Grease Podcast. There it is. That's the name of our new podcast, the Bear Grease Podcast. Why the name bear Grease? If you know much about me, you know that I love some bear grease, which is the rendered fat of a bear, literally the cooked lard of a bear that's turned into oil at one time. Bear grease or bear oil was a highly valued commodity and it was used for cooking and all other sorts of practical stuff. It was even used as currency. It had a ton of value, and today most people wouldn't know anything about it. Technology and modern times have buried some pretty cool stuff that we're rediscovering and we're redefining now even what's relevant by looking back, some of the things that time has forgotten are ripe for a cultural resurrection. Bear Grease is a metaphor or and as you follow along, I think you'll begin to understand what I mean. How certain are you that you saw two mountain lions? No doubt? Have you ever seen a lion? Mountain lion in Arkansas? I think there's panther. I think there's black mountain lions. Myself. On this episode of the Bear Grease Podcast will be exploring the myth of the Southern mountain lion and how the lore or maybe the hard science, we don't know which one has forever and inextricably connected itself to Southern culture. We're going to talk to some mountain lion believers, a biologists, and even a psychologist to get some answers about lions and about human nature. Well, I mean, I don't have any proof of it. I just always have heard that. You've heard it, you've heard of cognitive I mean I just believed the propaganda. My name is Clay Nukelem and this is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of Americans who lived their lives close to the land. There are two kinds of people in the South, those that have seen mountain lions in those that haven't. Both of these groups carry their own unique stigmas, perhaps both equally as wrought with irony as the other. They seem to huddle tightly and cult like clans of believers and unbelievers. But to understand the tension between those who have seen mountain lions and those who haven't, and yes, there is tension, you'll have to understand a bit of history. The mountain lion Puma con color is a large tan colored feline weighing up to two dred pounds or more. It, along with the jaguar, which are extremely rare and primarily live south of the US border in Mexico, are the only large cats in North America since the extinction of the giant cats of the Pleistocene, which basically was an epoch of time that ended about ten thousand years ago. These Pleistocene cats included saber tooth cats, American lions, American jaguars, the American cheetah. This place used to be crawling with giant purring predators. However, today we've pretty much got one large cat in the United States and Canada. The old mountain lion or puma or panther, or the painter or the catamount all the same animal, but they have different names and different regions. You might recognize one of these, But the mountain lion's native range extends from the Canadian Yukon all the way down to the Andes Mountains of South America, and from the east and west its range goes from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. This is fascinating that they are the most widespread terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere. To bring it home simply to North America. Prior to European settlement, they had the widest geographic spread of any large mammal, more than white tailed deer, more than elk, or than Buffalo more than anything, and here in lies are issue in They used to be here. But by the turn of the twentieth century, mountain lions were extirpated from almost one hundred percent of their eastern range in the entire Eastern Deciduous Forest. The word extra pated means that they didn't go extinct, but they were removed from a specific region. The Eastern Deciduous Forest basically extends from east Texas all the way to Maine, and from Wisconsin all the way down to Florida. Basically, it's the eastern one third of the United States. It's worth noting that mountain lions in southern Florida held on and were never entirely gone, perhaps making them the only mountain lions east of the Mississippi for a very long time. Or were they have they been in much of the Eastern Deciduous Forest all this time, just right under our noses. A lot of people think so, but for sure throughout the twentieth century, mountain lion populations only survived, according to science anyway, in the rugged out in this regions of the western US and Canada. Though lions haven't been in the South for the last hundred years, or at least that's what the government biologists tell us. Lots of people still see them. In fact, I know some of these hillbillies that aren't afraid to stand up against the statistics and against the science and boldly proclaimed their eyewitness convictions. Some might even call it conservation slander. The myth of the Southern mountain lion is so strongly imbedded into our culture they might as well actually be here. Or maybe they are here, maybe they've been here all along. The only way that I know how to get to the bottom of this is to hear some of these stories for myself, and some of these stories are pretty close to home. Just for the record, I've never seen a mountain lion in the South, but my dear sweet dad, Gary Newcom has, And here's his story. When was it? Tell me when it was? Oh, I would say twenty years ago, years ago to say late nineties, Well, yeah, probably probably. And I was in one of my favorite hunting areas, driving on a Warehouser road. But then I looked to my left, and when I turned my truck in the middle of the road to make that turn, I looked up there and there was what I thought was a bobcat. I thought, that's a big old bobcat, is it? Yeah? Yeah, it's like it's later in the afternoon, but still real clear light. I mean, it wasn't like dusty or anything. And I thought a bobcat. And then I saw the tail and I go, I look, yeah, it's some outline and you know it was hundred yards you know, it was pretty good ways off. You saw a distinctive just think deep, no question about it. So what color was I want to say blue? Yeah it was. It was just a tan colored animals. Yeah, I mean like, okay, so you're my dad, and I inherently trust your judgment. You've been around seventy two years. How certain are you if you if there was a way to tell, I mean, like, if there was really a way to know whether it was a mountain lie or not in your life depended on how certain are you that it was a mountain, it would be Oh yeah, I mean, I don't know what has a tail that this as long as the body, it seemed to me, like, what did it do? Was just standing the road and ran on It took his time, came across the road. By the time I saw it as pretty close to the ditch, and and if if I remember correctly, it looked at me. So it didn't just darted. No, no, no, it was moving slow, so you gotta look at it. Yeah, and so, but I didn't catch it from over here to here. I caught it towards the you know, just maybe two or three steps from the ditch, and then it just eased off in the ditch and then went into the cut over you know, ten year old cut. And uh, when I saw the tale, you know, I sit here, I's just thinking mountain lion, you know, I mean, it's just I mean, what what has it said? Yeah, Brent Reeves would be considered a hill billy if he didn't live in the Arkansas Delta or the swamp country. Regardless of semantics. He's a close friend of mine, veteran outdoorsman, and he's been in law enforcement for the last thirty years. I've only known him to stretch the truth on occasion. And he claims to not just have seen one mountain lion, but too. I'll let you judge his story. So, Brent, tell me about not one mountain lion, but two mountain lions that you've seen in Arkansas. I will gladly relate the following. The first one was probably in nineteen I'm gonna say it was an eight eight. Me and three other guys were working for a private UH timber management company, and we were in Ashley County, Arkansas, which is in right next to two counties away from from Mississippi and southeast Arkansas. We were driving down the timber company road going to manage September is probably nine o'clock in the morning, good daylight, and a panther, mountain lion, cougar, whatever you want to call it, jumped out in front of our truck at about thirty yards and loped down the road in front of us for twenty thirty seconds, and we're right behind it, and it ran off into a section September that we drove down another quarter of a mile and went in ourselves to cruise the timber see how much timber was in there. That was the at first one I've ever seen. And we got back that afternoon. There was no cell phones or anything back during that time. So when we got back to the office that afternoon, I called a friend and we then reported to the Game and Fish and we got a call back I think the next day that they had had reports to that in the area and actually attributed it to one that had escaped captivity. So it was it was known in that area to be rambling around. And so that wasn't the only mountain lion you've seen, You've seen another one. How did that? My friend David Boudra and I we're going coon hunt one evening. This would have been even a real name. It is. It is getting fisher and Fisher it is. It is a real name, and he can attest to it. But but David and I were going coon hunting one evening in Cleveland County where I grew up, and it's dusky dark, you don't have to drive with your lights on. And we were driving next to this big clear cut fresh clear cut, and there was two or three big trees that weren't mergetable for logs or anything. So the timber company left him out there. And this tree was probably it was a big white oak tree. It was probably hundred and fifty two hundred yards away from the timber access road and we're driving down through there. It's in the fall of the year, so the leaves are coming off pretty good and I look out there and I can see a silhouette of what I thought was a turkey, and I told David, I said, David looked at the big old turkey saitting on the limb out there, and he said, yeah, I see it. Well, I had my coon hunting light on. I just turned my light on see if I could see if it was a gobbler or a hen. And when I turned it on, the eyes were glowing back at me, which turkey's eyes don't normally do that. And we slowed down and David said, man, that's not a that's not a turkey. And we slowed down to look at it, and it turned started walking down that limb, and you could plainly see that big long tail out from out behind it. That thing walked down towards the trunk of the tree, got to where the limb leaves the trunk of the tree, put his feet down, their paws and just dropped down into that clear cut. And then we turned around and went back the other direction and turned their dogs loose. Let me ask you this, on both of these sightings, now thirty years later, if your life depended on it, and there was a way to know the absolute truth and they said they're gonna burn your house down if you're wrong. How certain are you that you saw two mountain lions? No doubt? And the thing about it is, both times I had a witness with me. Of course, one of them was a coon. I'm gonna I'm gonna need their phone numbers. One of them is, I say was one of them is a coupon hunter, and they you know he's not vaccinated against lyon. But I'm telling you no, no doubt about it. I'll let you be the edge of whether you believe these two stories or not. But I've got somebody that has the credentials to validate them or take away all their credibility. I'm not sure which one it will be. Myron Means is a statewide large carnivore program coordinator for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. If there's an expert on mountain lions around these parts, it's my Iron Means. I think you can give us some insight into the facts of whether the mythical mountain lions of the South are real or if they're just a farcical relic of folklore passed on from a time when they were actually here. Myra and When I first met you ten eleven years ago, you were the Arkansas Bear Coordinator black Bear Bio. Just that's right, and now you're not. Your your title has changed. What's your new title with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. My new title is Statewide Large Carnivore Program Coordinator for Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. That's a mouthful. Something happened because at one time there was just one large carnivore acknowledged by the Game and Fish and your title change, which indicates what happened. Well long about ten years ago, right after I took the bear program coordinator position, we started seeing mountlines in the state. And it's not that they weren't seen prior to that, it's just that, you know, we didn't have there were very very few ways to uh document a siting. I mean, you know, if you think back historically, people didn't have game cameras back much in the eighties, you know, and that's come that's kind of come along in the past fifteen years or so. But anyway, what basically what happened was mountainlins started showing up in the state from time to time, and UH, Game and Fish recognized that, you know, you need to have someone that's kind of coordinating the sightings, coordinating the verifications, uh, and just kind of packaging mountainlin stuff. So it's not necessarily that now there are lions here and there weren't before, but we're we just know about them. Is that what I'm hearing you say? That's right, that's right. You know, for a lot came primarily because of game cameras or you know, if someone has one like on a phone video or something like that. But it's primarily been the game cameras. Uh. That's really what has helped us, you know, document the occurrence and mountlines in the States. So here's here's the question. Where did they come from? Because bears mountain lions, this would be historic mountain lion range here in Arkansas and in all of the eastern United States. So where did our lines come from? Well, that's ah, that's a million dollar question. Who knows. The only evidence that we have currently was from a mountain line that was shot by a deer hunter back into two thousand and sixteen. Now that was harvested or shot in Bradley County by a deer hunter. That mountain lion was also previously documented on a cash in Marion County about two months prior to that, So that would have been in Uh, that was in two thousand and fourteen. I'm sorry. Uh. So the DNA evidence that we collected from that cat in both instances, UH told us that number one, it's the same cat. UH told us that number two, that cat had origins from the South Dakota population. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that cat was born in South Dakota. It just means that it's d n A origins came from that South Dakota population. Now, if you think of it in terms of where would it most likely come from, Well, there's established mountain populations in the Dakotas, South Dakota, which would be north and west of us, slightly primarily north, but still in the Mississippi River drainage for the most part. Well, it'd be kind of it'd be probably closer tied to the Missouri River drainage. Uh. There's an established population in northwest Nebraska. There's an established population out in the Panhandle of Oklahoma. There's an established population of lines in the Panhandle of Texas and in southern Texas. So I mean, uh, and of course you have the Florida panthers in Florida. So those are really the the closest quote established, how many that would be from here? You know, the closest population would probably be the Panhandle of Oklahoma, you know, out in the Black Hills area. But is it likely that those caps would move all the way across Oklahoma? Probably not, But because the travel corridors in the habitat just isn't there. Is it likely that a cat could move out of the Dakotas across northern Nebraska, uh into eastern Nebraska and hit the Missouri River drainage and follow the Missouri River down through the ozarks of Missouri and then into the ozarks of Arkansas and then go who knows where else. That's probably the most likely. So it's almost like highways, like habitat highways, like you could you could track good lion habitat all the way back to the Dakotas and Nebraska. Sure you could. I mean, you know there's gonna be some spancees of maybe hundred hundred fifty mile maybe even two hundred mile gaps, But you have to think and in travel terms, you know, that's something that a mountain lion could do. In a day or two. Byron, what about captive lions getting out? Because I remember growing up in western Arkansas, you'd hear the odd persons say they saw line and it was always thrown back up on cap. They said, somebody had a captive line and they let it lose. What do you think of that? Yeah, And a matter of fact, you know, that was really kind of the official, I guess position of the agency through the eighties and nineties, that more than likely if someone saw a mountain line, more than likely it was the result of an escaped cat or some a cat that someone couldn't care for anymore. They removing, maybe the owner died, maybe something, and so what are they gonna do? Just turn it out? So that was really kind of the official position of the agency for a couple of decades. Uh, that more n likely if you saw a cat, it was probably a release cat or an escaped cat. You know, that takes all the fun I've seen a mountain line. Well, it certainly presented a lot of gotcha opportunities, you know, for the agency. Uh, for a long time, back in the early two thousand's is probably when the agency started turning around saying more than likely rather than being an escaped cap because a lot of those captive breeders kind of fell out. You know, when I was a kidulations yeah, and it just wasn't the thing. I mean, I could remember, believe it or not. When I was a kid, I knew two people that I went to a grade school with that had pet mountain lines. I mean, you know so so, I mean back in the seventies, you know, it wasn't that odd of a deal for someone to have a mountain line as a pet. You know, we still have no proof. A lot of people try to play gotcha all the time with us and say, well, gaming Fish says that, you know, we don't have mountain lines. Well, you know, we've never said we don't have mountlines. What we've said for the past forty years or plus years is that we don't have any evidence of an established, reproducing population of mountainlines. And has that changed, still has not changed. We still don't have evidence of a reading population mountain lions here. We do not. Well, let me ask you this, do you feel like today in Arkansas there are mountain lions that are living here year round? I think there are mountain lions that live here year around. I think virtually all of the mountain lions that we have documented sightings of over the past, uh well since two thousand ten, I feel like they're all males, you know, either young males or older males. A lot of the picture evidence translates to them being older males. I'm not talking really old males, but mature males. And that would be very characteristic of an expanding population of large carnivores, whether it be bears or lions. You would start to see these fringe areas that would start to get satellite males. And uh, you know a lot of people don't realize with mountain lions is that you know, you're you're talking about a young animal that gets pushed out of the population, a young male that basically gets kicked out on the streets. You know, it's not something that they're just gonna travel another fifty miles down the road and establish, you know, a territory of their own. I mean, you're talking about animals that have no qualms about traveling hundreds of miles in order to find a suitable territory that has food, cover and females. Well, in the absence of females, they're not going to establish a territory. I mean, it's just that simple. So when you think of the behavior that takes place in these animals they move into, say if they did come from the Dakotas they move into the Missouri, they go down the Missouri drainage, they're starting to mature. They're no longer six months old, they're a year old. They're mature. Male. Uh So, there are a couple of things that are driving that young mountain lion to exist. One of them is food and the other one is reproduction. And until he finds both of those, he's not So he's looping down into Missouri and going back. Probably he might be going back. He much might just continue to keep going until he does find a female. And whether that means he has to cross four or five six states to do it, they'll do it. Wow. In the nineteen nineties movie Dumb and Dumber, Jim Carrey, when he's confronted with the fact that his girlfriend is leaving him forever and she gives him an inkling of hope that perhaps she'll come back to him, he says, so you're telling I feel like what Myron just said, and talking about the dispersal of mountain lions and their ability to travel such long distances give some credibility to the lore of the Southern mountain lion because we have an established population of lions in southern Florida and then in the West and would not be unheard of for lions travel that distance. So maybe there is something to all these mountain lions sightings, regardless of the fact that many of these sightings could have and very well may have been captive lions released that people were seen. So do you do you foresee a time like with the so with that, with the habitat structure that we currently have between here and these populations, do you forecast a time It might be twenty years from now, fifty years from now, five years from now. I don't know, will we have an established breeding populations line, because what would typically happen, as I understand dispersal of these large carnivores, is like the males start making these satellite loops and then at some point females, you know, like at some point we're gonna get a picture of a female in Arkansas. Well, you know, Missouri came up about four believe it's about four years ago. And they collected some hair off of a confirmed sighting. They confirmed that it was a female. Uh. The experts that I have talked to about mountain lions, all of them have been pretty consistent in saying that if you do have a female in a geographic area, a male will finder. It's just a matter of time. When you do have a female show up, you will have a breeding population. What I want to kind of talk to you about now is like mountain lion folklore essentially in places where they're historically haven't been lions in the last hundred years. So in Arkansas we have those arcs and washtaws, which would have these big vast sections of public land that would be for all of our deer populations would be less dense populations of deer than on private land. There's less deer in the mountains than there are in these agricultural areas, and civilizers, well, it seems to me that there is a unorthodox shift in mountain lion folklore in these like backwoods places, and I'm like, well, there's not enough deer there, Like there there's there's not enough game for these animals to be living. Like I think people would have this idea that a mountain lion, if he was living here, he'd be living way out and you know x X Mountain, which is far back in there. But what we're seeing with these lion sightings that you guys are confirming is that they're not necessarily in the backwoods there in places with higher deer density. Is that true? I think that would be the natural place to set up a territory exactly along the lines of what you're speaking of. I'll give you an example. Custer, South Dakota, is a very very small mountain town. And if you look a lot of the mountain towns up in the Black Hills, you know, they're very small communities in the lower portions of these valleys with the road highways running through them. And when you drive through them, you can see the edge of town, you know, up on the side of the mountain over there you can sit to the left and right. And when we were driving through there, one of the houndsmen that I was spent some time with, he'd be like, oh, yeah, you know, a mount line took a labrador from that guy's house right over there, and we go down the road and well, that guy was had his truck parked up at this you know, this bar or whatever it was sitting on the edge of town that you could see up there. But it's on the edge of town. Well, they came down and drug a deer out of that guy's truck, you know, and he's telling me all these stories, and uh, you know, mountain lions just don't have that secretiveness to them that I really thought they did. I mean, I thought they would stay, you know, a hundred miles away from a civilization or whatever, and and really they're not. It kind of cues back into what you were saying. They're gonna they're gonna go, and they're gonna set up shop where food is available, where it's the easiest, and where there's the most of It would be more natural for mountain line to set up an area that they're going to stay in a territory in the heart of the Ozark National Forest, or would it be more likely that he's set up in a territory on the fringes of national forest. Probably more likely to set up a territory on the fringes of national forest. But you're still talking about an animal leaven in prime mountain lion habitat. You're talking about an animal that has home ranges of you know, hundred plus square miles. So let's talk about where lines have been seen in Arkansas and how you guys determine that one is a sighting is valid. Probably a hundred and fifty plus sightings that people contact us a year now of those sightings that we're able to have physical evidence of, whether it be a track, whether it be a game camera photo, whether it be a phone photo video, whatever else, something that we have physical evidence that we can go out. We take a field investigation form. We go out on any sighting that has physical evidence and we'll record it. If it's a game camera photo, we're gonna record where the picture was, you know, whether it was yes, verify that it was taken from this camera at this spot. You have background everything. You're doing an investigation to verify that A, you know, it was a mountain line, B it was taken at this location. Because there's a lot of Internet hoaxes going out there. You know this this mountain line was taken at a friend of mine's, friends, uncle's, you know, best cousins. Whatever camera last week comes out that's been floating around the internet for six years and it was. You know, I was gonna say that if the game in fish gets a hundred and fifty sightings per year, I know about fifty of those guys, and I can tell you they're full of it. But what bulls right down to it. For the last decade or so, the amount of sightings that we have been able to verify and hold onto your seat, the mountain sightings that we have been able to verify per year averages to about one wow, one to two sightings per year that we're able to verify and say yes, that's without a doubt amount line, What is your personal feeling on all these other sightings? And just because someone can't verify sighting doesn't mean that it's not legit. It just means that they just means that us as a as a conservation agency here or a scientific agency. I mean, you know, we can't. I can't go out there and say, well, we've got a hundred mountain lines in the state because we've had this many sightings. I mean, I can't gotta have evidence. I gotta have evidence of it. I gotta have proof of it. I mean, you know, we don't just go out there and on on a whim and and say we've got this mini bear, this mini deers. So what's your gut about all these other sightings? Are people wrong or are people right? And it's just not verifiable. I think about ninety eight percent of the sightings that we get our misidentification, what are they see in? Uh, you'd be surprised at the amount of video or picture sightings that are sent to me every year. And I'm not talking about three or four. I'm talking about ten's fifty sixty, you know, maybe more pictures or videos that are sent to me every year that are housecats house cats? You mean to tell me that people are mistaken house cats for mountain lions, a fifteen pound cat versus a hundred and fifty pound cat. Believe it. Feral housecats are estimated to number seventy million, maybe even more. They're everywhere, and people don't understand scale often when they see an animal and get a picture of it. The biggest misidentification is by far and away, Uh, domestic house cats are just feral housecats. House cats in general. UH do have a lot of bobcat pictures that are sent to me, even videos of bobcats. And you know, there's some anatomical features that bobcats possessed that housecats or mountain lions don't possess. One of them, of course, is obvious, the bob tail. But I've seen a lot of pictures where a hind foot actually looks like a continuation of a tail, and then you look up at the head of it and you see these big, huge white dots on the backs of the ears, which are specific to bobcats, not mountain lions. Mountain lions don't have white patches on the back side. Okay, here's the here's the question of the hour. Okay, I've found living in the South, living in Arkansas, there's two kinds of people. There's people that have seen mountain lions and there are people that have not. So myran means, taken out of his position at the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, have you ever seen a lion mountain lion in Arkansas? Good? Thank goodness, firing. I wish I had. But you know, I mean, you know, I tell people this all the time, the amount of people that have seen mountain lions and everything else. I mean, if you think about that, it's it's it's a lot of people, a lot of people claimed to have seen him, and uh, I'm not here to tell anybody that they didn't see what they thought they saw. We're up to like since two thousand and ten, we're up to nineteen verified sightings in the last ten years in Arkansas. To understand why people so badly want to believe in mountain lions, we're gonna have to understand a bit about human nature. Dr. Richard Back has been a clinical psychologist since nineteen seventy nine, and he has some unique insight into why humans act the way they do. Dr Back of the of the hundreds, if not thousands, of mountain lions sightings that people would have claimed over the years to have happened here in Arkansas, and the actual number of verified sightings being so small, why do people Why do people believe that they've seen a lion when statistically they probably actually didn't. Well, it's probably two things going on there. One is that it's kind of an exciting thing to think is possible. And if people have any sort of belief established already, you know, whether they've read articles on mountain lions, or they had an uncle or grandfather talked about the mountain lions. If there's some connection somewhere and the person probably can't even identify where it was. But if it's an established fact that there are mountain lions, then when they see something that can be fit into that perception, they'll they'll they'll tend to do it, and then you can't talk them out of it no matter what you show them, and they are really confirming what they already believe or picked up somewhere. Is there a psychological term that would describe somebody that had a belief that may not even be true, and then something happened and they slotted that event that happened into a belief that wasn't real. Is there is there a psychological term for that. Yes, it's called confirmation bias, and it's just practically every person has it but is unaware of it and would certainly deny it if you ask. It's all over our lives. I guess, yeah, it's all over our lives. We end up believing things not even knowing where that comes from. In terms of what we think is the best model car or or the best football team or the best state to live in. We end up believing that and we couldn't really even probably voice reasons why We just like that, and then we cherry pick any sword of evidence, whether it's from newspapers or sports announcers or neighbors. But we cherry pick in terms of selecting information that supports what we already believe. Yeah, So it would be like really reasonable if if you were a young child growing up in somebody that you respected or maybe some of you didn't respect, told you that there were mountain lines here, regardless of that was like patently false, you would probably go through your life with a slot in your mind that there are potentially mountain lines here. So if you saw a flash a brown fur across the road, that might just easily slot into that place and it just be fact inside of your mind. Yes, yeah, that would happen. Can you tell me about naive realism what that means. Yeah, Naive realism is, I guess, in a sense, the foundation of confirmation bias. Naive realism is really kind of uh, fancy term for what I think we've probably all noticed, and that is almost everyone else we deal with thinks that they're right. Uh. And that's because most people do think and believe that their way of perceiving the world and interpreting data and selecting and making decisions. We all believe that we've come up on the right way of living life. So it's like you could be living just kind of you could just kind of have this false reality. Yeah, well yeah, lots of people do. And if anyone tries to convince them that they have a false reality, then they fall back on confirmation by us to really ignore anything they're saying that disputes what they believe and that, but they'll select all sorts of data that confirms there body confirms or bias. This is a great place to hear a story that actually happened. Scott Brown is my longtime good friend. He's a veteran woodsman, and I trust whatever the guy says. You're gonna get a kick out of this story. But I want you to ask yourself, which character in this story are you? So you know where I where I work, we sell hunting licenses, and usually the first the week right before modern gun Deer season opens, it just gets really busy. So I'm back there one night, I'm helping out and just trying to help him sell licenses, and a guy walks up and he says, Hey, I need to buy a license, And I said okay, no problem. I said what license you need and he said, well, I just need the Big Game license, the annual Big Game license. And said, okay, no problem. And so I asked for his driver's license and I'm I'm plugging his information. He says, well, that license allowed me to kill one of these and I said, what is it? And he shows me his phone. He's got this picture on his phone and when he shows it to me, it is, without question a bobcat. I mean it's it's, without question a bobcat. I've seen a lot of bobcats and I'm a hundred percent certain it was a bobcat. Had speckles on its belly. I mean it was. It's a bobcat, no question. And I said, yeah, yeah, it's it's a trail camera picture. Something he had on his trail camera there around his house somewhere. And I said, yeah, yeah, you shoot bobcats, coyotes and allow you shoot all that stuff. And when I said that, he was just I mean, he just snapped at me. He just said, that's not a bobcat. And I said, oh, it wasn't, and he said no, and he kind of hands the phone back over to me again. I'm thinking maybe I made a mistake. So I look at it again and I come to the same conclusion. It is a bobcat. I mean, there's just no question about it. And of course, you know, I didn't say anything. I just said, yeah, yeah, sure enough, you know, and just kind of blew him off, you know, as if he wants to believe that, he can believe that. I suppose. Well, it gets better. So as he tells me that there's three or four guys waiting and they're they're just standing around us. They're waiting on us, you know, so they can get a license. And the guy goes, did you say you have a mountain line on camera? And guy said yeah, yeah. So he kind of turns his phone around and shows this other guy and it kind of draws a crowd, and there's a three or four guys there and they're all like, oh, man, sure enough, you know it's a it's a big mountain line. Look at that thing. And they're all just handing around there. In the span of about one minute, he had convinced five people standing back there that he had a mountain line on camera, and every one of them believed it and had no trouble believing it. The only person by back there that thought otherwise was me, and it was it was because it was clearly a bobcat. This is how it started. Yeah, And I thought, man, this is how the legends and the myths and all these things you hear about people of seeing mountain lions get started. It just takes one person to see one. Now, all those five guys they left, I went wherever they went for the rest of the day and told how many people they saw a mountain lion on some guys game camera. And then thus, there's a mountain lion around and everybody's seen it, when actually only one guy saw it. It wasn't even a mountain lion. Now back to Myron, do you want to delve into the black panther myth? Absolutely yes. I meant to say that. In the South, particularly Myron, you hear this. You hear people talking about black panthers like I with my own ears, have heard countless grown men that I believe to be like rational thinking people tell me that they've seen black panthers. What's the deal with that? Well, I'll speak in scientific terms of black panthers. We can't have this discussion without talking about black panthers. My old, my, what a topic. Before we start, let me ask you a question. Do you believe in black panthers in North America? If you do or you don't, I gay wrong? Te you? You know some people that do, and they're probably normal, maybe even successful humans. I want you to think about that for a minute. I was shocked when my own father told me this story. When I was a kid, would go to Bucks Nord ain't Ali and Aunt Ali. They weren't an they ain't ain't Ali and ain't Ali. And then you'd go down to the Ali's house and she had the dog trot, and you'd spend a night down there, and you'd hear a panthers scream every now and then. Now, do you I don't have to be honest with you. I would be afraid that it was this cognitive disconnect where Lewin had talked about it so much, and they talked about it so much that when you mean, when you were there, it was like in this place you can hear panthers, oh man. And when you drove you, when you drove into Bucks, North, it was like if you were a city boy and guys like you and I that have a heart for the outdoors, even as a little kid. I mean, it would just be so exciting. The trees were over the road, and when you pulled up an ain't Alley's house, the yard was all sandy dirt, with doodle bugs everywhere in this big old dog trot down the middle, and a big old porch across the front, and june bugs. We'd always catch june bugs and fly those june bugs and we doodle bug and then at dark, you know, case man, he's thinking panthers would scream, or you know mountain lions. I think there's panther. I think there's black mountain lions myself. Do you realize Well, I mean I don't have a proof of it. I just always have heard that. You've heard so you've heard of cognitive DIC. I mean I just believed the propaganda. You so you you have like you're seventy two years old, that in Arkansas whole life, and you believe it. I'm not worried about you believing that. I'm just trying to get to the root of where that comes from. Hey who told Hey, Hey, when when I when I was a kid, when when you'd have a group of kids around and your favorite aunt would be there and she would it would say, hey, tell us a story, and they go, well, you know, there's just a little family and when they were you know, they were walking home one night and all of a sudden they looked around. There's a black panther and they take the booty off the baby. And you know those stories that just was all through was just always there. Yeah, you know, throw a booty off, and then the diaper, and then the shirt, and then all of a sudden he pitched the baby back. Anyway, but i'd hear I'd hear adults talking about black panthers. Now back to Myron, People for generations have called panthers mountain lions, catamounts, cougars, lions. They're all the same animal, you know. They have a whole litany of common localized names that people have called them, but when it comes right down to it, they're all mountain lions. They're all the same animals. There's no other species in North America of big cat, no currently on the land, well not in the United States anyway. Well, jaguars down inside are the only animal large cat that has known to exist or have occurrence for a melanistic color face, which is a quote black color phase are two of the large cats, jaguars and leopards. Okay, so there has never been a documented melanistic color phase of the mountain lion in history. Okay, so not even in people, not even in the Smithsonian Institute. So if you think in terms of black panthers, what most people are calling black panthers are black mountain lines, and uh, scientifically the animals never existed. I think a lot of it is folklore. I think a lot of it is uh, misidentification, folklore, you know, things of that nature. And uh, I mean, is it is it plausible that a large black cat, jaguar or leopard could never occur in Arkansas? It could if one of two things happened. Either A it escaped from someone's cage somewhere and it was a jaguar or a leopard, or b you had maybe a jaguar move up from Central America into Arkansas, which is just not plausible. Uh, you'd probably have just as good a chance to see in an ostrich as you would have black you know, jaguar. I have a lot of people you know that getting mad at me. Well, you're trying to tell me I didn't say it. No, I don't try to tell anybody they didn't see what they think they saw, or someone they know didn't see what they think through saw. I just stand on the on the scientific facts of the issue and the scientific fact behind the whole black panther deal. It's just that that particular animal does not exist or it's never been documented to occur in a melanistic color face and black color face. Believing and trusting people is part of the community structure of humankind. It's part of what separates us from the animals and what's made us biologically successful as a species. If we doubted everything people said and demanded proof of everything, we wouldn't have made it past the difficulty of our archaic past of slinging rocks and stuff and huddling and caves. Blind trust in our fellow man is evidence of our humanity, and deep down I believe that we want to believe people. Deep down, we want to trust our brother or sister. If there is any good in the folk lore of the Mountain lion in the black Panther, it's found in the social mechanics of wanting to believe the best of your neighbor and taking your friend at his word. Perhaps we need some more of that in today's time. Though mountain lions were certainly gone for the large part of the last hundred years in the South, wouldn't you know it, The truth has swung back around and found us still sitting here believing mountain lions are back. And this is a conservation success story. But it's also a story of how the truth, though temporarily labeled as folklore and it was, has once again been found as truthful. Mountain lions are here, and maybe they always have been. And if anybody ever doubts that Gary Nwcomb or Brent Reeves did not see a mountain lion, I'll punch him in the teeth, because I'll believe those two until the day I die. Long live the beast, and long live the good word of our brother and sister m HM.