00:00:00 Speaker 1: It seems like just yesterday, but on April the seventh, twenty twenty one, almost three years ago, we released the first episode of the bear Grease podcast titled The Myth of the Southern Mountain Lion. You may remember it. Today, we're going to go back to that inaugural episode to celebrate, analyze, and if you've got a minute, I'd like to give you some backstory on the bear Grease podcast. It's been a surprising journey for me, and honestly, I didn't think a mainstream audience would be interested in the kind of stories I was interested in telling. From the very beginning, I viewed my interests as niche or fringy, not mainstream stuff. But I seem to be wrong. We've told stories of gritty Americans who've lived their lives close to the land of frontiersmen and hillbillies, Native Americans and outlaws, houndsmen and snake handlers, anthropologists and biologists, stories of big rivers and the complexity of soils and deep dives. With nerdy historical authors. We've told some dark stories of enslavement, murder, racism, and lives Asa Carter. Remember that bear Grease has been an experiment and celebration of the American storyteller. And through it we've all learned a lot, or I've learned a lot. But I'm not sure that it's been a mainstream audience that has enjoyed these I'm not sure that you bear Greasers are a mainstream audience at all. I think that you're something pretty unique in regardless of if you is or isn't. I'm shocked at the response to these stories. Telling them has been a great joy of mine, and I don't take it for granted that you, your families, and your people follow along. I want to go back to the beginning for a minute to kind of give you a peak behind the veil, to the genesis of the Bear Grease podcast, when the grease was still solid fat, so to speak. When the idea of me doing a podcast for Meat Eater came up, Stephen Ornella said something to me to the effect of Clay, I'd like to hear you interview people, but afterwards, I'd like to hear your thoughts. It needs to be an efficient listen, kind of like a Terry Gross NPR interview. That was basically what he said. He was suggesting a documentary style podcast which sounded difficult to pull off, and at first I thought I was opposed to it. Interestingly, though, years before that, I had the thought somebody should do a really well thought out and highly produced documentary style hunting podcast that somebody isn't me. I had no interest in it. I didn't know how to make one. I didn't think I could find enough content. But mainly I wanted to do full length, bust interviews with people, and my past experiences the kind of people that I was interested in talking to didn't warm up too quickly sometimes, and I knew I wouldn't get the good stuff quickly. I had to work to get that, and so that meant long form conversations, and I felt like the documentary style interviews were short and personal and clinical. But turns out I was kind of wrong. After some time and some conversations with others on the team, I realized I could still have those long form conversations, but I cherry picked the relevant stuff, creating a polished, efficient listen. It was actually the best of both worlds. I remember where I was sitting in Montana in the back country when I said to somebody, this podcast needs to be called Bear Grease, Bear grease is a metaphor for things forgotten but relevant. At one time, everybody in America knew what bear grease was and what it was you. But today probably one percent knows what beargrease is today, and that's you. There's a lot of stuff that our culture has forgotten, left by the wayside that I think is really valuable, and I'm interested in that stuff. To go back to the nitty gritty of the beginnings of this podcast, which I really never shared originally, I was commissioned to make three mock episodes, and I quickly put together two. When they were mixed with music and audio mastered, myself and a team listened to them, and frankly, they were flat. I lacked passion and confidence as a host, Flow and momentum were absent. They were a solid four out of ten. But for the third one, I had a wild idea to interview a bunch of different people, some that you'd never expect on an outdoor podcast. I was going to interview a psychologist, a biologist, a guy who sold hunting licenses, and some first hand witness to the elusive and mythical Southern Mountain lion. I do some impromptu interviews and some formal ones. I just have fun and say things the way I was thinking them. I'd forget about any templates that I'd seen, and I'd just tell the story the way it made sense. After Phil Taylor mixed the episode the Myth of the Southern Mountain Lion, I literally clenched my fists and yelled. I was listening to it while I was on a walk in my front yard, and I yelled, that's it. That's the bear Grease podcast. I wasn't sure if I could replicate it, though, or find enough stories that were intriguing, or even another story ever that was as intriguing as this one about mountain lions, but I was gonna try. I mentioned his name before, but one guy that does not get enough credit is Phil Taylor for the actual production of the Bear Grease podcast. He's Meet Eater's chief audio man. He works extremely hard to put the audio magic in each other episode. Thank you, Phil, And in celebration of almost three years of making Bear Grease, I want to go back and replay that episode, the first one about mountain lions. To this day, I get more interaction around this first episode than any other topic that we've covered. My online life has basically become a service for people to forward pictures and stories about mountain lions and particularly black panthers. I speculate with great certainty that I have filtered more black panther images than anyone in America in the last three years, elevating me to a self titled, but unashamed and humble position of the black panther tzar of America. That's right, you heard correctly. I have an automated response to everyone that sends me a picture of this said black panther, and it goes like this, thank you, sir or Adam for your interest in the North American black panther. I'm very interested in your submission. However, upon further review from our team of one me, I have concluded that your image is number one not from North America. Or number two is a black cat that you've completely misjudged the scale of it in the photo. Number three it's a black dog with an odd tale. Number four, you've fallen prey to an Internet photoshop black panther scheme. Or lastly, number five confirmation bias has eaten your lunch. Your granddaddy didn't see a black panther. I'm sorry to crush your dreams. What you're a grown man and you should have known better that ain't no North American black panther. If you've listened to this episode yet, this will all make more sense to you. So, without further ado, here is episode one of bear Grease, originally played on April seventh, twenty twenty one. How certain are you that you saw two mountain lions? 00:08:14 Speaker 2: One percent? No doubt. 00:08:17 Speaker 1: Have you ever seen the lion mountain lion in Arkansas? 00:08:20 Speaker 3: No, I think there's panther. I think there's black mountain lions myself. 00:08:25 Speaker 1: On this episode of the bear Grease podcast, we'll 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 an inextricably connected itself to Southern culture. We're going to talk to some mountain lion believers, a biologist, and even a psychologist to get some answers about lions and about human nature. 00:08:53 Speaker 3: Well, I mean, I don't have any proof of it. I just always have heard that. You've heard so you've heard. 00:08:58 Speaker 4: Of cognitive I mean, I've just believed the propaganda my. 00:09:11 Speaker 1: Name is Clay Nukem, 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 live their lives close to the land, presented by FHF gear, American made purpose built hunting and fishing gear as designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. 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 in cult like clans of believers and unbelievers. But to understand the tension between those who've 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 hundred 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 eight we've pretty much got one large cat in the United States. In Canada, the old mountain lion or puma or panther or the painter or the catamount all the same animal, but they have different names in 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. 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, more than buffalo, more than anything. And herein lies our issue in twenty twenty one. They use 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 extirpated 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 mountainous regions of the western US and Canada. Those 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 proclaim their eyewitness convictions. Some might even call it conservation slander. The myth of the Southern mountain lion is so strongly embedded 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 Nucomb has, And here's his story. 00:14:13 Speaker 5: When was it? 00:14:13 Speaker 3: Tell me when it was? Oh, I would say twenty years ago, fifteen twenty years ago to say late nineties, Well, yeah, probably probably. And I was in one of my favorite hunting areas, driving on the Warehouse A 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 daytime? Yeah, yeah, it's later in the afternoon, but it's still real clear light. I mean, it wasn't like dusty or anything. And I thought big bobcat. And then I saw the tail and I go, holy Ki, it's a mountainline. And you know it was one hundred yards you know, it was pretty good ways off that. 00:15:04 Speaker 4: You saw a distinctive, distinctive, no question about it. 00:15:09 Speaker 3: So what color was it? I want to say blue? 00:15:14 Speaker 5: Yeah it was. 00:15:15 Speaker 3: It was just a tan colored animal. Really yeah. 00:15:18 Speaker 1: I mean like, okay, so you're my dad, and I inherently trust your judgment. 00:15:24 Speaker 3: You've been around seventy two years. 00:15:26 Speaker 6: Yeah, how certain are you if you if if there was a way to tell, I mean like, if there was really a way to know whether it was a mountain lion or not, and your life depended on, how certain are. 00:15:38 Speaker 5: You that it was a mountain lion? 00:15:40 Speaker 3: It would be Oh yeah, I mean I don't know what has a tail that was as long as the body. It seemed to me, like, what did it do? 00:15:47 Speaker 1: Was just standing on the road and ran. 00:15:48 Speaker 3: On It took his time, came across the road. By the time I saw it was pretty close to the ditch, and if if I remember correctly, it looked at me. So it didn't just dark, no, no, no, it was moving slow, so you got to look at it. Yeah, and so, but I didn't catch it from over here to hear. I caught it towards the you know, just maybe two or three steps from the ditch, and then it just eased off of the ditch and then went into the cutover you know, ten year old cut. And when I saw the tail, you know, a city, it's just thinking mountain lion, you know, I mean, it's just I mean, what has its head? Simple? Yeah. 00:16:34 Speaker 1: Brent Reeves would be considered a hillbilly if he didn't live in the Arkansas Delta or the swamp country. Regardless of semantics. He's a close friend of mine, a 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 two. I'll let you judge his story. So Brent, tell me about not one mountain line, but two mountain lines. That you've seen in Arkansas. 00:17:09 Speaker 2: I will gladly relate the following. The first one was probably in nineteen I'm going to say it was an eighty eight. Me and three other guys were working for a private timber management company and we were in Ashley County, Arkansas, which is in right next to two counties away from Mississippi and Southeast Arkansas. We were driving down 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 of timber that we drove down another quarter of a mile and went in ourselves to the cruise to timber to see how much timber was in there. That was the first one I'd ever seen. Now 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 that in that area to to be rambling around. 00:18:35 Speaker 1: And so that wasn't the only mountain lion you've seen, You've seen another one. 00:18:39 Speaker 5: How did that go down? 00:18:41 Speaker 2: My friend David Boudra and I were going coon hunting one evening and. 00:18:45 Speaker 1: This would have been a real name. 00:18:47 Speaker 2: It is. 00:18:48 Speaker 1: It is getting fisher and fishier. 00:18:51 Speaker 5: It is. 00:18:52 Speaker 2: 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 clearcut, fresh clear cut, and there was two or three big trees that weren't merchantable for logs or anything, so the timber company left them out there. And this tree was probably it was a big white oak tree. It was probably one 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 that big old turkey sitting 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 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 drop down into that clear cut. And then we turned around and went back the other direction and turned their dogs loose. 00:20:23 Speaker 1: 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 going to burn your house down if you're wrong. How certain are you that you saw two mountain lions. 00:20:41 Speaker 2: One, no doubt? And the thing about it is both times I had a witness with me. Of course, one of them was a coon. 00:20:50 Speaker 1: I'm going to need their phone numbers. 00:20:52 Speaker 2: One of them is a cook, I say, was one of them is a coon hunter? Didn't they? You know he's not vaccinated against lyon, But no doubt about it. 00:21:05 Speaker 1: I'll let you be the judge 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'll be. Myron Means is the 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. Myron. When I first met you ten eleven years ago, you were the Arkansas bear Coordinator. 00:21:53 Speaker 5: Black bear biologist, that's right. 00:21:55 Speaker 3: And. 00:21:56 Speaker 1: Now you're not. Your title has changed. What's your new title with Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. 00:22:01 Speaker 5: My new title is Statewide Large Carnivore Program Coordinator for Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. Okay, that's a mouthful. 00:22:10 Speaker 1: So something happened because at one time there was just one large carnivore acknowledged by the game And that's right. And your title change, which indicates what happened. 00:22:24 Speaker 5: Well long about ten years ago, right after I took the bear program coordinator position, we started seeing mountalines 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 document a sighting. 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 something that's kind of come along in the past fifteen years or so. But anyway, what basically what happened was mountain lion ste is showing up in the state from time to time, and Game and Fish recognized that, you know, you need to have someone that's kind of coordinating the sightings, coordinating the verifications, and just kind of packaging mountainline stuff. 00:23:17 Speaker 1: So it's not necessarily that now there are lines here and there weren't before, but we're we just know about them. Is that what I'm hearing you say? 00:23:26 Speaker 5: That's right, that's right. 00:23:27 Speaker 1: You know for a lot game camera. 00:23:29 Speaker 5: 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. That's really what has helped us, you know, document the occurrence and mountalines in the States. 00:23:46 Speaker 1: So here's here's the question. Where did they come from? Because bears mountain lions, this would be historic mountain line range here in Arkansas and in all of the eastern United States. So where did our lines come from? 00:23:58 Speaker 5: Well, that's that's a million dollar question. Who knows. The only evidence that we have currently was from a mountain lion that was shot by a deer hunter back into twenty 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 that was in twenty fourteen. I'm sorry. So the DNA evidence that we collected from that cat in both instances told us that number one, it's the same cat, 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 DNA 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 lion populations in the Dakotas, South Dakota. 00:25:11 Speaker 1: Which would be north and west of US, slightly primarily north, but still in the Mississippi River drainage for the most part. 00:25:18 Speaker 5: Well, it'd be kind of it'd be probably closer tied to the Missouri River drainage. Gotcha, 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, and of course you have the Florida panthers in Florida. So those are really the closest quote established. 00:25:50 Speaker 1: That would be five hundred miles from here. 00:25:52 Speaker 5: 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, because the travel corridors and the habitat just isn't there. Is it likely that a cat could move out of the Dakotas across northern Nebraska 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. 00:26:31 Speaker 1: So it's almost like highways like habitat highways, like you could you could track good lying habitat all the way back to the Dakotas and Nebraska. 00:26:41 Speaker 5: Sure you could. I mean, you know, there's gonna be some spances of maybe one hundred, one hundred and fifty mile maybe even two hundred mile gaps, But you have to think in travel terms. You know, that's something that a mountain lion could do in a day. Or two. 00:26:57 Speaker 1: Yeah, Myron, what about captive lions getting out? Because I remember growing up in western Arkansas, you'd hear the odd person say they saw a lion and it was always thrown back up on they said, somebody had a captive line and they let it loose. What do you think of that? 00:27:14 Speaker 5: Yeah, as 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 lion, more than likely it was the result of an escaped cat or some a cat that someone couldn't care for anymore. They were moving, maybe the owner died, maybe something, and so what are they going to do? Just turn it out? So that was really kind of the official position of the agency for a couple of decades, that more than likely if you saw cat, it was probably a release cat or an escape cat. 00:27:51 Speaker 1: You know, that takes all the fun out u seeing the mountain lion. 00:27:53 Speaker 5: Well, it certainly presented a lot of gotcha opportunities, you know, for the agency for a long time. Back in the early two thousands is probably when the agency started turning around saying well, more than likely rather than being a scape cat because a lot of those captive breeders kind of fell out, you know, when I was a caulation. It's got more reculations. 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 lions. I mean, you know, so yeah, so, I mean back in the seventies, you know, it wasn't that ought of a deal for someone to have a mountain lion 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 liones. Well, you know, we've never said we don't have mountainines. 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 mountain lions. 00:29:00 Speaker 1: And has that changed. 00:29:02 Speaker 5: No, still has not changed. 00:29:04 Speaker 1: We still don't have evidence of a breeding population of mountain lions here. 00:29:08 Speaker 5: We do not. 00:29:08 Speaker 1: Well, let me ask you this, do you feel like today in Arkansas there are mountain lions that are living here year round? 00:29:16 Speaker 5: I think there are mountain lions that live here year round. I think virtually all of the mountain lions that we have documented sightings of over the past wells in twenty 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. 00:29:40 Speaker 1: And that would be very characteristic of an expanding population of large carnivores, whether it be bears or would be or lions. You would start to see these fringe areas that would start to get satellite males. 00:29:55 Speaker 5: And 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, that's not something that they're just going to 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 in to 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 a mature male. 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 going to set up shop. 00:31:11 Speaker 1: So he's looping down into Missouri and going back. 00:31:14 Speaker 5: Probably he might be going back. He 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. 00:31:28 Speaker 1: 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. 00:31:43 Speaker 5: So you're telling me there's a chance. 00:31:46 Speaker 1: I feel like what Myron just said and talking about the dispersal of mountain lions and their ability to travel such long distances gives 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 it would not be unheard of for lions to travel that distance. So maybe there is something to all these mountain lion 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 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, disperse all of these large carnivores is like the males making these satellite loops and then at some point females, you know, like, at some point we're going to get a picture of a female in Arkansas. 00:33:08 Speaker 5: Well, you know, Missouri came up about four I believe it was about four years ago and they collected some hair off of a confirmed sighting. They confirmed that it was a female. The experts that I have talked to about mountain lions, all of them have been pretty consistent and 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. 00:33:40 Speaker 1: What I want to kind of talk to you about now is like mountain lion folklore essentially in places where there historically haven't been lyons in the last hundred years. So in Arkansas we have ozarks and washtaws, which would have these big, vast sections of public land that would be for all of our deer. Popular 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 an unorthodox shift in mountain lion folklore in these like backwoods places, And I'm like, well, there's not enough deer there, Like 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 XX 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. They're in places with higher deer density. Is that true. 00:34:43 Speaker 5: I think that would be the natural place to set up a territory. Yeah, 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 in the Black Hills, you know, they're very small communities in the lower portions of these valleys with 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 see it to the left and right. And when we were driving through there, one of the houndsmen that I was spent some time with, it'd be like, oh, yeah, you know, mountain lion 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, one hundred miles away from a civilization or whatever, 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 it be more natural for a mountain lion 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 forests. But you're still talking about an animal even in prime mountain lion habitat, you're talking about an animal that has home ranges of you know, one hundred plus square miles. 00:36:36 Speaker 1: So let's talk about where lines have been seen in Arkansas and how you guys determine that one is a sighting is valid described it. 00:36:45 Speaker 5: We get to probably one 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 will record it. If it's a game camera photo, we're going to 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. Yeah, you're doing everything now 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 hoax is going out there. You know this this mountain line was taken at a friend of mine's friends, uncles, 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. 00:37:53 Speaker 1: I was going to say that if the game fish gets one hundred and fifty sightings per year, I know about fifty of those guys, and I can tell you they're full of it. 00:38:03 Speaker 5: But uh what it boils 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 amount of 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 a mountain line. 00:38:28 Speaker 1: 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. 00:38:39 Speaker 5: Well, it just means that us as a as a conservation agency or a scientific agency. I mean, you know, we can't. I can't go out there and say, well, we've got one hundred mountain lines in the state because we've had this many sightings. I mean, I can't got to 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 a whim and say we've got this many bear, this many deer. 00:39:03 Speaker 1: So what's your gut about all these other sightings? Are people wrong or are people right? And it's just not verifiable. 00:39:11 Speaker 5: I think about ninety eight percent of the sightings that we get our misidentification, what are they seeing? 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 tens, fifty sixty, you know, maybe more pictures or videos that are sent to me every year that are housecats. 00:39:40 Speaker 1: House cats? You mean to tell me that people are mistaken housecats for mountain lions. A fifteen pound cat versus one hundred and fifty pound cat. 00:39:52 Speaker 5: Believe it. 00:39:53 Speaker 1: Feral housecats are estimated to number seventy million, maybe even more everywhere, and people don't understand scale. Often when they see an animal and get a picture of it. 00:40:08 Speaker 5: The biggest misidentification is by far and away, domestic housecats or just feral house cats. Housecats in general. I 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 the obvious, the bobtail. 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 of size ears. 00:40:52 Speaker 1: Okay, here's the question of the hour. Okakay, 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 Myron means, taken out of his position at the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, have you ever seen the lion mountain lion in Arkansas? 00:41:12 Speaker 2: No? 00:41:13 Speaker 1: I have good thank goodness firing I wish I. 00:41:16 Speaker 5: 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 a lot of people. A lot of people claimed to have seen them, and I'm not here to tell anybody that they didn't see what they thought they saw. Were up to like since twenty ten, were up to nineteenth. 00:41:42 Speaker 1: 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. Doctor Richard Back has been a clinical psycho since nineteen seventy nine, and he has some unique insight into why humans act the way they do. Doctor Back, of the of the hundreds, if not thousands, of mountain lion 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. 00:42:36 Speaker 7: Well, there's probably two things going on there. One is that it's kind of an exciting thing to think as 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 lines, 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. Are picked up somewhere. 00:43:29 Speaker 1: 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. 00:43:45 Speaker 7: 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 them. 00:43:56 Speaker 1: It's all over our lives. 00:43:58 Speaker 5: I guess, yeah, it's all all over our lives. 00:44:01 Speaker 7: We end up believing things not even knowing where that comes from. In terms of what we think is the best model car, 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 cherry pick any sort 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. 00:44:39 Speaker 1: Yeah, so it would be like really reasonable 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 lions 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 lions here. So if you saw a flash of brown fur across the road, that might just easily slot into that place and it just be fact inside of your mind. 00:45:10 Speaker 7: Yes, yeah, that would happen. 00:45:11 Speaker 1: Can you tell me about naive realism what that means. 00:45:15 Speaker 7: Yeah, Naive realism is, I guess, in a sense, the foundation of confirmation bias. Naive realism is really kind of a 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. 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 upon the right way of living life. 00:45:51 Speaker 1: So it's like you could be living just you could just kind of have this false reality. 00:45:56 Speaker 7: Yeah, well yeah, lots of people do. And if anyone tries to can bens them that they have a false reality, then they fall back on confirmation bias to really ignore anything they're saying that disputes what they believe, but they'll select all sorts. 00:46:13 Speaker 1: Of data that confirms their by it that confirms their 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 going to get a kick out of this story. But I want you to ask yourself, which character in this story are you? 00:46:44 Speaker 8: So you know, 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 them sell licenses, and I got I 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 I said, okay, no problem. And so I asked for his driver's license and 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 one hundred percent certain it was a bobcat. It had speckles on its belly. I mean it was He's a bobcat, no question. And I said, yeah, trail came. Yeah, it's it's a trail camera picture. Something he had on his trail camera there around his house somewhere. 00:47:47 Speaker 3: And I said, yeah, yeah, you. 00:47:49 Speaker 8: Shoot bobcats, coyotes, it'll 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. 00:48:04 Speaker 7: Again. 00:48:05 Speaker 8: 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, just kind of blew him off, you know, is 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, just there, waiting on us, you know, so they can get a license, and a guy goes, did you say you a mountain lion on camera? 00:48:39 Speaker 3: The guy said yeah, yeah. 00:48:40 Speaker 8: So he kind of turns his phone around and shows this other guy and it kind of draws a crowd, and there's three or four guys there and they're. 00:48:47 Speaker 3: All like, oh, man, sure enough, you know it's a big mountain lion. Look at that thing. And they're all just handing around there. 00:48:53 Speaker 8: So in a span of about one minute, he had convinced five people standing back there that he had a mountain lion on camera, and every one of them believed it and had no trouble believing. The only person back there that thought otherwise was me, and it was because it was clearly a Bob Katamy. 00:49:14 Speaker 3: This is how it starts. 00:49:15 Speaker 8: Yeah, And I thought, man, this is how the legends and the myths and all these things you hear about people seeing mountain lions gets started. It just takes one person to see one. Now, all those five guys they left 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 lying around and everybody's seen it, when actually only one guy saw it. It wasn't even a mountain lion. 00:49:43 Speaker 5: Now back to Myron, do you want to delve into the black panther myth? 00:49:49 Speaker 1: 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. 00:50:13 Speaker 5: What's the deal with that? Well, I'll speak in scientific terms of black panthers. 00:50:20 Speaker 1: We can't have this discussion without talking about black panthers. My oh 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 wron t 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. 00:50:55 Speaker 3: When I was a kid, we'd go to Bucksnord ain't Ali and an't Ali. They weren't ant they were ain't ain't Ali and ain't Ally. And then you'd go down to Oli's house and she had the dog trot and you'd spend a night down there, and you'd hear a panther scream every. 00:51:12 Speaker 7: Now and then. 00:51:13 Speaker 3: Now, I don't, 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. 00:51:24 Speaker 1: When you, I mean, when you were there, it was like in this place you can hear panthers scream, oh man. 00:51:31 Speaker 3: And when you drove you when you drove into Bucksnord it was like if you were a city boy and the 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 in 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 would always catch june bugs and fly those june bugs, and we'd doodle bug and then a dark you know in case of these stinking panthers would scream, or you know, mountain lions. I think there's panther. I think there's black mountain lions myself. Do you really well, I mean, I don't have any proof of it. I just always have heard that. You've heard so you've heard of cognitive disc I mean, I've just believed the propaganda. 00:52:27 Speaker 9: You so you you have like you're seventy two years old, living in Arkansas your whole life, and you believe it is this thing. Yeah, 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 me. 00:52:43 Speaker 3: 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 the story. And they'd go, well, you know, there's this little family and when they were you know, they were walking home one night and all of a sudden they looked around. There as a black panther and they take the booty off the baby. And you know those stories that just was all through my job. They're 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 pitch the baby back. Yeah. So anyway, but i'd hear adults talking about black panthers. 00:53:27 Speaker 1: Now back to Myron. 00:53:32 Speaker 5: 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. 00:53:55 Speaker 1: There's no other species in North America of big cat, no currently the land. 00:54:00 Speaker 5: 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 a mountain lion in history. Okay, so heartspiring, 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 lions, and uh, scientifically the animals never existed. I think a lot of it is folklore. I think a lot of it is misidentification, folklore, you know, things of that nature. And uh, I mean, is it is it plausible that a large black cat, a jaguar or leopard could never occur in Arkansas? It could if one of two things happen. 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. 00:55:33 Speaker 1: Arkansas, which is just not plausible. 00:55:38 Speaker 5: You'd probably have just as good a chance of seeing an ostrich as you would have black you know, jaguar. I have a lot of people, you know that that get mad at me. Well, you're trying to tell me I didn't see 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 they saw. I just stand on the on the scientific facts of the issue you 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, a black color face. 00:56:20 Speaker 1: 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 in 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 and the folklore the mountain lion in the Black Panther. It's found in the social mechanics of wanting to believe the best of your neighbor, in 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's 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 Nukeomb 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