December 13, 2023 • 58 mins
Bear Grease has been a surprising and rewarding journey of almost three years. Today we’re going back to the beginning with Episode 1: The Myth of the Southern Mountain Lion, with a peek into the genesis of Bear Grease.
There are two types of people in the South—those who’ve seen mountain lions and those who haven’t. Supposedly extirpated from the South, the native lion species has lived on through backwoods lore and many believe they’ve never left. But have they? Clay Newcomb explores the touchy topic, interviewing biologists, investigating two eye-witness sightings, and talking with a psychologist about how people can see things that aren’t real. This is a lesson in biology and human nature and a great story revealing the truth about South mountain lions.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
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,
(00:21):
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.
(00:45):
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.
(01:08):
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
(01:29):
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,
(01:51):
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
(02:13):
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
(02:35):
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
(02:58):
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
(03:19):
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
(03:39):
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
(04:03):
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,
(04:24):
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,
(04:46):
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
(05:07):
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
(05:30):
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
(05:52):
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
(06:14):
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
(06:36):
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,
(06:58):
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
(07:20):
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
(07:41):
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
(08:01):
played on April seventh, twenty twenty one. How certain are
you that you saw two mountain lions?
Speaker 2 (08:14):
One percent? No doubt.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
Have you ever seen the lion mountain lion in Arkansas?
Speaker 3 (08:20):
No, I think there's panther. I think there's black mountain
lions myself.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
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,
(08:47):
and even a psychologist to get some answers about lions
and about human nature.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
Well, I mean, I don't have any proof of it.
I just always have heard that. You've heard so you've heard.
Speaker 4 (08:58):
Of cognitive I mean, I've just believed the propaganda my.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
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
(09:33):
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
(09:56):
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.
(10:21):
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
(10:43):
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
(11:05):
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
(11:26):
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
(11:47):
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
(12:08):
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,
(12:28):
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
(12:50):
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
(13:13):
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
(13:36):
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
(13:58):
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.
Speaker 5 (14:13):
When was it?
Speaker 3 (14:13):
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
(14:35):
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,
(14:58):
it's a mountainline. And you know it was one hundred
yards you know, it was pretty good ways off that.
Speaker 4 (15:04):
You saw a distinctive, distinctive, no question about it.
Speaker 3 (15:09):
So what color was it? I want to say blue?
Speaker 5 (15:14):
Yeah it was.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
It was just a tan colored animal. Really yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
I mean like, okay, so you're my dad, and I
inherently trust your judgment.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
You've been around seventy two years.
Speaker 6 (15:26):
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.
Speaker 5 (15:38):
You that it was a mountain lion?
Speaker 3 (15:40):
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?
Speaker 1 (15:47):
Was just standing on the road and ran.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
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
(16:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
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,
(16:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
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
(17:29):
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,
(17:49):
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
(18:10):
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
(18:33):
to be rambling around.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
And so that wasn't the only mountain lion you've seen,
You've seen another one.
Speaker 5 (18:39):
How did that go down?
Speaker 2 (18:41):
My friend David Boudra and I were going coon hunting
one evening and.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
This would have been a real name.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
It is.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
It is getting fisher and fishier.
Speaker 5 (18:51):
It is.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
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
(19:15):
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
(19:36):
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
(19:57):
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.
(20:18):
And then we turned around and went back the other
direction and turned their dogs loose.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
I'm going to need their phone numbers.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
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
(21:25):
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.
(21:47):
When I first met you ten eleven years ago, you
were the Arkansas bear Coordinator.
Speaker 5 (21:53):
Black bear biologist, that's right.
Speaker 3 (21:55):
And.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
Now you're not. Your title has changed. What's your new
title with Arkansas Game and Fish Commission.
Speaker 5 (22:01):
My new title is Statewide Large Carnivore Program Coordinator for
Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. Okay, that's a mouthful.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
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.
Speaker 5 (22:24):
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.
(22:45):
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,
(23:06):
you know, you need to have someone that's kind of
coordinating the sightings, coordinating the verifications, and just kind of
packaging mountainline stuff.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
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?
Speaker 5 (23:26):
That's right, that's right.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
You know for a lot game camera.
Speaker 5 (23:29):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
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?
Speaker 5 (23:58):
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
(24:21):
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
(24:42):
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
(25:04):
most likely come from, Well, there's established mountain lion populations
in the Dakotas, South Dakota.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
Which would be north and west of US, slightly primarily north,
but still in the Mississippi River drainage for the most part.
Speaker 5 (25:18):
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,
(25:42):
and of course you have the Florida panthers in Florida.
So those are really the closest quote established.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
That would be five hundred miles from here.
Speaker 5 (25:52):
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
(26:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
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.
Speaker 5 (26:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
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?
Speaker 5 (27:14):
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
(27:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
You know, that takes all the fun out u seeing
the mountain lion.
Speaker 5 (27:53):
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.
(28:14):
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
(28:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
And has that changed.
Speaker 5 (29:02):
No, still has not changed.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
We still don't have evidence of a breeding population of
mountain lions here.
Speaker 5 (29:08):
We do not.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
Well, let me ask you this, do you feel like
today in Arkansas there are mountain lions that are living
here year round?
Speaker 5 (29:16):
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
(29:38):
old males, but mature males.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
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.
Speaker 5 (29:55):
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
(30:17):
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
(30:40):
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
(31:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:11):
So he's looping down into Missouri and going back.
Speaker 5 (31:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
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.
Speaker 5 (31:43):
So you're telling me there's a chance.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
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
(32:09):
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
(32:32):
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
(32:55):
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.
Speaker 5 (33:08):
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
(33:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
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
(34:01):
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
(34:23):
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.
Speaker 5 (34:43):
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
(35:04):
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
(35:24):
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
(35:46):
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
(36:08):
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
(36:30):
talking about an animal that has home ranges of you know,
one hundred plus square miles.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
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.
Speaker 5 (36:45):
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
(37:05):
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
(37:29):
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
(37:50):
internet for six years, and it was you know.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
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.
Speaker 5 (38:03):
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
(38:26):
say yes, that's without a doubt a mountain line.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
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.
Speaker 5 (38:39):
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
(39:00):
say we've got this many bear, this many deer.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
So what's your gut about all these other sightings? Are
people wrong or are people right? And it's just not verifiable.
Speaker 5 (39:11):
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,
(39:33):
you know, maybe more pictures or videos that are sent
to me every year that are housecats.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
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.
Speaker 5 (39:52):
Believe it.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
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.
Speaker 5 (40:08):
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.
(40:29):
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
(40:51):
size ears.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
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?
Speaker 2 (41:12):
No?
Speaker 1 (41:13):
I have good thank goodness firing I wish I.
Speaker 5 (41:16):
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,
(41:40):
were up to nineteenth.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
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
(42:04):
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
(42:30):
do people believe that they've seen a lion when statistically
they probably actually didn't.
Speaker 7 (42:36):
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.
(42:57):
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
(43:18):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:29):
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.
Speaker 7 (43:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:56):
It's all over our lives.
Speaker 5 (43:58):
I guess, yeah, it's all all over our lives.
Speaker 7 (44:01):
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,
(44:25):
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.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
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
(45:01):
brown fur across the road, that might just easily slot
into that place and it just be fact inside of
your mind.
Speaker 7 (45:10):
Yes, yeah, that would happen.
Speaker 1 (45:11):
Can you tell me about naive realism what that means.
Speaker 7 (45:15):
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
(45:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (45:51):
So it's like you could be living just you could
just kind of have this false reality.
Speaker 7 (45:56):
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.
Speaker 1 (46:13):
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.
(46:34):
But I want you to ask yourself, which character in
this story are you?
Speaker 8 (46:44):
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
(47:05):
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
(47:29):
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.
Speaker 3 (47:47):
And I said, yeah, yeah, you.
Speaker 8 (47:49):
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.
Speaker 7 (48:04):
Again.
Speaker 8 (48:05):
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.
(48:26):
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?
Speaker 3 (48:39):
The guy said yeah, yeah.
Speaker 8 (48:40):
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.
Speaker 3 (48:47):
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.
Speaker 8 (48:53):
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.
Speaker 3 (49:14):
This is how it starts.
Speaker 8 (49:15):
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
(49:37):
only one guy saw it. It wasn't even a mountain lion.
Speaker 5 (49:43):
Now back to Myron, do you want to delve into
the black panther myth?
Speaker 1 (49:49):
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
(50:10):
thinking people tell me that they've seen black panthers.
Speaker 5 (50:13):
What's the deal with that? Well, I'll speak in scientific
terms of black panthers.
Speaker 1 (50:20):
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,
(50:42):
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.
Speaker 3 (50:55):
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.
Speaker 7 (51:12):
Now and then.
Speaker 3 (51:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (51:24):
When you, I mean, when you were there, it was
like in this place you can hear panthers scream, oh man.
Speaker 3 (51:31):
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,
(51:51):
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,
(52:12):
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.
Speaker 9 (52:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (52:43):
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
(53:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (53:27):
Now back to Myron.
Speaker 5 (53:32):
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
(53:54):
mountain lions. They're all the same animals.
Speaker 1 (53:55):
There's no other species in North America of big cat,
no currently the land.
Speaker 5 (54:00):
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
(54:25):
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,
(54:46):
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.
(55:07):
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
(55:30):
maybe a jaguar move up from Central America into.
Speaker 1 (55:33):
Arkansas, which is just not plausible.
Speaker 5 (55:38):
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
(55:59):
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.
Speaker 1 (56:20):
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.
(56:45):
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
(57:05):
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
(57:27):
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
(57:51):
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
(58:11):
our brother and sister
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,
(00:21):
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.
(00:45):
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.
(01:08):
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
(01:29):
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,
(01:51):
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
(02:13):
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
(02:35):
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
(02:58):
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
(03:19):
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
(03:39):
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
(04:03):
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,
(04:24):
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,
(04:46):
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
(05:07):
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
(05:30):
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
(05:52):
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
(06:14):
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
(06:36):
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,
(06:58):
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
(07:20):
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
(07:41):
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
(08:01):
played on April seventh, twenty twenty one. How certain are
you that you saw two mountain lions?
Speaker 2 (08:14):
One percent? No doubt.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
Have you ever seen the lion mountain lion in Arkansas?
Speaker 3 (08:20):
No, I think there's panther. I think there's black mountain
lions myself.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
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,
(08:47):
and even a psychologist to get some answers about lions
and about human nature.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
Well, I mean, I don't have any proof of it.
I just always have heard that. You've heard so you've heard.
Speaker 4 (08:58):
Of cognitive I mean, I've just believed the propaganda my.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
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
(09:33):
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
(09:56):
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.
(10:21):
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
(10:43):
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
(11:05):
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
(11:26):
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
(11:47):
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
(12:08):
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,
(12:28):
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
(12:50):
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
(13:13):
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
(13:36):
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
(13:58):
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.
Speaker 5 (14:13):
When was it?
Speaker 3 (14:13):
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
(14:35):
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,
(14:58):
it's a mountainline. And you know it was one hundred
yards you know, it was pretty good ways off that.
Speaker 4 (15:04):
You saw a distinctive, distinctive, no question about it.
Speaker 3 (15:09):
So what color was it? I want to say blue?
Speaker 5 (15:14):
Yeah it was.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
It was just a tan colored animal. Really yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
I mean like, okay, so you're my dad, and I
inherently trust your judgment.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
You've been around seventy two years.
Speaker 6 (15:26):
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.
Speaker 5 (15:38):
You that it was a mountain lion?
Speaker 3 (15:40):
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?
Speaker 1 (15:47):
Was just standing on the road and ran.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
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
(16:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
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,
(16:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
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
(17:29):
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,
(17:49):
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
(18:10):
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
(18:33):
to be rambling around.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
And so that wasn't the only mountain lion you've seen,
You've seen another one.
Speaker 5 (18:39):
How did that go down?
Speaker 2 (18:41):
My friend David Boudra and I were going coon hunting
one evening and.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
This would have been a real name.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
It is.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
It is getting fisher and fishier.
Speaker 5 (18:51):
It is.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
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
(19:15):
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
(19:36):
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
(19:57):
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.
(20:18):
And then we turned around and went back the other
direction and turned their dogs loose.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
I'm going to need their phone numbers.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
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
(21:25):
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.
(21:47):
When I first met you ten eleven years ago, you
were the Arkansas bear Coordinator.
Speaker 5 (21:53):
Black bear biologist, that's right.
Speaker 3 (21:55):
And.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
Now you're not. Your title has changed. What's your new
title with Arkansas Game and Fish Commission.
Speaker 5 (22:01):
My new title is Statewide Large Carnivore Program Coordinator for
Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. Okay, that's a mouthful.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
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.
Speaker 5 (22:24):
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.
(22:45):
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,
(23:06):
you know, you need to have someone that's kind of
coordinating the sightings, coordinating the verifications, and just kind of
packaging mountainline stuff.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
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?
Speaker 5 (23:26):
That's right, that's right.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
You know for a lot game camera.
Speaker 5 (23:29):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
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?
Speaker 5 (23:58):
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
(24:21):
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
(24:42):
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
(25:04):
most likely come from, Well, there's established mountain lion populations
in the Dakotas, South Dakota.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
Which would be north and west of US, slightly primarily north,
but still in the Mississippi River drainage for the most part.
Speaker 5 (25:18):
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,
(25:42):
and of course you have the Florida panthers in Florida.
So those are really the closest quote established.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
That would be five hundred miles from here.
Speaker 5 (25:52):
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
(26:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
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.
Speaker 5 (26:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
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?
Speaker 5 (27:14):
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
(27:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
You know, that takes all the fun out u seeing
the mountain lion.
Speaker 5 (27:53):
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.
(28:14):
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
(28:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
And has that changed.
Speaker 5 (29:02):
No, still has not changed.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
We still don't have evidence of a breeding population of
mountain lions here.
Speaker 5 (29:08):
We do not.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
Well, let me ask you this, do you feel like
today in Arkansas there are mountain lions that are living
here year round?
Speaker 5 (29:16):
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
(29:38):
old males, but mature males.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
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.
Speaker 5 (29:55):
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
(30:17):
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
(30:40):
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
(31:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:11):
So he's looping down into Missouri and going back.
Speaker 5 (31:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
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.
Speaker 5 (31:43):
So you're telling me there's a chance.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
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
(32:09):
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
(32:32):
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
(32:55):
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.
Speaker 5 (33:08):
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
(33:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
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
(34:01):
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
(34:23):
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.
Speaker 5 (34:43):
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
(35:04):
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
(35:24):
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
(35:46):
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
(36:08):
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
(36:30):
talking about an animal that has home ranges of you know,
one hundred plus square miles.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
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.
Speaker 5 (36:45):
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
(37:05):
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
(37:29):
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
(37:50):
internet for six years, and it was you know.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
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.
Speaker 5 (38:03):
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
(38:26):
say yes, that's without a doubt a mountain line.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
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.
Speaker 5 (38:39):
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
(39:00):
say we've got this many bear, this many deer.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
So what's your gut about all these other sightings? Are
people wrong or are people right? And it's just not verifiable.
Speaker 5 (39:11):
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,
(39:33):
you know, maybe more pictures or videos that are sent
to me every year that are housecats.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
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.
Speaker 5 (39:52):
Believe it.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
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.
Speaker 5 (40:08):
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.
(40:29):
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
(40:51):
size ears.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
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?
Speaker 2 (41:12):
No?
Speaker 1 (41:13):
I have good thank goodness firing I wish I.
Speaker 5 (41:16):
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,
(41:40):
were up to nineteenth.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
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
(42:04):
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
(42:30):
do people believe that they've seen a lion when statistically
they probably actually didn't.
Speaker 7 (42:36):
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.
(42:57):
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
(43:18):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:29):
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.
Speaker 7 (43:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:56):
It's all over our lives.
Speaker 5 (43:58):
I guess, yeah, it's all all over our lives.
Speaker 7 (44:01):
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,
(44:25):
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.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
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
(45:01):
brown fur across the road, that might just easily slot
into that place and it just be fact inside of
your mind.
Speaker 7 (45:10):
Yes, yeah, that would happen.
Speaker 1 (45:11):
Can you tell me about naive realism what that means.
Speaker 7 (45:15):
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
(45:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (45:51):
So it's like you could be living just you could
just kind of have this false reality.
Speaker 7 (45:56):
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.
Speaker 1 (46:13):
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.
(46:34):
But I want you to ask yourself, which character in
this story are you?
Speaker 8 (46:44):
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
(47:05):
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
(47:29):
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.
Speaker 3 (47:47):
And I said, yeah, yeah, you.
Speaker 8 (47:49):
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.
Speaker 7 (48:04):
Again.
Speaker 8 (48:05):
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.
(48:26):
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?
Speaker 3 (48:39):
The guy said yeah, yeah.
Speaker 8 (48:40):
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.
Speaker 3 (48:47):
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.
Speaker 8 (48:53):
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.
Speaker 3 (49:14):
This is how it starts.
Speaker 8 (49:15):
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
(49:37):
only one guy saw it. It wasn't even a mountain lion.
Speaker 5 (49:43):
Now back to Myron, do you want to delve into
the black panther myth?
Speaker 1 (49:49):
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
(50:10):
thinking people tell me that they've seen black panthers.
Speaker 5 (50:13):
What's the deal with that? Well, I'll speak in scientific
terms of black panthers.
Speaker 1 (50:20):
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,
(50:42):
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.
Speaker 3 (50:55):
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.
Speaker 7 (51:12):
Now and then.
Speaker 3 (51:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (51:24):
When you, I mean, when you were there, it was
like in this place you can hear panthers scream, oh man.
Speaker 3 (51:31):
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,
(51:51):
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,
(52:12):
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.
Speaker 9 (52:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (52:43):
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
(53:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (53:27):
Now back to Myron.
Speaker 5 (53:32):
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
(53:54):
mountain lions. They're all the same animals.
Speaker 1 (53:55):
There's no other species in North America of big cat,
no currently the land.
Speaker 5 (54:00):
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
(54:25):
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,
(54:46):
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.
(55:07):
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
(55:30):
maybe a jaguar move up from Central America into.
Speaker 1 (55:33):
Arkansas, which is just not plausible.
Speaker 5 (55:38):
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
(55:59):
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.
Speaker 1 (56:20):
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.
(56:45):
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
(57:05):
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
(57:27):
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
(57:51):
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
(58:11):
our brother and sister
Host
Clay Newcomb
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