Siegfried Farnon (Robert Hardy) on the problems of keeping pets

It all makes sense, except for those barking retrievers and that fawn whippet that was Robert Hardy’s own beloved dog.

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The New Season of MeatEater on Netflix is a Work of Art

As long-time readers of this blog know, I am concerned about the future of hunting, especially because already-established hunters have hitched their wagons to an increasingly narrower and narrower spectrum of America politics. I have implored people involved in mass communications, be it film, television, or the written word, to find ways to reach beyond this narrow base. Indeed, had I not grown up in rural America where hunting and fishing were celebrated ways of life, I probably would be among the most noxious antis, just because my own politics simply don’t align with those of most hunters now.

However, there is at least one hunting communicator who does a great job reaching beyond this narrow base. Steven Rinella is an outdoor writer and science journalist extraordinaire, and what’s more, his art is reaching people who are not conservative in the true wonders that are hunting and fishing and preparation of wild meat. Rinella’s written word, such as can be found in what I consider his classic work, American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon, is a mixture of William Faulkner, Aldo Leopold, and certain Midwestern rusticity that I cannot fully place. and is this writing stye that he applies to narration and story-line of MeatEater.

In 16 new episodes, which you can watch on Netflix, Rinella takes us from Interior Alaska to the Rewa River in Guyana. Lots of things are learned in each episode, from Latvian hunting incantations to the finer art of hand-lining for black piranha, but the most important thing we learn is that hunting is not evil. Not a deer falls in the Nevada desert, when Rinella and Joe Rogan go bow-hunting for mulie bucks, and most of the two-part episode of hunting Sitka black-tails on Prince of Wales Island involves seeing no deer at all. Most of those two episodes involve foraging shrimp, rockfish, and red sea cucumbers from the oceans and simple friendship in magnificent land.

Rinella loves animals. He revels in their biology and habits. To him, hunting is an intellectual exercise in which he matches his skills against their instincts and far keener senses. Animals die, but the carcass is butchered. The meat and organs go not to some banal rough fare, but instead, they wind up being prepared in fine dishes, many of which are cooked right over a campfire.

There are many moving scenes in this new season. When Papa Janis Putelis kills a moose that appeared to have “manifested” itself before his gun as a result of his Latvian “magic,” we learn about his general philosophy of life, which is to enjoy every footstep and savor every breath. We marvel at petroglyphs left by ancient hunter-gatherers in Guyana, ones that even the natives who take Rinella to see the artifacts just call the “ancient ones.” Though these Amerindians who guide Rinella seem almost Stone Age to us, they are inheritors of this world, and their world is ultimately changing as new technologies and foreign capital begin to work their way deeper into their part of the jungle.

However, perhaps the most moving scene in all of this season comes when Doug Duren, a Wisconsin farmer and conservationist, bags a bull caribou out of the Fortymile herd. Duren shoots the bull with pinpoint accuracy, but when he approaches the fallen beast, his emotions are flying. He revels in the excitement of having killed, but there is a look of admiration for the bull on his face that is difficult to describe. He strokes its chocolate and cream-colored fur so tenderly it is as if he’s petting a beloved dog that was just euthanized. There is reverence for this beast as the living being it was. This scene is something I’ve never before seen on a hunting show. Most of these shows have the hunters celebrating and high-fiving as if they have won the Super Bowl.

This reverence for the animals and their habitat mixes so nicely with the realization that ever episode that winds up with an animal’s death ends with that animal being prepared into a fine piece of table fare. Rinella’s narration is mesmerizing and deep, for it is his skill as a writer that really shine. The cinematography is gorgeous, but Rinella’s words pull and prod the images along, striking your aesthetic senses at their very core.

This is the art of MeatEater, and why Rinella is such a fine spokesperson for hunting in this century. He is not trying to feed the prejudices of the already extant hunting show aficionados. Instead, he reaches people at their deepest romantic and aesthetic senses, the part that makes us love animals and nature so much that one could just as easily become an anti-hunter. Indeed, because so few publicly visible hunters try to communicate on this level, these senses remain untapped and untapped at our peril.

I loved this season so much that I was almost in tears when it finally ended. Rinella is truly at master at his craft as a writer and communicator, even more so than he is a master at the art of hunting.

But he is truly a master at both.

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How to condition a German shepherd

Materials needed:

1. 1 German shepherd that likes other dogs.
2. 1 whippet that likes other dogs and is friends with German shepherd.
3. Ball.

Instructions.

1. Throw ball for both dogs.
2. Whippet will beat the German shepherd to the ball.
3. Whippet will decide to run a victory lap, and the German shepherd will chase him.
4. No German shepherd alive can catch a whippet, so they will run a whole lot more than if you just threw the ball for the German shepherd.
5. Repeat once the whippet gets done with the ball and delivers it to hand.

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Rag racer

Poet playing chase with his big tug rope this morning.

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Ready for Action

Quest wants that ball thrown. This dog is totally AKC show-lines, and he does have a promising show career of ahead of him. He is a very intelligent dog with lots of drive.

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Brothers running

Clavo (left) and Quest (right) enjoy a morning’s whippet chase. Clavo is sichtlaut, while Quest is a silent runner. They are sables carrying black and tan (sable mother and black and tan father), and with these two, you might mistake them for black and tans, because their darker sabling is almost where the black saddle of a classic GSD is located.

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Yuri Trush documentary

This is the same story that John Vaillant recounts in The Tiger, but this documentary plays up the role of Trush’s laika a lot more. Warning: lots of gory images in this film, including human remains.

This is my all-time favorite wildlife story. It’s like Jaws met No Country for Old Men, and it’s a true story!

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Clive’s new digs

Clive got a new enclosure, a spacious, multi-level cat cage with his own cushion! Clive gets lots of time loose to play, but having a more spacious cage is certainly good for him.

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Tuggers

Poet and Clavo enjoyed some tug-of-war today.

The little whippet wins of course.

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Towards a new monophyletic Canis lupus

Charles Darwin was an early proponent of humans belonging to a single species. The concept was not popular in Darwin’s imperialist nation, where many of the best and brightest were dead certain that “lesser peoples” of the empire were entirely different species. Monogenists versus the polygenists this was the debate by even those who accepted Darwin’s controversial thesis that species evolved through natural selection and that humans evolved from African great apes.

We know now that the monogenists won out. Only the basest racist frauds believe that humans represent multiple species deriving from distinct evolutionary lineages. The only exceptions are that we do have evidence that humans have trace amounts of other extinct humans in their DNA, such as Neanderthals and the Denisovan hominin.

The monophyly of a species is a concept that should be axiomatic. Much of the “rewriting” of taxonomy and systematics comes from us discovering that a clade is either paraphyletic or polyphyletic, but what does sometimes happen is we do run into situations where we have thought species were really distinct but now we think of them as being subspecies. Black-tailed and mule deer come to mind, as do Cape and African forest buffalo. We have to combine them in a single species to retain its monophyly.

I think something now must be done with gray wolves and their closest kin. In recent years, it has become difficult to retain that domestic dogs and dingoes remain distinct species from the Holarctic gray wolf, especially if we wish to keep the species monophyletic. But I think now a good case can be made that coyotes belong to the same species as Canis lupus. They diverged from a common ancestor only recently, around 50,000 years ago, and the much debated Eastern and red wolf “species,” which appear to be hybrids between coyotes and gray wolves can also similarly be folded into Canis lupus. Whether there was a coyote sister population in the Eastern forest that gave rise to red and Eastern wolves is a moot point. That “forest coyote” population is no more distinct from gray wolves than those of the West are.

Further, we do have evidence of continued gene flow between gray wolves and coyotes. Eastern coyotes have wolf ancestry, and many also have wolf ancestry that comes from domestic dogs.

This new way of describing Canis lupus forms has some benefits. One is that we can come up with a strong legal foundation for the protection of red and Eastern wolves without them being distinct species. Their hybrid status is no longer problematic. We no longer must strain credibility talking about them being ancient North American wolves. Instead, we just go the Endangered Species Act’s statute language which defines an “endangered species” as being a “subspecies” that requires conservation action. We currently protect the Florida panther as an endangered species using this definition, and what is more, the Florida panther was given genetic rescue when Texas cougars were released into its range. The Florida panther exists as a hybrid that holds onto alleles of a population that no longer exists in its pure form, and in the case of red and Eastern wolves, one can very easily make this case.

The problem with going this route is that coyotes themselves do not experience many protections in the United States or Canada. Most states have a very open hunting season on them year-round, and some places have bounties on them. Eastern coyotes are hard to tell apart from what are called Eastern wolves and are even harder to tell apart from red wolves. There is an overlap in phenotype that comes from both forms having similar hybrid origins.

Further, because red wolves living in the North Carolina recovery range are all derived from 19 individuals, and wild wolf-like canids have inbreeding avoidance behavior, it is quite common for red wolves to pair up with Eastern coyotes. Much energy has been devoted to killing off and removing coyotes in red wolf recovery zones, including the euthanasia of crossbred puppies, but it seems that this won’t work long-term.

Recently, researchers at Princeton discovered that the coyotes of Galveston Island are quite closely related to the red wolves in the recovery program. The authors think that many southeastern coyotes might hold the alleles of these red wolves, but I think a better explanation is that we simply under-estimated what the coyote’s range was in the United States at the time of contact. John Smith described the “wolues” of Jamestown as not being much larger than English foxes, and I initially thought he was talking about gray foxes. But then I read original text, and the gray fox is described in complete detail, including the fact that it lacks the red fox’s odor. Henry Wharton Shoemaker, the naturalist and folklorist who chronicled much of the lore of Pennsylvania’s wildlife, wrote about a “small brown wolf” that lived along the Susquehanna River, which made a yipping howl that resembled that of the prairie wolf or coyote. Shoemaker postulated that these small brown wolves were the same species as the coyote, but very few scholars have taken his speculations seriously.

Perhaps, there were coyotes living in the forest alongside Eastern wolves and a endemic Southeastern form of wolf that was very often melanistic. All three exchanged genes, and all three were killed off for their furs and for bounties without any regard to what they were. It was only when settlers in Indiana noticed that some of the wolves in their area were quite small that they began to wonder if they were a distinct species. Later explorers into the West began to call them prairie wolves, which was their name until Americans adopted the Nahuatl-derived name for them.

The most important bit of text I’ve read in any of these North American wolf taxonomy papers is one in a response paper to another one that still argues for multiple species of wolf in North America. The authors write that “[the] genetic differentiation between red wolves and other North American [wolf-like] canids is comparable to the amount of genetic differentiation found between different continental human groups, which of course are not considered to be distinct evolutionary lineages.”

And at that moment, we are back to Mr. Darwin’s debate with the polygenists. He was right to oppose their claims back then, and maybe when it comes to North American and Eurasians wolves, dogs, dingoes, and coyotes, one should be a monogenists.

That’s where I am planting my flag. I think that is where it will all end up once we’ve sorted it all out.

I find the idea of gray wolves representing a phenotypically and behaviorally diverse species awfully intriguing. This diversity is greatly exaggerated in the domestic form, but this diversity is also reflected in the wild, where we have 15-pound coyotes and wolves that weigh 130 pounds.

It may even be that the African golden wolf, which is derived from the ancestor of the gray wolf and coyote mating with the ancestor of the Ethiopian wolf, may be close enough to extant gray wolves that we might also regard it as part of this very diverse species. It would be a coyote-evolved in parallel out of the gray wolf lineage, for the coyote likely evolved in its smaller and more generalist form from the ancestral Eurasian gray wolf because it could not compete as a pack hunter in a North America dominated by dire wolves. African wild dogs once ranged over almost the whole continent of Africa, and they could have provided competition for that niche that would force these ancestral gray wolves to evolve in something like an African coyote.

The recalibration of the evolution of Canis needs to be done with light of the knowledge that gray wolves and coyotes aren’t so genetically distinct from each other. We need new papers that look at he full genomes of golden and Himalayan wolves to get an idea of when they may have split from the rest of the gray wolf swarm. It may be very well be that they all belong to this wide-ranging phenotypically diverse species that over parts of four continents

Yes, this is controversial, but I think it is parsimonious. So many scientists now have no problem thinking that pugs and Yorkshire terriers are Canis lupus familiaris, so why is it so difficult to think of coyotes as being Canis lupus latrans?

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