#442 - Steven Rinella

Some pigs are gonna die this weekend. Steve Renella.

That's right.

I'm. I'm 90 shots in my shoulders made out of fucking hamburger right now from all the impacts.

Unless someone think we're talking about policemen, we're talking about Seuss Graffa.

Yeah. I thought about posting a photo of the targets that I shot saying some pigs are going to die, but I didn't think that that would be. No, that could be problematic.

Yep. Sue Scraffa.

I'm glad you're here.

This the eurasian wild boar. You know what's interesting, man? All pigs in North America. So domestic. The kind you and your bacon. Feral ones, wild ones. It's all one species.

Yeah, you told me that.

As much as there's difference, they recognize them all as one species. There's some old world, like in Africa, there's some other members of the pig family, and Havalina or not Havalina are a peckery. So, like, when you hear Havalina or people talk about pigs in Arizona, they're often talking about a peckery. But, yeah, all the pigs. So Charlote. No, that was a spider. Wilbur. From Wilbur to Hogzilla is Sue Scraffa.

That's so strange. I didn't know that until you told me when we were in Wisconsin. It doesn't seem right.

No, there's all these. But they roll all the dogs under. I mean, you think that pigs look. You think that Wilbur or the classic. Well, they don't really exist. The classic pink, hairless farm pig. I mean, he doesn't look as different from what we'd call a russian boar, which is a variety. He doesn't look as different as a chihuahua does from a mastiff. Yeah, but they would discuss those as being what? Canis? Domestic? What is the common dog?

What's weird about the common dog is that they all emanate from wolves. All of them?

Yeah.

That's so strange. That's wild that you take a wolf and turn it into an english bulldog. Like, how the fuck did that take.

But I don't know. Those boys. You might have read this. Those boys in Russia that were taking silver foxes and just, like, selecting for behavior and stuff, they could move those things. So move.

Move. The traits.

You just. Yeah, I can't remember the details. If I did tell you the details, you'd look it up and then call me. Telling boreal is wrong. I learned not to get too detailed with you, but they could move dogs really fast. Selecting for color, behavioral characteristics, it was amazing. Just in a few generations.

Wow.

So they're very malleable.

I've always wondered how. I think it's a massive mystery, isn't it, how dogs were initially created out of wolves.

You hear so much contradictory stuff, like, at a point in time, because I've always kind of followed this a little bit. I learned a lot about dogs. I probably mentioned this to you before I wrote a piece about eating dogs in Vietnam. And so I had this kind of little summation in this article about the history of dogs, and it went through the fact checking process at Outside magazine, which is very rigorous. Like, if you say my mom is my mom, they'll call your mom and make sure it's your mom. And I had all these things that I kind of assumed were just true, and this fact checkers, like, that's in fact not true. So I had to relearn my understanding of dogs. At the time. They were saying, oh, it seems that dogs originated in China, and the oldest trace of dogs is there. Since then, I feel like I've read that the first Americans definitely were traveling with dogs, brought them down in the new world. But here there seems to have been some intro aggression from the gray wolf. So they picked up some other characteristics from other things along the way. Even though the guys that came through the Bering land bridge were not packing with them a dog that looked wolf like, they were probably packing with them a dog that was decidedly domestic dog like.

Wow.

It had already gone through some, you know, it had already gone through some transformations. They weren't just traveling with wolf dogs. They were traveling with a dog that had been under selective pressure for 15,000 years. Because I remember one time saying, oh, the domestic dog seems to go back 30,000 years. The domestic dog seems to go back 50,000 years. But people arrived here. It's debated. But sometime between maybe 15, 20,000 years ago, and when they showed up, they had a dog that was not a wolf.

Wow.

But then there was intro aggression from wolves. But this seems to be, like a really hot topic, and people are always digging into this because genetics is changing. Everything we understand, like, things that we used to think were related are not related. Things we think were not related are, in fact related. The whole mule deer thing, that mule deers seem to be a very new species since the pleistocene.

Really?

Yeah, they haven't been around long. It was like a hybridization event between blacktail deer and whitetailed deer. Created the mule deer. It's like our newest big game species, and it's probably will be one that doesn't last long. It'll be like, in the long term, you might look at mule deer and see them as this blip.

Really?

Yeah, just like, I mean, they're still susceptible to being outcompeted. They're very. Habitat fragmentation is hard on them, and they haven't been here long. I mean, on the other hand, whitetail deer have been here millions of years. They thrive. They're super adaptable. They can eat anything, live anywhere. They're, like, amazingly capable of surviving on this continent. And mule deer are like this new thing. It's a bummer. Like, my favorite animal. I like the sun, and the sun's only going to last 4 billion more years. It's going to burn out. But I think I like mule deer a lot, too. And it seems like despite a lot of people's best efforts to prevent it from happening, it seems like mule deer are vulnerable.

It seems like they're slowly starting to die off, too. There was an article about the numbers dropping and their habitat dropping and being diminished, and they're being pushed out.

Yeah. And some things are hard to explain, but whitetails, they've always lived in the southeast, and whitetails seem to periodically expand out and then, for climatic reasons, retract. But they kind of keep that, like, ancestral homeland. I'm talking in very long term, that ancestral homeland in the southeast. But at one time, whitetails made it all the way across the country, and some climatic conditions or something happened, and the population retracted, but it left this remnant population in California, on the Pacific coast, and then there was a massive genetic barrier, like if you took a bunch of dogs and separated them and put some dogs in South America and some dogs in North America and came back and checked on them, in a long time, they're going to have gone in a little different direction. And that became the blacktail. And then at a time, the blacktail seems to have extended its range eastward. The whitetail deer extended its range back westward, and there was a hybridization event where male blacktails were breeding with female whitetails and producing, like, this hybrid mule deer. There was a habitat retraction again, and blacktails retracted back to the coast, and whitetails retracted back the other way. And you had this spawned this thing we call mule deer.

How do they follow? Like, how do they know that it.

Was all this guy, Valerius Geist, who's, like, the most interesting biologist. He's a guy out of Calgary and Valerius geist has kind of, like, done so much work on big game. He's kind of the mule. He's like. People are like, oh, he's the mule deer guy, he's the elk guy, he's the buffalo guy. He came up with a lot of interesting theories, like some stuff we talked about in the past, where Valerius Geiss came up with this idea that what happens to species when they colonize land that had been vacated by glaciers, and there's, like, certain things that go on. And he was into founder effect, where imagine, one way we got different as people is imagine that just, like, four people struck off across the oceans in a homemade craft and landed there, and you had a male and a female, and they spawn a new. They successfully breed and create a new population. But let's say they both just happen to be six, seven, and 300 pounds. You have this thing, like the founder effect, where a small little population can carry traits and characteristics that are maybe not totally not a complete example of where they came from. And so you have, like, a radical deviation when they spread out.

Wow.

So he got into this stuff with animals. And why do animals seem to change? Like, when the bison arrived in North America, why did it all have a six foot hornspan and then shrank very rapidly? So he got into a lot of these ideas, and he also did a lot of genetic work. You have, like, the mitochondrial dna so they can track female descent. You should have him on sometime.

Yeah.

He'd be the coolest guy to have on in the world, actually. Valerious, guys.

Yeah.

Where'd you live? Could I come listen? Yeah, I would just listen at home, like most people. Right?

We could just come in. You could come in. I'm sure you'd have questions.

Yeah. You could just sit there and drink coffee. Okay. And I'll be like, sounds perfect. I'll be like, now explain this to me, Mr. Geiss. Yeah, he's a great guy. So anyways, he got into a lot of stuff with deer. And I bring all this up because we're looking at your fine specimen. Your fine four x four mule sitting here on the.

Would have never happened if it wasn't for you. Boom, boom. I was watching this thing that was talking about deer on television. They were talking about the difference in the size of the bodies of deer from the far north, like Alberta in Canada, to the far south, like in Mexico. And the further you go south, the animals tend to be smaller. Tend to be smaller.

It's the prince, Alan, is the burger principle. It's got a name.