BONUS: When Animals Attack with Tooth & Claw | 6
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Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Against the Odds early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. From Wondery, I'm Mike Corey, and this is Against the Odds.

When we go out into the wilderness, we can never be sure what will happen. Part of the thrill is adventuring into the unknown. Sometimes things go as planned and sometimes they don't. But the more we learn, the more we experience, the more we practice, the better prepared we are when the unexpected happens.

On today's show, we're going to be talking all about real-life animal encounters and try to learn a little bit about what we can do if we come face-to-face with a rattler, a mountain lion, or a tiger shark in the wild.

As some of you may know, I absolutely love adventure. Also, the wilderness and animals are one of my favorite things on this planet. I have a background in biology. So you can imagine how thrilled I am to be joined by our guest, Wes Larson, host of the podcast, Tooth and Claw, True Stories of Animal Attacks.

Wes is a wildlife biologist. He says his first obsession was frogs, but somewhere along the way, he graduated to bears. For those who don't know, his podcast, Tooth and Claw, features true stories of animal-human interactions, and not the fun kind, and weaves in all kinds of great information about the behavior and biology of the animals. ♪

There are some crazy stories on the show, but there's also a message of conservation and respect for wild things. Because if we understand the natural world a bit better, the hope is that we can coexist or at least know what to do if we come face to face with a 300-pound bear.

So I'm going to talk to Wes about some of the wildest stories he's told on the podcast and also about some of his own run-ins with some pretty formidable animals. Our conversation is coming up next.

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Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates. Comparison rates not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy. Wes Larson, welcome to this special episode of Against the Odds.

Thanks, Mike. Good to be here. Your podcast, Tooth & Claw, features true stories of humans' encounters with all sorts of different wild animals, from snakes to alligators, elephants, and even leeches. But I'm hoping you can share one of your own personal stories first to get us all warmed up. I know you're a biologist and you work a lot with bears, and there's one particular story

where you got stuck up in a tree together with a bear. And I would love if you told it here today. Yeah, it's a good story for me, especially because it's one that really reminded me of how easy it is to get complacent around wildlife.

And I think you must know this, anyone that spends a lot of time in the wilderness knows this, that the more time you spend around animals, kind of the more comfortable you might become. And it's good every once in a while. It was good for me to be reminded that even, you know, me as a professional, someone who knows these animals behaviors really well, I still need to take the proper precautions too.

I was doing this black bear study in Bryce Canyon National Park, and we had caught a bear who had been collared. We'd caught her in a trap and collared her. I thought her collar might be getting a bit tight. So we needed to catch that particular bear and give her a new collar or loosen the one that she currently had.

So what we would do for those kind of circumstances, we'd actually use the GPS beacon and the antenna on those collars to figure out the area that bear was in. And then we'd go out with hounds and the hounds would pick up the scent of the bear. And then they chase that bear and we follow on horseback.

And the hope is that the bear will go up a tree. And if the dogs can chase the bear up a tree, we can then hopefully sedate the bear in the tree, lower her down and change her color. And that's, it's kind of, it sounds like a lot, but it's really the only way to target one specific animal in that kind of environment. That's so interesting because, I mean, if you're trying to find a lost child in the woods using hounds, you would train them on a piece of clothing. But I guess you can do the same thing with a wild bear, which is quite an interesting idea.

Yeah. And these dogs are trained to find bears at Mount Lyons. And so the second you cross one of her tracks, they pick up on it like that. And then you just hope that it's your bear. Essentially, you're like, I really hope this is...

the bear that we're looking for. So we went out, it was me and this kind of old trapper guy that I worked with that worked with the state. And he set his dogs out and they picked up the descent pretty quickly. And we ended up having to ride about five miles on horseback until the dogs finally treed this bear. And when we got there, it was perfect. She was like on one of the lowest branches. Her butt was hanging down.

All we needed to do was load a dart into his dart gun, put the dart in her. And generally what these bears will do is maybe climb up a few branches and then they lay out on these big ponderosa pine branches in a safe spot, fall asleep. We climb up, put some ropes around them and gently lower them down.

My friend loads up his dart gun, goes up there to shoot the dart, and it just bounces off of her. And so she climbs a little higher and we're at the point now where one of us has to go into the tree to sedate this animal. And so I said, yeah, I'll do it. You know, whatever. I'll go for it.

I'm in like some high top vans. It wasn't the right outfit or anything. And unfortunately, I'd forgotten bear spray that day too, which is something I almost always have with me. But I had gotten a little complacent around black bears. I'm not going to lie. This was a black bear. I'd kind of just seen them as an animal that I knew their behavior well enough. I didn't have to worry about.

So I climb up the tree. It's a big ponderosa pine. The branches are about 10 feet apart. And so it's really hard to climb. I would have to literally do like a pull up onto these branches and then get up on it. And they're really slippery bark. And the bear is really upset at this point. She's right above me. She's growling. There's saliva falling in my face. She's really not happy. The bear's saliva is falling in your face. Is that what you said? Yeah, like it was literally...

splashing into my face. And, and she would, she would do these little bluff charges, even in the tree where she was clacking her jaws and huffing at me and really letting me know, Hey, I'm not comfortable and I'm a bear. So what the hell are you doing in this tree with me? I tried to put another dart in her. Same thing happens. Uh, it bounces out and she climbs up higher. So I climb up higher. It happens again, exact same thing.

And then she climbs to where she's almost like 35, 40 feet up into this tree. And I climb up beneath her. I'm about 10 feet from her. And I look down and I think, you know what? If I were to sedate her at this height and she were to fall, it's a pretty big risk for her at this kind of height. And I put the dart gun in my pocket and I climb down. And when I'm about 15 feet up, I fall out of the tree and I land bad on my ankle and I break it.

And, um, we had ridden five miles in and I literally could not put any pressure on my ankle. I tried to stand and the pain was almost made me pass out. Um, so I crawl to a log where I can rest my head. My buddy comes over and he says, listen, there's an old logging road, not far from here. It's about a mile away. So I'm going to ride the horse back to the truck.

And I'll take the dogs with me. And then we'll drive this old logging road. We'll try to get a little bit closer. And he gave me some pills. And he said, hopefully by then you'll be able to at least get on your horse. And you only have to ride a mile instead of five miles. I was like, great, perfect. And then I'm laying there and he's gone. I'm by myself. I didn't have spray. The dart gun's not working. So I have no deterrent. And I start thinking, oh, there's a pissed off bear in this tree. I look like a wounded animal at the bottom of it.

And sure enough, she starts coming down and she's coming down pretty quick. And so I grabbed some rocks and pine cones and stuff and start throwing them at her and yelling. And I did that for a few hours, just hoping I was fairly confident that had she come down, she was just going to take off because that's what black bears almost always do. But you never know. It's a wild animal. They are unpredictable. Even if you have all the knowledge that we have as biologists, they can still surprise you. And I did look pretty helpless laying there on the ground.

And so I did that for a few hours. And then one of the dogs that we had lost in this whole ordeal showed up and that dog stayed right next to me. And whenever the bear would move, it would run up to the tree and start barking and send her back up. So that dog was a bit of a lifesaver for me. Um,

But then my buddy showed back up and he helped me onto the horse and we got out of there. But it was definitely a situation where I realized that I can't become complacent. And that's the reality of wildlife, like you said. And with people, you can understand people's behavior too. But then sometimes there's moods, there's different individuals that are unpredictable. I'd love for us to talk a bit about

different kinds of bears for a second, because you said black bears, right? So let's say there's a totem pole of bears and we've got black bears, brown bears, grizzly bears, panda bears, polar bears. That's

As far as risk level for these different species, where would you put them all? Panda bear is definitely prime predator, right? They're not. They're our most vegetarian of all the bears. I got to meet one once and I could not believe how cartoonish they actually were in real life. Oh, yeah. Rolling down hills, standing on their heads. You can't even believe that this creature would survive any time in the wild, actually.

Yeah, they're the jesters of the bear world. And their diet is almost exclusively bamboo. So they are not an aggressive bear. That's the bear that you're least concerned about. If I have to be on a deserted island with any of the eight bear species, I'm picking a panda. Yeah.

But the other ones you listed, so which ones? You said black bear, grizzly bear, polar bear, and panda bear? Brown bear as well. Okay. Yeah. So a brown bear is a grizzly bear. That's Ursus arctis. We call them grizzly bears in the US, but it's the same species as brown bear. So we're just going to lump them together. My next...

bear that I would want on that island with me is the black bear. Um, they're very shy. They have evolved to climb trees as a way to escape threats. That's their natural defense. Actually with great finesse. If you've never seen one climb before, it just zips right up the tree. Yeah. They have no problem climbing. It's why you, if you do have a problem with a black bear, you don't want to try and climb up a tree and get away from it or follow one up a tree. Exactly. It's a bad idea. Don't do it. Uh,

This is a hard one because I think I'd rather have the grizzly bear there with me than the polar bear. I think there's a lot of polar bear scientists that would disagree with me.

But I think my thing is, I really don't want to be eaten alive by a bear. And the one of these bear species that if it does decide to attack you is going to eat you alive, it's most likely the polar bear. There are only bear that's purely carnivorous when they do decide to attack humans, which is incredibly rare. They are almost always, you know, in predator mode. I think I'd still rather be in close proximity with the grizzly than a polar bear. And yeah.

You have taken quite an interest in bears, yeah? So what do you find about this particular animal so interesting? Yeah, I grew up here in Montana in the 80s and the 90s. And so I was kind of a latchkey kid where my parents just kicked me outside and said, go do whatever you want. And so I spent a lot of time out in the woods and fields and whatnot by my house on my own. And in Montana, if you're in those areas, your mind goes to predators and bears are kind of chief predators.

among those animals and especially grizzly bears. And for me, I spent so much time thinking about them. They became almost this mythological kind of all encompassing animal. Like they were always in all the shadows, all of the places in the woods. And I loved that feeling. I love that feeling of

like the woods feeling alive and dangerous and Intoxicating and that to me is what wilderness symbolizes it's this feeling that we have to kind of surrender part of ourselves to those areas and Having a large alpha predator like a grizzly bear on the landscape in my opinion is the only way that you can have those kind of feelings and so it became really important to me as I age to protect those kind of spaces and

And then to do that, you have to protect those animals. So for me, grizzly bears particularly became my focus in my conservation journey. On Tooth and Claw, your podcast, there was a three-part series that was called Night of the Grizzly. And it's about two different grizzly bear attacks that happened on the same night in Montana's Glacier National Park in, I think, 1967. Yep.

Unfortunately, both those attacks were fatal. I'd love to hear you tell a bit about that story because in it, while there's the tragedy of the two fatal attacks, there's also a lot of great bear biology and behavior you speak about. Can you dive into the series quickly?

Yeah, of course. So essentially the backdrop to this was this is the late 60s in Glacier National Park. And the Park Service had started to realize decades earlier that they had a problem with bears and their problem was self-created and that they had been actively feeding bears and allowing visitors to feed bears. And they had been doing their best to stop this practice. So by the late 60s, a lot of that had stopped.

But in Glacier National Park, there was still a couple problem spots. One of them was the Granite Park Chalet, where they were throwing food out every night, leftover food, so that a couple grizzly bears could come in and feed on it. And then another spot was Trout Lake Campground, where people were just leaving leftover food as they left their campsites. And there's a bear coming in and feeding on those scraps, too. We call this food conditioning with the bear. And the problem with food conditioning is the bear starts to associate human beings with the food reward.

When you think about it, if you give a bear a hunk of bacon or something, the calories it gets from that, it wouldn't get after days of eating blueberries or huckleberries or whatever. It gets all of those calories in just one bite when we give it human food. And that's so enticing for them that they're willing to then take much bigger risks than they would be naturally to get at that food.

And that's what these bears in Glacier were doing. They were starting to become very aggressive. And it just so happened that on one night, two women were killed by two different bears that had become food conditioned in two different parts of the park. And these bears found these women in their sleeping bags, attacked them and killed them and ate them. They were incredibly violent deaths. They were incredibly tragic deaths.

Up until that point, the park had just kind of thought that grizzly bears could be somewhat dangerous, but that they had never killed anyone. They had never really done much damage. So they kind of just saw them as a nuisance. And it really changed the way that we look at bears around the world and especially in the national park system. So you encounter a bear. The bear looks aggressive.

So is it go on the offensive, yell, act big, throw a rock? Are these all good ideas? Or run, turn your tail, run like hell?

It really depends on the species. So like grizzly bears or brown bears, they are a very defensive bear. That's the number one thing that leads to grizzly bear attacks is just a surprise encounter. So you're not making enough noise, you're out on a trail or you're trail running or mountain biking or something. You come around a corner and there's a bear there that you surprise. That bear has evolved to neutralize that threat when it's within a certain distance of it. You know, if you're far enough away and it hears you coming, it's just going to run off. But if

But if you're within a certain distance and it doesn't think it can get away, it's just going to hit you with everything it has. And for us, that can be devastating. So for a grizzly bear, it's often that. It's a surprise encounter. Black bears aren't nearly as defensive. So really, the only time a black bear makes contact with the person, and this isn't a hard rule, but it's often the case, is when they're actually trying to eat someone. And that's very rare, but about one in a million bears will do that. Black bears will actually try and predate

on a human being. So if you're attacked by a black bear, you have to do everything you can to stop it. You don't ever want to play dead because the second you play dead, you are surrendering control to that bear and that interaction. And you're pretty much telling it, you know, I'm going to let you decide how this ends. So my number one thing is like carry bear spray, because then you get to decide how that interaction ends. Um,

So black bears are very shy. They're very threat averse with a black bear, which is most people out here that are listening to this podcast. That's the bear they're most likely to encounter. You just want to be as big and as bad and as loud as possible because you're going to convince that bear, Hey, maybe this is food, but it is not worth it for me to risk, you know, doing anything with this. Don't eat your blueberries. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. A grizzly bear is very different with the grizzly bear.

There's three things you want to do, and these three things will decrease your problems by 99.9% if you run into a grizzly bear.

Number one is to group up. They do not attack groups of three or four or more if you stay unified. Two is you should get out your bear spray and get it ready. If you don't have bear spray and you're in grizzly country, it's like you're not wearing your seatbelt driving high speed. Carry bear spray. It works. It's incredibly effective. Get it out and get it ready. That's hint number two. Hint number three, slowly back away. If you do those three things...

you're very, very unlikely to have any kind of physical contact with that bear. I had a bear encounter. I want to hear it. It was my 30th birthday. And for my 30th birthday, I wanted to go spend a week alone in the forest, in the wilderness.

So I packed up all my stuff, big backpack, hammock, tarps, some jerky, some rice and beans, and got dropped off on this highway, middle of nowhere, hiked about three miles into the woods. It was probably about 50 miles away from the closest village and set up camp right next to a little river. And that first night had the thing I was worried about most, which was a bear encounter.

I hung up my hammock. The sun was setting over the forest. And I hear this massive crunching coming from the other side of the river. Crunch, smash, crunch, smash. In my head, it was a stegosaurus, man. It sounded humongous. And so I'm sitting, I'm kind of peeking from behind my tarp and my hammock. And I'm looking and I'm looking and I'm looking and out pops a black bear. And again, that's the most dangerous animal really in the forest where I'm from.

And that's the thing that I had dreaded. And I thought maybe in the 10 days I'm out there, I might see, I might see a bear. And so I had my bear spray and I had these different things. And so I saw the bear and it didn't see me. And so I make some startled cry and it looks up and I go, Hey bear. And it looks at me again. And then it just takes off running. Right.

And that summarizes, I would say, the majority of all bear encounters. They don't want anything to do with me or you or anybody. They don't. And it got spooked and ran away. And we were equally scared of each other. Perhaps it even more than scared of me, honestly. And that quelled so much nervousness of 30 years of this fear of bears kind of brewing. Oh, it attacked this dog. Oh, what happened? All these stories. And that was my first real data point. And it just changed how I saw those animals all together.

Totally. That for me is what it's all about. Just making sure you're prepared and then you get to have those kind of experiences that change your perceptions, which I love. I'm speaking with Wes Larson, one of the hosts of the podcast Tooth and Claw, True Stories of Animal Attacks. We're going to take a quick break and then talk about, well, snakes and leeches.

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There was a special episode you did on your podcast for Halloween, which is an animal many people fear, but is not at all that dangerous. Even some people seek out being bit by this particular animal. And it's leeches. Yeah. A couple of years ago, actually, I went to get my blood sucked by leeches. I was in Poland. And in some parts of the world, they still do bloodletting because they really do believe

that it can help your health. I'd love if you could jump into why you chose leeches and maybe explain for people who aren't familiar with this

slippery little creature, what they are, and why do people fear them so much? Yeah, we chose leeches because it was Halloween. We wanted to do an animal that people were afraid of. It's kind of creepy. Essentially, I think the main reason people are so disgusted by them is just because they are kind of a gross little critter. I think anything that sucks our blood

is going to be gross. But when it's a worm that actually bites you and sucks your blood, it's especially disgusting to people. I do think significantly one thing that's interesting about them is they don't really pass diseases. A lot of other blood sucking animals do have the propensity to pass some pretty gnarly diseases to humans. And leeches don't really do that.

But there have been people that have died from leeches. It's either because the leech gets into a place where you really don't want a leech, like their throat cavity or their intestines or someplace like that. Or there have been people that have just had so many leeches on them at once that they've died from essentially from blood loss.

Oh, you're giving me the shivers. So someone actually died from a leech attaching in their esophagus, and as it filled with blood, it blocked their airflow. How did someone swallow a leech that then choked them to death? Well, what happens almost always is they're drinking water from an impure water source. So this is unfortunately something that happens more in undeveloped areas where they're sharing water with livestock.

And there's just these tiny, essentially baby leeches in the water. They drink it. It latches onto their throat and then just starts feeding and engorging itself and getting bigger and bigger and bigger. They get much bigger, actually. They do. Yeah. Fun. Yeah. Pretty terrible. Yeah. And honestly, I think the worst part of that whole episode was learning

about leeches that have been pulled from your nether regions, that have been pulled from the worst possible places you can imagine having a leech. So it was one that after we recorded, I was ready to stop thinking about leeches for a little while. Honestly, I consider myself pretty tolerant to the creatures of the world. But if I'm in a lake and I see a big two-inch leech coming at me, man, I am out of that lake

so fast. But you're right. When they bite you, it doesn't even hurt. It's not painful. They don't have any diseases like mosquitoes or ticks. They're just icky, bro. From one biologist to another, they're just icky. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not a big fan either. And so if you were going to find a leech on you and it's sucking your blood and swelling up, what is the best way to get off a leech?

There are a number of different things that you can do. To be honest, I would just pull it off. There's probably better ways to get them off. You can smoke them off. You can use like something hot to get them off. Salt, I think, works too, right? Yeah. But honestly, just pull it off. It's not like a tick where you have to worry about the head getting lodged in you or something. If you can get that leech with your hand or something, just pull it off and that's good enough.

Another slithery creature we definitely need to address on today's show are snakes. How do you feel about snakes? I love snakes. Always been obsessed with snakes since I was really young. Here in Montana, we don't have a lot of species, but we had lots of garter snakes near my house. I would go out and catch them all the time.

Yeah, I'm pretty obsessed with snakes, to be honest. I am also obsessed with snakes. And maybe it's because I also grew up in a place where there was garter snakes, small little two-foot guys. But you see these pythons and mambas and emerald tree boas and these just elegant, beautiful things. For me, I think my obsession started when I...

I was taught, like we all are, snakes are dangerous and they're slimy, right? Snakes are slimy. And then the first time I, I think I was at some zoo and they had a big ball python or something large and they were letting all the kids hold it, right? And I remember realizing in that moment, they're not slimy.

Right. Yeah. And they're not poisonous. Some are venomous. And people have all of their facts all mixed up with these animals. This animal is incredible. It's so interesting how, you know, it can sense things with its Jacobson organ. It uses its tongue to taste and smell and it can sense vibration and heat with its faces. There's so many interesting things. And we just dismiss them as poisonous and slimy. Two things that are very false. Yeah.

Yeah, I think this is an animal more than most that's been demonized. And I think it's because we have this natural aversion to snakes. For some people, that expresses a real fear of snakes. And...

They are an animal that can be incredibly dangerous to people outside of mosquitoes. This is the animal that kills more people than any other animal out there. But it's because of a lot of different reasons. And a big part of that is that we've created habitat for these animals. In places where there are lots of venomous snakes, there's also often lots of rodents that we have kind of

help these rodent populations explode. And that brings snakes into our homes, into our cities, into the places where we live. But one thing I love about snakes, and you know, if we look at North America, our main venomous snake throughout North America that people encounter is a rattlesnake. And that animal not only doesn't want to bite you, it tells you that it doesn't want to bite you, you know, in a very visceral way, it shows you, Hey, I am not to be messed with.

do not come any closer to me. And I love that. The reason that people often get bit by snakes is because they're messing with them. And if we leave this animal alone, it does a huge service to humanity and the fact that they control rodent populations. They control a lot of pests that do a lot of damage to us. So...

I don't know. I just love them. I can't say enough about them. Unfortunately, they're nowhere near as frequently found as people think they are. Totally. And in my experience, in my travels, it's almost sad how they're treated very much like sharks in the sense that every snake is a bad snake. And I've seen people hack snakes to pieces that aren't venomous. They're just, it's a snake. Therefore, it's evil. Therefore, we're going to cut it to pieces. Totally.

And it breaks my heart because it's just a lack of understanding. Right. And, and, you know, now we have the tools in a lot of places when someone does get bit by a venomous snake to save their lives, to save their limbs. I'll say this, like, if you get bit by a venomous snake, there are two things that you need to have.

That's your phone and your keys. Take a picture of that snake if you can. Call a rescue and get in your car and drive to the hospital or have someone drive you to the hospital. That's what you do. Don't worry about trying to suck out venom. Don't worry about any of the little things you're going to read online. Get to some anti-venom as quickly as possible and take as much of it as you need.

to get better. On your podcast, there is a story you tell about a Western diamondback rattlesnake that bit a man and injected a ton of venom into his hand. But the circumstances were a bit abnormal. And I know listeners were quite surprised by how that story unfolded. Can you tell us a bit about it? Yeah, what had happened is this guy had found this diamondback rattlesnake in his yard. It had kind of cornered

His wife had kind of cornered herself with the snake. So he decided to kill it because he couldn't find a way for his wife to get around it. So he cut its head off with the machete. I can't exactly remember the tool he used, but he cut the snake's head off. And then him and his wife went inside. And not long after, he let his dogs out.

And when he did that, he realized like, oh, there's this snake out there still. I don't want them to mess with it. It's dead, but I don't want them to eat it or something. So he goes out to dispose of the snake. And this is 10 minutes after he had killed it. He picks up the head.

And it bites him. The severed head of this rattlesnake bites him on his hand and injects its entire load of venom into his hand. Because it still has the twitches of death. Exactly. So snakes, especially when you cut their head off, you've got to be careful because they can still react. They can still bite.

And the difference is when a snake bites something, when it's still completely intact, it has this kind of decision to make of how much venom to inject. And often they can be dry bites or they don't inject enough to even kill a human person. But this snake being dead just injected its entire load of venom into the sky and

And so he went to the hospital immediately and almost died. They had to give him 26 vials of antivenin for him to survive this bite. And he lost a finger or two in the process, but it was a near death circumstance for this guy. And that's rare for rattlesnakes, but pretty crazy one. It was a good story. Well, I think we learned an important lesson of don't pick up severed snake heads. If you see one, you know, just don't pick up venomous snakes, regardless dead or alive, just leave them alone. Yeah.

A good solid rule. After another break, Wes and I are going to talk about one of my favorite subjects, sharks, and one of his favorite topics, big cats, specifically the mountain lion. This season, Instacart has your back to school. As in, they've got your back to school lunch favorites, like snack packs and fresh fruit. And they've got your back to school supplies, like backpacks, binders, and pencils. And they've got your back when your kid casually tells you they have a huge school project due tomorrow.

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big cats like mountain lions or cougars. There are some pretty gnarly stories involving cougars. How do these generally go down? Because these animals, I have never seen one despite being born in a place where they apparently live, but they're very elusive and seem to want nothing to do with people. Yeah, I've seen a number of them here in Montana, one in Brazil and one in Patagonia, and they are incredibly stealthy, elusive animals. They are ambush predators.

So this is an animal that's learned how to be as quiet and as stealthy as it possibly can, because that's the way that it hunts prey. So often when people do have negative encounters with this animal, they don't even see it coming. It's something that they just get hit from behind with, and it can be very quick.

But these kind of incidents are incredibly rare. They hardly ever do attack people. And when they do, it's often a child or someone that's moving so quickly past the animal that they have to make a really quick decision. So trail runners, mountain bikers are at a higher risk of attack from mountain lions because they're

What happens when a predator sees us, they're doing this kind of calculus of, is this food? Is this a threat? What is this? And if you move by it so quickly, you're moving like food moves to a mountain lion. I mean, think of a house cat with a string. It's similar, right? Exactly. Exactly. And that triggers that predatory response and it jumps on you. Or a dog or something sprinting around the woods too, right? Totally. It's very rare again that it happens with people and it's almost always children, but dogs and cats are definitely on the menu for this animal.

There's a wild YouTube video of a trail runner who is walking in Utah and he encounters a cougar and that kitty is pissed. And about six minutes long, he was backing away, trying to scare it and its ears were back. It was not a fan of this guy. Go, go. No, no. Go away. Go away. Please go away.

The video is great because you see the trail runner go, you see a little kitten on the road and the guy's like, oh shit. And then mom comes charging in. Yeah, that's a video that was actually one of the things that made us want to start this podcast was that video. Because almost every single news article I saw about that video said,

mountain lion stalks runner in Utah. And the thing is, if a mountain lion is stalking you, you're probably not going to see it. If you do see it, you're very lucky because it's trying its best to be as quiet and as stealthy as possible. If you're on a trail and a mountain lion is bluff charging you and showing its side to you and

and yelling at you or slapping the ground like this cat is doing. It's pissed at you. You've done something to upset that animal. And what this cat was doing with this guy was escorting him away from its cubs. It was trying to push him as far as possible away from her offspring. She was trying to protect her cubs and

I'm sure if you have a cat at home, you know, they can get like focused on something and it's really hard to break their attention. And I think that's why this went on for so long was this cat was just so laser focused on getting this guy away that she almost forgot that she had left her cubs. I know. I was like, but your baby and even in the video is like, go back to your kid. Where's where's your kid? Leave me alone. Go away. I'm big and scary. You're a good little kitty cat. Go get your babies. I'm not coming back down. I promise.

I like the word escorting you used too. It's a very, very kind word. Yeah. And I think what finally breaks her focus is when he reaches down and grabs a rock or something. And she's finally like, oh, you know, I'm out of here. Because suddenly he's a threat and she realizes, oh, my cubs are all the way down the mountain. So she takes off.

It's hard to see that moment because the camera, I mean, obviously he's prioritizing his health and safety, not getting the best shot possible. So you see the camera pan off for a second, then you see kind of like a little puff of dust, which if you put the pieces together, it looks like he threw a rock. And that seemed to send her running. Did he handle that correctly, that whole scenario? He did. He did pretty well, yelling at her, doing whatever he could to discourage her. I

I would have grabbed something a lot earlier than he did to throw at her. The one thing you do want to be careful about with big cats is if you bend down to grab something and you break eye contact with them, sometimes if the animal is maybe going to be predatory, they see that as an opening to pounce on you. So you want to try and grab something while still standing up and

and maintaining a dominant kind of posture with that animal. So if you can make your way over to the hillside or something and grab a stick or a rock, that's a better way than bending completely over to grab something. With the cougar, we're obviously on land, which is where we are most familiar for most humans. So at least we feel like we're on maybe equal grounds.

But now we're going to go to the ocean. And we did a series here on Against the Odds about USS Indianapolis, which was the...

a massive shark attack on US sailors that were stranded in the water in 1945. It is such a wild story once you see all the pieces. I'm not going to spoil it all, but it's much more than just a shark attack. The story unfolds in such an interesting way. But one scene of Jaws actually talks about it specifically, where

where the actor Robert Shaw, who plays Captain Quint, gives this monologue about how many people got eaten by sharks. Shark comes the nearest man, that man, he start pounding, hollering and screaming. Sometimes the shark go away. Sometimes he wouldn't go away. It was something like 1,100 people fell into the water after being torpedoed by the Japanese and hundreds got chewed apart by sharks.

So for you and I both, we know that this is such a weird, strange scenario. But let's talk about why a shark would ever attack a human to begin with. Yeah, I think in a situation like the USS Indianapolis or some kind of shipwreck, you're often dealing with these open ocean pelagic sharks that essentially live in a desert. They live in a place where food is extremely limited and

And when there's suddenly a food source, they will stick by it as long as they have to until they get that food reward. And it's a very different scenario from someone swimming on the beach near the shore. So the sharks involved in these kind of attacks are often sharks like oceanic white tips or tiger sharks. And

They are opportunistic and it's a really bad situation to find yourself in. If you spend long enough bobbing out in the open ocean where there's sharks around, there's a decent chance you're going to get eaten by a shark. On the other hand, if you're like surfing in Monterey and you get attacked by a great white shark, there's a very large chance that what that shark was doing was simply investigating you as a potential source of food.

and it delivered what's called an exploratory bite where it took a bite to decide whether or not you were worth it, decided you weren't. But unfortunately for us, that bite may have taken off an entire leg or arm or been so devastating that you bleed out before you can even get to shore, even though that shark was really just

using its only tool it has to explore the world, which is its mouth. And something that I've learned through doing the podcast that's really interesting is for most sharks, and especially great whites, which are the shark that attacks people more than any other shark, we are so dense in bone mass that we're not good food for them. It

It almost takes more energy for them to process our bones than they receive from eating us. So when they take that first bite, they realize, oh, this is way too bony for me. I mean, they want to eat seals. Seals are these chubby little gummy candies, basically, of the ocean. High density fat, high reward for the effort. And we're these scrawny little bony beings, right? Exactly. On Tooth and Claw...

You guys did a series about shark attacks off the Jersey Shore, right? In 1916? Yeah. In 1916, there were a total of four people that died from a series of shark attacks and then a fifth person that was

injured really, really badly by these sharks. And it was all in the spate of a few weeks on the Jersey Shore. Very similar to Night of the Grizzlies in that this was an animal up until that point that we weren't really afraid of. People saw sharks as just kind of a big fish and they weren't our number one fear in the ocean. But this really changed perceptions in America about sharks. And the people were killed right offshore. The sharks seemed to be wanting to actually feed on these people. And then

then two of the victims actually were killed in an inlet, like a kind of estuary, brackish water, miles inland from the coast. Do we know what kind of sharks they were? That's a great question. So there's still debate about that. The two that are most often thought to be responsible were either a great white shark or...

or a bull shark. And after doing a lot of research into this, reading multiple books, a number of papers, I tend to agree with most shark biologists in saying that it was most likely a great white or multiple great whites that killed those people in 1916. And if I'm just the average person going for a nice swim, let's say I'm in Florida or Cabo or something like that, should I be worried about dangerous encounters with sharks?

I don't know if you should necessarily be worried, but I do think you need to be realistic that the second you enter the ocean, you are sacrificing some control to that environment. But I wouldn't be afraid of it. I swim in the ocean all the time. I absolutely love being in the ocean. I've never had any problems, but it can happen. So the main thing that I tell people is be really aware. Pay attention to signs on the beach.

pay attention to conditions. If the water's really murky that day, maybe don't go in the water because that can be one of the times when sharks are most active in looking for food. Um, if it's dusk or early morning, maybe stay out of the water. Those are times when sharks tend to be a bit more active as well. There's just different things that you can pay attention to that can really decrease your chances of having a bad encounter with a shark.

But the main truth there is that this is an animal that we do multitudes more harm to than they do to us on an almost unimaginable scale. And they're incredibly important players in their ecosystems too. And when you remove an animal like that from an ecosystem, it can have terrible cascading effects. Well, a big part of Tooth and Claw is about conservation.

from frogs to apex predators like grizzlies. In general, animals are in trouble, big animals, and it's mostly our fault as humans. I would love to know what your thoughts are on how can the people at home make a difference in this world to help conserve these large animals and these ecosystems? Yeah, it's a really good question, and it's a really hard one too. And I think a big part of our mission is

It's just inspiring people to go outside and to create a new relationship with wilderness, with wild places. Because I think when you do that and when you get to see these animals in the wild, you inherently care more about them and you just kind of naturally start to make better choices. All right. Before you go, I want to ask you a very serious question.

If you could pick one animal, one superpower, what animal would you choose and what superpower would they have? I have a really boring answer for this, Mike, and I'm sorry. I'm going to give you a boring answer to this great question, but it's the one that's true. I would just want to fly. I just want to be like a bird. I worked on a golden eagle project and I was monitoring nesting pairs of golden eagles and

And I would watch, they would do this thing called hyperbolic flight when they're recording. And the male would do this big loop way up in the air and then dive down and then go way up in the air again and dive down.

They can dive at 200 miles per hour. And I just watched it thinking, how can we possibly feel superior to this animal? This is something I can't even imagine being able to do. And it is a superpower. It's incredibly amazing. So that's definitely what I would pick. I want to fly like a bird. Especially when you see them just not even moving, just floating up there without an effort in the world. Yeah. And you know what? I could answer like,

like a cuttlefish that can change the color and texture of its skin or a chameleon and shoot out your tongue and eat Doritos from across the room. But both those don't beat flying. You're right. It's hard to beat. Well, Wes, thank you so much for taking time with me today on this very special episode of Against the Odds. Thank you, Mike. Really appreciate it. It was great talking to you. And thanks for all the good work you do.

Thank you so much to our guest, Wes Larson. To hear more from Wes, his brother Jeff, and producer Mike Smith, check out the podcast, Tooth & Claw, true stories of animal attacks, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm your host, Mike Corey. This episode was produced by Pauly Stryker, senior produced by Peter Arcuni. Audio engineer is Sergio Enriquez. Coordinating producer is Desi Blaylock. Series produced by Emily Frost and Alita Rozanski.

Managing producer is Matt Gant. Senior managing producer is Ryan Lohr. Senior producer is Andy Herman. Executive producers are Jenny Lauer-Beckman, Stephanie Jens, and Marshall Louis for Wondery. Welcome to the Offensive Line. You guys, on this podcast, we're going to make some picks, talk some s**t, and hopefully make you some money in the process. I'm your host, Annie Yeager.

So here's how this show's going to work, okay? We're going to run through the weekly slate of NFL and college football matchups, breaking them down into very serious categories like No offense. No offense, Travis Kelsey, but you've got to step up your game if Pat Mahomes is saying the Chiefs need to have more fun this year. We're also handing out a series of awards and making picks for the top storylines surrounding the world of football. Awards like the He May Have a Point Award for the wide receiver that's most justifiably bitter.

Is it Brandon Ayuk, Tee Higgins, or Devontae Adams? Plus, on Thursdays, we're doing an exclusive bonus episode on Wondery Plus, where I share my fantasy football picks ahead of Thursday night football and the weekend's matchups. Your fantasy league is as good as locked in. Follow the offensive line on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can access bonus episodes and listen ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus.