♪♪ >> this fall watch c-span's new series books that shaped america join us as we embark on a captivating journey. first created a book that shaped america. exploring key works of literature from history. a significant societal change and still being talked about today. here from featured renowned experts that will shed light on these iconic works. virtual journeys to significant locations across the country tied to the celebrated authors in their unforgettable books. among our featured books, common sense by thomas paine, huckleberry finn by mark twain, their eyes were watching god and free to choose. watch our 10 part series books that shaped america starting monday, september 18 at 9:00 p.m. eastern on c-span.

c-span now our free mobile video app or online at c-span.org. >> good evening, everybody. welcome to the north carolina museum of national sciences. thank you for tuning and if you're watching live with us online. we have a very special program for you tonight. we have a whole stage full of a billion people. not including myself. i worked here at the museum as a coordinator for current science program. that job title means i get the privilege t or -- pleasure employer village of welcoming everyone into the museum. science technology engineering mathematics art as it relates to science, education and even more it is always a thrill to be here in the museum talking about science orn, nature, conservatin or any of those great and

fabulous topics. that make this museum such a great resource in such a great place to be. heto my left, you can see that these are the brilliant people i been joined with tonight. first i want to introduce doctor mike, closest to me. we can clap. mike serves as a research curator here at the museum. he is an expert on rats. but i guess a particular type of rat. actually, iev will say he knowsa whole lot about a whole lot of mammals. we had an event not too long ago and the audience was peppering him with questions about all types of different animals from all regionscr of the planet and right at the top of his mind incredible answers to great questions. rats living in the appalachia mountains to south america. it was a great talk. thank you for being here, mike.

>> thank you for having me. and then across the way we have doctor roland. [applause] roland serves as the head of the biodiversity research lab here at the museum. his research lab is over and the research center. also a professor at north carolina state university teaching zoology ands an expert zoologistt. particularly skilled around animal tracking. maybe not so much sniffing animal tracks in the forest and knowing which way they went, although i would believe you're very good at that as well. >> if there is a snow, i can dot [laughter] >> that is perfect. also using more technology in modern techniques with animal trapping camera traps in gps tracking. >> happy to be here. >> thanks, rowan. >> the reason we are here at the

museum tonight is to hear about the new book. how humans t create animal villains. tonight we have a very special guest doctor bethany brooke sure bethany is a science journalist. you can read bethany's work in the washington post. late in the atlantic. places like scientific american spirit science news. a former staff writer which i sactually scrolled through the archives and just like so many things that i need to learn about in the archive there, i'm going to go be a student, and we are very excited that we have experts and animals that some people consider pets here at the museum and bethany that you could be with us to talk about your new book and share with us some of the cool science and stories you investigated. let's get to it. i am going to take a seat. thank you for letting me join

tonight's conversation as well. okay. let's get started. the best place to start is, bethany, tell us about the book. what is the sales pitch? >> i started researching this book all the way back in 2016. when the idea first happened. but i have become obsessed. what is a past? right? when you really think hard about it, an animal that makes you mad an animal that makes you mad. it has nothing to do with what the animal is, where it is going , what it is doing and it has everything to do with you and what you think your environment should be like. to should be and it. who belongs near you appeared and, so, i just became fascinated by this concept.

and i also realize that almost everyone you talk to, everybody has a past story. my personal story which is -- can i cuss here? >> you are the boss. can i cuss? okay. that looks like a thumbs up. >> the three of us worked for the state of north carolina. you do not. >> okay. the squirrel that i'm talking about his name is kevin. we call him kevin for short because a 3-year-old lives next door. a gray squirrel. he lives in my yard. i hate him. so much. this kevin, this squirrel, we e.all call kevin in my house. this squirrel is a reason i have not hady a tomato for my garden in five years.

because every time i go out, i plant tomatoes, i am super excited, they are green, they are hopeful and then kevin. kevin comes into my garden, he grabs a nice green tomato and he takes a big bite. and then kevin recalls that he does not in fact like tomatoes. [laughter] he leaves it with his tooth marks and it right where i can see it on my porch because he is a jerk. then the next day he does it again. and again. and again. [laughter] this squirrel has taken a bite out of every single tomato my garden for the last five years. i have tried many things to get rid of him including bird netting, metal netting,y cayene pepper -- [laughter] -- stray cats. [laughter] i did in fact try a stray cat. two cats actually came inside and we now pets. kevin just ate cap food. >> maybe you need kevin inside. >> let's not.

i began to realize i hated this animal. i would bring it up to my friends and they would be like you can't hurt him he has a squirrel. he is perfect. he is sweet. they would take pictures of the squirrel. people feed squirrels deliberately. people set up obstacle courses that go viral on youtube. i realized that every animal could be a pest to someone. it just mattered and what ways and so i wrote the book. >> until this morning, kevin's girlfriend showed up in my attic never until today. they had broke into my attic and

clogged through some stuff. that never has happened until my life until today. >> you are cursed. >> we did have one that got in my roof and one of the places that i rented because there were holes in the roof. she was so big. you think a squirrel would make a little stumped noise. no. [laughter] the guy who called her said it was the biggest squirrel ever seen. he told me he took her to a farm upstate. i did not inquire. >> this is really interesting. i have been thinking about this a lot. i live a little further outside of raleigh. my wife, my lovely wife has pet notes. and she had some sunflower seeds

for the goats. they stayed in the trunk in her car for a long weekend. by the end of the weekend, squirrels had chewed up through the underside of the bumper into the trunk and looted all of these, whatever, sunflower seeds for the goats. that bumper was held together with duct tape for a substantial amount of time. i never actually thought of them as best per se. how much do urban squirrels actually consumed garbage. soft fleshy fruits. they mostlysh eat acorns and stf there is usually not a shortage of these oaks, we are in the city of oaks.

it is interesting to hear that they are eating other things. >> birdseed. they are eating a lot of birdseed. >> i just think of them as eating hard seeds not hard things. >> that is why they did not finish your tomato. >> i thought this was a green nut and i was wrong. [laughter]r] one year i was like, you know what, "nuclear option." i planted no tomatoes. i planted jalapeno peppers. i had this vision. the squirrel running away with tears streaming down its furry cheeks. squirrels cannot weep. he did not eat them. he never touched that jalapeno pepper not t a single one. every single time i've grown hot peppers he knows. not a single one has a bite out of it. >> sometimes you need to change your habits instead of the animal. >> i learned things about the

spatial memory of squirrels. they have incredibly inaccurate memories. you have to set up your tomato cage overat your tomatoes before the tomatoes emerge. if you wait until they emerge, which i tried this, i bought a large gardners cage. i was feeling real good about myself. i get this text for my husband, could you please come home. i'm like, why? he sends a video. thereto squirrels that have gone into the gardners cage that are now bouncing around. like ping-pong balls because they can't get out. he had to let them out. twenty minutes later they were back in. he let them out again. then it turned into an anti- squirrel fortress involving chicken wire and gardner cage and bricks. this year, gardner cage need to go up early because the squirrels do not taste the think

they do not know it is there in they will not come and get it. the moral of the story is to learn about the behavior. >> it sounds like part of the criteria for some critter being deemed a pest at least have to be able to outsmart us regularly the whole squirrel thing is like , okay, they consistently get around whatever it is that we set up to stop them. also, they consistently frustrate us because they can do those two things. we get angry. we tried to stop them. they are just able to get around us at every turn. does not hold true for stuff that's like not squirrels or particular to squirrels? >> i ended up writing a lot about this in the section. roland has cited several times. so much what we call pest is about power and vulnerability.

it is about animals that make us feel powerless. that make us feel scared. these animals, once they make us feel powerful and scared our fear turns to anger and anger turns to hate and we turn to the dark side. it is what i talked to him. they are causing people issues. i would love to hear your take on why coyotes are spreading where they are and why they are spreading into more suburbanes environment on the east coast particularly. >> they were originally in grassland deserts open habitat in the western united states and mexico and into canada. this was the early 1900s. they started moving, expanding in all directions. if you think about the

environment, they move into the northern first of canada into alaska. south into the rain forest. they were not really before that there is more farm fields. they can handle little bit of forest. they move all the way to panama. they have not entered yet. right at the edge. camera traps that have gotten them in the rain forest. and then the east coast was this great bit of force that they never lived in. as well as forests and coyotes all over the place. as coyotes move east colonizing the better fields moving into the deep forest. going up into the night park it will get beat up by the other coyotes and if they go into the neighborhood well maybe he can

scrape out a living there. i have been slowly colonizing across the east coast cities more and more. i think here in raleigh they kind of showed up in the county and like the 90s. raleigh and st ultimate in adaptability they can eat fruit they can eat they can catch small prey, they can do okay with big prey. they're not really that good. they more often will scavenge roadkill. they'll eat some garbage, but usually not a lot, but sometimes little bit. they'll eat, certainly cats even better. cat if you put out cat food, kyra is going to be quite attracted to that. and so they've they've come in and in some ways it's probably we got rid of the wolves, right? wolves were considered a pest a couple hundred years ago. and so we killed almost all of them. and that kind of opened up the space for the coyote to expand and coyotes have become a pest, some people in some places, but a lot of places not.

and so i think it's interesting to see like a lot of places, they're sort of filling in for the ecologically not totally, definitely, completely, but, you know, whether they're a pest, sometimes we use the word invasive species, right. like an invasive. so they are exotic in that they're they didn't used to be here. they're not introduced. sometimes we use the word introduced. they weren't introduced. they got here on their own. we can see they're spread. and whether they're invasive whether they're a pest is sort of are they harm to humans, human societies or sort of other invasive species, other native species are causing problems. and there's some places where they do that and there's a lot of places that they don't. on average, they're not that big of a pest, i think. but where they are a they're one of the bigger, sort of scary to pass out there. it's really fascinating to me how ma it is really fascinating to me.

you always hear this. oh my goodness i had a rat it was the size of a cap. no it was not. i am sorry. it was not. no recorded wild browned doorway rat that is been over 2 pounds. i know a guy, bobby corrigan, he carries around a check. $500 for the first person i could hand him a 2-pound rat and he has never used that check. you tell me that rat is a size of a cat, that is a kitten. >> making $500. >> probably not. >> different species. >> it is just really interesting when we have an interaction that makes us feel powerless and scared. all of a a sudden the animal grs in our minds and it becomes huge .

the raccoon becomes a size of a large dog. [laughter] the coyote is the size of a wolf it is not. >> coyotes do look big. they are very lean. people always compare them with their dogs. people know how much their dogs way. many people have a 50-pound dog. they see a coyote in there like it was the size of my dog. i understand that. i would approximate them to be about the size of my dog. at the truth is, coyotes very rarely canoa get to 50 pounds. on average in the east coast they are like 35 pounds. west coast even smaller. 25 pounds. on average half the size of my dog. they are just so lean and fluffy and lengthy. they are tall. >> yeah. >> if you hear them howl, it sounds like a huge pack. ten or 15 of them.

they published, they experimentally -- people consistently always overestimates. part of the evolution of their house. they want their house to sound like a bigger group. makes it sound like a bigger group. people fall for it all the time. >> had to be part two. >> very funny when i was reporting on coyotes in california. one of myyo sources was super happy. we were in hollywood. he was like i will show you. it will be great. we are there we are waiting and were waiting for the coyotes to come out. our coyotes are much bigger than that. i actually saw a roadkill coyote out of washington, d.c. the other day.

i was so excited i almost pulled over. this is to you have become. >> as they were moving east, they got some wolf genes mixed in. they also moved east and got some dog genes moved in. an eastern coyote 80-90% coyote. but it has five-8% of dog genes and five-8% wolf genes. a great experiment in evolution. if those genes help but survived they willow survive better and they are passing the genes on. some of the wolf genes, from the dog genome we have a pretty good idea. bone growth and muscle growth. those genes are surviving better in helping coyotes survive better and being passed on. that is why they are 35-45 in western arein 25.

>> expanding coyote profile. does not match with anybody. poodle, poodle, labral doodle, german shepherd, fine, i will take the poodle. [laughter] >> the first coyote that got into north carolina, springtime came along, she had no one else to breedhe with. no other coyotes were there because she was the first one. they have to take the next best thing they can get. >> i'm just waiting for the dioxin. coyote dioxin hybrid. [laughter] >> what would you call that? [inaudible] >> when do coyotes become p pet? the situation is attacking dogs. we have been surveying, i have a

google news alert. any time coyotes make the news which is pretty much every single day, a lot of times it is because they attack dogs. they are almost always small dogs. someone left thei' dog out. going to the bathroom at night and then does not come back. there was a video the other day, i felt terrible. an old lady nla, walking her chihuahua on a leash. the coyote comes up and yanks it off the leash. we think that it may be aggressive. the small dog and coyotes are not a good mix. >> calling chihuahua was walking coyote stickers. >> yeah. snickers. >> snickers., out. >> when they are angry. >> alligators considered past? >> floridians do not enjoy them.

if the alligator is eating you, you are moving too slow. have you considered moving faster? alligators routinely kill people and dogs. it is really interesting how we are sometimes more tolerant. happening in places we deem to be wilderness. it's happening someplace like the everglades. that isex a wilderness. brown bears kill about one-two people a year. if they do not want you to be there, they will find a way to make you leave. by whatever means necessary. we arema kind of okay with that. they went out there in the wilderness and people don't realize that there is no such thing as wilderness. there is no such thing as a placee that should have no peope in it. a playset is for animals and a place that is for humans.

right. every place where we live we form our own ecology. some off these animals will take advantage of that ecology. >> animals like pythons in florida. there is apparently a lot of florida we can talk about. a lot of animals that are considered pest perhaps. gators may be. non-native species like pythons tagus. i don't evenn know what a tagus is. >> and argentine lizard. >> not to mention the gigantic land snail. >> florida has more invasive species living than anywhere else, i think. >> florida is the australia of the united states. yeah. >> are all of i these, if we tae

the definition, are the monkeys in florida a pest? are the tagus a pest or are they non-native they can survive theirr -- you mentioned, roland, are they doing harm or what harm are they doing and what is the threshold for a python or tagus? >> some of these species are fairly benign. small geckos, things like that, it isth unclear. playing any kind of role other than pray for bigger things. when you are dealing with the tagus, the burmese pythons, there are breeding populations, anacondas, you know, there is not really, you know, as we see from the work with the burmese pythons, burmese pythons are gigantic snakes.

they are cryptic enough that somehow they were, you know, last populating the everglades before anyone noticed. >> we have no choice. >> rights. i think that, you know, their impact is unequivocal. i am a mammal guy. there is no more mammals left to study in parts of the everglades because the pythons have literally consumed them all. the beauty of being a python is you have such a slow metabolism that you could last 500 days towithout eating if you have the fat reserves. they can just sit and wait for new pray to eventually migrated or move in or repopulate. they are also shifting their diets. we seeee them, where i worked in the florida keys and key largo is an endangered item ecosystem. now we are studying the impacts on the endangered animals there.

compared to the everglades, we are only just now seeing the prevalence of the pythons increasing. effectively at the front of that end of the invasion curve where the population is growing where we are hoping to be able to manage it. and contain it and prevent that, you know, extinction of these endangered rodents. we are lucky that we observed it early enough in this case. but, that is an easy system to work and because it is contains. i think that, you know, the northern invasion frontth of the python,hi there is not really anything stopping them.rs cars. they get hit by cars. the state of florida has python roundups.

if you look at the data, these roundups are removing a couple hundred pythons a year. contractors looking for them. the folks out there are throwing everything that they possibly can. not removing pythons and just figuring out a way to find the pythons. in order to remove them. that northern invasion front, it is slowly expanding northward. if you look at the climate models of their suitable niche space in the climate, they can make it all the way up into north carolina. that is without any kind of warning. >> keep your eyes open. >> it is a slow steady slithering front they are. but we need to be monitoring and managing. the part of my work in the keys that we talked about in the book was trying to mitigate these things at the southern invasion front and hopefully we are learning something for that.

>> i actually kind of wanted to follow up on that. interestingly, burmese pythons are threatened in their native range. they are from southeast asia. threatened by habitat in particular. why aren't we pleased that they are actually doing well in florida. they came to florida and should we be happy? while not happy, but contempt? if they made it anywhere, we would be absolutely sharing. but we are not. what i found really fascinating as your own work to save a rat and a mouse. >> a veryey special rat and mou. >> they are extremely cute. it is not their fault. it is just really interesting.

those are animals that you would otherwise consider, some people may consider pest. >> i think that this is an interesting kind of moral ethical question teetering on that edge. >> it is really unfortunate that they are endangered in their native range. in a perfect world, we could start collecting them in florida and shipping them back and reintroducing them. they have been breeding in the everglades and presumably adapting hyper specifically to that environment and shifting to a largely aquatic ecosystem, largely aquatic diet. they have shifted their jot -- diets.

it is unclear. they were, you know, founded by a small population of released pets. and then who knows what kind of diseases they have been exposed to. in there, you know, invasive range. that they could potentially bring back and basically wipe out the native range or something like that. i think, you know, we have plenty of other species that are s more common in these ranges. camels are, you know, they basically don't exist anymore in the wild. well, i don't know that they are abundant, butpp they exist throughout the outback. >> they are pretty abundant. >> pablo escobar's hippos. how about that. >> hippos, camels, horses. >> yeah.

>> the wild mustangs of those planes are not wild. [laughter] pigeons. they are succeeding wildly. one wild known colony of pigeons left in the world off the coast of israel. another colony that is debatable off the coast of scotland. i don't believe it. sorry, will. >> what is the rat connection to the pythons? there iss just no mammals. i know that you studied specific species of rats in florida. is there some connection between yothe fieldwork you have been doingre? >> oh, yes. [laughter] >> working in south florida has

its charms. i effectively work in an interconnected web of pest. i studied these endangered rodents. they are ecosystem engineers. they are doing all kinds of important seed dispersal. they are great. they live in the forest. they are not coming out to people's homes. they are doing their thing. >> giant cool mass. >> then you have the non-native black rats, the invasive black rats. we have had a long-running history with pharaoh and free roaming cats as an issue. consuming these endangered rodents. now we have the pythons. we have coyotes, to. recently invading. they have to come over 18 miles

bridges and berms. >> we talked about this. you actually successfully managed the population of key largo. >> i i did not do it -- >> documenting some of it and following along. it has been fun working there. i been working there for 10 years now. a decade. time to move on i guess. >> everybody loves florida. , on. >> the fish and wildlife service has been working in the community there to mitigate the impacts of pharaoh and free roaming cats. live trapping them and, you know , reminding people that responsible pet ownership is the only way to mitigate these issues. >> what is the factor that led to pet ownership than anything

else? >> coyotes and burmese pythons. [laughter] >> all of a sudden helping with the biology. >> how exactly are they doing that western mark how are they helping the biologist? >> we get support from the community because they are interested in this common enemy of the burmese pythons. >> pythons, pythons are absolutely consuming cats there. they consume any mammals that they can find. but, anna devotedly, this is a little bit of scientific gossip here, but we find a lot more fat reserves in the pythons where the urban edges where they are more cats in the environment. i mean, presumably the raccoons andre opossums have higher fat reserves so they could be accumulating in multiple pathways.

>> if you are putting out cap food, of course you will be attracting the cats that will come there. and then the raccoons and the opossums and thus comps. >> and the rats. >> when a cold-blooded animal comes around sticking its tongue out, they will go there. >> you just sit and wait. >> yeah. >> that is one of the things i found really fascinating reporting this book. how many w people want to feed things. they want to feed animals specifically. i call it the disney princess moment of the bird landing on your hands. they want to have the deer eat out of your hands. they want to feed birds.

they want to feed cats. whatever. they put out a dish of food and they honestly believe that only the one species they want is going to eat it. if you leave a box of cookies out on the counter and you have a family, do you honestly expect that box of oreos to be untouched when you come back? no, of course not. you may have intended it for you , but your dog had other ideas. >> it is super interesting, the smaller the critter and the less pest like they are, birds, feed the birds. the hummingbirds, what could be more. >> pure. >> right. them feeding a hummingbird, the smallest of the critters. and then, okay, other birds, but then somebody starts feeding a raccoon. foxes. somebody feeding a coyote. should not be feeding the

coyotes. oh, yeah, wait a second. as you get bigger, all of a sudden like, why is it okay to feed the hummingbirds but not the black bears? it is because they are potential to be a pest. a serious pest. has a hummingbird ever been a pest? >> not that i know of. but i'm sure give it time. small but mighty. in my reporting in massachusetts i was working with this there biologist. there was a dude in western massachusetts that insisted on feeding the bears. he had a platform set up in his backyard. >> and a youtube channel. >> probably tiktok to be honest. the bears would come every day. he would not stop feeding the bears. he would not stop. even though the bear biologist came to him and said, hey, in an effort to get to your food there bears getting killed on the highway outside this

neighborhood because they are trying to get to where you are feeding them. he said that's none of my business i just want to feed the bears. okay. >> i also think it is this habituation and external resources that are creating pest creating, you know, individual mismanagement of resources in terms of intentional food supplementation. there is plenty of other things like securing trash and, you know, other things like that to prevent animals from getting into the message that they can create. putting stuff there is not what d drives it. it is the habituation and all of all of a sudden it is not acceptable. >> and then all of a sudden it is too much. >> everybody seems to want the photos until it is too much.

that is one of the things that i was kind of looking into. humans, we have this idea, we, by we i mean mostly western white, groups have this idea that we dominate the environment we deserve to have only the animals we want be there. and we refuse to change our own behavior when those animals because problems. if the animal is getting into our trash, it is not we who should lock up the trash, it is we should poison the animal. there is actually another solution to this. it is really interesting. i found that this is a very western view. not everyone thinks this way. there are other groups that would say, okay, we need to change our own behavior. these animals are clear and we live with them.ld we need to live with them

responsibly. this is something we all could probably learnte from honestly. in other news, please lock up your trash. >> it's interesting in your book how you talk about there are situations where just a few can create. if there are feeders that are feeding the pigeons in the whole population of the city, for their own personal region, the same thing with cats sometimes. >> absolutely. like a hoarder. >> an animal hoarder situation. >> that was really interesting. one of the things that i found about pest as they can be a problem of social justice because many of the people who i talked tole who studied the socl science of pigeon feeding, people in this world to study god bless academia. he iss at nyu. wrote a whole book on a. love day.

fantastic. a+ research. he talked to people who fed pigeons. why they did. they were lonely. many of these people were elderly. they were alone. they had nothing. they had no friends. what else are they going to do. a harmless thing to feed the birds. the birds are grateful and the birds are friendly. there so tame they can reach down and pick one up. i have done it. you do understand why. you understand this is a social justice issue. we could help people who are elderly and socially isolated be less socially isolated. people who feed cats are often very socially isolated. we could take care of that. people that live with rats do so because they have no choice and they are living in poverty and homes that are not impervious to rodents. we could fix those problems.

they are often becoming pest because our social contracts have failed. i think that is a really important thing to keep in mind. >> yeah, absolutely. quite powerful. >> thanks. [laughter] >> to put it together, just before we got to the social contract part, we talked about some threshold we eventually get to within an animal and then it becomes a pest. we go from being okay with it to vilifying it. then being okay and then blaming that thing because we cannot look at ourselves. it is not our fault. it has to be something else's fault and then that extends to our neighbor as well. all of a sudden, the problem, it is not our problem anymore. we will blame some other person, some other type of person or

some other behavior. >> yes, absolutely. that happens, especially with rats. some of the reporting i did was an homeless encampments where people are living with rats that were excessive. it was a lot. they did not want that. first of all, they don't want to bebe homeless. they really don't want to live with rats. they did not want to live in an environment that was dirty. you could see places where they were organizing and keeping spaces clean. they were doing their best. it was a social contract that it failed them. it was a society that i decided they did not deserve. to be free of living with animals. i think that is a really important thing to think about. .... .... an, to get dark. no, think that's a fantastic

place to maybe see what some of the if there's anyone who's here in the theater us that has any thoughts questions they'd like to share can just wave at me. i'll actually i'm going to bring you a microphone but. i think it's a great spot to leave it as a reflection. right. that's like a that's a good moment. well, while you run down there, can mike tell the story of the python and pants? oh, my gosh. simply it's you know, you're to you're supposed to leave that for a secret. oh, you'll have to read chapter two of pest. everybody such a good. i. december 2007. i guess i was i in a former life before curatorial duties here at the north carolina museum of natural sciences. i was a zookeeper at the palm beach zoo in 2007, and i

backcountry camping in the everglades by myself and it was right after hurricane wilma a lot of the trails been cleared and i needed a permit to go you know backcountry camping whatever and i went i went solo and there was an 11 or 12 mile hike and i was i don't six or seven miles in and and i found this burmese python like this beautiful. and i looked at it and i admired it along the trail stuff. and it's like, wow, that's why i hold you because it doesn't belong here. and this is before it was kind of well known. yeah. 2007 was like really early in this you know before they really knew a lot about them. so you knew you had to catch it. i started walking. i started, i kept going and then i was like, wait a second, i've got to catch this thing. and so turned back and i, you know, didn't really have a plan. i just grabbed it by the tail. and, you know, i grew up in the era of the steve irwin days,

right? i was like, oh, okay. and i had no actual i grabbed had it by the tail i threw my i took my shirt off. i threw my shirt over the head because, you know, a simple is that if you cover an animal's, they'll be easy to capture and. so i grabbed it by the head and then and then its body and then its wrapped all around me right. and so then i, you know, i was hopped up on adrenaline at that point. and i was like, okay, now what? you know, and this was don't know. i, i, i'm sure like the coyotes and everything. i'll elaborate. it was probably 30 feet. >> it was probably 13 feet. i think i said it was smaller. >> and then you said you looked it up and it was 8 feet. [laughter] like the strength of the python. >>wa anyway long story short.

i am an eagle scout and resourceful i took my pants off, my jeans, one-handed and i tied the legs of each of them with my teeth and then i slowly unraveled theo snake and stuffed it into my pants and put a bungee cord through the belt loop and shut it and then put it in my backpack and i slept with it in my tent that d night. on the way out the next morning i saw 3 additional burmese python's. this is a bigger deal than anyone realize. and with my backcountry permit. and i said are people finding burmese pythons in the everglades? she said i have a better

question where are youre pants? i said they are theree on the sidewalk in the python is in their. [laughter]nd >> it was before camera phones. i have 0 documentation of that other than the national park service actually came and collected there snake early in the research and put a transmitter in and released it as part of their initial studying the behavior of burmese pythons. >> you describe the encounter. >> and then he sent it to me for fact checking. >> the snake grows every yearnc since 2007. and now i'm back in the florida keys studying pythons.

>> i'm glad we got that story. i will have you tell that story a lot. >> the past that are the biggest past are insects. then i saw mammals including what look like a squirrel. perhaps your squirrel but now we talked about reptiles and birds how did you decide what to cover or not quick. >> the book is only vertebratese certainly every time you talk about tests i have a list as long as my arm that did not make it. there are so many. eagles, crows, wild hogs, giant land snails, so many. i ended up focusing on vertebrates for a reason because this was about the

subjective nature of pass. the reality is even on the agricultural crop that we value it is still a subjective judgment. but you cannot get people to make an emotional connection to in a fed or a roach. it is hard. snakes are hard enough. i would focus on vertebrates because i want people to feel the tension and the subjectiveness of the definition to realize these are definitions that we impose on the animals and don't have anything to do with the nsanimals themselves. no animal invertebrate or insect or otherwise they are taking advantage of opportunities we provide. >> if an insect is classified

as a pastor then it changes the way it is regulated. is that true? how does a past get classified in that regard how it will be dealt with public policy? >> think about the rabbits in australia. >> generally with the vertebrates what you are allowed to do with an animal depends on the game agency they will regulate the seasons and the ways to hunt them and to have classified different species according to that.o that gets most interesting in some of these areas because

sometimes if they classify them as a big game species is different than more of a past if they are a past then they will open up more open season no bag limit. more liberal of what you can use to harvest them. so generally speaking with vertebrates you can do whatever you want to because they are invasive open season. but is not quite the same with agriculture because most of the vertebrates don't get classified the same way as vertebrates do. you do often if you have a dear that is an agricultural test then with the rules of the hunting? so you do have special test rules to apply and tell the state with the problem is.

and then to shoot the deer out of season unless you want to elaborate? >> bad is in line with what i had in mind. there is no legal classification. as far as i understand. in terms of feral hogs in the state of north carolina it is open season. the important thing is there are rules and regulations about how humane. >> just like the stair traps that are regulated.

so wide is interesting my work in the keys started as a follow-up to the integrated pest management plan. and then to remove all invasive species including feral cats. that istrov where a lot of the controversies stems from because people have a hard time t accepting that animals that can be our pets cats or pets or pythons can also be invasive, deadly, destructive predators to the ecosystem. what i find most fascinating isee part of the work i have been doing with pythons, we were tracking them because they were consuming the prey

animals in our most recent research. i have been fielding a lot of e-mails from people. from the general public. they have all kinds of ideas about putting poison pills on the callers of the's raccoons or possums or detonators as soon as the python consumes them they blow up or as spikes that expand out as soon as they hit the stomach acid of a python. it is fascinating because people celebrate the killing of pythons. everyone is excited about the's python derbies.th there are some coyote derbies in some places also. but a lot of other species feral and free-roaming cats that are just as destructive in thend environment, we look

past that because they are cute or we affiliate or associate them to be our pets and not and invasive predator. there was a lot of humanization. and that probably correlates with that humanization of them and how we align with them. >> that something i have been thinking about a lot. we will do a great deal to protect the animals we value to the point we will do awful things to the animals we don't because be value another animal more. think about this aeg lot.

he will have rats on the island and there is a population of beavers. and people will drop millions ofof tons of poison on the rats and they will celebrate. yes. if it is a cat, all of a sudden or rabbits, have you considered rehoming? taking it somewhere to adopt it? what is the difference? and also made me ask the question and i asked them , what is the right decision and why? why are some animals more valuable?

the rats are killed will because they are a past and comment. why is it bad to be more common or privileged or rare? why is biodiversity considered inherent? is not that i don't think that because i do. biodiversity is great. but it's also a judgment that we made. in 1 we have to live with the consequences with. >> in australia you can shoot a cat whenever you want by the way. or rabbit. they are a past' >> all this python talk maids we realize there's an elephant on your book nobody would consider an elephant as a past but i can clearly imagine where they are but where i have personal experiences living in austin texas were a

very large colony of bats lives in ay. man-made structure and then go south for the winter the population to gather around and watch them come out at sunset. >> that's a tourist attraction. >> i avoided that because it was a little sensitive at the time because some species of bats, they are interesting. keep an eye on this space. that is interesting people

don't go out to trap and poison that. they are killed, it is in t retaliation. but elephants, yes i got to study elephants in kenya. african elephants. they are beautiful and so smart and sweet, they kill 200 people per year in east africa and cause millions of dollars in crop damage. >>t they are the funny past. a lot of people have relationship' with you can call them a funny name but then there is the elephant.le and there are other species in your book is much more consequential.

like 2 different words. >> looking at the article on this topic in 2016 where he actually classified animals into 8 cubes of humani judgment. it was a 3 dimensional type where the x axis is how common the encounter is, the y-letter axis and then the middle axis is how positive or negative it is. it's hard to remember 3 dimensional. but it is very interesting because we think of animals where consequences are rare, severe and negative.

those are predators. brown bears, sharks, things like that. very rare and negative. that doesn't turn out well. but then encounters on gradation that are less severe but more common. most of the time when people have negative encounters of elephants are eating the entire crop for the season not because they are killing. if they kill it is by accident usually. couple of cases are not. elephants are smart. and mostly animals we think of past like rats and pigeons and canada geese. the interactions are extremely common and extremely mild and only slightly negative. people hate goose poop but every group of canada geese on the golf course we brought them there because we thought they were picturesque.

they stayed and now we are mad. now it makes me happy. >> let's give our guests 1 more round of applause. [applause]