#time

"I actually tried to find some other analogy around the world in modern history that provided an example of any country that had killed this many animals in a short period of time of only a hundred years, and came to the conclusion that in American history between 1800 and about 1920 we engaged in the largest destruction of animal life discoverable anywhere in world history. We take out 30 million, 15 millions, probably between a half-million and a million gray wolves, a hundred thousand grizzly bears once ranged across the west. They were down to fewer than 500 by the end of the 19th century. I mean, and this story happens over and over again with every animal you can think of. We drove grizzlies into the mountains, drove off the plains into the mountains, wiped out all the bighorn sheep that were in the bad lands and canyons of the great plains, all gone by 1906. And so it's this slaughterhouse that takes place. And it takes place, interestingly enough, at the same time that the conservation movement is creating these big game parks in Africa, in Kenya, in what becomes Tanzania, in South Africa. And yet, on our own great plains we don't do it... because the great plains becomes the part of the west that we privatize with homesteads and with ranches, and everyone who settles on the great plains basically regards all these animals as an annoyance that we need to get rid of..."

React to this quote

More by Dan Flores

See all

“But the conventional narrative is lumpy, a story that glosses what passes for quiescence to focus on "events": the appearance of Lewis and Clark and DeSmut, the removal of the native Salish people, the arrival of the railroads, irrigation and logging and town-building, booms in sheep, busts in apples. Settlement, local politics, participation in the nation's wars, schemes to make money. And now the resources are tourism and real estate based on scenery and an amenity lifestyle in a mountain paradise. These seem to be what we think of as history.”

“The humanities have usually left evolutionary nature to the biologists. But some of the other questions here are... posed by the multidisciplinary field known as.”

“he truth is that coyotes have never been solely wilderness creatures. ...for the 15,000 years since we humans have been in North America, coyotes have always been capable of living among us. ...A coyote's primary prey happens to be... the mice and rats that flourish around and among us... By the time Europeans got to America, coyotes had long since sought out the major Indian cities of Mesoamerica.”

“Chaco unquestionably had coyotes in town; coyote bones are common in the archeological sites of the inner city.”

“Dan Flores, Historian and Author, Part 2 "Report from Santa Fe" produced by KENW.”

“The ancestral canids that would eventually produce coyotes sprang from North American stock, a line of animals that evolved in the American Southwest. That ancient coyote line spawned animals that migrated to Eurasia and eventually to Africa to become Old Worlds. In North America, archeological sites from the late Pleistocene have yielded coyote remains from as far east as Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and genetic evidence indicates that coyotes thronged eastward out of their core range in the American West in at least two swarms, roughly between three hundred and nine hundred years ago. The truth is, roaming coyotes have probably been swimming the Mississippi River to eastern America during most decades since there have been coyotes.”