S7. E19: C.J. Dirago: Song Dogs
“Let's say I own a gun shop, and I want to drum up business, right? I can host a coyote killing contest, which they'll call predator hunting, where cash prizes of let's say $1000 goes to whomever kills the most coyotes in a 24 hour period. You might have 500 people show up from my state and out of state, and through any means - necessary thermal scopes at night, any technology, electronic game calls to lure them in, hunting over bait... The competitive killing of coyotes happens for cash prizes all over the United States, today.”
– C.J. Dirago
The most persecuted carnivore in North America is the coyote, they’re poisoned, they’re trapped, they’re aerial gunned, and killed for bounties and contests constantly. Over half a million coyotes are slaughtered in the U.S. every year.
I'm a little embarrassed to say that I really haven't thought about coyotes all that much. They just haven't really come into my radar until recently when I met C.J. Dirago.
C.J. knows a ton about coyotes and is doing everything he can to protect coyotes and give them a better rap. He's the founder of Bombazine, an organization seeking to protect wildlife and habitat in reciprocity with nature. Their inaugural project is called Song Dogs. It's an NFT collection of trail camera photography, with all proceeds funding coyote conservation.
Please listen and share.
In gratitude,
Elizabeth Novogratz
Follow Song Dogs on Twitter
Follow C.J. on TikTok
Transcript:
CJ: [00:00:15] Let's say I own a gun shop and I want to drum up the business. Right. I can host a coyote killing contest. Which they'll call predator hunting. Where there are cash prizes of, let's say, 1000 to whomever kills the most coyotes in a 24 hour period might have 500 people show up from my state and out of state and through any means necessary thermal scopes at night, any technology, electronic game calls to lure them in, hunting over bait. The competitive killing of coyotes happens for cash prizes all over the United States today.
Elizabeth: [00:01:01] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz. This is Species Unite. We have a favor to ask. If you like today's episode and you have a spare minute, could you please rate and review Species Unite on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts? It really helps people to find the show. The most persecuted carnivore in North America is the coyote. They're poisoned. They're trapped. They're aerial gunned and killed for bounties and contests constantly. Over half a million coyotes are slaughtered in the U.S. every year. I'm a little embarrassed to say that I really haven't thought about coyotes. They just haven't really come into my radar until I met C.J. Dirago. C.J. is doing everything he can to protect coyotes and give them a better rap. He's the founder of Bombazine, an organization seeking to protect wildlife and habitat and reciprocity with nature. Their inaugural project is called Song Dogs. It's an NFT collection of trail camera photography with all proceeds funding coyote conservation. Hi, C.J., thank you so much for being here today.
CJ: [00:02:28] Thank you for having me. It's a real pleasure.
Elizabeth: [00:02:29] I want to talk about coyotes. I want to talk about everything you're doing, this whole project. But first, because as we were talking last week, and I said to you, you know, a lot of especially issues that are happening with animals come across my radar and it's one I'm in every day. So one of the first things that really stuck out for me when I first talked to you was like, I don't ever hear anything about coyotes. I definitely don't ever hear about anybody who's doing anything to help them and that could just be like a weird coincidences thing, or it could just be because there's not a lot of people doing a lot to help them. I didn't realize the peril they're in and what's happening to them. Why aren't they on my radar? You know, as somebody who's always reading about everything bad happening to animals.
CJ: [00:03:21] It's such a poignant point that you make, because I would expect that if anyone were to have coyotes on their radar and understand some of the issues surrounding coyotes, it would be you. So the fact that it's not gives me more motivation to want to do this work around education as it relates to coyotes and other large carnivores. To answer your question or to speculate on an answer to your question, I would say a couple of things. The focus has largely been on wolves as of late, which is a good thing. Wolves were formerly eradicated, right. They disappeared for seven years. We know that. Coyotes haven't been able to be eradicated. So if you're looking at crude numbers of a population of animals, as we know, it is not an indication of any part of the health of that species. So just because there's a lot of coyotes or a lot of some animal species doesn't mean that the population is healthy. So we should establish that. But there are a lot of coyotes and it's nearly impossible to eradicate them. It seems to me, again, I'm speculating that people start to pay attention when the Red Wolf, for example, gets down to numbers like 12. That's really alarming to risk losing a species like that. Or when wolves disappear, it becomes part of the conversation. My hunch is that because coyotes are so resilient and the most adaptable and one of the most evolved species on this continent, that they just haven't entered the conversation yet. But if I have anything to do with it, we're going to change that. There's certainly a big education push that has to happen for that to happen.
Elizabeth: [00:05:04] Yeah, I mean, first, I think and I know this is part of what you're doing, but I don't think like most humans really understand coyotes to begin with. They've gotten a really bad rap. Will you talk about who they are and why we don't actually know much about them?
CJ: [00:05:21] Sure. I'll just preface this by saying that I'm an informed citizen coming at this issue with a deep passion and concern for wildlife. So I've switched my career from a career of real estate development to that of conservation, focusing on carnivores and land conservation. So I'm relatively new at this. That being said, by the great fortune of surrounding myself with some of the country's leading scientists on coyotes like Dr. Robert Crabtree out in Yellowstone, and Jerry Stein, who runs the Coyote Center in Maine and several others in Canada, so to speak just a little bit about Coyote, you mentioned that we don't know a whole lot about them. Well, the species has been on this continent for over a million years. Some would argue up to 5 million years. That certainly predates the concept of statehood. I hear this a lot. Coyotes aren't native to my state. Your state wasn't a concept when Coyote roamed this continent.
Elizabeth: [00:06:17] And are they in every state?
CJ: [00:06:19] They are. Yes. All over the United States. There hasn't been research done on coyotes' role in the ecosystem since, or I shouldn't say it didn't start until about the 1930s. So for a species that's been here for about a million years, humans have been on this continent for, let's call it about 25,000 years. We're talking about a relatively new history that anyone's ever paid attention to. In my home state of Maine, there has not been research done on coyotes since the late nineties. Not a single study. That's part of what I'm up to with the Song Dog Project is to fund Maine's first Coyote Research Project in over 30 years. They haven't gotten the amount of attention that would warrant studies. Dr. Robert Crabtree and others have conducted studies, but there are few and far between, and part of that's a funding issue. So Coyote is an ancient carnivore that has outlasted the likes of other major species that unfortunately we've lost. They're certainly the most adaptable species, I would argue, that has roamed this continent. The reason that coyotes expanded so voraciously and outside of Yellowstone, they're more or less their birthplace is largely due to humans having nearly eradicated wolves. So wolves kept the coyote population in check, like they do in Yellowstone. Wolves will kill coyotes and outside of human persecution that's the coyotes most pressure that they'll receive. So any time humans get involved in this, as we know, this colonial term of managing wildlife, what happens right, imbalance.
Elizabeth: [00:07:55] Yeah.
CJ: [00:07:56] So coyotes expanded throughout the rest of the country. To your point about why we only hear about negative interactions like coyotes will prey on a stray cat or a small dog. That's what makes the news and it's really unfortunate. But what are all the benefits as a keystone carnivore that helps balance ecosystems? Those aren't the conversations that are happening. So that's what I'm trying to bring to light by doing some research and helping to educate.
Elizabeth: [00:08:25] In the pack mentality and that sort of thing. Are they like wolves, like how they live?
CJ: [00:08:29] Yes and no. They don't hunt in packs, so coyotes will largely hunt solo or as a mated pair. That's a key difference. I'll often hear people who are responding to some of my educational videos on Tik Tok or elsewhere and say, I saw a pack of coyotes take down a deer. No, you didn't.
Elizabeth: [00:08:47] I used to when I lived in L.A. for a while, for a long time, and I would run in Griffith Park with my dog, who was big. Every now and then we'd come across a single coyote, and my dog could not keep up with the coyote. So it didn't stress me out, but she would chase them. But we never saw more than one coyote at a time.
CJ: [00:09:04] And they're territorial. So there's never going to be more than a certain number of coyotes in a particular area. That is a function of the carrying capacity. You know, what are the prey species in that area and coyotes don't war with each other, so they're not battling over the territory. They respect each other's territory. They mark it, they patrol it and these are the communications you hear. So a lot of times people have had a positive interaction with coyotes to the extent that they've heard them howl. Coyotes have something like I believe it's 11 or 12 different vocalizations. So they're basically ventriloquists and when there are two coyotes communicating, sort of like, hey, I'm over here. Hey, I'm over there. This is my territory. This is my territory communication. We barely understand any of it. Nonetheless, it's a beautiful sound and some people are familiar with it. Some of the feedback you'll hear is, I heard 20 coyotes in my backyard. It was probably two. So some of the misconceptions about how many there are, they're territorial. I photographed coyotes for the last year intensely. I used 15 motion activated trail cameras in about a five square mile radius in upstate New York and far northern Maine, to the point where I was able to identify individual coyotes. One of the ways I was able to do that in northern Maine, for example, is there the color of some of these. There's a golden coyote, there was a red one, just remarkable fur patterns. So I was taking notes, putting together this collection of photographs and I would see the same 2 to 3 coyotes in a general area. That was it. There weren't any new ones.
Elizabeth: [00:11:28] They don't hang out like in big packs.
CJ: [00:11:32] No, no. They hang out as a family and they're largely monogamous, too. So when you have a stable population where coyotes aren't being persecuted, they practice this amazing form of birth control whereby the female alpha female will only become in heat, or is essentially it set another way sterile. But for four or five days a year, which was about last month, February ish, when coyote breeding season takes place. That breed that particular year and no other coyotes in that family, that sort of lesser coyotes will breed. What happens in far northern Maine, where coyotes are heavily persecuted by white tailed deer hunters? Largely. If you kill, said female coyote, the coyotes in that family who otherwise would not breed because they are younger, more juvenile, as an evolutionary response will start to breed rapidly.
Elizabeth: [00:12:29] Like all of them.
CJ: [00:12:31] Yes and what happens when you have teenage parents? They just don't have the experience to be able to raise their young in a certain way. So they tend to have negative interactions, be that preying on livestock, for example, to support larger and larger litter sizes. So when you kill a coyote, this is what's remarkable about them. It's not to say that you can't eradicate them, humans have certainly tried. Dr. Robert Crabtree claims that you would have to eradicate over 70% of all coyotes, period, in order to fully eradicate them. That being said, when you shoot coyotes or control coyotes, which USDA and others try to do with lethal control programs, they respond by breeding rapidly. Not to mention other coyotes will move into the territory. So, I'm fascinated by that. I think we have a lot to learn about how coyotes have learned to respond and learned how to adapt to persecution. I think we could apply some of the lessons to other animals that might be endangered.
Elizabeth: [00:13:28] Yeah, that's kind of nuts. It's also one more reason it's really stupid that we're killing all the coyotes.
CJ: [00:13:36] I think there's a big question about what are we doing to this ancient native carnivore? Coyotes are America's song dog. I mentioned the vocalizations. The name of my project is Song Dogs for that reason. They are native to this country, to this continent, I should say. What are we doing to them by killing 500,000 plus coyotes a year? One per minute. Those are questions that I don't think are being asked and certainly not being researched as much. It's part of our research question for the project that will focus in Maine. What's happening to their social systems in areas where they're heavily persecuted? It's a really big question.
Elizabeth: [00:14:14] Well, what's happening to them individually and evolutionarily?
CJ: [00:14:17] Absolutely and what's happening to us as a species. We're not the darlings of creation. I'd like to establish that much. I like the indigenous ways of knowing when it comes to relations with other than human, more than human lives. I like the way that Indigenous people, first nations people in this country refer to sibling relationships with wildlife. Coyote was revered as the trickster. A lot to learn from a benevolent healer. Amazing stories around this species. Here the modern American persecutes coyotes heavily. I want to start asking questions about what we have to learn from them because we haven't been around a long time. Coyote’s have been around for over a million years. My questions are, what do we have to learn?
Elizabeth: [00:15:07] I think we need to talk about hatred. We've talked about love. This is kind of like carnivores across the USA, right? There's deep hatred. Let's start with the killing contests, because I don't think a lot of people know about them and they're so appalling and coyotes are pretty much in every killing contest. Will you explain what killing contests are first and then we'll get into the coyote hatred itself.
CJ: [00:15:33] It's really unfortunate that I'm describing this concept and that it's legal in most states in the United States. So keep that in mind.
Elizabeth: [00:15:41] It's 43 states.
CJ: [00:15:43] More than 40, including my home state of Maine, for the record. It is legal to, let's say that I own let's say I own a gun shop and I want to drum up business. Right. I can host a coyote killing contest which they'll call predator hunting. That's the other name for it. Where cash prizes of, let's say, 1000 to whomever kills the most coyotes in a 24 hour period might have 500 people show up from my state and out of state and through any means necessary thermal scopes at night, any technology, electronic game calls to lure them in, hunting over bait. The competitive killing of coyotes happens for cash prizes all over the United States today. It was recently banned in Massachusetts and with some of the funds that we raise through the Song Dogs Project, you can believe that I'll be working with lobbyists to try to change some of the laws in the state from a grassroots effort once people are aware that you can competitively kill coyotes for cash prizes in Maine and what was it, 43 other states in the US?
Elizabeth: [00:16:53] Yeah, that's sick. It's completely sick. So this hatred though, because and I asked when I'm talking to people about wolves and because it's a similar hatred, right? Like why do so many people in this country have this deep seated more than like, oh, I just want to hunt that thing. But they really hate these animals. I know you probably don't know the full answer to this, but you've spent a lot of time looking at it, so I would love your opinion.
CJ: [00:17:22] Sure. Just to talk about something from the seventies, I read this. I think it was from Dan Flores, who wrote a phenomenal book called Coyote America, which I would recommend to anybody. There was a ranking of Americans' attitudes toward animals. Have you heard this before?
Elizabeth: [00:17:38] No.
CJ: [00:17:39] In about the seventies, coyotes ranked lower than cockroaches and rats.
Elizabeth: [00:17:44] I don't know anybody personally that hates coyotes, but I live in New York, so it's different. But that is unbelievable.
CJ: [00:17:50] Go to any rural area and you will find that the belief systems which are deeply ingrained and largely just passed on because your dad hated coyotes and he told you to hate coyotes. When you dig deeper, people don't really have too much ground to stand on. But there's a deep, deep hatred. Look, I think it starts 500 years ago with Europeans who later colonized this country. There was a fear of the Woods, Little Red Riding Hood. Right? Fear of the unknown. Empathetically I can understand that there were things out there and still are that can kill you. Grizzly bears, mountain lions, cougars, coyotes. Coyotes don't kill humans. But there are large carnivores that when people were expanding across this country would kill. You know, these quote unquote, new Americans. So there is a legitimate fear. But I think it's because the apex predators that's removed themselves from the food chain a lot, humans are afraid of other predators. There seems to be a cultural misalignment. Think about our fear of sharks. Right. I believe more hippos kill people annually than sharks do. But what do we read about sharks? Because they kill for their survival. I've noticed that you'll hear in the white tailed deer hunting community, for example, and we could talk about this later. But a guy showed up at my parents house in northern Maine where I was filming Coyotes to share his hatred toward them.
Elizabeth: [00:19:22] With you?
CJ: [00:19:23] Yes. 6:00 at night, in the pitch black, a guy shows up in his truck to share that he had heard from a local butcher that I was baiting coyotes, using venison and to get them to come into the cameras and that I wasn't killing them. He was so pissed off about this that he drove to my parents house where I was set up to speak to us about this and to air his grievances. He said, and I happen to have all of this on a ring camera because it's a ring camera and I made a TikTok video about it.
Elizabeth: [00:19:52] That is awesome.
CJ: [00:19:54] It's amazing. He says coyotes are vicious killers of white tailed deer. That's a projection. Coyotes kill other animals for their survival. But humans seem to have this big issue with forgetting the fact that how many animals, domestic livestock are slaughtered annually for humans to eat when another animal does that we seem to have an issue with it, and I can't quite figure that out, but I've just noticed that that's largely why some of the hatred comes from like we should be the only ones that gets to kill all of these animals. Another animal doing it and and dare I say, like part of, if you truly believe the sort of the Western, call it, you know, Christian perspective, that all the animals are on the planet for our benefit and some other species also consumes that animal for food. Well, they're competing with you, right? If a coyote kills a deer. Well, that was my dear. The real question is, who do the animals belong to? They belong to themselves, not to us. You've got coyotes ranking lower than cockroaches and rats in the seventies. You have 500 years of a fear of the woods, fear of predators, and this concept of manifest destiny and anything that stands in our way ought to be eliminated. So we get to the American West and the ranching and farming community, where when you own 30,000 acres and have however many thousands of heads of cattle and a coyote or a wolf eats the calf that that your heifer just gave birth to, you're going to want to kill it. That's the mentality. Right. So you see a lot of the hatred toward coyotes coming from the ranching community. I'll leave it at that. A lot of the hatred from toward coyotes comes out of the ranching community, probably most of it.
Elizabeth: [00:21:45] The majority of it. They're the same people that hate the wolves.
CJ: [00:21:48] Exactly and I ask some of these folks that I interact with, where do you stop? Are you going to eliminate every species? They genuinely would if given the option.
Elizabeth: [00:21:57] Well, and they kind of are, because once we lose certain species, we're going to lose more and we're going to lose more. This is kind of how you do it. So in 50 states, we have coyotes. Can you kill them in 50 states? Is it kind of like a free for all against them?
CJ: [00:22:11] Generally, the answer to that question is yes. Not only is it a free for all, I would just follow up to say that in most states in the US you can kill coyotes year round there is not a bag limit, meaning there's no limit on the amount that you can kill. Name one other species where that's the case, by the way. You can hunt them day or night. You can use thermal imaging, night scopes, and night vision. You can use electronic calls to lure them in. You can hunt them over bait, you can poison them, you can trap them. USDA and other organizations aerial gun them. This is why it's not just me that's made this argument. The coyotes are the most maligned and misunderstood species on the continent. They get a bad rap, but they also are so heavily persecuted unlike any other animal. So these are largely white tailed deer hunters that think that every fawn born is a potential big buck, that they might be able to hunt someday and it belongs to them. Or it's a farmer or a rancher who has livestock and coyotes will occasionally prey on livestock. So you have these two groups that are heavily persecuting coyotes and killing them in any manner whatsoever. I just want to speak to a concept in the legislature and it relates to hunting called wanton waste. So in the state of Maine, there is a rule that says if you kill game, you have to use it. So if I'm a white tailed deer hunter, I bow hunt whitetail deer. If I shoot a deer, I can't just leave it there. It's illegal. Right. I need to utilize it in some manner, whether that's harvesting the meat or tanning the hide or both. You get the idea. With coyotes, they are excluded. I'm speaking about the state of Maine, for example. They are excluded from wants and waste laws. So you could shoot 200 coyotes over the course of two weeks if you were able to pile them up and let them sit there and rot.
Elizabeth: [00:24:15] That's horrible.
CJ: [00:24:16] Through any means necessary.
Elizabeth: [00:24:18] It’s just baffling. It just doesn't make sense.
CJ: [00:24:20] It doesn't make any sense.
Elizabeth: [00:24:21] Just so people know who, people who don't know understand this when a wolf. It's the same with coyotes. When a coyote kills a cow, the farmer is reimbursed.
CJ: [00:24:32] Yeah. Depending on the state. Absolutely. They'll certainly make the claim that they've lost a ton of money. But look, I'm not a rancher, and I don't pretend to be, but I've certainly talked to enough ranchers and I grew up on a subsistence farm. Just a quick story on that. I grew up poor. We lived in North Carolina in the Blue Ridge Mountains and my parents grew all the food that we ate, all the vegetables, and we had cattle and we had chickens and turkeys and other animals around. We co-existed, which is to just talk about what the alternative to this heavy persecution is coexistence. Now, this wasn't a factory farm where we had 30,000 acres and weren't able to keep an eye on things. We had dogs and we had human presence to great coexistence strategies. But coexistence is possible and I'd like to make the case that what's the alternative to this persecution? It's the ability to coexist.
Elizabeth: [00:25:28] Absolutely. So you grew up in North Carolina, but then you ended up in Maine. When did you end up in Maine?
CJ: [00:25:32] I was a little kid, so I would say the first six years of life as I knew it or my earliest memories were in North Carolina living on this farm and my family moved to Maine, which was a real gift because I got to grow up outside in nature and experiencing wildlife. So my happy place is on the ocean or outside, deep in the woods.
Elizabeth: [00:25:54] Once you move to Maine, were coyotes in your life, how did this kind of all get brewing in you that this is now what you're doing?
CJ: [00:26:01] Got it. So how did I go from 12 years as a real estate developer into focusing on conservation chiefly around large carnivores like coyotes? I'll tell you the exact moment during the pandemic, I was watching David Attenborough's newest film, A Life on Our Planet. Have you seen it?
Elizabeth: [00:26:17] Yeah, it's awesome.
CJ: [00:26:18] And I had an epiphany that I could do something about this. This was a large area, right? Where? In what manner? What is the cause? I just felt this call to do something.
Elizabeth: [00:26:33] And unfortunately, the choice is pretty much any species on the planet because we're destroying them all.
CJ: [00:26:39] Exactly and so it wasn't so much that I chose to focus on Coyote as I think the choice came to me. I'm an amateur wildlife photographer. My favorite thing to use for wildlife photography are motion activated trail cameras. But I post images and videos on the internet. I posted a picture of a coyote in this organization called the Coyote Center in my home state of Maine, run by a carnivore conservation biologist named Jerry Westin who wrote back and commented, and I wondered, who is this coyote center? So I started to dig deeper and what she's really about is citizen science and education and advocacy for coyotes in Maine. I immediately reached out. I asked her if we could have a phone conversation. We did and that's what started my education around Coyote. It's from her that I learned that no research had been done on coyotes in the state of Maine since the late nineties. That's where my attention went immediately, if we don't respect the species enough to study it, where are we?
Elizabeth: [00:27:46] And how are we going to fight for it?
CJ: [00:27:47] And so why don't we study it? Well, it costs a lot of money to run one of these studies, about $200,000 a year is the budget that we put together. I've proposed to come up with a way to finance this, which I think will be a first of its kind in the country. Those trail camera images that I mentioned, I turned them into NFT’s, Non-fungible tokens, which will be sold on the blockchain with 100% of the money from primary sales going to fund research on coyotes in Maine. If we're lucky enough to raise substantial funds, we'll be able to conduct a successful five year study. It's the only animal I would argue that humans have been unable to eradicate. The question is what are we doing to them?
Elizabeth: [00:28:30] But also we've destroyed probably how they work socially, right?
CJ: [00:28:34] 100% and to what effect. These are questions that we want to ask in our research in Maine: as a keystone carnivore, what is this level of persecution doing to them and their ability to balance ecosystems, which is the promise of having a large carnivore on the landscape? When you have a coyote present on the landscape, it's a sign of a healthy ecosystem.
Elizabeth: [00:28:56] Right. In that sense, people aren't really worried about the ecosystem.
CJ: [00:28:59] Right and I should preface this by saying that no study has been done that I'm aware of on this topic specifically yet. So I'm going to speculate a bit. But I think folks will understand that coyotes primarily eat mice and small rodents. Mice and small rodents are vectors for Lyme disease. It's not too far off to be able to make the case that the presence of coyotes can help reduce the spread of Lyme disease. To the extent that that gets proved out in a scientific piece and in a peer reviewed, published article. I genuinely think people would care a whole lot more about coyotes. We would welcome them. I wish that it wouldn't take something like that to get people to care, but at this point, whatever gets people to care is what needs to be marketed. So I'm really interested. I don't know if we'll be able to study that particular issue. I'm hopeful that others are, that it's in the works, but I think the case could easily be made that the presence of coyotes leads to a heavy reduction in mice and small rodents, therefore, hopefully a reduction in the spread of Lyme disease.
Elizabeth: [00:30:09] Is there a lot of research happening anywhere outside of Yellowstone?
CJ: [00:30:13] Not a lot and part of that is a function of where the dollars and cents are and how hard it is to get. In Maine, for example, you could raise money to do a study about birds. That's more common or links for example, white tailed deer and moose, plenty of money. It's that coyotes just get a bad rap and there aren't research dollars available to be able to do it. That's why we're looking at this really creative avenue of NFT’s to raise money for carnivore research.
Elizabeth: [00:30:47] Well, I'm embarrassed that I, honest to God, have not thought about coyotes at all.
CJ: [00:30:53] Well, I hope that this is the start of an ongoing dialogue.
Elizabeth: [00:30:55] Clearly we need people to care and we like we need to change their reputation. That has to change. I mean, money needs to start going this way. How does this happen? I know you're doing it, but I mean, it needs to happen across the country.
CJ: [00:31:10] It does. It does. Well, I think the approach is to scale the unscalable. We start with one study in the state of Maine and I am willing to share that beyond this NFD project for Song Dogs, I'm in talks with Dr. Robert Crabtree out in Yellowstone about doing an NFT project to study large carnivores in general. So our sort of series two part of this project is already in the works. We'll be looking at taking that research nationally with some of the biggest names in conservation, biology and carnivore biology. So if this project is successful, we're certainly going to take it nationwide. I should also mention internationally, because some of the advisors on the Song Dogs project are scientists out of Canada.
Elizabeth: [00:32:01] Seriously, C.J., thank you for this. I literally it's like kind of it's a huge wakeup, like just in the sense that it just wasn't on my radar at all. I had no idea one Coyote was killed every minute.
CJ: [00:32:12] Well, I'm happy that it's on your radar because you're a powerful person with a big platform and a big heart. So to that point, I'm really excited that you're thinking about it.
Elizabeth: [00:32:29] To learn more about C.J. and to learn more about coyotes go to our website SpeciesUnite.com. We will have links to everything. We're on Facebook and Instagram, @SpeciesUnite. If you have a spare minute and could do us a favor, please subscribe, rate, review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. If you'd like to support Species Unite, we would greatly appreciate it. Go to our website, SpeciesUnite.com and click Donate. I'd like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Caitlin Pierce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santina Polky, Bethany Jones and Anna O'Connor, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening. Have a wonderful day.
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