A couple years ago, Claudia and Mike set out a game camera on a dead cow they’d found during a routine pasture check on the Frying Pan Ranch. It wasn’t clear what had happened to the cow—an occasional death is a natural part of the life of animals living out on the land. We’d been waiting for an opportunity to document what happens to a cow carcass on a ranch, how the energy and nutrients contained in her body are recycled back into the ecosystem, and Claudia and Mike captured some amazing imagery of coyotes and ravens and magpies scavenging the carcass.

We haven’t shared the images yet though, because we wanted to find someone who could write about coyote behavior to contextualize the photos. Of course, Dan Flores, the author of the New York Times bestseller Coyote America, was the obvious choice. By the time we got around to asking Dan some questions, he’d already released an ambitious, brand new book, Wild New World, so in the following Q&A, we cover many of the ideas contained in that recent work, which is a survey of the environmental history of humans and wildlife in North America, as well as his prior writings on coyotes.

All of Dan’s books are worth reading, and he addresses sometimes controversial topics, like coyotes, with the sober facts of history and science. No matter what point of view you’re approaching these issues from, you’ll almost certainly learn something new from Dan’s writing.

Dan Flores is an environmental writer who held the A. B. Hammond Chair in the History of the American West at the University of Montana. A native of Louisiana who currently lives outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, he has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and Time Magazine. Along with appearances on Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown on CNN and on The Joe Rogan Experience podcasts, he is featured in Ken Burns's 2023 film on the story of the American buffalo. Flores has written 11 books, the most recent of which are American Serengeti, winner of the Stubbendieck Distinguished Book Prize in 2017; Coyote America, a 2017 New York Times Bestseller, winner of the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, and a Finalist for PEN America’s E. O. Wilson Prize in Literary Science Writing; and Wild New World, one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Nonfiction Books of 2022, winner of the 2023 Rachel Carson Environmental Book Prize, and Finalist for the 2023 Ralph Waldo Emerson Book Prize.

Say I’m new to your work as an environmental historian and to your most recent book. Tell me, in a few sentences, what Wild New World is about.

Wild New World is a book of “Big History” – think Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel or Yuval Harrari’s Sapiens – but with a focus on North America’s animals and the human story. It begins with how America acquired its wild creatures and the impact humanity had on the animals of this “wild new world,” a story from this continent we never suspected and have known about only for a century now. Across 390 pages, the book’s narrative story continues through Native America, the colonial period, and national history to our modern struggles to save and recover species on today’s overheating planet. From our evolution as predatory hunters to our role in the ongoing Sixth Extinction, the book engages topics such as why we no longer have elephants, how native people sustained biological diversity across the 10,000 years before Europeans arrived, why Old Worlders were so committed to destroying the continent’s wolves, and how religion and free-market capitalism allowed the United States to engage in the most massive destruction of animal life in modern world history. Yet in a modern extinction crisis and climate change that are scrambling ecologies everywhere, America’s public lands and its fifty year-old Endangered Species Act has the United States in better shape than almost anywhere else in the world. I argue that despite all our tragic losses of creatures, many of which had been here for millions of years, in 21st century America we still enjoy a chance to experience one of Earth’s wild marvels.

I wouldn’t say it’s exactly a fun book to read. The story you tell of human-animal interactions in North America from 1500-1900 is really bleak–incomparable, you write, in known world history. The sheer number of animals killed is staggering and the callousness with which it is apparently done is frankly difficult to read about. Was all of this history known to you already, or did you uncover some new stories when you set out to write the book?

I wrote Wild New World after having published both Coyote America and American Serengeti, two other books of mine that focus on more specific animal stories. And I taught scores of graduate and undergraduate courses in a field called Environmental History at three different universities. So the outline and the trajectory of Wild New World weren’t brand-new to me. But yes, the research for it yielded plenty of stories I hadn’t known. As a couple of examples, the new genomic science allowed me to answer all manner of questions about American extinctions that had been hanging fire. I hadn’t known native people on the West Coast drove a flightless sea duck to extinction. Or that the so-called “plume trade” (bird feathers for women’s fashion) had precipitated the deaths of tens-of-thousands of hummingbirds! Now that I think of it this way, the book is actually filled with stories and episodes I didn’t know before I began working on it.

Was there any psychological toll that immersing yourself in this history took on you? I found myself very overwhelmed by trying to wrap my head around how much violence and destruction took place, especially when trying to fathom the scope of suffering endured by individual animals. How do you cope with or make sense of the very thorough understanding you consequently have about how much destruction was done?

Well, I think readers who are used to reading triumphant or celebratory accounts of the past may have to ease into a book like Wild New World. Those who have read about Native American history or the history of slavery or civil rights may not be as surprised by my narrative. It’s an axiom of history that critical accounts are usually more useful than celebratory ones. I wrote all three of my animal books because I was pretty certain that, aside from some vague sense that once there were millions of buffalo or passenger pigeons and then none (or almost so), most Americans know almost nothing about the story of humans and animals in America. And if you don’t know those stories, you may struggle to understand modern issues like wolf recovery, the essential nature of regulatory governments, or why our history led us to create the first endangered species legislation in the world. Or why, as Henry David Thoreau put it way back in 1856, we modern Americans unfortunately don’t get to experience “an entire heaven and an entire earth.”

As for a psychological toll on me as a writer, my prior books had prepared me for what I had to write about in Wild New World. They’d probably even given me a certain Cormac McCarthy view of human nature. I did sometimes need long hikes with my dog after composing certain passages.

But, at the same time, you identify the confluence of certain philosophies and worldviews during that period of history that made such destruction possible–a lack of scientific understanding about ecological balance, our Cartesian view of animals as mechanistic, non-sentient creatures, free market forces incentivizing endless “extraction” of wildlife as resources, lack of any protection or regulation from the government, even skepticism about extinction as a biological possibility. Viewed from that perspective, we can see how much progress has been made scientifically, culturally, and politically. It’s hard to imagine any possible scenario these days, for example, in which a logging company could get away with cutting down a stand of trees where the last known individuals of a particular species of bird are nesting, as you explain was done with the ivory-billed woodpecker. Do you feel optimistic about this shift in our contemporary worldviews, and what it might mean for wildlife and biodiversity?

I actually think of Wild New World as an optimistic book. Its narrative is not necessarily an upward, onward, and better story through time, though. I argue that the ancient sense that other animals were us and we were them – an idea of kinship finally confirmed by science and Charles Darwin only 160 years ago – was a more enlightened and beneficial philosophy for other creatures than the one Europeans brought to America, wherein humans were exceptional and separate from all other life and had license to exploit other creatures without remorse. But the advent of the sciences of evolution and ecology have allowed a flowering of understanding, a way to grasp reality, not present in the four centuries of American history prior to the early 1900s. Despite the hurdles various outmoded ideas throw up, Wild New World’s story of the last 100 years is very much that of an upward, more positive trajectory. Arriving at the point where we understand that we do not have the moral right to deprive other species of their right to exist is a step of significant enlightenment, I’d say. To me the Endangered Species Act of 1973 is right up there with the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation in showing who we are as a people.

You describe a long period of ecological balance in North America (“Raven and Coyote’s America”) during Native American habitation of the continent prior to European arrival. For those 10,000 years, only one species is known to have gone extinct. What lessons do you think we can draw from Native American culture and relationship to wildlife?

I’m afraid not all the lessons of that 10,000 years of Native America are available to us now. But some are.

There were several reasons why American ecologies remained largely intact across that unfathomably long period of time. For one, because America was settled so much later than Eurasia, the agricultural revolution arrived many thousands of years later here. Everywhere agriculture was invented it allowed human populations to ratchet up dramatically. In North America that revolution happened only a couple-thousand years ago. In 1500 much of America was yet settled by hunter-gatherers who had long managed their populations. So 500 years ago there were still fewer than five million people in what is now the U.S. and Canada, countries with a present population of 370 million. Along with their late acquisition of agriculture, these early North Americans never made an effort to domesticate ungulates the way Old Worlders had. Without a herding tradition they were free to allow predators like wolves and mountain lions to continue to shape American ecologies as they had for five million years. That at least is an understanding of American ecological health we’re finally learning now, if grudgingly. But their philosophy of kinship with the other creatures around them is, I think, the most important lesson we can take from them. It’s an old human idea Europeans almost completely abandoned for several thousand years but indigenous Americans had retained. Whether understanding that animals are us and we are them is still available to us is hard to say. It ought to be.

In the midst of all the stories of wildlife declines, extinctions, and near-extinctions, one biography that stands out is that of the coyote, a species to which you once devoted an entire book. Despite being the “most persecuted large mammal in American history,” coyotes as a species are doing better than they ever have before. They’re “the wolf we tried to erase who instead ended up in our backyard,” as you write. It’s such a great example of the limitations of humanity to assert complete dominion over nature. Can you explain what accounts for this tenacity and resilience of the coyote as a species? As well as why killing coyotes indiscriminately might actually have adverse effects on efforts to decrease their populations or protect livestock and pets?

One of the satisfying things I was able to do with Coyote America was to write the biography of a long reviled underdog who stood the usual environmental story on its head. The coyote is something of a terrestrial Moby Dick, a legendary and (for many) hated animal that drove us Ahab-mad at the futility of our efforts at destruction. By the end of that book the underdog has prevailed. Except in Hollywood, that’s not a story one gets to tell very often.  

At least twice in the past 10,000 years – first when the extinction crash at the end of the Pleistocene took out dramatic American species like mammoths, saber-tooth cats, dire wolves; and second at the end of the 1800s when bison, elk, pronghorns, bighorn sheep, passenger pigeons, and wolves were all disappearing – coyotes somehow survived a vast simplification in American nature. That first survival led native people to see the coyote as a kind of avatar and deity, which accounts for our oldest American literature: Indian coyote stories. The second survival led to confusion among American naturalists, who created fanciful explanations for why coyotes weren’t disappearing when everything else was.

It took trapping, shooting, and poisoning millions of them, but by the 1950s biologists were finally figuring out how coyotes could do something like this. Along with being generalists as opposed to big game specialists like wolves, along with having new territories opened to them when we were successful at nearly ridding America of wolves, coyotes were aided by a remarkable evolutionary adaptation that probably emerged to counter harassment by wolves. Fission/fusion is a rare adaptation only 19 species around the world have (we humans are one of them). It allows coyotes to survive well either as individuals/pairs (fission) or in packs (fusion). Eventually persecuted enough by humans to break up their packs, coyotes in fission mode colonized across the American landscape so that now every state in the U.S. except Hawaii has coyotes.

Killing coyotes by the millions has thus produced the opposite of what we intended. Nor does indiscriminate killing work locally. Like most species, coyote populations naturally rise to the carrying capacity of the local landscape. Endlessly killing adult coyotes not only puts packs under control of inexperienced animals that can get into trouble, it also allows beta females to breed. Coyotes often have larger litters (and get more pups to adulthood) when they’re under attack. The result, as biologists since the 1950s have demonstrated again and again, is that under “control” you can take out 70% of a local coyote population year after year and their population will rise to carrying capacity again every time.

The best thing to do with coyotes is to learn to co-exist and appreciate them as indigenous animals that have been in America several hundred times longer than we have. Resistance in the form of “control” is futile and counterproductive.

You reference studies done by the Murie brothers in the early 20th century looking at the ecological impact of coyotes in Yellowstone. At the time they were published, their findings contradicted widely held assumptions about the significance of coyote predation on game animal populations. Instead, these studies showed, coyotes subsisted primarily on gophers, rabbits, and insects, with negligible effects on elk or deer. Have there been any comparable studies done in the context of livestock or pets? What does the scientific evidence show about the threat of coyotes to domesticated animals?

New wildlife science appears all the time, so there may well be new work on coyotes and how they interact with domestic animals. In terms of livestock, the primary targets for coyotes have long been sheep, and Wildlife Services coyote control is largely on behalf of sheep raisers. The more common story about coyotes since they’ve moved into American cities is about their attacks on dogs and cats. The literature I read when writing Coyote America pointed strongly towards coyotes attacking pets because they saw them as intra-guild predators invading coyote territories rather than as food sources. Coyotes are highly individualistic, though, so it’s hard to make blanket pronouncements. And when they have pups to feed anything goes. But that same literature indicated that in cities like Chicago where biologists like Stan Gehrt have long studied urban coyotes, 95% of the coyote population consists of solid, upstanding coyote citizens that rarely or never get into trouble. That was one of the reasons I told the story in Coyote America of my Navajo friend whose chapter leadership asked him to take out a problem coyote, but who ended up not shooting the coyote he located because he wasn’t sure it was the problem animal. That strategy of just going after any handy animal (or group of Indians) as punishment for someone’s transgressions is time-honored but obviously mistaken.

The reason the Murie brothers’ work on coyotes in Yellowstone and Jackson Hole – and Adolph Murie’s book on wolves in Mt. McKinley National Park, which I write about in Wild New World – was so significant was because until then American predator policy had just followed Old World folk tradition and reflexively tried to wipe out predators without doing any scientific study at all on their ecological roles. This is what Aldo Leopold went after when he reviewed the wolf and coyote books the government Animal Damage Control leaders authored in the 1940s. America’s massive predator campaigns were based on unquestioned Old World traditions rather than the new ecological science, he argued.

At one point in Coyote America, you describe a scene you observed in Yellowstone National Park, watching coyotes emerge to feed on an elk carcass brought down by wolves, after the wolves have finished eating and moved on. It brought to mind a series of photographs we’ve captured at the Frying Pan Ranch via a game camera that we set up on a cow carcass, with a group of coyotes coming in to feed “in the midst of an entourage of ravens and magpies,” just like you saw in Yellowstone. The way that the wolf-coyote relationship has now stabilized, after a bloody period for the coyotes immediately following wolf reintroduction to the Park in 1995, seems like a vision for how we could imagine the human-coyote relationship stabilizing after so many years of destruction after the introduction of Europeans to America. To a relationship in which the animals can benefit from some of the “byproducts” of human existence–scavenging a cow from a rancher’s herd that fell ill and died for whatever reason, or preying on all the rodents that have colonized our urban areas—just like they can sometimes enjoy the spoils of a wolf’s hunt. Do you also see a potential equivalence there for how two predator species (wolves and coyotes/humans and coyotes) can co-exist, or is that too much of a stretch, in your opinion?

As with wolves and coyotes coming to terms with one another in Yellowstone again, I tend to think we Americans have little choice but to accommodate ourselves to having coyotes in our midst. Native people had done this forever and had made the coyote a semi-deity. That those of us from Old World backgrounds appeared to think that what America really needed was a good faunal weeding says an awful lot about our arrogance, and our ignorance about the continent we were settling. The abysmal failure of coyote eradication testifies to the hubris of it all.

If we want healthy ecologies going into the future, I suspect we’re going to have to look at our 400-year war on wolves as a miscalculation born of myopia, and probably a momentary detour in our history. Europeans’ first “environmental” law in America was a bounty on wolves, and until we drew up wolf recovery programs under the Endangered Species Act we warred on them incessantly, invoking herder grievances thousands of years old. Ideas that are thousands of years old have a lot of inertia. So a more comfortable human/wolf coexistence in America is going to take awhile. Having gotten to watch wolves hunt, cross the road in front of my car as I drove home at night, and listened to them howl as I sat by the fire with a beer in my yard in Montana, I hope plenty of other people get to enjoy those experiences. As those wolf-watchers in the Lamar Valley in Yellowstone will testify, experiences with wolves can be life-changing.

One of the central themes of your writings is the emphasis on the need to see humans as a part of nature, rather than separate from it and presiding over it. The coyote breaks this illusion of the human/nature divide by showing up in the heart of our cities, the most “radically urban” spaces on earth. In Wild New World, you break that illusion by tracing our ancient animal origins as a hominid species. At one point you pose a question: Are we too far gone into the Anthropocene to be able to learn anything from an animal? How would you answer that question now, having delved deep into the full history of humans and wildlife in North America?

Good question. In the Epilogue of Wild New World I quote the British ecologist Melanie Challenger: “The world is now dominated by an animal that doesn’t think it’s an animal.” My study of the Big History human story doesn’t make me think this was always the cross we had to bear, but it has certainly come to be. To distinguish ourselves from the other Earthly lifeforms around us, the Western tradition came up with the idea of a magical, immortal essence we called the soul, which we told ourselves we alone possessed since we alone were made in the image of a god. After Darwin, humanists decided the real difference between us and all other life was that we had culture while they didn’t. That was before we discovered that culture is almost a universal trait among all higher lifeforms share. As is, it now appears, sentience and self-consciousness. As Darwin said, whatever differences there are between us and them are in degree, not kind.

Our goal, it seems to me, is to get past being so impressed with ourselves and try to come to terms with who we are, which has the potential for more empathy for other life than we’ve tended to extend when we’ve thought of ourselves as the planet’s ultimate reason for being. I think at least some of us are on that path. The stories of a good many of those who are appear in my books.