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0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

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0:00:10
Celestia Ward: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange. This is Celestia Ward with co-hosts Ben and Pascual. Say hello guys.

BR: Hello guys.

Pascual Romero: Hey, hey.

So I’m here with Ben Radford and Pascual Romero. And this episode, which is 103, if my count is correct, we’re gonna be talking about mysterious animal deaths. Not your standard environmental scientist point of view, but rather the, ooh, something strange and biblical or alien or conspiracy theory is going on that must explain this pile of frogs.

BR: So an animal has expired in a weird way and we wanna figure out why.

CW: Yeah, in fact, just this past week, October 8th is the date of this article from none other than NPR. I mean, not really known to be World Weekly News or anything. NPR is pretty straight-laced. The title is, Not One Drop of Blood, Cattle Mysteriously Mutilated in Oregon. You took a look at this Ben, you didn’t really pass your smell test?

BR: I did. This actually hit the news right around the time I was in England at the time I was traveling and so I wasn’t really paying much attention to the online world and nonetheless, I got a handful of messages from people saying, look at this.

CW: I know you’re on vacation, but here’s a dead cow.

BR: Please examine this and let me know what you think.

CW: Yeah, but we’ll be discussing dead cows. Well, not really dead cattle because that’s a whole other topic. Cattle mutilations kind of flows into the satanic panic a little bit. That’s a whole different thing. But in the meantime, is there anything you guys are skeptical of?

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0:02:31
PR: Yeah, I am… this one I am going to put on my my kid gloves for this one because this this is a touchy one but I am skeptical about a story about a Utah woman that was charged for being topless in her own home.

0:02:53
CW: Topless in her own home? That’s outrageous!

0:02:57
BR: The horror!

0:02:59
PR: Yeah, so it made the rounds briefly. I think it’s still kind of floating out there, but in the last few weeks I saw that a woman in Utah was being charged for not having a shirt on in her own home. Now of course that’s pretty much the extent of most of the headlines that I’ve seen about it. So of course it kind of made the rounds in the world of equality especially because of the recent ruling in Oklahoma and well actually was for the district that covers Oklahoma as well as Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, I believe Arizona as well, that women can go without shirts, that nipples can be exposed legally.

BR: And just to be just to be clear, I mean, that’s that’s not that’s not unheard of. I’ve often I’ve seen stories from people online saying this is ridiculous. Women can’t go topless like they can a lot of places, New York City among them.

0:03:57
PR: Yeah. Yeah.

0:03:58
CW: Once again, the headline here doesn’t tell the whole story.

0:04:04
PR: Yeah, that’s that’s the problem. And, you know, I want to start by saying that I am sympathetic to the fight for equality in that sense. I think it is kind of ridiculous and very prudish to be so concerned with something like this in terms of making laws that do not allow, you know, one gender’s nipples versus another, especially in a time where we have a greater understanding of gender and what a continuum it is on. So, you know, I just want to preface this by saying that I’m all for that. However…

0:04:37
CW: Yeah, and anybody who’s got a Facebook feed, especially me, with full of artists who do, who regularly do nudes on Facebook, you’ve seen that little meme where it says, this is a photo of a male nipple. Just, just cut it out and paste it over any bare-breasted women you have and you can put the photos up on Facebook.

0:04:54
PR: So that you know but this story sort of has a basis the way the headline delivers it as you know as being you know about about lewdness now there is a charge involved with being I believe it’s a being lewd in front of a minor.

CW: Yeah. Yeah.

PR: But the problem is the story so at face value It sounds like something that probably someone shouldn’t be charged with which is that the framing seems to make it sound like the woman was in her house around her family They were installing insulation in the garage and it said that they had she and her husband, this girl Tilly Buchanan, they’d taken their clothes off to get the materials from the insulation off of their skin. Now, anyone who’s dealt with fiberglass or insulation, that stuff is pretty nasty and there’s no reason to think that that wasn’t completely within the course of dealing with insulation, just taking the clothes off while you’re still in the garage and leaving them in there.

0:05:58
CW: Yeah, I might take my shirt off in front of 100 people if I had fiberglass in it.

PR: Yeah.

CW: It’s horrible. Yeah. And I read through this pretty carefully as well, Pascual. And again, the headline and I’m sure there’s a lot of people sharing this, as people do in the spirit of outrage, a lot of people sharing this after just reading the headline and the headline would imply and here’s the headline I’m reading here. Utah woman charged for being topless in her own home. If you just leave it at that, it sounds like police barged in, hey, we heard you don’t have your top on, we’re arresting you. Or maybe she was sunbathing or whatnot. But it doesn’t even the headline doesn’t even mention that there were kids involved. And of course, the charges revolve around the kids. And there’s multiple stories, there’s multiple versions of the story, and it’s old. So it’s it’s kind of, there’s a lot of nuance here.

0:06:49
PR: Yeah, and that’s the tricky part, because of course, the SJW in me sees it and says, hey, you know, that’s ridiculous. You know, this is a fight about equality and private and personal rights. And I don’t know why you would ever charge someone for being topless in their own home. But of course, there were children involved, you know, in the story.

BR: Were they her own children? I still don’t have a good grasp of what the story is.

PR: So that’s the thing. This is kind of all part of what’s contributing to the confusion and the problem with this story is that she was actually the stepmother of the children involved. So that was the first thing that we kind of have to take into account.

0:07:29
CW: Three kids, two of them were boys, like a 13-year-old boy and a 9-year-old boy, and I could certainly see somebody being upset if you showed your boobs to my 13-year-old son, depending on the circumstances, I’d be like, that’s not right for you to do. In a girl’s gone wild situation. Nursing mother, totally different aspect. And again, there’s two versions of this story. One of the versions, the version that the young lady is saying is we were installing fiberglass. We got fiberglass all over our tops and our, you know, so we stripped down toward just our bottom underpants in order to throw the clothes in the wash. And we were surprised by the three kids who rushed in. And in that situation, heavens no, she didn’t do anything wrong. If anything, she tried to diffuse the situation and and make it blase by just saying, Hey, you kids shouldn’t be worried about this. I’ve got the same parts. There’s no reason why you should be freaked out. I have nipples. Your dad has nipples. It’s fine. And that could really, that’s a good parenting move in terms of, or step parenting move, I should say, in terms of making the kid not freak out and not have weird, like, oh, I saw something naughty, you know, thoughts about stepmom, which they might have anyway. Who knows? I don’t know what goes on in the head of a 13 year old boy, but just kind of de-escalate the situation. And the other version, which I guess came from the children’s biological mother, is that she was drinking, which you don’t want to be drinking and installing fiberglass insulation.

PR: No, not advised.

CW: Yeah, she was drinking and not only was she topless, but she was urging her husband, the kid’s father, to pull out his penis. And I don’t know anything about which version is true, but if one party is stating that happened that way, then yeah, there’d be some backing for lewdness charges there.

0:09:28
BR: Where did the police get involved?

0:09:31
CW: That’s the crazy thing. This all happened like two or three years ago. Nothing happened at the time. In fact, the woman involved, Tilly, says she just forgot about it for years. It was just a thing that happened and was done. But apparently Child Protective Services or something was involved. Here I’m looking at the article now from the Salt Lake Tribune. It says the police became involved in the situation after the Division of Child and Family Services began an investigation involving the children that was unrelated to Buchanan. So it was not the focus of the initial investigation, but the children’s mother over the course of this investigation happening, the mother reported it to authorities because she was alarmed about what had happened. I’m sorry, if you’re alarmed about something that happened with your kids and you think it’s actually warrants a lewdness charge, you don’t wait two or three years to report it to anybody. I’m my skeptical radar is going off there.

0:10:28
PR: Yeah, and I think, and that’s why it’s tricky, and that’s why I kind of wanted to bring it up because, you know, I have not fallen on one side or the other because we really just don’t have enough information to know who’s correct about this story and everything. But because of how questionable the entire situation is, it’s not a good example to be using when you’re trying to push for things like equality when it comes to going topless. And to me, it’s just that we don’t know how this is really going to pan out. And now we’re pushing this as a fight for personal rights and for the equality of whether a man or woman needs to cover up. And I think that it’s a shaky case right now, and nobody seems to have any clear answers.

0:11:16
CW: And yeah, well, she says herself that she was never intending to be some sort of fighter for equal rights, independence, free the dipole kind of person. But and quite frankly, I think anybody fighting for that, you know, get a case that doesn’t involve three kids, you know, at least keep their names out of the headlines for crying out loud.

0:11:35
PR: That’s the toughest part for me because I understand the prudish history of women covering their breasts and I think that that in and of itself is just very much rooted in something that I personally don’t agree with at all and it’s mostly religious. But the problem is that we live in a society where that still is a thing. a 13-year-old boy or just anyone around the age of puberty may be uncomfortable with it anyway. And again, I’m not saying it’s right or wrong. I’m just saying, you know, from the perspective of a 13-year-old boy being confronted with that situation may be very uncomfortable. And frankly, I think in the Me Too era, we need to keep that in mind that the children could have been made very uncomfortable with the situation regardless of the intention of the stepmother.

CW: Exactly.

PR: And to sort of force them into a conversation about it being okay or not okay, you know, I don’t know personally if I would be comfortable putting that on a step-parent. And as a person who has step-parents, I think that if I were faced with that situation, I would have been extremely uncomfortable with it, even as a person who, you know, as an adult does not consider himself to be prudish. But again, I grew up in this society, you know, this American kind of, you know, pious society that we have. And it did give me some hang-ups growing up, you know, I had to become an adult and sort of be exposed to the world to finally, you know, let all that stuff go. So I don’t know if at 13 that would have been a good situation for me to be in.

BR: We also don’t know what the children thought about it. I mean, from from what you guys are saying, you know, it was the it was the mother that complained about it. So for all we know, the children weren’t fazed by it at all and didn’t pay it any mind. There could have been some sort of custodial issue or whatever else.

0:13:29
CW: But well, there’s something going on if the you know, the child services is investigating. And yeah, I’m just completely guessing here. If the mother didn’t report it right away when she heard about it, then either she didn’t care at the time or didn’t think it warranted any sort of certainly criminal charges, or it’s possible the kids didn’t tell her for a long time. Maybe it just came up casually a year and a half later, like, you know, the two kids are playing video games and you know… So but even then it it wasn’t the initial investigation it came up as a sidebar Which which might have been an effort to deflect if the event if the investigation is about the mother I could see her throwing out anything and everything to try and deflect, but I’m just completely speculating here I don’t know these people and I hope the kids don’t have their names dragged through the news, which I suppose that’s one positive aspect to the fact that the headline itself doesn’t mention children at all, doesn’t mention any of the circumstances besides women topless in her own home facing criminal charges. And it kind of even sort of in my clickbait detection sort of part of my brain goes, oh, it sounds like they’re trying to piggyback off of the zeitgeist right now of of these horrific police situations where just recently a black woman and prior to that in Dallas, a black man were shot in their own homes for for just being in their own home. I’m not saying that this white woman is trying to piggyback off of that, but I’m saying the headline writers trying to go viral, trying to grab onto that, look at this, how this police overreach, I’m thinking they might be cognizant of that in their wanting the story to go viral.

0:15:26
PR: Yeah.

0:15:27
BR: Yeah, and keep in mind, of course, it raises the issue of, if kids are uncomfortable around topless women, well, as I mentioned, in many places, it is legal to go topless, including New York City. So the question is, if women are topless in Central Park, should teenagers or youth be protected from that?

CW: I mean, if you know, it’s out of the public sphere.

PR: Yeah, right. I mean, if that’s legal and if there are people like Pascual mentioned, who who might be concerned their children might see a topless woman, does that then pose some sort of threat to the children?

0:16:02
BR: Yeah, I don’t think so, but that’s the logical extension.

PR: Sure, and I think it’s good to bring that up because I think right now we’re in a period where we haven’t transitioned into this very well and we have so many people with old, outdated ideas about this stuff trying to police it. And frankly, the sooner we get over it, the better. But at the same time, it’s like, I don’t, you know, who am I to tell people how to raise their kids? So it’s, you know, it’s a tricky, it’s a minefield right now, for sure.

0:16:34
CW: Well, perhaps, perhaps the authorities in Utah can take a couple of pages from whatever the laws are in New York City or other places, because apparently, one of their one of their statements in this article was that, well, we can’t change the lewdness laws to be equal. We can’t make it legal for women to bare their breasts just anywhere. Because if we do, then that means that a young girl’s budding breasts won’t be considered sexual, and under the law, a pedophile can grab a young girl’s boobs or take her shirt off and he won’t be committing a crime. And that’s really weak sauce.

0:17:19
PR: Yeah.

0:17:20
CW: You can absolutely write the law to reflect that a woman is not being lewd by taking off her shirt in most circumstances.

PR: Absolutely.

CW: And that doesn’t mean pedos get to go around fondling 12-year-old girls.

0:17:32
PR: Yeah, I was going to say, I think that the current law as it stands still keeps people from grabbing each other and taking each other’s shirts off without permission.

0:17:44
CW: Yeah.

0:17:45
BR: And keep in mind for those who don’t know, the International Go Topless Day, which is celebrated every year, I think for the last 10 years or so, was actually started by the Raelian cult.

0:17:58
PR: Oh wow.

0:17:59
CW: Really?

BR: Yeah, the UFO cult that claimed that they had cloned people. Remember that?

PR: Oh, yeah.

BR: And that turned out to be a hoax. Yeah, so the The founder of the railings founded the the free the nipple go topless day.

0:18:12
PR: Wow.

0:18:13
BR: So if you go to some of the go topless events hoping to see some some hot babes with nice boobs You’re likely to be handed a brochure saying wouldn’t you like to join the Raelian movement?

0:18:26
CW: Leave it to Ben. We start a conversation about bear boobs and Ben manages to turn it to Raelians and hoaxes and cults.

0:18:33
BR: You’re welcome.

0:18:34
CW: Good job, Ben. Well, without further ado, let’s talk about some mysterious animal deaths.

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0:18:36
BR: Yes, today’s episode is full of exciting, PETA-annoying topics, such as the great New Mexico elk murder conspiracy, which I played a role in.

0:18:55
CW: Oh, that makes it sound like you’re culpable in some way. Did you do anything dastardly to these elk?

BR: You’ll have to wait about 35 minutes to hear the whole story.

CW: Okay, I’m sure listeners are on the edge of their seats. So, well, brace yourselves, listeners, we’re going to be talking about something that’s not really cheerful, but it is a part of nature and a part of life and sometimes a part of something grander and creepier and more scary and beyond belief, if you choose to interpret it that way.

BR: Yes, mass animal deaths.

CW: Yes, and mass animal deaths, that can really be defined in a whole lot of different ways, and it unnerves us for a whole lot of different reasons. I’m sure you’ve heard the, well, it’s a famous Police song, and also a saying, canary in a coal mine, right?

BR: Absolutely, yeah.

CW: That’s what tells the miners that things are desperate and dangerous, and you’ve got to get out of there, because if the canary dies, you’re next.

0:20:02
BR: And, you know, think of it more broadly. I mean, you there’s a lot of folklore that’s tied in specifically to animal behavior. You have, you know, the the idea that that animals can predict the future and our importance, black cats signifying bad luck. There’s lots of social and cultural baggage that goes along with animal behavior, including deaths.

0:20:25
CW: Yes. And animals, unfortunately, that you know, there’s not a whole lot of folklore or stories or biblical passages that talk about an animal warning us of some danger by going, hey, talking animal over here, I’m going to tell you the danger so you can run away. No, the animal tends to die. That’s the that’s a big sign of danger. The cow’s milk dries up or the flock is dead or the fish wash up to the shore.

BR: Something suitably mysterious.

CW: Yeah, so you know, animals, that tends to be the way that they warn us of things and stories as they turn up dead.

0:20:59
BR: Now, theoretically, pet psychics could help with that if they were real.

CW: That’s a whole other episode.

BR: If they were real, then they could help us out with that because then you have an animal that, you know, something bad is going on and so all you do is dial up your local pet psychic and say, so Buffy here is a little acting a little weird. What’s wrong? And oh, let me, you know, first of all, send me 35 bucks. OK, yes, I’m connecting. Buffy’s a little cranky. Apparently someone’s going to die soon. And then. OK, good.

CW: All right. Problem solved. We just need more pet psychics. Oh, yes. Don’t ever don’t ever quote me as saying that. Let’s go over a couple of things that mass animal deaths are commonly attributed to. We’re not talking about scientists here. We’re talking about lovers of the strange.

BR: The Fortean types.

CW: The Fortean types. Conspiracy thinkers. Not necessarily rational, scientifically minded folk. But one of the things that pops up is animal suicide.

BR: Yes.

CW: Have your cats ever expressed a desire to just end it all, Ben?

BR: They can be dramatic. I wouldn’t say that I’ve seen any signs of despondency at that level, but you know, if there’s not as much food in the bowl as they’re expecting there to be, they can act like the world’s going to end any minute, yeah.

0:22:19
CW: Well, and we as human beings really do assign a lot of cognition and self-awareness to animals. And, you know, there’s a little bit of uncertainty there even in the field of people who study this sort of thing. But as far as having the type of cognition to form the necessary ennui to want to end one’s life, typically animals aren’t really judged to necessarily have that going on. Nevertheless, we have a lot of instances that are quite, I’m sure you’ve heard of, you know, the lemmings rushing off of a cliff.

0:22:47
BR: Yes.

0:22:48
CW: That’s a whole other topic I heard that was not actually them committing suicide at all. They were spooked and sent off of it for a neat little bit of footage. But we got beached whales. People constantly theorize that the whales are killing themselves for some reason, for some cognitive traumatic reason where they just must end their life.

0:23:14
BR: I remember getting into discussion with a new age woman a couple years back who explained to me that the reason that whales beach themselves is in protest for our polluting the earth.

0:23:25
CW: Wow, they must be getting it like they must be reading it on the whale internet and they keep up with all this.

0:23:30
BR: Yeah, I didn’t, it didn’t, she seemed very sincere and nice and I didn’t want to, I was like, that’s an interesting idea and then I moved on.

0:23:41
CW: Well, and whales are often, you know, whales are nice, huggy, wonderful, nice animals. People tend to identify with whales as like, oh, they’re earth creatures. There’s never like, oh, this whale was being a total dickhead and he totally did this awful thing.

0:23:57
BR: Unless, of course, you co-opt them into a sinister online game.

0:24:02
CW: Oh, that’s right, the blue whale. That would be an instance of a bad whale. But I mean, they’re not like hyenas or jackals or cockroaches where people are just like, oh, we’re better off without them. They’re terrible animals.

0:24:16
BR: They’re noble, wise, sentient beings of the sea, yes.

0:24:20
CW: So yes, a whale committing suicide in protest of the social and environmental wrongs that we humans are committing is that kind of goes along with that narrative pretty well. Then there’s the of course we’ve talked about this you mentioned the dog suicide bridge inScotland right?

0:24:36
BR: Yeah yeah in fact I heard about that many years ago and while I was in I was at a folklore conference in Brussels a year or two back and there was somebody who’d given a talk on that. In fact, one of the early investigators of that folklorist by the name of Sandy Hobbs was there and it was really cool talking to him about the alleged dog suicide bridge.

0:24:58
CW: Overtown, Overtoun Bridge, how do you pronounce that?

BR: I think it’s Overtoun. I’ve not been there. But anyway, that’s a topic for another story. If you’re interested, you can look up Sandy Hobbs, H-O-B-B-S. And I think, if I’m not mistaken, Brian Dunning did a decent write-up for Skeptoid.

0:25:20
CW: Ah, yes, and the other, one of the stories I came across about animal suicide, I’m sorry it made me laugh. You know the old standby of counting sheep jumping over something when you’re sleepy?

0:25:33
BR: Mm-hmm.

0:25:34
CW: Well, in Turkey in 2005, a bunch of sheep went off a cliff, one after the other, just like 1100 sheep went off this cliff. They couldn’t really quite see where they were going and they are, well, they’re sheep.

0:25:49
BR: Do they bounce? How does that… I’ve never seen a sheep fall, thankfully.

0:25:52
CW: That’s the thing that made me kind of laugh. 400 of the sheep died, but see, 1100 of them actually went over the cliff. The thing is, after 400 of them had died and made a little fluffy pile at the bottom, the other 700 just bounced off, like, and didn’t really die because of the cushioning of their- BR: The first ones took it for the team. That’s admirable.

BR: Yeah. And I’m sorry, I think in cartoon terms it shouldn’t make me laugh, but I’m giggling imagining the scene, so I’m a bad person.

0:26:22
BR: To be fair, I mean, I think that, you know, by the time sheep number 699 has seen the other ones go off the cliff, you’d think that somebody would be like, you know, I don’t think I want to go in this direction today.

0:26:35
CW: Well, no, it’s peer pressure. They can’t see that. It might be like a sheep paradise just below the ridge. You just can’t see it.

0:26:41
BR: So that’s true.

0:26:42
CW: Now, besides just the loss of animal life here, the financial tragedy is that these These Turkish sheep represented the major source of income for the families that were raising them over in rural Turkey. So it was estimated that the sheep that died represented a loss of about $100,000. And that’s another reason why people put a lot of stock into mass animal deaths. And a mass animal death could be thousands and thousands of fish or crabs or it can be you know losing five of your goats. Speaking of goats, that moves us to reason number two behind mass animal deaths and that is an alien or a cryptid or some nefarious creature preying on these animals. And of course when I think of goats and something sucking the goats life out of them, I think of.

0:27:39
BR: Yeah, well, you know, that’s always, that is of course one of the signature characteristics of the chupacabra, chupacabra meaning goat sucker in Spanish. And yeah, I mean, that’s what it does, is it leaves behind allegedly exsanguinated carcasses, unlike, you know, Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster or Mothman or Lizardman or whatever else. And so that’s a really interesting sort of forensic medical question that I looked at when I was researching my book on the chupacabra and looking at the different ways in which people can mistake ordinary animal predation for mysterious vampiric attacks and sucking the blood out of animals and stuff. So, there’s a lot to that. And one thing to keep in mind, particularly regarding the chupacabra and some of these other animal deaths, is that for exactly the reason you just mentioned, which is in some cases, the death of livestock is critical to families. I mean, it may not seem like much, oh, whatever, you know, 20 chickens and two cows were killed in Puerto Rico overalls. Well, to a small family of ranchers or farmers, that may be all they have.

CW: Yeah. So it’s not non-consequential and it’s all the more reason to try and find an actual legitimate, accurate, scientific explanation of these things because if you attribute it to the chupacabra, and spoiler alert, probably not the chupacabra, then you’re not looking for the true answer.

BR: If you’re going to settle on the mysterious, well, it’s this mysterious unknown thing, well, then you’re not actually looking for what actually killed them and that’s, you know, that’s a problem.

CW: Yeah, the mysterious option, the spooky, strange, creepy, supernatural, paranormal option is usually the shiny thing that distracts you from what you really should be looking to protect yourself from.

BR: Well said.

CW: And your animals from. And this also ties into all the cattle mutilations we heard about, you know, years ago where people were thinking that aliens were coming down to earth and taking cows’ anuses and tongues and eyes when in actuality those are just the soft tissues that scavengers were getting to first.

0:29:49
BR: Yes, that’s exactly right and cattle mutilation is kind of its own thing but that’s part of this whole mystery and there’s a case from 2013 that I’ll talk about a little bit later that has exactly that.

0:30:03
CW: Okay. Well, moving on from aliens or cryptids like the chupacabra as the reason behind a mass animal death, we’re going to look at also environmental collapse typically due to climate change or unseen corporate entities that are poisoning our water and air and land. And it’s really hard for me to label this as a strange spooky topic because it’s not. It’s absolutely real. I’m not dismissing this as a potential cause. It is absolutely a potential cause of mass animal death and industries do pollute and they sometimes do it against regulations and then sometimes regulations are rolled back as has been happening with this recent administration. We have had a lot of the EPA protections have been rolled back, and that does make people nervous about what we’re in for in terms of environmental damage.

0:30:57
BR: Yeah, and it ties in with what you were talking about earlier about, for example, the canary in the coal mine issues. There’s a natural and often founded assumption that if there’s mass animal deaths, well, must be some cause and environmental pollution is high on people’s minds and has been for decades, certainly since the 70s. So it’s a natural thing to think, oh my God, what killed these things? I think back to the Simpsons, the three-eyed fish. But oftentimes it’s not that crystal clear. There was actually a river disaster, the Gold King Mine here in New Mexico several years back where there was a bunch of mine waste that flooded the Animas River coming down in Colorado and through New Mexico. And it made national news and there was this video footage of this horrific sludge coming through there. And it was shut down and there were lawsuits and this and that. But as far as we know, there was no mass fish die off. I mean, there may have been some right next to the mine tailings that went into the river. But again, just because there’s an environmental disaster doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to find scads and scads of dead animals. You may or may not.

0:32:13
CW: Yeah. And just if you find scads and scads of dead animals, it might be due to environmental factors like this or it might not. Animal populations go up and down all the time. They do starve if for some reason the type of grass they’re feeding on has a bad year, then you’re going to have populations of grazing animals go up and down. And the other big, scary, hard-to-really-measure ecosystem here is the ocean, where with climate change, the oceans are feeling climate change more than we as humans ever can. It’s a very sensitive environment from what I’ve heard on all the marine biology shows I watch, which I’m no expert by any means, but I’ve seen some stuff. And you could have a population of squid or or fish or you know, whatnot, end up in the wrong area because the water that they’re in has gone up two degrees.

0:33:10
BR: Right.

0:33:11
CW: You can have currents change because the water in one area goes down or up a degree and a half. And these little changes that seem like, oh, big deal, it’s going to be two degrees hotter this summer, no big deal, I’ll run the air conditioner 2% more. Well, it can make for big, big changes in the ocean. We’re not really sure what’s going to be in store. So, that leads to a lot of uncertainty and fear and scientists address it whenever there’s a mass die-off, of course, on the news. The first thing the newscaster does is they go to the Game and Wildlife Department or the local national parks, people who are in charge of that particular population of animals in that particular area, and they start testing for things, and they start finding out, contaminant or a change in water temperature due to some factory releasing wastewater, you know, or, you know, so it’s the smoking gun that we look for first. But there are instances of conspiracy thinking in terms of like, oh, there’s this big shadow network of corporate interests. And even if you find a natural explanation, people sometimes hold on to that. This is hard to let go. It’s like, no, I know they’re evil. I know they’re evil, so they must be behind it.

0:34:28
BR: Right. Yeah. In fact, I’ll be talking some about that in the the great elk murder conspiracy story in a little bit.

0:34:36
CW: Oh, OK, cool. The other I have number four here of creepy explanations for animals dying is lightning.

0:34:43
BR: Lightning.

0:34:46
CW: Yes. Now, lightning can take on a story like a likely story. Indeed, lightning can certainly take on a Fortean character. I mean, ball lightning, mysterious formations of lightning, weather can be really weird sometimes. And people may recall a lightning strike in Norway that killed around 300 reindeer because they were all huddled together due to the storm.

BR: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

CW: Stuff like that has also happened quite a few times to cows in Virginia and Australia and Uruguay. It’s just one of those confluences of factors. If you get a storm happening and you’ve got a herd of animals, they tend to clump together for warmth and everything, and then you get a lightning strike, bang, boom, you know, barbecue.

0:35:30
BR: Another factor to that is that it may not always be obvious that it was a lightning strike, unless people actually see them being killed.

0:35:40
CW: It is the perfect killer, it just disappears.

0:35:43
BR: Yeah, I mean it’s sudden, it’s flash, and it’s gone, and there could be hearts simply stopping just from the electricity and being electrocuted that wouldn’t necessarily demonstrate or show obvious lightning birds.

0:35:58
CW: Yeah, I mean if an animal is struck directly, then of course it’s going to be fried to a crisp. But if the lightning strikes nearby and goes up through the wet, you know, the water, you know, that the animals are standing in, you’re right, it could just be enough to shock their hearts and kill them all, but won’t leave any real obvious signs.

BR: And the other thing is that, you know, some golfer somewhere or somebody at a party was struck by lightning and maybe two people or something, but we don’t normally associate lightning with mass deaths. Just because most of the times that lightning is relevant to us, it’s because it’s people. So I mean, I’ve never heard of, you know, 30 people being killed by lightning. I’m not saying it hasn’t happened, but it’s so rare that it’s not something we normally think of. But of course, when you’re talking about animals out in the prairies and farms and ranches, they have different behavioral patterns than we do.

0:36:58
CW: Yeah, we’ve been trained from an early age. You know certain things, you’re told certain things as a youngster. If your clothing catches fire, you stop, drop and roll. If it looks like there’s a lightning happening, don’t go under a tree that’s a lightning rod. You wanna get inside where you’re safer from lightning. Don’t go golfing in the middle of a lightning storm.

0:37:17
BR: For example, right.

0:37:18
CW: Yeah. And animals do not have that necessary training to avoid lightning strikes. And interesting, interesting note about the case in Norway where we had 300 reindeer all dying from lightning. Scientists went and studied the area a couple of years later and they found that it was, it had been an optimal event for creating more diversity in the plant life there. They believed that that was a thing that was part of the natural cycle where you would just have these herd animals occasionally all getting killed in a mass lightning strike death. What happens is, of course, the carcasses start rotting. That enriches the soil with a bunch of chemicals that the soil needs. All the scavengers come out to pick apart the carcasses. They poop and they’ve got seeds in their feces. And so you’ve got all these seeds that are deposited in this rich soil that’s been prepped with fertilizer from the carcasses and you end up with a whole bunch of different plant life springing up in that area that wouldn’t have been there before.

0:38:18
BR: God works in mysterious ways.

0:38:19
CW: Yes, indeed.

0:38:21
BR: The reindeer one you just mentioned is probably the highest profile and I remember that one. I was like, wow, this is a creepy story.

CW: Yeah.

BR: But it also happens here in the States. In October 2005, for example, in Colorado, there were nearly two dozen animals that were discovered dead in two separate instances over the course of about three weeks. It was really mysterious and strange. There were like 23 animals. They were horses and mules. When they were found, it caused a lot of consternation because at first people thought that it were they’d been shot to death. And some of them seemed to have what appeared to be bullet wounds in their necks and their hides, but upon closer examination, no bullet could be found. So, I mean, then you have an even bigger mystery of a disappearing bullet. And they realized that the wounds were actually too shallow to have killed the animals and there were no other obvious marks or injuries. Another possibility that came up was poisoning.

0:39:13
CW: That’s often often a suggestion.

0:39:15
BR: Yeah. Yeah. And in that case, I mean, you know, that you you there are cases where feuding ranches, for example, have been known to to poison each other’s livestock and cattle in a particularly nasty and cruel act of retribution. But in that in that case as well, the investigators finally concluded that most of the animals, if not all of them, had been had been hit by lightning.

0:39:38
CW: I actually did not put poisoning or hunters or poachers on the list because I deemed them to be too mundane. They weren’t quite strange enough. But that is an in addition to the environmental collapse concerns. That is the first thing people look for as a smoking gun is where these you know, if you see five elephants on the dead in a circle in Africa, the first thought is poachers. Right, evil doers. We could just lump them in with evil doers. Speaking of evil doers, number five is a bit of a stranger type of human being than your average hunter or poisoner, and that’s Satanists, people in a Satanic cult.

0:40:19
BR: Yes, Satanists have been accused of killing animals for quite a while. That was one of the facets that I sort of stumbled across when I was writing what the Chupacabra was. There have been several cases where killings and mutilations particularly had been attributed to Satanists. And when I investigate one of these cases and try to parse it out, one of my questions is always, number one, did this actually happen? So how did it happen? But another big question I always have is, but why do people think it’s X?

0:40:54
CW: Yeah, that’s the psychological reasoning behind their conclusions that they jump to.

0:40:59
BR: Yeah, exactly. That’s, to me, that’s an important key that’s often sort of overlooked and glossed over. It’s like, well, you know, people will just believe it. But back up a second. Why do people believe it? Because understanding why people believe it is key to hopefully preventing them from believing in the future. To some people, particularly those in rural America, it can seem plausible because it certainly is true that some religions do have an element of animal sacrifice. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, they all have in their history animal sacrifice.

CW: Somehow it all went right from the Abrahamic religion worshippers to Satan worshippers.

0:41:44
BR: Right, well, but it had to stop along the way, which is with some of the Afro-Caribbean religions such as Centuria and Voodoo, right? So this is why, you know, occasionally you’ll see news reports or even TV shows talking about there are rituals, there are specific rituals for sacrifice, typically chickens or goats. It is a real thing, that’s not hyped, it’s an actual thing, but again, it’s not, within these religions, again, including Santeria and Kendo and some versions of voodoo, they’re not driving around rural America looking for livestock to kill and sacrifice. That’s not how that works. The rituals are done in very specific prescribed locations and with animals that are clean and things like that. But for a lot of people, it’s just, oh, well, you know them scary voodoo santuria, you know, they kill animals all the time, so it wouldn’t surprise me if they’re coming through. It’s like, no, that’s not how that works.

0:42:49
CW: So the element of xenophobia, as you see in a lot of folklore and explanations.

BR: Yeah.

CW: And it also and then we got, you know, we could talk for eons about the connection to the satanic panic and cattle mutilations and all that. But let’s just leave it at saying satanists have been brought up as a potential reason for finding a bunch of dead animals somewhere.

0:43:11
BR: Well, I do want to bring up one quick example, which was the the pony of Dartmoor, England.

CW: Sounds like a Dungeons and Dragons inn.

BR: It does like a like a Sherlock Holmes sequel to the Dog in the Nighttime or something. Yeah, it happened in July 2013. And there was a pony that was found under sort of horrific circumstances. It had been mutilated and several of its organs were missing. Which as as you touched on earlier is said to be a sign of satanic or some sort of occult pagan ritual sacrifice. And it was a two-month-old male pony and it apparently had its genitals, eyes and tongue and at least one ear removed. It made the news and the explanation was of course…

0:43:58
CW: Aliens or Satanists?

BR: Devil worshippers and witches.

CW: Oh, okay.

0:44:03
BR: Because why wouldn’t it be in 2013?

CW: Flip a coin, flip a coin. It could be alien Satanists that could have been visiting from another planet, but also belonging to a Satanic cult.

BR: Exactly. Keep in mind that, again, this is England. England is known for many things, including tea and tabloids.

CW: Oh, tabloids. Okay, I thought you were going to say they’re famous for burning women for witchcraft.

0:44:26
BR: Well, they do that too, although that’s, you know, we don’t want to go back that far. But so the Devon and Cornwall police issued a statement after, again, a couple weeks of wild speculation and fear and concern that there were witches and Satanists roaming around Dartmoor looking for animals to kill. They said, quote, initial media reports link the death of the pony to satanic cults and ritualistic killing, the police said in a statement. The police have sought the advice of experts and have come to the view the death of this pony was through natural causes. All the injuries can be attributed to those caused by other wild animals. This incident received significant media reporting, some of which was clearly sensationalist. He said in understatement.

CW: OK.

BR: This is what we’re talking about, right? So an animal dies, other prey come in and they eat the soft tissue. Someone who isn’t well informed about how these things work, certainly not a medical pathologist, sees this, freaks out, figures, you know, oh, this is crazy, why would its anus and its eyes be, you know, removed? And sometimes they say it’s with surgical precision.

CW: Oh, yeah.

BR: Which is always a red flag for me because in order to verify that something is actually done with surgical precision, you need to compare it with surgical precision.

CW: Well, I don’t know, if you’ve ever seen a dog be able to surgically, with surgical precision, eat the cheese around the pill you’re supposed to be feeding him and leave the pill intact, that’s some precise surgical eating capabilities.

0:46:05
BR: Well, there’s that. But no, but again, so I just wanted to throw that example because it’s interesting and it’s instructive from a skeptical point of view because what you find is that the same carcass will be interpreted in different ways depending on the cultural context. You see this, for example, with animal mutilations or with chupacabra carcasses or what have you, where if the exact same animal is found, say, in 1970s, late 1970s New Mexico, somebody will probably blame it on aliens. If that carcass is found in the late 80s in the Midwest or in Texas, it’s going to be blamed on Satanists. And if that exact same carcass with the same markings and everything else is found in Mexico or Puerto Rico in the early 90s, it’s going to be a chupacabra. So the diagnosis and the designation of these things as being either Satanist or mysterious or lightning or whatever else, a lot of that is culturally influenced.

0:47:05
CW: It’s almost like a strange little branch of sociology that you’ve taken up.

0:47:09
BR: It runs, what do they say, my waters run shallow and deeper.

0:47:13
CW: No, your stream runs shallow but wide. OK, and and the pony you’re talking about that caused that brouhaha in England was just one animal. I mean, can you imagine the emotional freakout you would have coming out and seeing five of your horses having passed away? And this has happened to their carcasses or or a whole herd of cattle or a whole flock of geese or or or actually there was one we actually talked about a case of a mysterious animal death On an episode quite a bit earlier episode 49 good times with pink slime.

BR: Yes Yes, the the the mysterious death of Jasper the Tasmanian devil for the Tasmanian devil I was it was it yeah, I think it was a Tasmanian devil.

CW: Yeah, I remember him. Well you spoke of him.

BR: Yeah, it was You should go listen to it. Basically it was a local, it was a local Tasmanian devil, a cute little thing here in the zoo, here in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And Jasper died under very mysterious circumstances. And they ended up actually hiring an investigator to figure out what happened. But it was a tragic story, but it was not as tragic as first thought. I’ll just leave it at that.

0:48:28
CW: All right. Has there been a Tasmanian devil murder?

0:48:32
BR: Hmm. I say, where’s Colonel Mustard?

0:48:36
CW: Okay. Well, but there’s, you know, it’s not just, you know, the beasts of the field and, you know, animals that crawl and swim. There’s a whole category of like birds getting killed by very, I mean, everything from windmills, as you’ll hear from Donald Trump and there’s some truth to that. Birds do get killed by windmills and lots of other things kill birds. But there have been quite a few scares involving flocks of birds just falling out of the sky.

0:49:05
BR: Yeah. For example, there was a case in August 2005 where there were two flocks of geese that were discovered dead on a farm in Manitoba, Canada.

0:49:14
CW: Had they like fallen out of the sky or something?

0:49:17
BR: Yes, there were over 200 of them.

0:49:19
CW: Oh, that’s a lot of geese.

0:49:20
BR: That’s a lot of geese. But the story gets even weirder because there were no external injuries. There were no gunshot wounds. There seemed to be no reason why they would just fall out of the moonless night sky. They just a farmer went out and there’s 200 geese dead in the field.

0:49:38
CW: Because you are an investigator of the strange, I trust you found a reason for these geese or you’re going to at least let us know.

0:49:45
BR: But I can enlighten us. So again, it was just the strangest damn thing. And people thought, well, they’ve been shot. But number one, you’d have to first of all, to fell 200 geese would require a lot of firepower. And again, there was no obvious external injuries. Then people thought that maybe they’d been poisoned, but the toxicology tests came back negative. Even weirder, it appeared that the birds had actually flown directly into the ground.

CW: Oh, they dive-bombed?

BR: They dive-bombed, yeah.

0:50:15
CW: This could be category one of animal suicides then.

BR: Yeah, yeah. So this, so the Canadian wildlife officials finally realized that, again, this happened specifically on a moonless night sky.

0:50:31
CW: Oh, that wasn’t just for effect?

BR: That was not just for effect.

CW: You were just trying to make it sound spookier. There’s actually relevance there.

BR: On a dark and stormy night. See, it’s called foreshadowing. Look into it. So what happened was that the geese had become disoriented in the darkness because it was just an unusually dark sky. And they lost sight of the horizon and apparently accidentally smashed into the ground. They just they just…

CW: Navigational error.

BR: Exactly. Sort of sort of JFK Jr. type thing.

CW: Oh, dear. And just like sheep, you know, they’re you know, they’re herd animals of the sky. They tend to follow a leader. And so if that lead goose gets confused, goodbye to all of them, huh?

0:51:14
BR: Yeah, yeah.

0:51:15
CW: Crazy stuff. Well, you were saying that culturally, different animals dying in different areas, different times of, you know, during different years will be interpreted in different ways. And I’m going to talk about the last category I’ve got here which encompasses all of everything you can imagine. Every animal die off going back decades and every animal die-off of every type of animal, every place. There’s actually a cottage industry of people who keep track of all of these. Unfortunately, I’m not talking about scientists, and I’m not talking about even data that can be used in any sort of meaningful way. It would be nice if we could crowdsource this data and actually just be able to keep track of it, but But from what I’ve seen scanning through some of these lists, it’s exaggerated. There’s a lot of rumors. It’s not quite kept with an eye to accuracy. And I’m talking about lists that are kept by apocalypse fans who are trying to ferret out when the events in Revelations have occurred or will occur.

BR: I see where you’re going with this.

CW: Yeah, I’m talking about, you know, it’s just a hop, skip and a jump from satanic cults to end time cults. And biblical end times, there’s quite a few instances of animals dying off in biblical quotes regarding the end times. Revelation says a bunch of them. In Hosea 4.3, we’ve got, quote, “Therefore shall the land mourn and everyone that dwelleth therein shall languish with the beasts of the field and with the fowls of the heavens. Yea, the fishes of the sea also shall be taken away.” And then another one for you, just a nice bedtime reading here. Revelation 16.3, the second angel poured out his bowl into the sea and it became like the blood of a corpse and every living thing died that was in the sea. So I’ve scanned through some of these. They’re depressing and people have cobbled a number of these lists together online and also YouTube videos. I watched a couple of those. Those are scary. Basically clipping together of every type of scary sensational news footage reel of a bunch of birds have fallen to the ground in Ohio or a thousand crabs washed up on the coast of such-and-such, or anything that is a dying off of animals, they tend to list. It went so far as to, you know, one that I looked at, endtimesprophecy.org, even listed six monkeys that had died in India.

0:53:56
BR: Six monkeys?

0:53:57
CW: Six monkeys. That’s not even enough to make a good Brad Pitt movie.

0:54:01
BR: They didn’t even have to make a good joke.

0:54:03
CW: Yeah, oh, anyway, and they had died of a heat wave. And so it’s kind of hard to call that supernatural or spooky, things die in heat waves. India can get really hot. And if you notice there are six monkeys that have died because of heat exposure, well, they made the list.

0:54:22
BR: Hmm, sounds like they’re stretching a bit.

0:54:24
CW: Yeah, and so a lot of the, there were some of these animal die-offs that had reasons listed like, and they were standard stuff like heat waves or droughts or diseases. And those are things that kill animals, that just happens. I mean, it would be really unusual if we had no animal deaths from any of those things. Like you had a real bad heat wave and no animals died at all. Or you had a drought, guess what, no animals died.

0:54:50
BR: Let me just add that’s a really good sort of skeptical thing to keep in mind. When you hear about some allegedly mysterious and strange factoid, take a second to think of whether the opposite of that would be remarkable or unusual or unexplainable.

0:55:08
CW: That would be remarkable and unexplainable. And yeah, diseases too. If you have a disease, that’s the definition of a disease it’s it’s something that hurts and kills people or animals and so the fact that the avian flu has killed birds is not a surprise that’s why they call it that anyway so I’m as I was going through this list I discovered that the your your mysterious elk murders have did make the list for for 2013 and that’s one of the things that made me question the veracity of pretty much everything on the list, including the six monkeys in India, because they don’t mention anything about the cause. So it’s according to them, it’s still a mystery. And they say 100 plus elk found dead on ranch causes shock near Las Vegas, America. And I’m like, Las Vegas, America, that would be… most reasonable people would assume that means Las Vegas, Nevada, but it wasn’t Las Vegas, Nevada, was it?

0:56:04
BR: It was not. It was Las Vegas, New Mexico.

0:56:07
CW: Few people understand that there is a Las Vegas in New Mexico.

0:56:11
BR: Yeah, it’s, to be honest, it’s a lot less glamorous and glitzy. I don’t think they’ve had a magician or a showperson come through there. In many, many a year. I don’t want to get angry letters from the tourism board, but there’s not a lot going in Las Vegas, New Mexico.

0:56:30
CW: Oh, our town’s poor forgotten stepchild. Well, why don’t you tell us about something that did rock the citizens of Las Vegas, New Mexico to their core, to their very core?

BR: Yes. Well, this is the story of the the great New Mexico elk murder conspiracy. It begins, as all good stories do…

CW: With a dark and stormy night?

0:56:52
CW: Kind of. So it was actually August 27, 2013, and there was a hunter on a ranch north of Las Vegas, on a big ranch, 75,000 acres actually, so bigger than you would want to walk in one day. He came across over 100 dead elk on the ground and he thought it was odd, as one would when sees 100 dead animals just laying there on the ground. And he probably assumed at one point that they’d been shot. But again, you know, unless you have a machine gun or something, this could take a lot of work to kill that many.

CW: Yeah, it does make sense that the first smoking gun they look for is, well, a literal smoking gun.

0:57:29
BR: Yes, well put. But, however, in this particular case, there was no obvious signs of trauma. There were no bullet wounds. There were no claw marks. They had apparently just simply dropped dead, apparently en masse and on the spot. So it’s not like someone had wandered far afield. They were all more or less in the same place and they had all just died. Now as we touched on before, livestock deaths by themselves are not unusual. These things happen. As long as humans have kept animals for meat or milk or things like that, other animals have preyed on those animals. It’s just a fact of life. And there are things that kill animals in the wild. There’s predators, there’s poachers, natural or man-made toxins, disease, drought, heat, starvation, lightning. I mean, there’s lots of things that can kill animals, particularly ones that are sort of out there, exposed to the elements, far from people. But even so, so many animals dying off at one place is mysterious, and especially since they all seem to have died around the same time. And again, they didn’t die over the course of days or weeks, they were all apparently around the same time, and they know this because they were in the same stages of decomposition.

0:58:48
CW: Okay, but they weren’t all clumped real close together like a lightning strike. It was more right and the same. So lightning, probably not. Poison? Did they look for poison?

BR: They look for poison. They looked for for again gunshots. There was nothing there. Some people suspected anthrax.

0:59:04
CW: Like so you mean somebody had sent these these elk a letter and they opened it without checking it first?

0:59:12
BR: Well no and I’m not talking about the heavy metal band either. I’m talking about the bacteria which exists actually naturally here in the southwest and can and does kill large animals.

0:59:24
CW: That’s scary to think that anthrax is something that, I mean, you don’t really think of stuff like that being a natural part of the ecosystem, but I guess it kind of is.

0:59:32
BR:It kind of is. And you know, it’s true that New Mexico has an unusually high number of lightning strikes compared to other states. We are a very lightning heavy state just because of the…

CW: God hates you.

BR: God is not happy with us for various reasons. But nonetheless, killing over 100 animals at one time would be a very rare event. So most of the explanations that we’ve talked about were pretty quickly dismissed. Satanists didn’t come up, unusually in this particular case. And most of the other explanations sort of fell apart. So the other possible explanation was that some sort of contamination of the well or water tanks had had caused their deaths. But the first tests didn’t find anything.

CW: OK.

BR: So this this case, again, I remember very clearly because, you know, I was here at the time and it was a weird case. I remember making the newspaper in the news.

1:00:28
CW: Oh, and you sort of made it part of the news, too, because you wrote about this one, didn’t you?

1:00:32
BR: I did write about it. Yes, I had written about this story, I think, for Discovery News or Life Science or forget which. The reason I wrote about it was because it had been a widely reported mystery. And finally, the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish figured out what it was.

1:00:47
CW: Yay!

1:00:48
BR: Yay, science!

1:00:49
CW: And what was it?

1:00:51
BR: Well, on October 22nd, the Game and Fish Department issued a statement saying that, I’ll briefly quote the statement, it says, the Department of Game and Fish has included that a toxic algae bloom caused the death of more than 100 elk discovered in northeastern New Mexico. Department biologists collected tissue samples from the dead elk and water samples from privately owned land north of Las Vegas, and they found a neurotoxin, anatoxin A, in the water sample. And this potent neurotoxin can cause illness and death within 4 to 12 hours if ingested. So that was pretty much it. That was, there you go, they were poisoned but they weren’t intentionally poisoned. There was an algae bloom in the water they were drinking because of course they have to eat and drink something and that’s what did it.

1:01:37
CW: And so was this in a pond or something nearby?

1:01:40
BR: No, it was in a watering tank, particularly in rural New Mexico and elsewhere. The ranchers will have water tanks, of course, because there’s not always natural water here in the desert. And so, they fill up these tanks and they have pumps and the whole thing like that. So, as it turned out, there was a blue-green algae or what’s called cyanobacteria. The biologists found the elk within about a half mile by three-quarter mile area and suspect they died from the same 24-hour poisoning. The elk showed signs of having struggled on the ground, symptoms consistent with poisoning from a neurotoxin.

1:02:16
CW: Oh, that’s a sad way for elk or anybody to go.

BR: Yeah, it sounds weird, and it is weird, but it’s actually fairly common. If you if you watch the news, oftentimes you’ll hear these stories of toxic blooms and fish, particularly fish. And this especially happens during the warm weather. And of course, with global warming, we’re going to see more and more of that.

1:02:40
CW: Yeah. So so the the happy the sort of happy ending part of this is that scientists trained to look for reasons behind deaths like this found a reason, a biological reason, and I’m assuming they gave ranchers some instructions to help avoid this, or?

1:02:57
BR: Yes, so that’s one of the things you can do, is that if you’re aware of it, you can test for it, and you can also try to make sure the water is clean and purified as best you can. But again, these toxic algae brooms, the cyanobacteria, are like anthrax. They’re naturally occurring. They happen in the real world, out in streams and cities and deserts. And so it’s just something that happens.

1:03:24
CW: I guess all ranchers can really do is just step up their testing and their sanitizing methods for watering holes.

1:03:32
BR: Yeah, and again, it’s a particularly creepy thing. I mean, the neurotoxin is called anatoxin A, and it’s lethal to most animals, including humans. And what it does is it basically makes you suffocate because you can’t breathe even though you’re on dry land. And the algae that’s produced in this neurotoxin is similar to curare, the poison arrow neurotoxin used in South America with poison arrow darts.

1:04:00
CW: Do they make that from algae?

1:04:03
BR: No, it’s but it’s the same. It’s a similar neurotoxin that’s actually used. That’s actually from poison dart frogs.

1:04:09
CW: Man, nature just finds interesting ways to kill each other here. Yeah. Yeah.

1:04:16
BR: One way or the other.

1:04:18
CW: So anyway, so that’s the good.

1:04:20
BR: So that was the story of this weird, mysterious case. All these dead elk and science came in and looked at it and they found traces of this particular neurotoxin. This is not a new, it’s not like, oh, what is this mysterious thing? It’s like, no, it’s a known neurotoxin and algae blooms are a real problem. It just so happened that it was unusual for this many elk to die in this particular place.

1:04:44
CW: Okay, well, even though you might be calling this a mundane explanation, I still find it scary as f**k.

1:04:51
BR: Yes, well it is creepy and scary and to some people that explanation was dubious.

1:04:57
CW: Dubious, like it wasn’t scary enough for them?

1:05:00
BR: Well, so here’s what happened. So I wrote up an article for Discovery News and soon afterwards I was contacted by a person named Kirby Carmichael. He said that I didn’t know what I was talking about, and Antitoxin A has never killed humans, which is actually not true. So Carmichael said that number one, I was wrong on some of the facts, which I actually wasn’t. But more to the point, he said, no, there was a conspiracy behind it.

1:05:25
CW: OK, so…

1:05:26
BR: Right, so I’m thinking, is the Illuminati sitting around thinking of how to kill 100 elk in New Mexico? Is this high on their agenda?

1:05:36
CW: I mean, I’m assuming he meant like a conspiracy among people who are poisoning our land like industrialists and government people who are…

1:05:45
BR: So I wrote I said, well, I what exactly are you getting at? I said, well, he thinks that’s do with fracking

1:05:55
CW: Oh. Fracking.

1:06:05
BR: And here in New Mexico, as in many places around the country and elsewhere, there is concern over fracking. In a nutshell, fracking is when the hydraulic fracking is when underground gas or oil are extracted by injecting water or fracturing fluids, some of which may be toxic, into the ground.

1:06:27
CW: Yeah, that’s been a cause for concern among many states, and there’s even a movie about how horrible it is. And I don’t really know how bad or good it is. I haven’t looked into it.

1:06:37
BR: Yeah, and again, to be clear, I’m not taking a position on it. I’m not taking a position for or against fracking. The question put to me is, could fracking have killed these elk?

1:06:47
CW: So yeah, you’ve got to narrow your parameters. You can’t say, I’m going to defend the fracking industry as a whole. You got to say, is fracking responsible for these animals dying?

1:06:57
BR: Right. As one question we ask in science is, what is the mechanism? Let’s assume that fracking is bad and let’s assume that there’s fracking in that part of the state. OK, so what happened? How how did fracking kill these elk? Well, is there fracking in that part of the state? There is fracking in that part of the state. There’s fracking, in fact, throughout the whole state. When I looked into it, I found that fracking had actually been going on here in New Mexico for many, many years all around the place.

1:07:26
CW: How many years are we talking about?

1:07:29
BR: Since the 1940s.

1:07:31
CW: So like a whole generation of fracking. Right.

1:07:36
BR: Right, so as of 2012, there were over 50,000 oil and gas wells in New Mexico, and 95% of those were fracked.

1:07:45
CW: Ugh, it sounds like your explanation is fracked.

1:07:49
BR: So you know, if there’s about 57,000 oil and gas wells, and most of them are as dangerous as is being claimed, then you would expect, and again, this has been going on for decades, so the question then becomes, well, hold on here. Why aren’t we seeing mass animal deaths like this for the past 60 years?

1:08:08
CW: Well, I’m going to play a conspiratorialist’s advocate here and say, well, this is like a canary in a coal mine, but it just took like 70 years for this particular canary to die. So you might be saying, well, fracking’s been going on since the 1940s. And I’m saying, yeah, so it’s about time to start killing stuff, right?

1:08:29
BR: Right. Well, that’s one way to put it. Yeah. The fact is that one of the possibilities that was put forth was fracking fluids. And as I mentioned, some fracking fluids can be toxic. I mean, that’s a known thing. Everybody admits that. But not only is there no evidence that the elk ingested fracking fluid, but we actually do have evidence that they ingested this neurotoxin.

1:08:56
CW: Okay, so this is like coming home and you find your butler dead and there’s a knife through his heart and you say, oh no, someone has strangled him. And the police say, but there’s a knife through his heart and you say, well, we should really test for strangling too.

1:09:13
BR: Right, you need to look deeper, my friend. You need to look beyond the known cause of this antitoxin A to also test for this. And so I explained this to this guy and I said, look, I’m not saying you’re wrong. I just you’re not giving me any evidence. I mean, you’re claiming that there’s this big conspiracy among the fracking corporations and the oil and gas industry, which is big here in New Mexico, as it is many places in the Southwest. Keep in mind that the government, the Department of Wildlife, had done these tests. And so his explanation was, well, we can’t really trust what the government said.

CW: Oh, so the government was the one testing.

1:09:49
BR: Right. Yeah. See, this is where you start going down the rabbit hole. Is where, like, OK, so let me just make sure I understand. So you’re claiming that fracking somehow killed these elk, these 100 elk, and there’s no evidence of that at all. And you cite the government report, which then a second later you tell me is wrong. The whole thing fell apart. So I said, I don’t have a lot of time on this. I mean, but I said, if you truly believe, and apparently this person did, that it’s something other than this neurotoxin that was found in their water and in their bodies killed them which again Occam’s razor suggests that’s what it is we don’t need to keep digging. Then what do you got for me I mean it is possible that the fracking industry killed these elk for some reason and doesn’t want to pay for it I mean just that doesn’t well…

CW: And also it it harkens back to the government ineptitude and genius at the same time that are assumed by conspiratorial thinkers when they blame something on the big bad government because okay, if why would the government not just release a very believable explanation right away instead of letting this become a big thing in the press where people are wondering what could have killed these elk for days or weeks or whatnot. They could have just said a bunch of elk have been killed. It was a hunter or it was a rogue coyote or something rather than just make everybody start grasping for explanations and have it fill up news reports for so long. Because if you’re going to cover something up, just do it right from the get go.

1:11:29
BR: Yeah, I mean, the conspiracy I was being given fell apart under its own absurdity. I mean, he’s like, maybe they didn’t want to do it. They didn’t want to admit that it was fracking fluid because they didn’t want to pay the rancher for the dead elk. I’m thinking, well, hold on here. I mean, the oil and gas industry has lots and lots of money. This story made national news because it was such a weird story.

1:11:52
CW: Yeah.

1:11:53
BR: So I guarantee you that any industry, big oil, would be more than happy to write a check for probably 10 times what the dead elk were worth to make the story go away, rather than have it make national news and potentially expose the evil that fracking does.

1:12:10
CW: Yeah. And really, what is more expensive? A herd of elk or the number of people you need to buy off for a conspiracy?

1:12:17
BR: Exactly. So again, I’m not saying that some conspiracies may not be true. I’m not saying that fracking is not dangerous to wildlife. All I’m saying is that in this particular case, in this particular weird mass murder death of the elk in 2013, there’s no evidence whatsoever that there was a conspiracy behind it and it was very clear evidence that it was exactly what it seems to be, which is anatoxin A in algae blooms, which are happening more and more. So keep an eye out for them in the news.

1:12:46
CW: And because you are who you are and you write about things like this, you got to be on the front lines of hearing about people who are convinced it’s something else.

BR: Yes. Yeah.

CW: Well, speaking of journalists and their role in mass animal death hysteria, one of the things I couldn’t help noticing is that it seemed to be a really easy go to story for a lot of news channels that perhaps were having a slow day and decided to report on birds falling out of the sky or fish have washed up and just like the biblical end time prophecy people would make connections of every single animal death across the span of decades. Journalists were doing the same thing on a smaller scale. They would talk about a bunch of marine birds dying and they’d say this is causing alarm among many communities. Something just like it happened in another state. And they’ll talk about something that happened like in a totally different season for a totally different reason, like five states away. But they make it they make it connected by reporting it together so that they can put up a scary news graphic and talk about animal deaths. And of course, that also allows them to throw up some tweets or comments or quotes from people who are, of course, predicting this is part of some mass cover up or part of end time predictions in the Bible.

1:14:12
BR: Yeah, I mean, people love to latch on to these stories because, you know, they’re sensational, they’re weird, they’re scary. Again, the canary in the coal mine thing, I mean, that was what the guy that contacted me about the elk thing. I’m sure he was sincere. I mean, I don’t think I was being put on. I think he generally was concerned about the environment as I am and as many people are. And he didn’t like fracking. And I’m no particular fan of fracking. And he he saw that as a vehicle for, you know, going on an anti fracking rant about, well, look what it’s doing to these elk.

1:14:43
CW: Well, let’s talk about see, we’re going to end on probably the scariest note of all of this, if you’re a rational thinker and that is let’s look at the people who legitimately study this, who don’t reach for crazy crank explanations or hold on to something after it’s been disproved. The scientific question here is are animal die-offs happening more often than they were before? I dug up a New York Times article from 2016. Samuel Fay, who is a researcher in biology at Yale, he was noticing all the news media attention given to animal die-offs and whether or not they were increasing for real over time. He says, quote, these individual events garner so much attention, they have shock and awe value, which we certainly agree with, this whole episode is about that. So I’m gonna read from the article here. So he and Stephanie Carlson, a specialist in environmental science at the University of California, Berkeley, and a group of other researchers put together a database of more than 700 such events worldwide in 2,400 animal populations dating back to the 19th century. Their analysis, published in 2015, showed that the magnitude of die-offs since about 1940 had increased. But in terms of frequency, all they could say was that reports of die-offs were certainly increasing. They could not say whether the reports represented a real increase or just increased attention, because, as Dr. Fay said last week after reports of the murer deaths, that’s a type of a marine bird, there is no central database of big die-offs of birds, fish, frogs, and other animals. So, the scientific perspective here seems to be, yes, there’s an increase, but we don’t really have a handle on it. We’re still parsing it out. It certainly seems plausible that with the increase in temperature, in average temperatures that climate change has been bringing, that it’s going to disrupt some populations. So it makes sense, but we need a lot more data and a lot more accuracy to really pinpoint what’s going on and how.

1:16:50
BR: Absolutely. That’s what science is about. You go beyond anecdotes to the data.

1:16:55
CW: And also data is scary. That’s another reason why journalists have an easy grab when they want to scare people with numbers. Like you think, I mean, six monkeys dying in India can be marked down as a biblical prophecy thing and one pony dying in England can set off a whole scare about the mysterious circumstances. But in actual numbers, yeah, animals die and they often die in groups. I touched on earlier the concerns about windmills killing birds.

1:17:25
BR: To be fair, windmills, they can be pretty nasty. I’ve seen windmills take down elephants. No, no, you piss off the windmills, especially the Dutch ones. The Dutch ones will mess you up. I saw a, I don’t know if it was a troll or if it was a giant or a hobgoblin, but I saw one decapitated by a windmill one time.

CW: Is that in the Don Quixote movie that I missed?

BR: Yes, I think so.

1:17:44
CW: Oh, okay. All right. Well, seriously, the wind farms, the old design that they had in the 1990s for some of these windmills had an area where raptors would nest and they would end up dying because they were nesting in the wrong parts of these windmill guts. But they’ve changed the design and wind farms do still kill some birds and some eagles and some important raptors. But the numbers I found were about 20,000 a year according to a 2009 study. So it’s a little old, but that’s what I found. However, you’ve got to parse this with all the other data and all the other ways a bird can meet its end. That’s significantly lower than how many birds die from nuclear plants, which is, you’d want to compare that, it’s 20,000 a year are dying because of windmills. 330,000 die because of nuclear plants. When you get into fossil fuel power plants, you’re looking at more than 14 million birds dying per year.

1:18:52
BR: Is this because of collisions or what’s the cause of death?

1:18:56
CW: It didn’t go into the specifics. I’m assuming nuclear power plants certainly give off heat and the fossil fuels give off pollution and carbon into the air and just airplane strikes. Airplanes kill over 14,000 birds a year and that number has been steadily increasing. We’ve also had a steady increase of air traffic. But I do have good news. As far as we know, there has only been one bird death as a result of Fabio riding a roller coaster.

1:19:23
BR: Oh, wow.

1:19:25
CW: Yeah, so we don’t have to worry about that too much anymore.

1:19:28
BR: That’s half as many as died on the Miracle in the Hudson.

1:19:32
CW: Oh, OK. Now, outdoor pet cats kill a ton of animals. As many as 4 billion animals a year were estimated to be meeting their ends at the hands or the claws of your pet cats if you let your cats roam outside. That’s just in the US. Invasive species are a whole other category. We’re talking about cane toads in Australia, zebra mussels or carp in the US waters. Those types of things end up populating and so you have a whole bunch of new animals and that causes a die-off of the native species. So yeah, you can look at those as a reason for mass deaths in animals as well. That is something that ecologists are studying and trying to get a handle on and reduce the damages from. And in a truly great irony, there are a ton of animals who have died at the hands of PETA. I’m sure skeptics are familiar with the notion that PETA doesn’t so much have shelters as it has little kill mills, as they’re called, and they don’t believe in pet ownership. And there’s a bit of controversy here. I mean, PETA has come out and said that they end up having such a high kill rate because they end up with the animals that you just can’t adopt out or have a tremendous amount of health problems or something. But when you look at the numbers and all the numbers I could find were only from Virginia because the Virginia Department of Agriculture requires that euthanasia statistics are reported. But for Virginia, it says PETA has killed 20,746 cats and dogs over the past 10 years. As far as I can tell, those numbers appear to only represent Virginia and all the horrific stories and there are a bunch of horrific individual stories you can find online. Those tend to be stuff that happened in Virginia. So for whatever reason, Virginia’s got its finger on the pulse of PETA there. And as we touched on, this type of statistics gathering and dead animals, you know, you take a photograph of a bunch of dead birds that have fallen out of the sky apparently. It’s for shock and awe. It is overwhelming just by the sheer magnitude of seeing all these dead animals, creatures. And people are bad with big numbers. They don’t understand that animals die. And if you have a herd of 10,000 cattle and 10 of them turn up dead, your average rancher is gonna be like, well, I guess we lost 10 of them. But yeah, if you have a tabloid writer nearby, it’ll turn into something a lot bigger.

BR: Probably Satanists and or chupacabras.

CW: Yes, or Satan, satanic chupacabras.

BR: That’s the other option, yes.

1:22:10
CW: That’d be a great name for a rock band.

1:22:13
BR: There you go. The mystery of animal deaths goes back a long way. As we mentioned at the top of the episode, we mentioned Charles Fort in Fortean Things. And he was an early collector of reports of strange and mysterious phenomena. He’s of course the person that 14 Times Magazine, the British publication, is based on. And he wrote several books, basically just collections of stories, but one of the – his best known is 1919’s The Book of the Damned, which is full of stories of frogs which flew from the air and died upon impact, which is kind of gross if you think about it. A shower of frogs is kind of, it’s kind of cute until you realize that they’ve fallen from the sky and this is not just frogs. By the time they hit the ground, it’s frog mess.

CW: It reminds me of the frog in a blender joke, yeah.

1:23:08
BR: But anyway, so, you know, the The mystery of mass animal deaths and mass murders is a long and storied one, and I’m sure we’ll be touching more on them in future episodes.

(MUSIC)

PR: So, thanks for that discussion, guys. Sorry, I was as mysteriously absent as many of the animals in these stories.

CW: But nobody mutilated you, I hope.

1:23:39
PR: No, well, not without my permission. But anyway…

CW: The great, the great Pascual Conspiracy.

PR: Yes. But yes, no, that was a great topic. Thank you guys so much for handling that one. And next week, we have a little bit of a bonus coming up just in time for the spooky season.So what are we going to be looking at?

1:24:15
BR: So I thought we would turn our attention, our Squaring the Strange attention to clown panics. Just in time for Halloween, there’s lots of parallels to clowns and scary things and we have touched a little bit on it in previous episodes but I thought we’d sort of give an overview of a history of clown panics, which is not a phrase you hear often.

1:24:38
CW: Unless you’re talking to Ben Radford, who’s kind of an expert on clown panics. Now we touched a little bit on this topic back, way back in episode 29, but that was more of an overview of your book, Bad Clowns, which listeners, you should all own a copy of Bad Clowns. If you don’t, run to the bookstore right now and get yourself a copy. And we’re going to be discussing clown panics in general. There’s a pretty big history of these clown panics, believe it or not. They happen every so often in America. And there’s some spooky similarities. And if I can edit it quickly enough, this next episode might actually happen next week. We’ve gone to the bi-weekly schedule for so long now, but I think, especially for Halloween, we might be able to get you two episodes in the next two weeks.

1:25:26
PR: Yeah.

1:25:27
BR: Cool!

1:25:28
CW: All right, take care everybody.

1:25:29
See ya, bye bye. We would like to extend heartfelt thanks to our sponsor-level patrons, Amy Frusciaro-Kelly, Dr. Angela Matkey, and Elizabeth Leggett. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor, or just throwing us a buck or two per episode, check out patreon.com forward slash squaringthestrange. Every little bit helps us keep the lights on here, and we could not keep bringing you content without the support of our generous friends. If you’re short on friends, hey, remember that each five-star review helps us get higher on the podcast charts. Squaring the Strange is a production of Two Heads Studio, LLC, copyright 2018. Theme music by Shriekback, additional music by Memory, Keytard and Feathered, and Pasqual Romero. Additional support provided by Ashley Romero, Robert Sundin, and of course our listeners and patrons. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of Squaring the Strange and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Two Head Studio, Kronos Creative, Center for Inquiry, our advertisers, or any affiliated organizations and employers.

1:26:48
Okay……….

Transcribed with Cockatoo