How to Stalk a Predator

How do a lifetime of “firsts” and a fearless curiosity reshape everything we know about the world’s top predators?

In this episode, we sit down with Maurice Hornocker—TWS member, Aldo Leopold Memorial Award winner, and a widely considered godfather of carnivore research—to uncover the work that helped write the playbook for studying large predators.

Hornocker helped pioneer the practice of marking individual animals, and transformed wildlife research in the process. Along the way, he built something just as critical: the credibility and community trust needed to turn data into policy that lasts.

From grizzlies and cougars to bobcats and river otters, Hornocker has seen it all. His stories reveal not only how we learned to study carnivores, but how we learned to understand them.

Share this episode with a fellow wildlife enthusiast, subscribe to the show, and leave a quick review to help more listeners discover Our Wild Lives!

Learn more:

About Maurice Hornocker - https://wildlife.org/maurice-hornocker-wins-aldo-leopold-memorial-award/

Maurice's memoir, "Cougars on the Cliff" - https://www.cougarsonthecliff.com/

Research Gate: https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Maurice-G-Hornocker-31501351

Aldo Leopold Memorial Award Speech - https://youtu.be/vjtevQzncWg?si=oCM0lYKBDzyTqBjH 

Nature Disturbed
Mother Nature is one weird lady

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Chapters

• 29:16 [Ad] Nature Disturbed
• 30:06 (Cont.) How to Stalk a Predator

Transcript

[00:00:00]  Katie Perkins: Would you climb a tree with a mountain lion? Not entirely sure it was fully sedated. Just to understand it better? 

Well, today's guest did, and for him, that was just another day at the office. 

You're about to hear the phrase 'first ever' more than a few times. Maurice Hornocker, TWS member, Aldo Leopold Memorial Award winner and the godfather of modern carnivore research, spent his career redefining what we know about the world's top predators.

He helped launch groundbreaking studies on grizzly bears, cougars, bobcats, African leopards, lions, you name the carnivore: he's probably tracked it. In our conversation, Maurice looks back on the challenges that shaped his work, like trying to conduct research on Siberian Tigers in Russia during the Cold War, winning over hunters who killed his study animals and more.

He reflects on his decades of discovery and tells us what it really took to earn trust in those communities. I'm your host, Katie Perkins. Welcome to the Our Wild Lives Podcast, brought to you by The Wildlife Society.

[00:01:05] Maurice Hornocker: Well, it began at the University of Montana, I had the good fortune of meeting John Craighead and, he offered me a summer job, my first year at, Missoula, after, leaving the military. I was in the military for four years, the Korean War.

 John took me under his wing and I ended up with him for almost 10 years. He was my master's, uh, advisor. He and I started the grizzly project in Yellowstone and I worked with them for five years and he advised me, to, go further in research, but I would need to, uh, go for the PhD.

And he advised a couple of schools and encouraged me to apply there. And I ended up at the University of British Columbia. And in that process I was approached by the state of Idaho to conduct a cougar study, and I had an agreement with the state and I uh, brought the University of Idaho into that. So I was involved in that for 10 years. The cougar steady in the Idaho backcountry.

Midway through that, Paul Dalkey, the unit leader at the university, retired and I was hired to fill that position and I was there at the university for 18 years. I left that and formed my own organization, a nonprofit called the Hornocker Wildlife Institute.

During my tenure at Idaho. Some of the, productive years, we completed the cougar study, the first ever done on that species. We completed the first ever done on bobcats. We did that on the national reactor station over at Arco. Ted Bailey was a graduate student, resulted in a book and the first ever complete population study done on bobcat utilizing radio telemetry.

We then went to Africa for the African leopard. We worked in Kruger National Park for four years and did the first ever ecological study on the African leopard. And I moved then to a different venue, a different ecological situation for the mountain lion to the desert of New Mexico.

And we worked for 10 years in the, White Sands missile range, a protected area. Again chronicling the life history of cougars in a totally different environment. And it gave evidence to the fact that this is one of the most adaptable mammals in North America. Or in South America as well, could live in Los Angeles or desert or rainforest, Olympic Peninsula, anywhere, and take a wide range of prey.

The clipper leopard and the mountain lion were cousins, you might say leopard at one point occupied most of Europe and most of Asia, now pretty well confined to different areas as our lions are. But those were for initial projects, never done before. So then to continue, we studied lynxs in the Okanagan.

We were involved with jaguars in Brazil , with, ocelots in Texas. Mike Tewes and Howard Quigley were my graduate students on those projects. Went on to great careers of their own. But anyway, so then we covered kind of the bases on the cats from, the little ones to the big ones. But then we also concentrated in my years at the U of I and the early years of the institute on the smaller carnivores, the mustelids, uh, river otter, uh, no one had ever studied those before Wolverines, we did the same thing there, did the initial project utilizing individually marked animals with, uh, with radio telemetry. And we had to design different logistic approaches to it. You couldn't put a collar on a river otter because the neck's larger than the head.

So we adopted what one of our former students and colleagues in Yellowstone Harry Reynolds had done in Alaska with grizzlies, implant transmitters. So we implanted about the size of a pen in the body cavity of the river otters. Worked beautifully. We did the same with wolverine.

Because they were the same way. Again, those were the first ever life history studies. And with carnivores, you have to know the denomination of the coins. Dr. Chitty preached that. Ungulate biologists are interested in numbers. Fish biologists are interested in numbers, and that's understandable.

But with carnivores who have to depend on their intelligence, their lifestyles and all to make a living, have to do different. So we have to approach the carnivores with the same logic a sociologist would for Moscow, Idaho. Analyze the population, the adults, the reproductive adults, the old, the young, the reproductive rates, the doctors, lawyers, plumbers, all who make that up, the prey base. Wheat, in Moscow, you have to learn all of those things about a carnivore. So you have to individually approach it. And no one had ever marked these animals before, individually. No one had ever marked the bears as we did in Yellowstone before that. But you have to again know the denominations, the sociology of that carnivore population.

[00:07:16]  Katie Perkins: So what was it that drew you to big cats? Or just cats in general, you worked with some smaller cats too. 

[00:07:22] Maurice Hornocker: Well it started with my daughter's, uh, cats. I grew up on a depression era farm in Iowa where we had cats, but they were just to get mice and rats. 

[00:07:33]  Katie Perkins: Mm-hmm. 

Quick pause. It was at this point that Maurice's new kitten Woody, came into the room and really wanted to be on the show. So you might hear or see some kitten content from here on out. Please enjoy and we'll get back to the show right now.

There he is. 

[00:07:48] Maurice Hornocker: He is something else. And that's one thing I learned from the cats. He is, his behavior mirrors a Siberian tiger. There's 37 species of cats and they're all solitary except for the African lions. . And the, the cheetahs have a kind of a loose social structure, but all the others are solitary.

But I learned it from my daughter's house cats that the cougars and the, and we raised cougars as well from kittens to adult. And the behavior is the same. They're all, they're like people. They're people, but they can be, behave a little different, but still the DNA dictates to that little guy as it does to a siberian tiger cub across the board and all the others as well.

[00:08:40]  Katie Perkins: And the manxs are kind of special. They really are. Yeah. Big guy. Yeah. He's saying hi. That's awesome. 

[00:08:50] Maurice Hornocker: Oh, he, he's an absolute joy. He's taken over. But anyway, after the cougars, I, I was hooked on the big cats and that's why I went to Africa with the, African leopard. And then that led on to the others. But the big cats are the most advanced of the mammalian other than us and I'd I use advanced loosely. Uh, the most advanced, in the evolutionary chain.

The fewest number of teeth, the most specialized teeth, the most specialized musculature. They're, uh, one of the most athletic of all the mammal species. And so it's just fascinating how they live. And the carnivores are so much more interesting than the ungulates. They really are.

But, uh, because of their need to be intelligent, to make a living, 

[00:09:45]  Katie Perkins: You're gonna make some ungulate folks mad with that one! 

[00:09:47] Maurice Hornocker: Figure what those animals are going to do if they're going make a living on them. 

[00:09:51]  Katie Perkins: You or the first to ever start tracking these species. Tell us just what that was like.

[00:09:58] Maurice Hornocker: It was a challenge, many of my projects were risk. Real risk. And it was tough to raise funds for them. And really the start of the funding, you know, I used to joke, Magellan had a hell of a time raising the money. He finally had to go to Spain to get it. Mm-hmm. But I had the same problem with a number of my projects. And I decided early on I could make a much greater contribution, with passionate young colleagues rather than going, single species. I would've loved to do that, but I, I felt I could make a bigger contribution by doing all these other things that hadn't been done before. And there's a certain satisfaction in succeeding at something that others tell you you can't do.

There's a great satisfaction in doing something for the first time ever. Think of it, just think of it. All these eons of time, nobody knew what cougars did. Nobody knew what siberian tigers did. They had ideas, but they didn't have fact. They didn't have proof, which we were able to get and adopt different techniques.

[00:11:20]  Katie Perkins: You are a menace, Woody. 

[00:11:22] Maurice Hornocker: You have your own water over there, you little rascal. I know. But anyway, that then the siberian tiger, I got really interested in that. Smithsonian wanted me to take on a, a tiger study in India. Well, I, I had all these other things going on. I had a young family. I couldn't go to India.

But the Smithsonian sent me there and I, went and spent three months and decided against anything useful in India. Couldn't be done because of human pressures and, and the economy and everything else. But I went to Nepal and recommended that such a study was possible in Chitwan National Park.

But anyway the, tiger expert in China at that time wrote me a letter and invited me to come to Siberia to look at that.

That was back in the 1970s, but we were in a cold war with Russia and I was a Fish and Wildlife service employee at the time. They wouldn't let me go. So then Nixon opened up China and we had a faculty member at, the University of Idaho who had maintained his contacts in China over those years.

And so Ernie Abels and Elwood Bezo and I went to China, and I toured all of the northeastern China and all that country up there.

Interestingly enough, I was just a hundred miles across the border from Russia where we ended up with the project. to, We warmed relations with Gorbachev and Russia, and then a delegation of scientists led by the head of the Russian Academy of Science came to Idaho to, well a number of facilities across the country, toured the INL and then came to the university and the president then brought 'em back to Taylor Ranch back in the wilderness. And my colleague at the time, Howard Quigley, they wanted me to go and I was tied up. So Howard Quigley went and over the campfire, the discussion came to our cougar work in the back country and the head of the delegation, invited us to come to Russia to look at the tigers.

So I jumped on that. 

And, the, uh, uh, Academy of Science ranked right along with the military in Russia at that time. And they had a wonderful program, but they were shut off from the rest of the scientific world. But still those scientists in, uh, the, the natural science scientists knew of our work.

So Howard and I went, explored the possibilities, went out there and toured a bunch of places in Russia and settled on this great reserve. And you might say the rest is history. It was difficult going into a totally different culture, but we found the Russians. After living in, decades, centuries, perhaps of authoritarian rule, they're very cautious, very critical.

You have to prove yourself. You have to prove credibility. But that goes just as much in Idaho as it did in Siberia. You gotta prove credibility. And all over the world, I've found that people respect as much as anything else, honest, genuine, hard work, it's respected in the most remote villages anywhere else.

Well, we established that in Russia and we found them warm. They'll give you their shirt off their back. And they, they made me an honorary citizen to be like making a Russian scientist, honorary citizen of Idaho.

[00:15:07]  Katie Perkins: Wow. 

[00:15:07] Maurice Hornocker: And I treasure that. 

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[00:15:39]  Katie Perkins: Maurice, tell me about the first few times you went out to go trap a mountain lion. Having no one done it before to trap and put a collar on them. What was that like? 

[00:15:52] Maurice Hornocker: Well, I started it over in Missoula at John's, urging. And I got a, a grant from the American Museum of Natural History for an exploratory study of lion. The view then was that lions just ranged all over. I mean, they, they'd go everywhere. You might catch one, you might be in Washington state next week. That was the general opinion.

Even the hunters felt that way. But anyway, I got that grant and we marked 13 lions outta Missoula. I got the word out. I'd give $50 to a hunter who'd tree me a cougar, and hold it there until I could get there to tranquilize it. Radio telemetry, we we're still developing that for grizzlies. It wasn't available.

So I'd go out there and, mark the, the cat, tranquilize it, and that was an experiment in its own, but the cat would remain in the tree, and so he had time to do it, and I marked them all. We lost nine of those to hunters the first winter, nine of the 13. So a study in w estern Montana simply was not possible.

Then timing and luck entered. Idaho had a new director who was interested in a lion study. He heard of me, got a hold of me, and the rest is history. But, the first cat up the tree you don't know, you know, it involves, sometimes a dangerous climb 

[00:17:21]  Katie Perkins: So the process was you had hunters with dogs, tree the cougar.

[00:17:26] Maurice Hornocker: Yeah. 

[00:17:26]  Katie Perkins: And then you would, 

[00:17:28] Maurice Hornocker: Then I'd come shoot it with darts and watching it closely to see if the darts, if the drug was taking effect, then I'd put on climbing spurs and go up and put a rope on the cat and lower it to the ground. 

[00:17:42]  Katie Perkins: Wow. 

[00:17:43] Maurice Hornocker: And that had some some tense moments, 

[00:17:48]  Katie Perkins: I'm sure. Do you remember any stories where maybe you went up a little too early?

[00:17:52] Maurice Hornocker: I relate one of those stories in, the, uh, Chicago press book, Cougar, Ecology and Management, Ecology and Conservation, which is being used in a lot of, classrooms now, and the used market price going way up. But anyway they had some tense moments, some close calls, and climbing was more dangerous than the cats after we came down to the, the technique but we treed one big one in the Bitterroot, and that's the one I write about in the top.

I call it the Bitterroot tom. We brought him into, the lab at the university, and I kept him for a month. Just testing my different drugs and dosages and all. We kind of got to know each other and, uh, I hated to turn him loose. But after a month I took him back to where we caught him and turned him loose.

He ran up this road, turn around and looked back. Oh

[00:18:57]  : yeah. 

[00:18:58] Maurice Hornocker: Oh, that's one of those. It's etched. Sorry. It's okay. It's okay. But he, uh, he was killed by a hunter 3 years later in the same area. He weighed 182 pounds. He was a big one, but I learned all the drugging and all of that, and so I came to Idaho pretty well prepared in that regard.

 But again, you run into equipment problems. I used an air gun, wouldn't work out of a backpack and freezing temperatures. So I designed a, a, a zip gun that anybody could build and went to a gunsmith there in Missoula, it's just a barrel that you screw the stock off of and then just pull a spring, put the cartridge in, screw the stock on and shoot.

It worked just great. Fish and Game adopted that and had a number of 'em built for their game warden. But anyway, we couldn't use dogs in New Mexico on the cougars because there were no trees. They had run into the cliffs, the rocky areas, and fight the dogs. And so, I adopted the Aldridge snare, which, uh, was developed by a trapper named Aldridge on, uh, tree farms in Washington state where black bears were, damaging trees.

And so we used those foot snares in the trails and it worked beautifully. And the cat's fore paw is nothing but sin. There's no soft flesh in this fore paw, below this joint. There's just no, it's just sinew, and tough tissue. So we never had any injuries with the snare. Well the Russians wouldn't hear to, uh, snare.

'Cause they were poachers snares were neck snares and the only thing they connected to snares were, you know, fatal. So no snares aren't gonna work here. You can't use them. So they built these huge box traps because they had used those to catch, tigers that would enter villages, starving tigers. And those were desperate enough, they'd go in those boxes. The wild tigers ignored them, wouldn't go near 'em. So I, I had a, on one of my trips, I took two crates of snares, invited all the scientists in, and we had a demonstration and I stepped in the snare and showed them how it worked. 

[00:21:38]  Katie Perkins: The leg snare you'd been using on the mountain lions?

[00:21:41] Maurice Hornocker: Yeah. 

[00:21:42]  Katie Perkins: To show them that it wasn't harmful to 

[00:21:45] Maurice Hornocker: them. 

Yeah. And uh, so I convinced them and I told 'em the project was gonna fail if we, and then we ran into a difficult situation because we weren't having any success first. And my funding organizations, which Geographic started it, but I still had some NGO funding and they were, you know, wondering what's going on?

Well, nothing was. And so they'd kind of announced to me that, that, you know, they couldn't continue to support a project that wasn't going to show any success. And, uh, a lady named Dorothy Palmer had placed a $500,000 endowment with The National Wildlife Federation in my name for my study of endangered species or similar studies.

 And I went to, that drew the whole thing out, half a million and put it into the tiger project to keep it going in those early years.

[00:22:48]  Katie Perkins: So, Maurice, what has working with these large carnivores taught you throughout your life? 

[00:22:56] Maurice Hornocker: That's a tough one. I guess I, when I was a kid, I was interested in birds. And I loved to hunt and learn the habits. I became a pretty good trapper and muskrat and mink put me through school.

Dad would let me use the car on my trap line, but I had to use the money I got from the furs to buy my books and school clothes. But I just got obsessed with that. And the birds, I learned I was more interested in bird

I went, eight years to a one room country school and the bookmobile would come once a month and I'd get all the books on wildlife and birds that I could every trip.

And I got to learn most of the bird calls there in that neighborhood. And had I had any encouragement, I brought two redtail hawk fledglings home once, and my dad made me get rid of them. He said, take 'em back. Chicken hawks, so he wouldn't let me keep 'em. But if I'd had a Morley Nelson or someone who, who was king, literally he and Tom Cade of, uh, Peregrine Fund. Uh, if I'd had him here I'd have probably, been an ornithologist, but, uh, timing and luck plays a role.

If it hadn't been for the Korean War, I'd have probably been a fat retired Iowa farmer playing cribbage , in Yuma.

That was, they had raised by a German father. Boys in the Depression farm, boys were raised, you know, to marry the neighbor's daughter, buy the local farm, spend the rest of your life paying for it. It's tough to get out, and that's what my life was planned for me.

So, but then Korean War came along and I spent four years, learning a lot about a lot of the rest of the world and shipmates and all, and the things they were doing. And then well, a big tragedy came when I went back to the farm. We had a terrible drought, had to sell all the stock, and my dad informed me that I had to get a job.

A farm wouldn't provide for he and my brother and me. So I got a job at a, there was a roustabout at a El Paso natural gas pumping station. And I picked up an old, I think Saturday Evening Post, and there was a story in there about a forest ranger in Buffalo, Wyoming, kind of a day in the life of a forest ranger.

And I thought, God, that that'd be why something I'd like to do. So I got $10 worth of of quarters, went to a phone booth after work and called the College of Forestry. Guess who answered? The dean! The dean answered, Ross Wilson. And I told him, you know, I thought I was too old to go to school.

But he said, hell, I got a college full of you Korean guys. Come on now. Ask me my grades and all. And he said, come on out. I went home and said, I asked my wife if she wanted to move to Montana, and she said, sure. Rest is history,

[00:26:07]  Katie Perkins: mm-hmm. Wow. 

[00:26:08] Maurice Hornocker: So those tragedies come along, don't, uh, totally discard them.

Might be something really great. 

[00:26:15]  Katie Perkins: What have you seen from being one of the first people to track and monitor individual animals to where wildlife conservation is today? 

[00:26:27] Maurice Hornocker: Oh my goodness. The digital age has, you know, changed so much. GPS has changed and, and I'm not opposed to that one bit. I still feel a biologist has gotta get out in the field.

You can't, Leopold wouldn't have, if he hadn't seen that incident with the old wolf had he been at a computer screen. You don't, all you see is what happens on the screen. You don't know why it happened, how it happened, what transpired before it happened, how many failures had that animal had before he had success.

So you have to consider that. But it's a wonderful tool. We tracked the wolverine from, uh, west Yellowstone clear over east of Cody, Wyoming, back through the Absaroka and the baretooth back to west of West Yellowstone. Took him better part of a year. 

[00:27:25]  Katie Perkins: Wow. 

[00:27:25] Maurice Hornocker: Yeah. And, uh, marked a cougar out of South Dakota was killed on a highway in Connecticut, and they GPS tracked him all the way across.

[00:27:34]  Katie Perkins: That's amazing, 

[00:27:35] Maurice Hornocker: Isn't it? Yeah. How he made that across how many highways? We captured and, and uh, part of the New Mexico work was five years to determine what was going on with the cougars and the, the, uh prey species After five years and we had all of that established, remove half the population and take them to North New Mexico and release them 300 miles away.

We had one male go all the way home in just a short time. 

But another male waited. He went south to Interstate 40 and kind of holed up there for two months and we thought, well, it maybe he had established there, but it, the next flight he had crossed, uh, the interstate and two days later he was back on his old, territory in White Sands.

Without that, the technology, we would, wouldn't know that, wouldn't know how he traveled or his route. We'd have eventually caught him again down south and confirmed that as we did with the catch and release, all the way through. So I'm not opposed to technology, but there, there are limits as far as your wisdom.

As far as knowledge and understanding how things work, I think you still have to experience it all firsthand. 

[00:29:02]  Katie Perkins: Get out in the field, 

[00:29:03] Maurice Hornocker: But still use the tools. Use, use the tools. 

[00:29:07]  Katie Perkins: Was there any individual that you tracked again and again that, you know, you kind of became connected with that taught you something?

[00:29:15] Maurice Hornocker: Yeah. 

[00:29:15]  Katie Perkins: About them or about yourself? 

[00:29:17] Maurice Hornocker: Rex, the, the cougar on the cover. We called him Rex after Rex Landam and the owner of the ranch that was given us a lot of crap and was opposed to the study. But anyway, we named him Rex 'cause he was, boy was he a, a hunter killer cougar. But it was, I said it was after Tyrannosaurus, but we captured him, uh, the full 10, 10 year period, 14 different times.

We got to know him pretty well and I'm sure got to know us pretty well and I figured he'd say, damn dogs again. Come on. One time, the last time we, we captured him was when patchy snow you, on those slopes, there would be patches of snow that we'd track him across, but you tracked him clear down to the cliffs.

In fact the, the same cliffs where I took those photographs early in the study. And, And the, the hounds were barking into the, into cliffs and they'd lost him. There was a big bare spot between the last snow spot and the cliffs. The tree back here. I was down here looking around, looked, I looked back.

Wilbur was up here under a tree, Rex was about four feet above him laying on a limb, looking down at him directly below him. 

[00:30:44]  Katie Perkins: And this was one of your students or one of your 

[00:30:47] Maurice Hornocker: No, that was my partner. Wilbur Wild. 

[00:30:49]  Katie Perkins: Okay. 

[00:30:50] Maurice Hornocker: Yeah. 

[00:30:50]  Katie Perkins: And he had no idea that Rex was right above him. Yeah. 

[00:30:54] Maurice Hornocker: He looked ha 

Yeah. Well that numerous times, if they had have felt like attacking us, they could have, particularly when we had 'em cornered on cliffs or in the rocks.

[00:31:08]  Katie Perkins: Mm-hmm. 

[00:31:08] Maurice Hornocker: Caves. But they choose to flee rather than, than, uh, fight. The difference between black bears and grizzlies. Grizzlies will turn and fight. Black bear will try to get away. Black bears are all over the continent. Grizzlies are isolated in a few spots. Protected spots. We had, uh, tranquilize the grizzlies on the dump in, uh, Yellowstone, put 'em through that ordeal, they'd be back the next night. We tranquilized a black bear on those dumps. Uh, he wouldn't be back for a week. And when he was boy, it was, 

[00:31:47]  Katie Perkins: He was nervous. He was cautious. 

[00:31:49] Maurice Hornocker: Pretty careful. Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:31:50]  Katie Perkins: So what does that tell us about these ideas that people have in their heads about predators and especially mountain lions?

A lot of people, I think, view them as a nuisance and as something to get rid of. 

[00:32:02] Maurice Hornocker: Yeah. Well, it goes clear back to written history, including the Bible. That we dominate. And wolves in Russian literature and all the old they were competitors and we had to get rid of the competitors in order to raise our livestock or our safety or whatever.

So we got rid of them as much as we could because we didn't understand the role that they were playing in Leopold's Natural Laboratory. The lid on. Keeping the lid, keeping it here. 'Cause if it goes here it's, uh, Kaibab Plateau again, bare as this table. ' Cause ungulates will eat themselves outta house and home.

It's like a rancher who has a pasture that he can maintain with a thousand head of cattle. So he decides to make a little more money. He puts in 500 more. They eat themselves, bare as this table and, and die and all. But he manages them like a predator managed the, again, the population here.

You put it in in there and then they eat themselves out of, that was the balance that was worked for years and years. And yet we tipped that balance and we haven't mitigated it. We plowed the Great Plains and created the dust bowl. We've cut the forest and created more fire danger than we had before, before because that forest got there through eons of fire, still there. Insects, same way.

 we only learn by mistake. And that's what, uh, Leopold preached. Learn what's going on before. Coyotes we spend millions of dollars trying to get rid of coyotes and never have Murie, 85 years ago came closest to determining what a coyote population would do if left alone, they become like a lone wolf. And they operate just like a lone wolf would and control other outcasts coming in. They run 'em off.

We could utilize that in our management, but we have a lobby that says, no, you can't do it. And, and the congressional delegation we have in states like Idaho would never permit not giving the money to kill. We're spending close to a million dollars on wolf control in this state, and yet we're harvesting record numbers of. Every year. How can that be? 

[00:34:38]  Katie Perkins: Mm-hmm.

[00:34:39] Maurice Hornocker: Why don't we let the wolves harvest those elk and maintain them? It's in the DNA, the human DNA. Get rid of the competition. But coyotes aren't a competition.

And that way I hunt up in northeast Montana on a farm he's a soil conservationist and he entertains a young fireman from Minneapolis every year who takes his annual leave and comes and hunts coyotes on his big farm. And he said it's sure a good thing he comes. 'cause he kills a hundred coyotes a year and if he didn't we wouldn't have any pheasants. 

I said, look Don, tell him I'll give him $2 for every pheasant he finds in the stomach of those coyotes he killed. But he has to gimme a dollar for every rabbit who eats the same food as pheasants. For every rat who steals pheasant eggs and all. Every ground squirrel who is a predator of pheasant eggs. Every snake that, that is a predator. I'll give him a dollar for all those.

He wouldn't do it. And at the end of the year he said, boy, oh boy, I'd have owed that guy a hell of a lot of money. Coyotes aren't efficient game bird predators, foxes are, but it's in the DNA . 

[00:35:57]  Katie Perkins: What advice would you give to fellow wildlife professionals or young professionals starting out in their career?

What advice would you give them to, to how to be a good steward of the land? How to, you know, do work that matters and how to just navigate the challenges of this profession? 

[00:36:17] Maurice Hornocker: First you have to establish credibility, and you have to listen to the critics. You have to become aware of their concerns, how deep rooted they are, where they come from, what's the basis of it. A lot of it is just what they hear at the barbershop or from the neighbor, 

[00:36:38]  Katie Perkins: Right. 

[00:36:38] Maurice Hornocker: And so you have to do that to start. But then you have to, to provide them with experiences and facts that you can back up. All of the outfitters and guides in Idaho were totally opposed to my cougar study because the cougars were eating all the deer and elk and they were gonna start, killing sheep and cattle and everything else.

But I showed 'em that we had , a finite cougar population in a certain region that didn't exceed that because of the territorial, I proved it. 

[00:37:13]  Katie Perkins: And that had not been proven before. That's your study, correct? 

[00:37:15] Maurice Hornocker: Oh, no, no. That was probably the most important finding I made was that territorialism controlled the numbers and it didn't get outta hand in Leopold's words.

And if you never talk down. I've talked to some audiences that I, I joke, I put my, fireproof shorts on before I went. But you talk at their level and then you don't talk down to 'em. You just lay out the facts. They're aware of how you got 'em. And it was hard damn work to get those facts.

And they respected the work. They respected my colleague and then you put their situation in. How many cattle did you lose last year to cougars? How many elk were killed last year in Idaho? How many elk were killed in your region? And, and, and they had to tell me, you know, that it was, they hadn't suffered any loss.

So what the hell's your beef? 

[00:38:19]  Katie Perkins: Mm-hmm. 

[00:38:20] Maurice Hornocker: You don't put it in those words, right? But, well, this is the fact. You'll see.

[00:38:25]  Katie Perkins: Is there a moment from your career that you're particularly proud of? 

[00:38:28] Maurice Hornocker: Uh, the governor signing the bill making the cougar a game animal instead of vermin. 

[00:38:36]  Katie Perkins: And how did your work contribute to that? 

[00:38:38] Maurice Hornocker: Testimony with the legislature, three or four different times. Worked with the sheep growers, wool growers, then that went to invite, went to their convention in Burley over in eastern Idaho. And Bill Sidaway was a national president of the ool growers as well as the state president. A real gentleman, rancher. I took the predator road control supervisor for the state with me.

I'd known him for some time. Mm-hmm. And a reasonable person just doing his job. And, uh, I had invited for breakfast, laid it all out for Bill, that there was nothing in there that would prevent a, a sheep herder from shooting a predatory cougar or but he had to have, you know, evidence that it was a threat. That wasn't threatened at all.

Went through the whole thing A, B, C 1, 2, 3. And, uh, he looked at Warren and said, uh, Warren, what do you think of this? He said, well, this will fly. No problem here. Okay, I'll tell the boys. Never heard another word of protest out of the sheep grower wool grower. 

[00:39:43]  Katie Perkins: Wow. 

[00:39:43] Maurice Hornocker: And so once again, you have to establish that credibility.

You have to not be the ivory tower, mad scientist or enemy. And a lot of biologists in this country, in the Western U.S. At least, are viewed that way. 

But first you have to know people management. And you have to do it at their level until you feel comfortable challenging them on their, their ground. 

I got a rumor that an outfitter in Challis, eastern Idaho, had killed one of my marked cougars. He never showed up, I figured something had happened, so I put on my bulletproof shorts and went over to challis, cowboy country. And went to his home and his wife told me, well, he was up at the bar and uh, she said, you can wait here. And I said, well, I'll go up there. So I went up there and I had battered old pickup and I walked over to the bar. It was a summer evening and the bar was open. Saw a line of cowboy hats down the bar, thought, oh shit, I'm not going in.

[00:40:50]  Katie Perkins: What am I getting myself into? 

[00:40:51] Maurice Hornocker: I'm not going in there. I'll just wait out here. So pretty soon a guy comes to the door, looks around and spots me over there and here he comes and it's him. He uh, said, you Hornocker? And I said, yeah. And I figured I'd better get out. So he said, well, come on in, the boys wanna meet you.

His wife had called him, told him I was looking for him. I was a hero amongst those cowboys. And it was because of the effort. Those guys work hard. Long hours, lousy weather. They know what I was experiencing and I was doing it all on foot. They had horses. But they admired the work and they admired me and they admired my partner.

They were still opposed to cougars, but I was a hero. Had to go get some big thick steaks and go down to the house and a couple of cases of beer and I won 'em over. First you have to have your credibility, which I had established. Secondly, you have to be able to accept their view of why they hold that view and how you might be able to change it.

Either with a, an acceptable management practice, whether it's economical like wolves, like jaguars, uh, that changes people's view of the whole thing. The rest is history. 

[00:42:22]  Katie Perkins: Let's close out with one last question. What is the legacy that you hope your work has left? And what do you hope survives you or that they, that you want the public to take from all of your life's work? What's one thing you'd wanna leave them with? 

[00:42:39] Maurice Hornocker: Foster your curiosity. Never take anything like the other manx cat we had was born in an irrigation pipe and they had to trap him to get him. And his mother had taught him, never trust anybody. Nobody. Don't trust anybody. But don't trust hearsay or what other people tell you.

Find out for yourself. Seek the facts. Seek the fact. But a childlike curiosity, a genuine curiosity is a treasure. Foster it and pursue your passion. I've advised whatever it is, pursue it. You'll go through a lot of ups and downs and hills and vales. But if you, if you follow that passion and your immediate, halfway successful, it's a reward.

And I've advised my daughter, find something that you're so passionate about. Find something that you can make a contribution, that you can make, you know, a respectable living. And do it. Do it. I was, uh, offered the job as the supervisor of the Denver Lab. It's one of the big ones in the Fish and Wildlife Service in Interior 400 and some employees.

And Tom Basket was the head of the units at that time. And, uh, and he offered me that job and I said, no, It'd had tripled my salary at the unit in Moscow. You can't eat like the old chief on Bristol Bay when they're trying to fight that big mine said, what good is money? You can't eat it. What good is it? How much do you need? I wasn't cut out for that kind of a, I couldn't imagine myself in a job like that. 

Couldn't. Imagine I had the best job in the, in the unit. Gene Hester was, he was the assistant Secretary of the interior and I was sitting in on a cuss Craighead mission uh, meeting.

Reed was a interior secretary and he was a good friend of mine, but they all hated Craighead on the grizzly thing, and I'd supported him, wrote a strong letter in support of the Craighead study. But anyway, they invited me to this Craighead meeting and so I stood up and said, I just can't believe what I'm hearing here. Uh, I was a part of that project for five years. I know how it was conducted and, and I'm a hundred percent behind the findings. And if you'd have followed the Craighead, advice you wouldn't have had the problems you did. You certainly wouldn't have. And it was proven after, after. But anyway, Hester got me aside after and he said, well, what is it about the units that's made them so powerful and so successful?

There were only 17 at the time. And I said, because you placed people in, in the leadership position there that had a track record of success and had a passion for what they were doing. And, equally as important, you didn't give them any money. There was no money. So what do they do? They want us, they want to contribute, they want to do so they pursue their passion and they go out and find the money to do it.

It was Woodcock in Massachusetts, Tom Basket in Missouri with the mourning dove, Craighead with Grizzlies, Souls in Arizona on pecaries and, and the hogs, Dan in Georgia on snakes. The literature counts on those people's findings. That's what I'd like people to, hopefully biologists, but equally as important, if not more so the public follow some of the same findings that, uh, I had.

I made that, uh, decision to, to write the music, but hire a conductor to conduct it in their own personal style, but always following Leopold's big picture. It worked out. 

[00:46:51]  Katie Perkins: Maurice, thank you so much. Thanks for telling us your story and well thank you for, for bringing us along. 

[00:46:57] Maurice Hornocker: Thank you. 

[00:46:57]  Katie Perkins: You've been listening to the Our Wildlife Podcast, brought to you by The Wildlife Society. If you're loving the show, we'd love to hear about it. Leave us a review or shoot us a message at the link in the description box. You can learn more about The Wildlife Society at wildlife.org and on our social media pages @TheWildlifeSociety. We'll see you next week with more stories from the wild.