Good morning. Let's--or afternoon, I guess. It's time for lunch.  I figured maybe you'd wanna have lunch with me.  I've got a six inch sweet onion chicken teriyaki from Subway, a company that is not doing I think particularly well right now.  I remember when I was a kid and Subway started happening.  Suddenly they were everywhere and my dad, who was in real estate, explained to me how it was better or easier to set up than your traditional fast food restaurant because they didn't need to have as big of a kitchen, so you can put it into a smaller footprint because my dad was a nerd just like me and wanted me to know all about commercial real estate but now Subways are closing down because apparently it's just not what people want anymore.  You can have a kind of like a similar experience at like a burrito restaurant, where, you know, for around the same price as a Subway sub, you can get 1800 calories of food and then eat it all in one sitting.  Just the burrito part of the burrito is like as many calories as a frickin Subway sub.  I don't know how they do it!  What do they put in those things?  Is it just like rolled out lard?  What's happening?  

Today, I wanted to talk about something that happened in Montana.  There was a farmer, rancher, who shot what he thought was a wolf and now, the first thing I wanna say is I'm not like super in favor of shooting wolves and in fact, a lot of people in Montana are like, think that wolves shouldn't exist almost, like that they are too dangerous.  Why would a human and a wolf want to live on the same planet?  Obviously we fill the--like, we eat similar things and sometimes they eat people and sometimes we eat them, so let's just make it even and say no more wolves.  That is the kind of perspective that some people have and when your livelihood and like, for a long time, I could not understand this position because wolves are amazing, beautiful creatures that I want to share my planet with but I also know people who have, you know, for reasons of economic livelihood, cut baby sheep out of their mother that was killed by a wolf.  

When you have that relationship with a wolf, and you have things that you are connected to economically and also emotionally and they kill it, then it's not as fun.  Ranchers are allowed to kill wolves if they're approaching their livestock or if they've been harassing their livestock or eating their livestock and this, this wolf got shot, killed, then the guy looked at it and he goes like, that doesn't look normal.  I've seen wolves, that's the size of a wolf but it's very--it's different, and so it's this subject of a number of headlines.  Wolf-like thing, thing that isn't a wolf, shot in Montana and everybody's speculation--it could be a Chupacabra, because apparently we might have those up here.  It could be--well, isn't that supposed to be like a goat-like thing?  This is definitely dog-ish.  It could be a werewolf, people are saying.  

No, we know what it is.  It's not a wolf, and it's probably not a dog.  It's probably a wolf-dog, but the--it's really big for a wolf-dog and it's very different looking from a wolf, so it's weird and they got some samples and they're gonna do genetic testing but we're not gonna know for a while but look, it's gonna come back wolf-dog.  We might get more specific though, like, what did a wolf do it with and how?  Well, maybe not how, we probably won't find out how.  The specifics of exactly how probably isn't gonna come out but we're gonna know that it like, maybe what breed of dog got it on with the wolf to make this female wolf-dog and the thing is, with wolf-dogs, like, they're close enough together that a wolf-dog hybrid can actually have baby, fertile babies and so like, two wolf-dogs can come together and have more wolf-dogs and so I think what might be happening here is there's a number, there's like a pack of wolf-dogs out there making multi-generational wolf-dogs which is--like, that's interesting to me, but a thing that I read while learning about this, 'cause I, you know, I'm into like, giant weird non-specific, we-don't-know-what-this-is animals.  

Farmers will often put, like, a sheepdog out in their sheep flock to prevent wolves from harassing their sheep because the dog will be like, arr arr arr arr arr, get the heck away from me, but a fair amount of the time, instead, like, they'll, you know, be a little antagonistic but then they'll work it out and then be like, let's be friends, like more than friends though, like, friends with benefits and then you've got yourself a, you know, a new problem. 

It's sort of amazing for me to think that like, a female wolf--'cause if it's the female sheepdog, then you have the dog have the puppies in the sheep pen, the--I forgot what that's called, the pasture or something, and you got the babies there and you're like, oh jeez, I got wolf-dogs, half-Australian shepherd, half frickin' giant wolf and I forgot to eat my food.  I'm getting so into this story.  But if the wolf is the female, and the Australian shepherd or whatever, or in this case like, St. Bernard maybe, is the one who does business then the wolf dogs get born out somewhere else.  You never see them until they show up at your farm, your ranch, to get a little bit of mutton.  

And this got me thinking, there are actually people who instead of dogs, use llamas for this purpose because llamas, unlike sheep, will not take harassment from a wolf.  Sheep apparently are just like, well, you're here, I'm here, you eat sheep, I'm a sheep, so like if you could make it fast, that'd be great, whereas a llama will be like, look.  I'm aware that you want some of these sheep.  I'm aware that you would also not mind eating me, but I'm gonna fucking murder you if you get any closer and then they'll fight and the wolf will be like well, this isn't worth it.  Sometimes, though, they will kill the llama and that's a thing, and so there's sort of this like, balance between like, do I want the llama, which might be a little less effective at deterring the wolf, or do I want the dog, which might be more effective at deterring the wolf but also might fuck it and then you've got the llama, which definitely is not gonna fuck a wolf, like 0% chance, so that's a pro-llama argument, and then, but the dog problem is that like, yeah, they'll--they will, and then they'll like, be out there and then suddenly you got like a pack of wolf-dogs and I don't know, if it does it with like, a good enough dog, like a big dog, maybe they'll be even bigger and badder than wolves and then you got this, but apparently the paws were smaller than a wolf, the teeth were smaller than a wolf, but looking at the pictures of this thing, it makes it difficult for me to believe that the animal itself was smaller than a wolf 'cause it's huge, but wolves are very big.  This is something that like, people who are not like, have never been in the same room as  a wolf--room, not usually a room, space.  That's like, hey, and you're like, oh, good to see you, you still working on that DPS report, Jeffrey?  Yep, yep, arr arr arr arr. 

Instead, you know, you're out in a place, but when you get up close to a wolf, you're like, ah, yeah, that's not a dog.  One, it's a thousand pounds.  Two, I don't know how much they weigh.  Let's look it up.  Up to 180 pounds, so that's me.  I'm about 180 pounds.  Ughhh no, goodn--my dog was like 60 pounds and she was huge!  Whereas, a mastiff on the upper end is 130 pounds, so these are big, big animals and then so in addition to just the size, where you're like, ohh, this is--I did not--it does not fit into my brain for the size that a wolf, that a dog-thing could be, then you've got their eyes, which they look at you and you're like.  Oh.  You're thinking about things.  Like, a lot.  You have a lot--you're having a lot of thoughts right now and I don't know what any of them are, but none of them--like, a number of them probably aren't good for me, is the feeling that you get when a wolf looks in your eyes.  They're not dogs, and a wolf-dog is also like a very, like, there are people who have pet wolf-dogs in my town and I'm like, I don't know, man.

What's the biggest dog?  The biggest dog breed is the great Dane, and what is a great Dane weigh?  The upper end of a great Dane is 200 pounds so maybe this wolf did it with a great Dane and that's why it looks so big to me but also maybe it's just big 'cause it's part wolf.  Maybe it's part wolf and part like, collie, and it just happens to be that wolves are big and so when you see one stretched out dead  on the back of somebody's tailgate, you think that is abnormally large but maybe it's normally large.  It definitely doesn't look like a wolf though and it definitely isn't but the mystery of what it is, it's a wolf-dog.  Like 100%.  There's nothing else that it could be.  The question is, what did it do?  Not like, wh--we know what it did, it went and got too close to a sheep, but, but what animal did it do?  What dog?  What dog did it do?  Don't fuck a llama!