Dan Flores > Quotes

“We stood by and allowed what happened to the Great Plains a century ago, the destruction of one of the ecological wonders of the world. In modern America, we need to see this with clear eyes, and soberly, so that we understand well that the flyover country of our own time derives much of its forgettability from being a slate wiped almost clean of its original figures.”
― Dan Flores, American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains

“If one’s argument for civilization holds that wild predators should never roam in broad daylight through the boroughs of America’s largest, loudest, most radically urban metropolis, then, truly, the end of civilization had arrived on paw prints in the snow.”
― Dan Flores, Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History

“Coyote power: surviving by one’s own intelligence and wits when others cannot; embracing existence in a mad, dancing, laughing, sympathetic expression of pure joy at evading the grimmest of fates; exulting in sheer aliveness; recognizing our shortcomings with rueful chagrin.”
― Dan Flores, Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History

“In our twenty-first century world, the terms "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" sit uneasily in the mind, associated with some of our darkest and most disturbing thoughts about human nature. They conjure Darfur, Serbia, Cambodia, and Pol Pot, and, most vividly of all for many of us, the horrors in Europe before and during World War II. "Species cleansing," on the other hand, is not a term that falls readily to hand, although we have engaged in it without much remorse for at least 10,000 years and probably more. Be it North American mammoths, driven to annihilation ten millennia ago by bands of a near-professional hunting culture known as Clovis ... to passenger pigeons and ivory-billed woodpeckers ... in twentieth century America, humans are ancient veterans of the art of species cleansing, ...”
― Dan Flores, Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History

“Why did we so consistently look at the West through the sights of a rifle?”
― Dan Flores, American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains

“Coyote power: surviving by one's intelligence and wits when others cannot; embracing existence in a mad, dancing, laughing, sympathetic expression of pure joy at evading the grimmest of fates; exulting in sheer aliveness; recognizing our shortcomings with rueful chagrin. These are the values Old Man America has embodied for thousands of years.”
― Dan Flores, Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History

“[Curtis Carley, first field coordinator for the Red Wolf Recovery Program] decided early in the project that there was only one possible way of saving red wolves from genetic swamping by coyotes. Biologists were going to have to capture every red wolf remaining in the wild for placement in a captive breeding program. In effect, preserving the red wolf's purity required first bringing about its extinction in the wild and turning its former range over to coyotes and hybrids until biologists could produce enough "pure" animals, then finding a suitable protected preserve for releasing a captive-bred population into the wild again.

How difficult was that? After establishing a certified breeding program for red wolves at Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma, Washington, in 1974 and 1975, the Red Wolf Recovery team decided to examine as breeding candidates some fifty red wolves held in almost twenty zoos across the country. Using the morphology-howl criteria they had established, out of those fifty they identified but a single red wolf, a female in the Oklahoma City Zoo. They were convinced all the rest, plus their pups, were actually either coyotes or hybrids, and in the latter case the team insisted they be destroyed. When some of the shocked zoo personnel refused such a draconian order, in the name of purity Curtis Carley carried out the death sentences himself.”
― Dan Flores, Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History

“Coyotes, it turns out, are also a kind of wolf. They shared a common ancestor with gray wolves down to about 3.2 million years ago, when coyote and gray wolf ancestors began to separate, first geographically, then, as distance increased, genetically.”
― Dan Flores, Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History

“as perfect in my memory as a circle.”
― Dan Flores, Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History

“Face-to-face, the vast prairie sweeps belie your
instincts about such country. Their sublimity, I think, arises from their unfathomable boundaries and their self-confident grandness of scale, combined with an echoless, calm monotony of sensory affect.”
― Dan Flores, Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History

“From the time the bison slaughter commenced in the 1820s, it took little more than half a century to clear the Great Plains of that ancient population of animals, which during spans of good weather must have approached 25 to 30 million animals. One effect of that species cleansing was to open up the great grasslands to domesticated animals.”
― Dan Flores, Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History

“To lay out the wildlife story of those last five centuries in another way, since 1500 we Americans have managed to commit the largest single destruction of wild animals discoverable in modern history.”
― Dan Flores, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

“Our disruption of ecologies around the world isn't just threatening wildife extinctions. It's posing an existential threat to our own species.”
― Dan Flores, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

“The prescription I've come to seems to be this. Know the heaven and earth that was, but experience the world that is.”
― Dan Flores, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

“...we've thought of living creatures as mere resources in an economy designed to enrich us, and that has produced one ugly, depraved story after another, a history of inhumanity perpetrated by ordinary Americans in the name of freedom and the market, its cruelty and barbarism as often as not endorsed by government and sometimes even carried out by its agents. This is how we de-buffaloed, de-pigeoned, de-wolfed America.”
― Dan Flores, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

“In Denver coyotes had become an urban presence by the 1970s. Chicago, in the 1990's was next, and by roughly 200 almost every city in the united States and Canada, no matter how small and picturesque or sprawling and ear splitting, possessed a thriving population of coyotes as full-time residents.”
― Dan Flores, Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History

“The ecological niche breakthrough was critical for understanding wild coyotes and appreciating predators generally. In nature a "niche," is analagous to an occupation in human culture.”
― Dan Flores, Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History

“Earth proved finite, and so did its animals.”
― Dan Flores, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

“As with coyotes, as with most mammals, as with us. Epigenetics determine who we are; that mysterious interplay between our hardwired genetic selves and the experiences we have, which turn off some genes and dial up the gain on others, shapes the beings we become.”
― Dan Flores, Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History

“Long before the dawn of written history, human impacts were responsible for a fantastically destructive wave of extinctions around the globe.”
― Dan Flores, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

“We wield the sword of extermination as we advance.”
― Dan Flores, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

“Altogether, we kill about 500,000 of them (coyotes) a year in the United States.”
― Dan Flores, Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History

“As Chuck Jones described his antihero’s appeal years later, “Humiliation and indifference—these are conditions everyone of us finds unbearable—this is why the Coyote when falling is more concerned with the audience’s opinion of him than he is with the inevitable result of too much gravity.” Wile”
― Dan Flores, Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History

“The prime directive (in living safely with coyotes) is straightforward and delivered with an exclamation mark: For chrissake, do not feed coyotes and accustom them to associating food with humans! To avoid the most common human conflict with coyotes, don't let your cats or small dogs outside at night.”
― Dan Flores, Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History

“Most recently science is rewriting biological histories, while helping us understand that the self-awareness and cultural richness we celebrate as human place us within animal life, not outside it. All is vanity to think otherwise.”
― Dan Flores, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

“Existence.”
― Dan Flores, Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History

“...we Americans have never been good at accepting blame for screwing up the world. Surely the gods, or the government, or the Chinese, or the sun! must be doing this. It can't be us.”
― Dan Flores, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

“We successfully eradicated the bright green and yellow Carolina parakeet, our only native parrot and one of America’s most beautiful birds (look at Audubon’s painting of them sometime) because, as with coyotes, agriculturalists thought they were pests whose lives weren’t worth the space the creatures were taking up. During this unique and”
― Dan Flores, Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History

“We all exist in a world handed down by the prior occupants. Like coming generations, who will have to live with a planet our generations have overheated, we, too, suffer from the selfishness of those who lived before us. In our case our ancestors left us a simplified and devastated Earth.”
― Dan Flores, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

“This place was deja-vu for me not from some past life, but from the minds of others, who had made me know what a magical world the Great Plains once had been. The poetry of the plains was considerably fainter in my time on earth, but this particular morning on the Missouri I was hearing enough of the passages to realize that despite all, we had not entirely lost the American Serengeti. Not yet.”
― Dan Flores, American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains