Beth Shapiro

One of them was the guy who was the inspiration for the Boy Scouts of America.

And another guy was like a con man who had worked as a pimp and a journalist and all these other things.

And they had actually been employed during the Boer Wars to kill each other.

But they came together on part of this congressman's team.

The scout thought it was a great idea.

He wanted people to bring in all sorts of animals from Africa and put them in national parks so that people would want to go to national parks because they could hunt them and they could...

And that would, you know, have more reason for people to want to support the idea of national parks at the time, which is great.

Like, you know, this utility of nature.

It seems weird compared to how we think of it now.

But I think this is really it's really important.

And it was really important part of the way we we got conservation legislation in the U.S.,

So he was excited about this.

And then the congressman, when he was pulling together the team of people that he wanted to be on his side for this, he went to a show that this other guy, the sort of con man, traveling salesman, pimp escape artist dude, was having about how he was an intrepid explorer.

And he was like, that guy is an expert as well.

He can also be on my team.

And they testified in front of Congress and they asked questions like, you know, how do you know that they're safe?

How do you know that they're tamed?

This con man, he was like, well, you know, there's plenty of evidence that you can even feed them from a baby's bottle with no evidence whatsoever.

Right.

Just everybody was like, yeah, awesome.