“5. One might expect, though, that apes – largely owing to their intelligence, I would think – would concentrate in the best habitats in the places they are found. But it would also make sense that they could take advantage – largely owing to their intelligence – of less than optimal places, too.

6. Historically, those places are where our biggest cities have sprung up. …”

I added verbiage to 5. that clouds the meaning. The BEST habitats – not the less than optimal ones – are where our biggest cities are. The less than optimal places are where concentrations of sightings are: not as good, maybe, as the city sites once were, but still more than good enough to support a full range of species.

One frequently hears skeptical thinkers – and even some proponents – saying that it’s very unlikely to impossible that the sasquatch, if it’s real, lives outside of places that are very remote by current standards, i.e., the Pacific Northwest. (Alaska and Western Canada might not come up for discussion because, although remote, we just can’t as a culture mentally fit apes into cold places.) The thinking seems to be that an animal this elusive couldn’t possibly be in a place where it would have to be seen frequently (like say, the Texas counties bordering Houston, the fourth-largest city in the US, which report concentrations of sasquatch sightings).

In terms of the current topic, here is why I personally have problems with that thinking.

1. The PNW isn’t the most species-rich part of the continent, by a good bit. Now – thanks to our destructive ways – it might be up there. But historically (compared to MD and VA, say), no way. It simply doesn’t have the diversity of habitats required.

2. Apes, where we know they are found, are exclusively found in species-rich environments.

3. The sasquatch seems to run against that thinking, in that the places they are reputed to be are not nearly as rich as the tropical forests in which known apes are found.

4. But most kinds of mammals – cats; dogs; deer; cattle; bears; primates; etc. – have representatives not just in tropical, but in temperate and even arctic and subarctic environments. (There are monkeys living in places where winter temperatures routinely get as low as minus-30 F.) So the concept of apes – among the smartest mammals, with demonstrated omnivory – in the temperate zone isn’t really farfetched at all.

5. One might expect, though, that apes – largely owing to their intelligence, I would think – would concentrate in the best habitats in the places they are found. But it would also make sense that they could take advantage – largely owing to their intelligence – of less than optimal places, too.

6. Historically, those places are where our biggest cities have sprung up. It’s worth noting here that the PNW areas postulated as prime sasquatch habitat aren’t particularly near, say, Portland or Seattle, which historically had much better habitat.

7. By this theory, it would make sense to me that the sasquatch – an animal that the evidence links very closely to water, and major bodies of water are practically a prime requisite of big cities – has been pushed away from prime habitat, which historically was where major-city centers now are, to its fringes, which …well, look at the BFRO and TBRC websites for what I’m talking about.

8. Oh. Evidence indicates that the sasquatch is seen much more frequently then either skeptics or many proponents (“they shape-shift; that’s why no one sees them, oh and they bury their dead too”) would have you believe.

In other words, according to this theory, that we are getting reports of a big, omnivorous, highly intelligent animal across a continent that has historically had high species diversity in many places – and that those places seem to have concentrations of sightings to this day – shouldn’t surprise us much.

Not a three-term syllogism, I know. But logically I like it.

‘Mountain devils’ may used to have been called ‘forest devils’?

I’m safe, I’m an atheist…..

Maybe.

Humans have pushed many animals – including all the big terrestrial ones – into the least-hospitable places they can live. The grizzly and wolverine were everywhere in the West; elk wolf cougar and bison everywhere in the East as well. The bighorn sheep used to abound on the Great Plains; they sought out those inhospitable high crags because we killed them off wherever they were easy to get to. Most of the remaining “untouched” habitat for terrestrial mammals is in the places we have set aside for them – where we could set up shop easily if we wanted to.

Let’s give humans more credit. In the most inhospitable places we live, we’re considerably more comfortable, I’d say, than the wild animals with which we share that range. In the places where we simply don’t (obviously I’m not talking about places we have set aside like parks and refuges, but about “inhospitable” places like mountain peaks and deserts and polar wastes and underwater), species are few and big animals even fewer (whales, seals, penguins and the like being exceptions that prove the rule). If humans had settled, literally, everywhere we could live, there wouldn’t be much left bigger than fox-size. And only those animals who learned to scavenge off us and our livestock would be left, pretty much. Our parks and refuges are the only significant reservoirs of large-animal biodiversity we have left. We set them aside, largely, to avoid overrunning them ourselves.

Now if you’re talking mice, we can talk Austria. There’s a tiny trickle of larger stuff – some ibex, a very few bears, maybe a wolf here and there – hanging on in places we could live, but have left to them.

I still think that this finding isn’t a surprise, and is sort of stating the obvious.

With that cryptid tip that I’ll let stand as well.

The number of niches, environments, and ranges that are obviously NOT great, good, or even fair for humans compared to all other mammals is enormous.

But isn’t this kind of an obvious conclusion?

1) Center of range tends to get obliterated, because for many if not most species (maybe I should say “most if not all), the best range for them is the best range for us too.

2) Ergo, the “edge of the pre-decline range” tends to be where there are fewer of us.

3) We just tend not to look for animals in what we consider marginal habitat for them.

Where this might help the search for a certain cryptid:

We presume that certain cryptid (hint: Cryptomundo flagship critter) to only be found in really remote areas, by current standards. The best way to think of it is to look where our biggest cities are; that was really really good wildlife range, before we got through with it. So finding that certain cryptid across the continent – it’s mobile, and smart, and a catholic eater, so why not? – at the edges of what used to be fantastic habitat for it isn’t a stretch at all.