People are buying coyote urine. Where does it come from?
Last spring, a curious listener called with an unusual question about coyote urine. Is it – as advertised by companies who sell it – an effective, all natural pest deterrent? And more importantly: “Who are the coyotes that are providing this urine?”
Since then, producer Taylor Quimby has been trying to find out… and with literal gallons of the stuff available online, he discovered the answers aren’t pretty.
Today on Outside/In, we peek inside the unregulated Pandora’s box of urine farming. Does it work? Is it ethical? And is anybody willing to actually talk about it?
Featuring Jeannie Bartlett, Caroline Long, Ed Brookmyer, Laura Koivula.
ADDITIONAL MATERIALS
Coyote urine is widely available online from places like Amazon, Walmart, and Home Depot.
This 1998 study assessed coyote urine as a deterrent for deer, and found (with some caveats) a 15-24% reduction in deer browsing after exposure to the urine.
However, coyote urine had no measurable effect on the deer browsing of yew saplings in this more recent study.
Websites for some coyote urine brands, like PredatorPee.com and Shake-away animal repellents, claim that they source urine from regulated farms that treat animals humanely, but did not provide more information when asked.
This article from Cleveland.com details the conditions at The Grand River Fur Exchange, a fur and urine farm where hundreds of animals were found in poor condition after the owner’s death.
A coyote in a cage during the rescue operation at the Grand Fur Exchange outside of Cleveland, Ohio. Credit: The Humane World for Animals.
CREDITS
Host: Nate Hegyi
Reported and produced by Taylor Quimby
Mixed by Taylor Quimby
Editing by Rebecca Lavoie, Marina Henke, and Katie Colaneri.
Our staff includes Justine Paradis, Felix Poon, and Jessica Hunt
Executive producer: Taylor Quimby
Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio
Music by Blue Dot Sessions
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio
Submit a question to the “Outside/Inbox.” We answer queries about the natural world, climate change, sustainability, and human evolution. You can send a voice memo to outsidein@nhpr.org or leave a message on our hotline, 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837).
Audio Transcript
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Nate Hegyi: Hey, this is Outside/In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I'm Nate Hegyi.
And today's story starts in a humble strawberry patch that's under attack.
Jeannie Bartlett: At one point, up to a third of the strawberry plants had been nibbled down so that just the crown was left and most of the leaves had been eaten.
[Mux - Clover Sprig (Blue Dot Sessions)]
And of course, lovely deer droppings all through my field, too.
Nate Hegyi: This is Jeannie Bartlett. Jeannie works on a farm in Vermont, but she also has the side hustle selling her own home grown strawberries.
That is when they're not being pilfered by rogue deer.
Jeannie Bartlett: Deer are cute and everything, but they wreak havoc.
Nate Hegyi: Now, Jeannie has been a long time fan of the show, which I know because she has called our listener hotline over a dozen times.
Jeannie Bartlett (calling): This is Jeannie calling from Montpelier, Vermont…
Jeannie Bartlett (calling): This is Jeannie Bartlett...
Jeannie Bartett (calling): This is Jeannie. and several of my friends from Burlington, Vermont…
Nate Hegyi: But this particular call – about a possible solution to her deer problem – was so intriguing. Producer Taylor Quimby just had to call her back.
[mux fades]
Taylor Quimby (tape): So where did you hear talk of the… the urine solution?
Jeannie Bartlett: Yeah, I think I first remember hearing of coyote urine when I was little. The deer were eating the You bushes outside my house, and I'm pretty sure a few years my dad sprayed a coyote urine product on them. And I remember my mom complaining about the smell and being like, well, I guess it helps to keep the deer off of them, but it really stinks.
Nate Hegyi: Coyote urine.
It may sound like an ingredient in a witch's cauldron, but this animal waste product is a surprisingly commonplace garden tool. According to the people who sell it sprinkle a little around your veggie patch and those hungry deer will steer clear. But if you think about it…like if you really think about it… you gotta wonder…
Jeannie Bartlett: One is does it work? But honestly, the questions that interest me more are how do they get it? Like how do they get it from the coyotes? Are these like captive coyotes that are in some kind of animal rehabilitation program, or are they bred for this purpose, or is it somehow collected in the wild?
[Mux swells - Clover Sprig (Blue Dot Sessions)]
I think my biggest question is like, who are the coyotes that are providing this urine?
Nate Hegyi: Today and outside in, Genie's natural curiosity has us sending producer Taylor Quimby into some unfamiliar territory.
Ken Johnson: When you’re in this business you have a lot of opportunities to smell things.
Nate Hegyi: Who buys this stuff? Does it work? And most importantly, where is it coming from?
Laura Koivula: I cannot explain to you the absolute gut wrenching, vomit inducing smell.
Nate Hegyi: Stay tuned.
[mux posts and fades]
PRE ROLL
Nate Hegyi: Hey, this is Outside/In. I'm Nate Hegyi and here with me today is my boss, executive producer Taylor Quimby. Taylor.
Taylor Quimby: Hey, are you ready for this?
Nate Hegyi: I think so.
Taylor Quimby: Is anybody? I mean, honestly.
Nate Hegyi: [Laughs]
Taylor Quimby: So when I started digging into this story, you know, I figured commercial coyote urine was relatively rare. You know, a niche product sold in tiny quantities at specialty stores.
Nate Hegyi: I honestly thought it would have just been, like, synthetic.
Taylor Quimby: Well, this is not one of those cases.
And if you go online, you will discover that you can order coyote urine from Walmart, from Amazon, from Home Depot.
Home Depot voicemail: Yes, we have available urine in stock. Would you like me to send you a link to those available items and their information?
Taylor Quimby: You can buy this stuff in handy little spray bottles. You can get it in solid granules or soaked into woodchips. Nate, you can buy coyote urine in bulk by the gallon.
Nate Hegyi: Oh, that just made me feel a little bit nauseous.
Taylor Quimby: But if you’re looking to buy some fresh off the shelf, not online, in person – there’s one big box retailer that you can usually count on.
Taylor Quimby (field tape): Okay. I just got to Bass Pro Shop, New Hampshire's great American outdoor store. We're about to try and find some coyote urine.
[mux creeps in - The Gran Dias, Blue Dot Sessions]
Nate Hegyi: Taylor, was that your first time ever at a bass pro shop?
Taylor Quimby: Oh, no. I've been there many, many times.
Nate: Okay.
Taylor Quimby (field tape): So if you haven't been to a Bass Pro, basically like the Walmart for hunting and fishing and sporting equipment and boats, all that good stuff.
Taylor Quimby: So one thing I learned is that it’s not just gardeners who are using coyote urine as a deterrent for deer. It’s also something used by trappers to lure in other coyotes. [mux fades]
And so when I went to my local bass Pro, I discovered there is a whole section for stuff like this with all sorts of things I never would have imagined. They had red fox urine, beaver, castor oil, something called coon chum.
Nate Hegyi: Wait a second, Coon chum. That sounds like a really good like ska band, Coon chum.
Taylor Quimby: You can open it for the mighty, mighty bass tones.
Nate Hegyi: [laughs]
Taylor Quimby… And of course, they had what I was looking for.
Taylor Quimby (field tape): And here we go. Coyote urine. Wow. God, this little bottle looks like a you put, like, vanilla extract or something in this.
Nate Hegyi: How much did that bottle cost?
Taylor Quimby: It was about seven bucks.
Nate Hegyi: All right. Not too bad.
Taylor Quimby: And, you know, on NHPR. Of course on NHPR. The weirdest thing I'll ever expense, I think.
Nate Hegyi: Sorry, Jim.
[Mux - Nom’s Castle, Blue Dot Sessions]
Taylor Quimby: Yeah. So I grabbed my four ounce bottle of coyote urine. I take it to the checkout counter. And I head home to give it a whiff because I just felt like I had to! Nate Hegyi: You're doing God's work.
Taylor Quimby (field tape): Taking off the protective seal. I'm not gonna, like, just whiff this. I'm gonna pour a little bit out carefully. Oh, yeah.
It's like friggin Coca-Cola Brown. Wow. [Sniff]. You know, it's not as bad as I would have thought.
[coughs/gags suddenly] Oh. Okay. Yeah, it's pretty pungent. Yeah.
[mux swells and fades]
Nate Hegyi: Taylor. If the urine is Coca-Cola Brown, don't sniff it. I mean, what did you expect, man?
Taylor Quimby: This is journalism, my man. This is how. This is how you get the job done.
Nate Hegyi: All right. All right, well, I guess. Thank you.
Taylor Quimby: So, where is all this coyote urine coming from? After Jeanie left us this message, you know, I started to make some calls. And right off the bat, I discovered this is one of those stories where nobody really wants to talk to you.
And you've had this before, right? Sometimes you, you know, you start reaching out and you just get crickets.
Nate Hegyi: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Like, vast swaths of the federal government are like that. You just get crickets.
Taylor Quimby: So I decide to pivot and try and answer Jeannie's first question whether coyote urine could even help with her deer problem in the first place, and I wound up reaching out to this woman.
Caroline Long: Sometimes people hear that I'm a graduate student and that I'm a scientist, and they think they're like, oh, you must be all like prim and proper. And I'm like, I'm literally out in muck boots, like squatting over a giant turd, like messing with pee.
Nate Hegyi: Now that's science.
Taylor Quimby: So this is Caroline Long. She is an ecology student at Utah State, and she jokes that she's getting a PhD in PE because she's actually studying how urine plays a role in coyote relationships.
Caroline Long: The studies that they've done with sense have shown that, you know, certain animals can distinguish even individual identity from a scent, and then they can tell, you know, how old is this scent? Um, was this individual stressed when they deposited this scent? You know, things like that, which I think is so cool because, again, I personally don't get that information from a smell.
Taylor Quimby: So what Caroline told me is that there is quite a bit of research out there on using animal urine as a deterrent.
But a lot of that research is actually focused on whether predator urine can be used – not for deer – but to keep other predators away.
Caroline Long: So if you put out the scent of a wolf pack, it keeps wolves from entering into that area because they sense, oh, there's a neighboring pack there, I don't want to risk getting in trouble for going over there. And it's pretty effective.
Taylor Quimby: It's like an invisible fence.
Caroline Long: Yeah. Like, I think they call it a bio fence.
Ironically, Caroline says that the research shows this doesn’t hold true for coyotes – basically, they’re not as scared about entering another pack’s territory as wolves are – they’re a little more curious, AND not quite as territorial.
I saw a study they tried to do with coyotes, and the coyotes were like all up in the scent, like, just completely opposite effect, like, totally attracted to it. Like way more likely to go over there.
Nate Hegyi: Okay. I wonder if that's a big reason why they've also just been able to spread across the entire country just like, you know, we're not going to kill each other.
Taylor Quimby: It is. And listeners should listen to our previous episode on the wonder that is the coyote. Uh, to hear more about that.
Nate Hegyi: That's a good plug right there.
Taylor Quimby: Where this gets complicated, is that there are all sorts of factors here that might make a difference in the reaction a scent might provoke – you know, is this urine from a male or a female, from a whole pack or just a single individual?
But to get back to our listener's strawberry deer problem, Caroline says that for gardeners that stuff doesn’t matter as much...
Caroline Long: For people who, for instance, some people will use, coyote urine as a deterrent in their gardens. Um, and I do think for a prey species, the specifics aren't as important. You don't care if it's one coyote or 12 coyotes. You don't care if it's, you know, a male coyote or a female coyote. It's a coyote, and it's a threat. And like, I'm out of here.
[mux - Calisson, Blue Dot Sessions]
Nate Hegyi: Okay, so it works.
Taylor Quimby: Yeah. I mean, it’s a little mixed but there is some research. Not a ton, but there's been some work done that shows coyote urine is moderately effective as a deterrent for deer. Basically, researchers applied it to different trees and plants, and generally they saw deer browsing go down in those areas.
There are some caveats. One study in Connecticut found coyote urine had no deterrent effect on deer browsing of yew saplings.
There's also some evidence that if the deer density is too high, or if you just keep using the same stuff week after week after week, prey species - like deer - are probably gonna stop caring. You know, they're not going to be spooked indefinitely.
[mux swell and fade]
But this does bring us back to the main question, which is who are the coyotes providing this pee? Mhm. So in Caroline's case, she's actively working with coyotes at this research facility in Utah. And she only needs tiny little vials for her experiments. So if a coyote pup she's working with pees on the floor, she can just pipette it up and save it for later. You know, don't let that waste go to waste. And she says, you know, that is totally different than the commercially available stuff that I bought at Bass Pro.
Caroline Long: From what I’ve learned. And I don't again, I don't know anyone who produces commercial coyote urine, but what I've heard is that it's sort of a farm situation where they have coyotes in enclosures and there's like metal chutes, that kind of pool, all the urine at the bottom, and then they collect it from there.
[mux - Slowest Time, Blue Dot Sessions]
Nate Hegyi: That doesn't sound too nice.
Taylor Quimby: Hmm. Well, after the break, I will try a little harder to get a peek inside one of these quote farm situations.
Nate Hegyi: Stick around.
BREAK
Hey, this is Outside/In, I'm Nate Hegy here with producer Taylor Quimby, and in classic outside in fashion, we are talking all about animal pee.
Taylor Quimby: So, you know, at this point in my investigation, I decided to pivot back to the main question: where is all this coyote urine coming from? Who is collecting it? And I decided to reach out to distributors who are selling it wholesale. Okay? And one of my first tries was a guy based in Maine named Ken Johnson.
Ken Johnson (tape from The Economics of Everyday Things podcast): Well, I'm known as the pee man. I started an operate Predator Pee.com.
Nate Hegyi: “I'm known as the pee man.” That's amazing.
Taylor Quimby: If it's good for business, you know…
Nate Hegyi: You gotta do it.
Taylor Quimby: Embrace it.
Now, Ken declined to be interviewed by me, but he did speak with another podcast called The Economics of Everyday Things, which is where I got this tape.
Ken Johnson (tape from The Economics of Everyday Things podcast): When you're in this business, you know, you have a lot of opportunities to smell things. They each have a very unique aroma.
Taylor Quimby: Now at PredatorPee.Com you can buy a whole lot of varieties of pee. They've got coyote urine, wolf urine, bobcat urine if you need it, even bear urine.
Nate Hegyi: Okay.
Taylor Quimby: And Ken, in this interview says the source of all this stuff is pretty straightforward.
Ken Johnson (tape from The Economics of Everyday Things podcast): The animals are, in various places: zoos, game farms, refuges. They collect the urine with a floor drain and they ship it to us. And that's about it. It's not very complicated.
[mux swells]
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, it's kind of like a secondary economy. Like…
Taylor Quimby: Yeah, yeah.
Nate Heygi: You know, you got the animals and then, hey, the waste… make a couple bucks off that too.
Taylor Quimby: So I heard this, and I was like, okay, I guess that's plausible. So I started calling zoos…
Taylor Quimby (field tape): I have got probably the weirdest question that anybody is going to ask you today…
And animal sanctuaries.
Voice: Hello, and thank you for calling Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary.
Taylor Quimby: I reached out to about a dozen places in the New England region and beyond.
Taylor (field tape): I'm working on a story, and I'm trying to fact check a pretty odd question about...
Taylor Quimby: But of the six that got back to me, not one of them collected animal urine.
Voice: We’ve never ever been approached to do that.
Taylor Quimby: And most of them had never heard that this was even a thing at all.
Voice: I have not ever heard of it. I have not ever heard of any zoos or wildlife sanctuaries that work with those animals.
[mux fades]
Nate Hegyi: Hmm. Is the pee man full of number two?
Taylor Quimby: Well, uh, even though, uh, they said no to my original interview request, I did email and leave messages back. I said, you know, would you provide a list of the places you get your urine from?
Nate Hegyi. Yeah.
Taylor Quimby: They never responded.
Nate Hegyi: Suspicious.
Taylor Quimby: So next, I reached out to another punny pee retailer. This guy has a line of urine products under the name Scent-sational Classic.
Nate Hegyi: Very clever.
Taylor Quimby: And he. I was really pleased to know was willing to chat.
Ed Brookmyer: Yes. I think most people, uh, you know, wonder how have you actually get it?
Taylor Quimby: So this is Ed Brookmyer. He is president of Bare Ground Solutions. Refreshingly candid with me.
He told me he gets his supply from a trapper, uh, who works on a farm in Illinois. And he says, listen, this guy is just one of a big network of folks who do this.
Ed Brookmyer: And so what they do in a general sense is they have enclosures. And the animals obviously are an asset to this business, to their business. And so they take extra precaution to make sure they protect their assets, and they have graded floors that collect all of the waste. And as disgusting as it may seem, they collect it, they strain it, and they actually put it into drums and barrels and ship it all over the country.
Nate Hegyi: Okay, so wait, are like trappers, like trapping coyotes and then bringing them back home and, like, putting them in cages and waiting for them to pee. I'm very confused.
Taylor Quimby: Well, that’s fair because this is confusing stuff, so let me take this one thing at a time.
In a lot of states, trapping and keeping – or even owning coyotes at all – is outright illegal. So for example, here in New Hampshire, the only people who can keep a coyote are licensed wildlife rehab facilities. Ok?
There are other states that ARE more permissive, but in a lot of those it’s still illegal to trap and keep those trapped wild animals. But in some of those states, you can get a permit to buy coyotes, to use them for their fur, their urine, or to breed and sell them as pets.
And then there are, frankly, some states that are pretty much the Wild West – few to no regulations on a whole host of laws around exotic animals.
But regardless of the state by state rules, or who exactly is doing the collecting, I think what people like our listener Caroline want to know is what do these places look like? How are the animals treated?
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, are they like animal sanctuaries, or factory farms, or somewhere in between?
So I asked Ed Brookmyer, the guy who sells Scentsational coyote urine, what can you tell me about the welfare of these animals?
Ed Brookmyer: I have not been to the farm. And what I have found is the people who are in this business are very, very close to the vest. They don't invite you in, they don't want you to learn how to do what they do. And I respect that.
So what I do ask is that they furnish me with a vet report. There are vets that go out and inspect the animals on a monthly basis to make sure that the animals are being humanely treated.
Nate Hegyi: Hmm. Okay… So, you know, you were kind of talking earlier about kind of a lack of regulation on this, but at least I guess vets are going out to check on these coyotes?
Taylor Quimby: Maybe in some cases, but I think it’s important to know that even in the places with regulations, you know, vets aren’t endorsing the practice – they’d only be saying, ok, these animals aren’t sick or diseased.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah.
Taylor Quimby: Another way to think about this is, you can have a puppy mill that gets regular vet checks – which is better than not – but it doesn't mean it’s not a puppy mill, right?
Taylor Quimby: So again, I really want to get a firsthand view, or at least account, of what these places look like. In Ed’s case, he shared the name of the trapper he buys his urine from.
So I gave that guy a call. I will say we had a really polite conversation, but he wouldn't share any details and, you know, didn't want to go on the record to say anything except listen. No offense, but what your listeners think about this topic is none of my business. It is not my job to convince them of anything.
Nate Hegyi: I don't really know about that, though, right? Taylor. Because it's like when you're buying something, whether it's coyote urine or lettuce at the grocery store. You kind of want to know where it came from.
Taylor Quimby: Totally. So I reached back out to Ed, and he provided the name of the vet he says checks out their farm.
I gave that guy a call, and get this – the vet told me he’d never been to this urine farm, had never even heard of the trapper who runs it, and from what I can tell, it looks like the vet report that Ed has gotten was a forged document.
NH: Scandalous! Wow.
Taylor Quimby: I have tried really hard to see inside this world.
I reached out to a couple other producers, I reached out to state and national trapper’s associations. They either won’t talk to me, say they know nothing about the industry, or won’t share any real details about the urine farms where they get this stuff.
Nate Hegyi: Well, this is the problem of like keeping things like this in the dark is because, you know, you're… I don't know about you, but I automatically start thinking, well, you know, if there's no regulations, nobody wants to talk about this… There might be some bad stuff happening that people would rather just keep in the dark.
Taylor Quimby: So speaking of which, as I was struggling to know whether or not we could really even do this story.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah.
Taylor Quimby: I stumble across a report from last year that sort of flew under the radar, and I got in touch with this woman.
Laura Koivula: My name is Laura Koivula. I am the director of animal crimes and investigations for Humane World for animals.
Taylor Quimby: So Laura works for Humane World, formerly the Humane Society. She was a former animal control officer, had a very no nonsense detective vibe, and she starts telling me this story.
Laura Koivula: Yeah. So it was just, uh, I think it was the evening before Christmas day. And it was an email from Ashtabula County, which we had been in touch with previously.
Taylor Quimby: This is the end of 2024. Ashtabula County is a rural patch of Ohio outside of Cleveland that borders Lake Erie. And the email is about a place called the Grand River Fur Exchange.
Laura Koivula: We received a complaint about that property about eight years ago.
Laura Koivula: We knew that the conditions on the property were not great, but we also knew that they had a current license from the state to propagate these species.
Taylor Quimby: And what she reads in this email is that the owner of The Grand River Fur Exchange, Mark Gutman, has died. And when authorities show up on this property, they have no idea what to do.
Laura Koivula: So myself and one of my colleagues went out just to get kind of a handle on the situation.
[mux - Slowest Time, Blue Dot Sessions]
Taylor Quimby: Laura flies out from Maryland, out to Cleveland.
Laura Koivula: It was January, so very, very cold.
Taylor Quimby: We're talking single digits. There's tons of snow on the ground.
Laura Koivula: Driving down the road. There were small farm-ettes, larger farms, houses, a gas station. And I actually drove past this place more than one time trying to find the entrance, and it just looked like a house.
Laura Koivula: You drove back behind the house and you kept driving and driving. You went over like a little creek. And there was this stockade fencing. And behind this stockade fencing were just these buildings.
Taylor Quimby: Uh, and a quick warning for you Nate, and for listeners, this is about to get pretty graphic. What Laura finds in that first building are rows of cages with coyotes, raccoons and foxes.
Laura Koivula: Um, it was quite jarring. So the majority of the coyotes were in tiny metal wire cages with no access to a wooden box, so they had no shelter or the majority of the coyotes. And these wire cages looked almost like crab pots.
Taylor Quimby: In the next building, more cages, this time with wolf dogs, opossums, skunks.
Laura Koivula: Most of the animals could not stand up straight.
Taylor Quimby: And then outside, we're talking, exposed to the elements even more cages. I mean, it just kept going and going and going.
Laura Koivula: There were a number of dead animals still in their enclosures. Um, some covered in snow. There were some dead animals still in with living animals in the same cage. Some of the animals had missing limbs and ears or tails.
[mux ends]
It was really horrifying. It was one of the most. Horrifying things I had ever seen. And so I can't imagine a person who raises or keeps these animals in that condition and sees it every day. I just I can't comprehend that.
Taylor Quimby: All told, they found over 400 animals on this farm. About a quarter of them were in bad enough shape that they were euthanized. It took the team about three weeks and a lot of money to process and relocate the rest. And I don't relish really lingering on more details here, but we did kind of skip over the subject at hand, which is like, you know, how are they collecting the urine? That's what we've been here to talk about. And that is what we are going to answer right now.
Laura Koivula: Yeah. So he was farming the urine of all of the animals. So the skunks, the fox, the coyotes, the raccoons.
Taylor Quimby: And as opposed to some of the other descriptions we've heard at this point, you know, slanted floors with grates in the middle that catch and collect urine. You know, these cages at the Grand River Fur Exchange. They were off the ground. There were no floors at all. Animals are going to the bathroom right onto the bottoms of these mesh cages. We're talking both number one and number two. And that would drip into, you know, these sort of wide gutters that lead into buckets.
Laura Koivula: Luckily for us, it was majority of the time it was frozen because it was the middle of the winter, but it still smelled pretty horrible. There was one weekend where it did get above freezing and everything started to melt. And I cannot explain to you the absolute gut wrenching, vomit inducing smell. I mean, it was in your hair and your clothes, the rental vehicles that we were driving in.
Nate Hegyi: How long had Mark been dead for? When they got the call
Taylor Quimby: There was another person who, like a caretaker that also worked with him. So he was found the same day he died.
Nate Heygi: So this wasn't just like, hey, he'd been dead for a couple of weeks and, you know, operations had stopped and animals had died.
Taylor Quimby: Nope.
Nate Hegyi: Geez. That's a that's brutal.
Taylor Quimby: Yeah. So here's here's my dilemma, Nate. You know, I cannot tell you that other urine farms look anything like this one, right?
It is possible that this place was the exception rather than the rule. I will say Laura is doubtful that’s the case.
Laura Koivula: I don't think that there is probably a higher standard held commonly. Um, and the reason that I, I think that is because the profit margin is, is fairly low. And so in, in order to kind of make a profit off of this, off of urine, essentially they have to have high numbers and spend little money on each animal.
But neither of us can tell you that for sure. Because A) nobody else was willing to go on the record, and B) despite some states that have some rules around these things, there is no federal oversight on urine farms whatsoever.
Laura Koivula: So we don't know how many of these farms exist. We know that there are quite a few, um, they are not regulated. There's no registration or license. So we don't… we have no idea.
Taylor Quimby: This is one of those episodes where we're like, oh, there is no fun way to end this. Yeah. Uh, you know, I have two things to say. First, if anybody listening out there knows more than we do. You know, if you know a zoo or a company that is doing this in a completely different way, like we would want to hear about that. Please email us. Our email is outside in at nhpr.org.
Nate Hegyi: Absolutely.
Taylor Quimby: Yeah. And the second thing I want to say is a big thank you to our longtime fan, Jeannie, for sending this question in, because I think this story tells us a lot about the power of curiosity. You know, lots of people I talked to for this story, their first reaction was, I had no idea this existed. Or they'd be like, yeah, you know, I never wondered where it comes from. Yeah. And I think this is a space where if you don't bring that curiosity, if you don't wonder, it stays in the dark. And for some companies, some people, that is how they would prefer it. So I don't know. I think we should stay curious, folks. That's my big takeaway.