It’s October, MONSTER MONTH! We’re starting it off right with an episode about the Yeti! I literally could have made this episode an hour long without even touching on half the information out there, but no one wants to listen to me talk for that long. If you're intrigued and want to hear more about our big furry friend from the Himalayas, check out the fine podcasts listed below. The Himalayas, in map form: A Himalayan brown bear (tongue blep alert!): A bear standing up (this is a brown bear from Alaska but I like the picture. Bears stand up a lot): Recommended listening: Museum of Natural Mystery - episode 14: "Backtracking with Bigfoot" - highly recommended for information about North American bigfoot/Sasquatch lore and history. It's family friendly and not very long. I heart it. MonsterTalk - episode 116 "Yetipalooza" - lots of Yeti information and some terrible, terrible puns Strange Matters Podcast - "Legendary Humanoid Creatures" - a good overview of a lot of different bigfoot type monsters, including the Yeti Hidden Creatures Podcast - Episode Six A "Yearning for the Yeti's Discovery" and Episode Six B "The Yeti...Again" - lots of info on the Yeti All of the above should be family friendly, with possible mild language. Resources/further reading: The Historical Bigfoot by Chad Arment Abominable Science! by Daniel Loxton and Donald R. Prothero Hunting Monsters by Darren Naish Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. It’s October and that means monsters. Let’s jump right in with one of the biggest stars of cryptozoology, bigfoot! As part of my research for this episode, I listened to other podcasts that have covered bigfoot and his kin. One of those was the Museum of Natural Mystery’s episode 14, Backtracking with Bigfoot. I was more than a little dismayed when I listened to that one, because it’s exactly what I had hoped to do with this episode. In fact, while Museum of Natural Mystery covers other topics than just animals, when they do focus on animals they scratch the same itch I created Strange Animals podcast to scratch. If I’d discovered them earlier, the podcast you’re listening to now would probably be about music or something, not animals. There’s a link to Backtracking with Bigfoot in the show notes and I highly recommend you go listen to it. It focuses mainly on the Bigfoot phenomenon in North America, from Sasquatch to skunk apes. Rather than cover the same ground, my focus here is going to be on bigfoot legends from other parts of the world. There’s so much fascinating information out there that I had to break the episode into two parts. This week we’re looking at the yeti. But first, some background. There are a couple of starting places for the modern concept of bigfoot. In 1921, the Everest Reconnaissance Expedition found tracks in the snow resembling a bare human foot. They realized the tracks were probably made by wolves, the front and rear tracks overlapping and the snow melted enough to obscure the paw pads. Expedition leader Charles Howard-Bury wrote that the expedition’s Sherpa guides claimed the tracks were made by a wild hairy man. At about the same time, the 1920s, British Columbian schoolteacher John W. Burns was collecting reports of Native encounters with giant wild people. He coined the term Sasquatch by anglicizing a couple of different words from several different Native dialects. Burns published his stories in magazines. Howard-Bury talked to reporters about his Everest expedition. The idea of bigfoot took shape and took off in the public imagination. It merged with giant apes and ape-men in popular culture, like King Kong in 1933 and the movie Tarzan the Ape Man in 1932, both of which were huge hits. Before this, from the early 19th century to around the 1940s, newspaper reports that would today be called bigfoot sightings were attributed to wild men or occasionally to esc...