All right, this is Ellen Weatherford.

I'm here with Just the Zoo of Us, your favorite animal review podcast.

And this week we have a brand new friend.

This is Jasmine.

Say hi, Jasmine.

Hi, hi, everybody.

I'm super excited to be here.

Yay, I'm so excited to talk to you today.

First of all about our really cool animal, but we'll get into that in a minute. Before we talk about our cool animal today, why don't you introduce yourself a little bit for our friends and tell us who you are and what got you into working with coyotes? Yeah, so my name's Jasmine. I'm also known as Sunny. I kind of go by both names, so I don't want anybody

get confused. I'm the same person. Don't worry. I guess right now, I'm kind of a master's student in limbo.

So I got my bachelor's of science in zoology at UC Santa Barbara. And then wanted to be a wildlife biologist but that's like a crazy

competitive field so I just kind of ended up going back to school and doing environmental policy

and management and so you know my program at first it like started off I didn't really know what

I wanted to do I knew I wanted to kind of look into kind of wildlife and the natural world in the context of cities and stuff.

And at first I concentrated on urban gardening, which was like cool, but I just wasn't passionate about it.

And then I happened to find that there's a lot of controversy surrounding the management of coyotes.

So I started to kind of look more into it and it just kind of ended up being this rabbit hole that I like live in now.

So yeah, there's just there's a lot of not only ethical controversy but cultural controversy that's actually rooted

hundreds and hundreds of years ago in colonialism. And so that really pushed me to not only

want to learn more about coyotes, but get involved with kind of destigmatizing the species and

getting people to learn more about them. And so with that, I've

ended up kind of venturing more into SciCom, which is science communication. And that led me to

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