TBRC's Response to: Could Bigfoot Live in Texas?

The Texas Bigfoot Research Conservancy has a lot of very smart people in their group. Their articles are generally well written, scientific and very thoughtful. To see what we mean, you have to read their response to physical anthropologist and Bigfoot skeptic, Eugenie C. Scott's lecture about the possibility of Bigfoot in Texas. According to Dr. Scott, it’s not possible for a large primate to exist in Texas due to the lack of available food.  Although she thinks there is a less than 5% chance Bigfoot is real, she is optimistic about the scientific approach towards the subject and praised people like Dr. Jeff Meldrum for being on the right track.

In their response, TBRC’s Alton Higgins and Daryl Colyer expressed their profound disagreement with Dr. Scott's comments and noted a number of large animals living in eastern Texas such coyotes, wild hogs, and black bears.

Here TBRC's transcript of Dr. Scott speaking at a conference in San Francisco, CA about “Bigfoot and Other Wild Men of the Forest”:

One thing you want to consider is where do these creatures live? Well, they live all over the place. There’s a Texas bigfoot group and they have marked where bigfoot has been spotted, they claim, in Texas. You can find maps like this for virtually any state in the country. Bigfoot appears not just in the Pacific Northwest and in northern California, which is where we’re used to thinking about bigfoot as Californians, they occur in Nebraska and in the Ozarks and in the Appalachians and Texas, not too far from Austin, apparently, from the looks of this one map.

So, okay, if they live all over the place, does that make it less likely or more likely that they really exist? I would suggest that it probably makes it less likely, because if you’re a very large mammal you’re probably going to be fairly specialized to a, well, not overly specialized, not like a koala bear or something like that, but there’s going to be a certain limitation to the kinds of environments that you can live in.

One thing, consider a large-bodied primate like a gorilla. Now gorillas live in a tropical environment. Yeah, some of the bigfoot, you know, some of the “Big Guys” live in tropical environments, but most of them are reported from temperate environments, and western Texas is not a tropical environment. Okay? Gorillas live in tropical environments, they have to take in, given their body size, they have to take in something like eight or nine thousand calories a day. They tend not to eat very calorie-rich food. A gorilla eats mostly leaves and shoots, the fruits when they can get it, nuts if they can get it, but they’re mostly folivores, they’re mostly leaf eaters, and a gorilla will spend something like half of his waking hours eating.

Now you go to, you see the movies on National Geographic and so forth of gorillas, they’ve got these big guts? Reason for that. Because they have to keep eating constantly, almost constantly, in order to get enough calories to keep that big bulk going. And the kind of food they tend to eat, leaves tend to be not very high calorie foods, and because that’s the major component of their diet, they tend to really have to eat a whole lot.

Okay, what is there to eat in western Texas that would be comparable, that, to keep alive a really big mammal like that? Those are the kinds of questions you need to ask if you’re going to look scientifically at bigfoot. Because, the first question you want to ask is, “How do these observations fit with everything else we know from science?” Okay. If we know from science that big-bodied primates have to eat a lot of food, then what does that tell you about the carrying capacity of the environment?

Click here to read TBRC's response to Dr. Scott.