Season 8 Episode 14: Blame Canada(?) and Tarantula Emotional Support Animals

Smoke turns the sky orange and suddenly everyone wants a simple villain. We get why that’s tempting, but we care more about what the evidence says about Canadian wildfires, boreal forest fire behavior, and the real drivers behind those brutal smoke days that drift into the U.S. Midwest and East Coast. We walk through just how massive Canada’s boreal forest is, why so many ignitions happen far from roads and crews, and why lightning-caused wildfires account for so much of the total area burned. Once fires hit “extreme” size and intensity, the goal shifts from “put it out” to “protect people and infrastructure,” because the physics stops cooperating.

We also talk about the spooky side of mega fires: pyrocumulus clouds and fire thunderstorms that can generate their own lightning and spread. From there, we connect the dots to climate change and why hotter, drier conditions raise the likelihood of severe burn seasons, alongside knock-on effects like pest-killed trees adding fuel. And we don’t skip the health impacts either, because wildfire smoke and fine particulate matter are a serious air quality issue, not just an inconvenience.

Then we pivot to a different kind of public trust question: emotional support animals. ESAs can be meaningful, but they don’t always come with specialized training or consistent public access rules. We break down research on what shapes trust in ESA owners, why dogs are judged differently than snakes or tarantulas, and why the setting matters so much (a park feels different than a gym or a plane). If you like smart science with real-world stakes and a few laughs along the way, subscribe, share this with a friend, and leave us a review. What’s the most unexpected ESA you’ve ever heard of?

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Transcript

Welcome To Science And Pets

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Hello, science enthusiasts. I'm Jason Zakowski.

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And I'm Chris Zakowski.

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We're the pet parents of Bunsen Beaker, Bernoulli, and Bricks.

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The science animals on social media. If you love science and you love pets, you've come to the right spot.

SPEAKER_00 0:25

So put on your safety glasses.

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And hold on to your tail.

SPEAKER_00 0:29

This is the Science Podcast. Hi, everybody, and welcome back to the Science Podcast. This is episode 14 of season eight. Chris, are you enjoying the summer?

SPEAKER_01 0:41

I am. I really am enjoying the summer. The weather is super nice now that it's not raining every day, and we've been out and about doing things together with the family, with ourselves, with the dogs, with bricks. It's just been one big adventure that

Bricks Becomes A Hiking Cat

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we've been sharing with each other and the world with our social media.

SPEAKER_00 1:01

I know. And we have a new addition to the pack, and that's Bricks. He has been a hiking cat, which has been crazy. Can't believe it.

SPEAKER_01 1:10

I know. When I put him down for the first time, and I was like, I guess we'll just see what happens now. He just started walking. And if by walking, I mean he booked it. He was just given her as he was walking down by Gorado Canyon, and the dogs were like, Oh, I guess Bricks is walking with us. Yeah. Great. Awesome. And he just was like a little man on a mission, I tell you.

SPEAKER_00 1:38

Yeah, pretty incredible. What's on the show this week? In Science News, should we blame Canada for all of the wildfire smoke? That is was a hot button issue a couple a week ago and even today with all of the smoke that's in the air. Probably not, but we're a little biased as we're from Canada. Yeah. And in pet science, we're going to talk about emotional support animals and public trust with emotional support animals. It's an interesting study where they looked at how people feel about those ESAs, emotional support animals.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

And part of our interest in that is we are looking at training Bernoulli to see if he could be considered a facility dog or a therapy dog. And ESAs are definitely part of the package that we're learning about as we

Two Big Stories Ahead

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journey with Bernoulli.

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There's no time like Science Time.

Wildfire Smoke And The Blame Game

SPEAKER_00 2:39

This week in Science News, let's talk about those wildfires that are raging across Canada, creating a lot of smoke. And that smoke has definitely annoyed our friends to the South, the Americans. There was a whole bunch of news programs about people unhappy with the smoke. Politicians got into the blame game, and it reminds me of that song that both you and I love from South Park called Blame Canada.

SPEAKER_01 3:04

We love a lot of songs from South Park for sure. We laugh out loud every time we sing them together. But yeah, Blame Canada was definitely top S tier for sure.

SPEAKER_00 3:17

Okay, so let's start talking about something that we've had like really good discussions with folks all over the world, but specifically Americans, and that's how vast Canada's boreal forests are. It's a scope that's really tough to understand for folks that are from smaller countries. Uh, I'm thinking like the European countries, and even though the United States is an extremely large country, uh it is a much more populated country than Canada. Our boreal forests specifically cover around 200 million hectares. And if you think about all of the boreal forests in the world, that's 28% of them. It's the most. Canada has the most forests that are boreal in the world. And if you were to superimpose our forest over a country, that's the same as India. The entire country of India, just trees. That's it. Just trees, India. And Canada alone has a quarter of the world's remaining intact forest, which is larger than the Amazon rainforest. So it is really tough to wrap your head around, but it is just an enormous part of Canada.

SPEAKER_01 4:36

And our Boreal region alone actually accounts for roughly 75% of all of Canada's forested land. And it stretches actually in an arc from the Mackenzie Delta to the Alaska border all the way to Newfoundland and Labrador. So it's massive, the amount of forest that we have. And it's kind of interesting because we don't a lot of Canadians don't live there. It's inhabitable. And yeah, so they're not there to start the fires or fight the fires. It's just wonderful forest that we have in our country.

SPEAKER_00 5:15

Yeah, I always say that if you drive north of Edmonton just a bit, off the roads on either side. Emmonton is the capital of Alberta. It's just trees. It's trees as far as you can see, with thousands of little lakes and ponds and stuff dotting all the way to the Arctic Circle. Just trees. All right, so let's talk about the 2026 fire season. Specifically, we're going to focus in on Ontario, because that's where all that wildfire smoke blew south, caused a bunch of problems. There are currently more than 190 wildfires burning across or burned across Ontario, and that's cooked almost three-quarters of a million

How Huge The Boreal Forest Is

SPEAKER_00 5:58

hectares of boreal forest. So it seems like that's a lot, but it's not even a million. And remember, we have 270 million hectares. So it's a sizable chunk, but set like that amount of boreal forest may be the entire boreal forest other countries have that is now burned up. And smoke from those fires is what blew south into the US, Midwest, and East Coast of Canada, which was similar to something that happened a couple of years ago in 2023. But what's causing these fires, Chris?

SPEAKER_01 6:30

It's lightning, basically, not carelessness, that drives the worst of the fires. So when I'm talking about lightning, that's definitely a natural cause. Human activity consists of cigarettes, campfire, embers, and rail sparks, start actually the roughly the same numbers of fire each year. So there isn't necessarily an increase in human activity, but lightning does account for about 92% of total area burned because it strikes in remote regions where fires are monitored rather than actively fought. As a result, scientists note that the boreal forest evolved to burn periodically as part of its natural renewal cycle. Suppression of fires isn't always ecologically desirable unless communities are threatened. But effective firefighting generally requires quick response, typically within the first 30 minutes of ignition, and that's rarely feasible in our vast, sparsely populated wilderness. They're not there right there to be able to start that firefighting process. Now, the good news is that public education briefly reduced human-caused fires by 2018, but those numbers are climbing again. But it's not necessarily because people are more careless, but we do have a hotter, drier landscape, which means even a small spark can ignite a major fire.

SPEAKER_00 8:00

Yeah, we I've seen a small fire start from in our front yard, Jason. Okay, not that one. That's the one I caused. That did not cause cause a forest fire, Chris. That caused a grass fire. Anyways, when I was a teenager and we were driving in the mountains, sa a rock kicked off of a truck and it s sparked into the ditch and started a fire. Because it was on a highway close to civilization, that fire was put out pretty quickly. If these lightnings strike, like you say, way up north where nobody even lives and nobody's around, they're out of control by the time they're detected. And and as we're gonna talk, once once these fires reach

Lightning Starts The Biggest Burns

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a certain point, nothing you can do will put them out. They become like a hurricane. If we had the technology to stop hurricanes, we would. So fires exceeding the what firefighters and the firefighting forces in Canada call call extreme fires are fires that are exceeding 200,000 hectares burning. These are a small amount of the fires in Canada, they're about 3%, but because they're so huge, it accounts for 97% of all of the fire areas that's burnt. And these fires are burn so hot and they're in such a large area, they create spooky things, like super spooky stuff. They make their own weather, they produce fire thunderstorms, which basically makes lightning that spawn even more fires. So it's they get so hot they create these weird clouds.

SPEAKER_01 9:40

They're called pyrocumulus clouds. So they are pyromaniacs, but pyrocumulus clouds. And it's not funny. I know we shouldn't be laughing about it because it is devastating.

SPEAKER_00 9:52

But the scale of fires are like the ski once they reach the size, the scale of them becomes really again, just like the size of the boreal forests in Canada. They're really hard to wrap your head around. Conventional firefighting tools fail to work. You can drop all of the water on them that you want. You you just can't stop them. You have to wait for them to burn out and stop. And you have to hope for wind and you have to hope for rain. One guy on the news, he was talking about them. He's like, Have you ever tried to put out a bonfire by peeing on it? That's basically what it's like with all of the conventional firefighting tools that we have. And the soil gets so hot it can smolder for weeks after these big fires, and a little bit of wind can get it going again. And so the ground crews that are attempting to deal with it, they have to go in with infrared cameras to spot all those hot spots and put them out.

SPEAKER_01 10:47

So the firefight fighters are working very hard. They take it very seriously. They do want to contain these fires and make sure that civilization is protected. But there is some misinformation out there that is complicating this fire management. Now, there have been some claims that suggest poor forest management. So failing to clear old trees or debris is to blame for Canada's fires. But the researchers do dispute this because our remote Boreal forests spanning about 300 million hectares have never actively been managed. So all of a sudden, a lack of management wouldn't explain a recent increase in the extreme fires. Instead, scientists are pointing to climate change, making our boreal forests structurally more prone to severe burns, which is an inevitable thing with climate change.

SPEAKER_00 11:49

So forests, the boreal forests are definitely on a natural cycle where that's how they replenish themselves. The big trees take up all of the sunlight and they choke out the ground. And a forest fire comes along and takes out the old trees that have died and the elder trees, and a lot of the acorns need fire for them to open. That is the only way they open to create more trees. And so there's that. We shouldn't downplay the health impacts of wildfire smoke because there's it's not necessarily great to breathe it in. In a lot of places in eastern Canada and the Midwest of the United States, they had the worst air quality on Earth when this was happening. Wildfire smoke particles contain little tiny tiny particles 30 times smaller than the a human hair, and that's enough to get it lodged in your

When Fires Create Their Own Weather

SPEAKER_00 12:45

bloodstream or your lungs. This smoke also carries harmful gases like formaldehyde and benzene and ozone and all of this crap made all a lot of the places that were had all the smoke tell people to stay indoors and don't go outside.

SPEAKER_01 13:03

Now in Canada here, 2023 remains Canada's worst fire year on record. So in 2023, we had roughly 15 million hectares burned, which is about the size, an area the size of Illinois, which is a state in the United States, which actually was more than double the previous record, which was 6.9 million hectares. So there was a climate attribution study, and it found that climate change more than doubled the likelihood of the extreme fire conditions seen in eastern Canada that year in 2023. Now, Canada also is warming at roughly twice the global average rate. So we are experiencing longer summers, which I love, earlier snow melt, also I love, and drier soils, which all of these things I love add more available fuel. So that's super unfortunate. Additionally, like if we're talking about climate change and our jet stream patterns, those shifting jet stream patterns are reducing precipitation. And the warmer winters are expanding the range of the pine bark beetles. Definitely it's a concern the pine bark beetle between Alberta and British Columbia because the pine beetles kill trees, and then the dead trees add more dry fuel.

SPEAKER_00 14:36

Yeah, those pine bark beetles are nasty. We've driven to British Columbia many times, and you drive through sections of the forest, and there'll be a massive section of the forest that's just dead from the pine bark beetle.

SPEAKER_01 14:50

Another thing that's important to note is the six most active fire years on record actually have occurred in the past decade. And more land was burned between 2017 and 2025 than the rest of the historical record combined. And 2023, 2024,

Climate Change And Smoke Health Risks

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and 2025 were the first three consecutive big fire years on record, which now we're looking at 2026. And that's a test of whether this is now the annual norm, or is this an anomaly of having those three consecutive big fire years on record? If we continue the course that we are, we need to continue doing research to see if we're on that path or that trajectory.

SPEAKER_00 15:38

So that's a little bit about the forest fires in Canada. Could our governments do more to

Firefighting Limits And Global Help

SPEAKER_00 15:45

fight forest fires? Probably. There could be more personnel that's hired to fight fires. We could get more bombers and more equipment that could potentially nail down some of the smaller ones. But from the experts that we've listened to, it's just a tough thing. There's just too much forest where nobody lives. And because of that, there's no infrastructure at all to get personnel or water up there or that Canada does is we have all we do share our forest fighting, our forest firefighting knowledge with the world and our personnel. While these fires are going on, some of our personnel were down in the states helping them with their fires. And when California had big fires, there were our best crews were down there helping. We currently have crews right now with in Spain helping as well. And you might say, why are they there instead of here? And it the answer is that they can help. Those fires, they the fires that are were in Canada, they're just too big to do anything about. So they'll of course be recalled home if some of these get close to a town or something that could potentially be saved. But that's one thing that Canada tries to do is we try to help out others with our expertise.

SPEAKER_01 17:06

Yeah, because forests aren't necessarily localized to just Canada. There are forests all over the world. And right now, Spain and France are experiencing some horrific ones.

SPEAKER_00 17:18

Yeah. All right. That's I was gonna say that's fire news. All right, that's science news for this week in Pet

What Emotional Support Animals Are

SPEAKER_00 17:26

Science. Let's talk about emotional support animals and how the public trusts them. This was a really interesting article. Emotional support animals don't necessarily get specialized training. And in some places in North America, there's no guaranteed public access under different types of laws. In the States, it's called the Fair Housing Amendments Act. The Air Carrier Access Act in the States used to cover the flights for ESAs, but as of 2020, that protection's gone. Airlines now treat ESAs just like regular pets.

SPEAKER_01 18:01

So people would take their great dane on a small jet, and that's a massive dog that takes up a whole seat, or maybe can fit under the footrest. I'm not sure. A man actually had a snake on the New York subway, which you and I went, we tried when we went to New York. We're like, let's just try this experience of the subway and imagine seeing someone with a snake. Jason, your nope ropes.

SPEAKER_00 18:29

I already was confused. I'd be even more confused seeing somebody with a snake.

SPEAKER_01 18:34

Yeah. And a baseball fan came to watch a game at a stadium with his ESA alligator. And back to the Westerner days here in Red Deer, we've watched like an alligator show where a guy wrangles an alligator and they're not too friendly. So I don't definitely have experience with what do I do if an alligator approaches me. The peacock, which is a beautiful bird, it was denied boarding on United Airlines. Airlines can now treat ESAs like regular pets or exotics.

SPEAKER_00 19:10

I don't want to take away anything from the guy who's going to see a baseball game with his alligator. I'm not a hundred percent sure how

Trust Depends On Species And Place

SPEAKER_00 19:17

that fits. If and because there's I'm not sure you how you train an alligator to be an emotional support animal either. Between 90 to 93 percent of participants in the studies we're gonna look at have already heard of emotional support animals. Like this isn't a fringe concept. The average person, if you say an emotional support animal, they'll have an idea what they are, or they'll at least heard of it. It's not gonna be something, oh, I haven't heard of that at all. So in study one, they looked at who trusts more. The two personality traits that predicted trust were nature relatedness, so that's how connected someone feels to nature, and self-efficacy, how capable someone feels of handling challenges on their own. So they asked the folks, and people connected more to nature trusted the ESA owners more. And people with higher self-efficacy trusted ESA owners less. This is trait projection. If you feel like you can handle your own stress without an animal, you probably expect others to as well. And they get skeptical when people say they need one. Is that fair? We've done mental health studies before, Chris, where that's the biggest stigma about mental health is I don't have mental health problems. Why do you? That's come up a lot before. And it's not necessarily fair, but it's it's a natural human emotion.

SPEAKER_01 20:41

Yeah, that that's why it's challenging with the ESAs, and they're definitely different than specific service dogs who have been trained specifically for a task. And that's why that specific training allows those animals to go into other areas that ESAs are not.

SPEAKER_00 21:02

Within study one, they looked at the species and where they are, and they rated them on one to seven, from one being not appropriate to seven being extremely appropriate. Guess which species scored the highest?

SPEAKER_01 21:18

Uh that they're allowed, dogs.

SPEAKER_00 21:20

Yeah, so dogs were just about at a five, four point eight, which seems low, like on appropriateness, but then they had a whole bunch of other animals, like tarantulas. Tarantulas scored a 3.8, which seems pretty close to a dog. And snakes scored the lowest, which was 3.7. So people are more comfortable with a tarantula as an ESA than a snake. I don't know about that. I do that. The snakes are the lowest because I'm not a fan of a snake, but I know a lot of people love their snakes. And then they rated where they were with their animal, with being one very comfortable, and five being not comfortable. People were the most comfortable at a public park with somebody with their ESA. The gym dropped a bunch. People were less comfortable. And the one that had the lowest comfortability was on a plane. Probably because you're trapped in the sky and somebody has an alligator, maybe.

SPEAKER_01 22:21

It wasn't necessarily the alligator.

SPEAKER_00 22:24

No, I'm just being silly.

SPEAKER_01 22:26

The scores did show like a relative discomfort, not outright rejection of these animals. So even the worst comfort score of flights being about three is still on the more comfortable half of the five-point scale.

SPEAKER_00 22:41

I bet you if they stacked a tarantula up against a crying toddler on a plane, I think the tarantula would score higher for comfort.

SPEAKER_01 22:50

And that's not exactly what study two looked at, but study two looked at the species times the space interaction. So the design consisted of participants randomly being assigned to one of four scenarios, like a dog versus a tarantula crossed with a park versus the gym. And so then they did do a manipulation check, and that confirmed that people really did perceive parks versus the gym differently. But the main effect was that the ESA species type did significantly affect trust overall. What they did find was that the ESA species type did significantly affect trust overall. And if the interaction type was distant, so if we're looking at uh ESA that is in a gym, which isn't necessarily a natural spot, the trust for the ESA dog owners was higher than for tarantula owners, which there was a significant real gap of lack of trust for tarantula owners, bringing them to the gym. But what they found in when you're taking your tarantula or your dog to a park, which is a a natural space, the trust was basically identical, not significant. So if you're talking about the tarantula, same tarantula, same owner saying that they need the tarantula as an ESA, that's fine. But if you take it from a gym to a park, the the credible penalty of having an unusual ESA basically disappears.

SPEAKER_00 24:33

Oh, so it's not that people don't trust weird or unusual ESAs, it's where they are in the world that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 24:42

That's what the study

Policy Ideas For Fewer Conflicts

SPEAKER_01 24:43

showed. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:44

Oh, that's interesting. Cool.

SPEAKER_01 24:45

So, Jason, what are some bigger implications then with the data of these two studies behind them?

SPEAKER_00 24:51

What they're already seeing is that probably a good strategy for airplanes to avoid kerfuffles is that if you are bringing an ESA on the plane, you need to figure out what that ESA is. This, of course, would screen out things that are maybe the unusual ones like peacocks, alligators, and tarantulas. But maybe you'd get to keep your cat or your dog the one that in that contact context people would be less skeptical of and maybe more accepting of.

SPEAKER_01 25:23

Is it a pet or is it a pest? So 63% of people generally categorize tarantulas as pests, and 46% categorize snakes as pests, whereas dogs are not categorized the same way. Like less than a percent for dogs and two and a half for cats.

SPEAKER_00 25:42

Where in the world are tarantulas pests? Not in Canada. I don't see a tarantula walking around. If somebody's like, yo, I've got an emotional support animal and it's a Canadian, it's a Canada goose, I'm gonna bring it on the plane. I'd be like, hell no. I am not getting on that plane with you and your damn goose. It's gonna kill us all. It's gonna bring that's a pest. That's a murder chicken. It is gonna it's going to cobra a chicken us all, and we're all gonna crash. So yeah. Maybe that's contextual based on where you are in the world. Somebody who doesn't know how evil Canada goose are would be like, oh, it's so cute, it's a great big goose, and it's like and it just bites your face off.

SPEAKER_01 26:26

So exactly, but the the Canada geese are protected. But why if we're looking at this study, it was self-reported. So all of the measures were based on self-reported hypothetical trust, which is not necessarily a reaction to a real encounter. So it's still how would you feel versus how did you feel?

SPEAKER_00 26:49

I get what you're saying. You and I both teach kids from cultures all over the world, and dogs in some parts of the world are terrifying. I I've taught kids when we've had even Beaker, who's like a smaller golden retriever, kids scream and run away when they see her. Because where they're from in the world, dogs are very dangerous. They or they are not considered pets, they would probably be considered pests. Anyways, kind of cool study. I apologize if you have a emotional support tarantula and you feel like we've been targeting you this, but they actually that was one of the scenarios.

SPEAKER_01 27:27

Or a snake.

SPEAKER_00 27:29

Or a snake. What exotic animal would you have as your emotional support animal if you could, Chris?

SPEAKER_01 27:36

The turtles.

SPEAKER_00 27:38

Oh yeah. They're pretty cute though. They're kind of cute. I would have a beaver as my emotional support animal.

SPEAKER_01 27:46

Jason, beavers are not they are a wild animal. And I guess the turtles are too.

SPEAKER_00 27:54

Tarantulas aren't wild animals or snakes.

SPEAKER_01 27:57

I guess, but they're domesticated, but they're reptiles and arachnids. I don't know that you can domesticate a snake.

SPEAKER_00 28:04

I don't know. I would just bring a bunch of wood chips in my bag and just feed them that on the plane. Here you go, buddy.

SPEAKER_01 28:12

Nom nom nom.

SPEAKER_00 28:13

All right, that's pet science for this week. That's

Patreon Shoutouts And Closing

SPEAKER_00 28:17

it for this week's show. Thanks for coming back week after week to listen to the science podcast. And a shout out to all the top dogs. That's the top tier of our Patreon community, The Pop Pack. You can sign up in our show notes. All right, Chris, let's hear those names that are part of the top dogs.

SPEAKER_01 28:33

Shona J. Schneider, Patrick, Jennifer Essery, Barbara Radner, Amelia Fettig, Rhee Ota, Carol A. Heenel, Jennifer Chlan, Karen Cronster, Vicky Otero, Cassie M. Christy Snake Walker, Sarah Bram, Wendy Diane Mason, and Lou. Helen Chin, Elizabeth Bougeois, Marianne McNally, Catherine G. Jordan, Shelly Smith, Laura Steffenson, Tracy Linebaugh, Anne Uchida, Heather Burbach, Kelly King, Tracy Halberg, Ben Rathart, Debbie Anderson, Sandy Brimer, Mary Lamagna Ryder, Bianca Hyde, Andrew Lynn, Brenda Clark, Brianne Haas, Peggy McKeel, Holly Birch, Kathy Zerker, Susan Wagner, and Liz Button.