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There are 304,255 signatories to this petition. While they may agree with experts, it seems unlikely that more than a small minority have actually researched the issue, much less qualifying as experts.

https://petition.parliament.uk/archived/petitions/38257

> Farmers are experts in breeding cattle. Point. Not more, not less. Basic concepts in biology are often terribly misunderstood or just ignored stubbornly by them for decades, and there is a big inertia in small villages to accept changes. For some reason, all people are instead ready to follow the local hero, with his myth based ideas, and often lose money by this.

This is a wildly arrogant big city point of view.

> Farmers are experts in breeding cattle. Point. Not more, not less.

I hope you're going for hyperbole here. If not, you may be surprised at the proportion of farmers who do understand how biology works; who do work with vets and other professionals and follow research into animal health and disease.

Your statement does a large number of people a disservice.

Those are all directly related to raising cattle, though.

What the parent is talking about are the broader consequences of decisions that farmers make based on the limited scope of their expertise.

A big example is the use of antibiotics to manage disease in livestock, which obviously takes some understanding of biology and consultation with vets and other experts. Unfortunately, it is very likely contributing to the evolution of bacteria away from susceptibility to those antibiotics.

Farmers are not unique in the fact that their expertise doesn't cover all possible outcomes. That's true of everyone. It doesn't mean they are ignorant and I don't think it does them a disservice to say it.

What the parent is talking about cultural factors that might lead farmers or other "small town" folks to dismiss the findings of other experts, because those expert don't know as much about farming. A big-city evolutionary biologist Ph.D. is going to look stupid if they're quizzed about raising cattle or shooting guns. That doesn't mean they're wrong about bacterial evolution.

This is not limited to farmers, of course--in big cities you get people who don't listen to doctors about vaccines, simply because they don't know anything about doctors except that they make a lot of money.

If anyone is interested in a such a farmer, I would recommend looking up Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms. He really counters the general stereotype that farmers are dumb people, which they certainly are not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Salatin

> all those knowledge is generated normally in universities, placed in big cities, after years of painfully slow research done by experts in zoology, chemistry, genetics...

IIRC, so are the ideas that wolves, an animal capable of eating sheep or even moose would not eat children if they happened to walk unprotected.

Not saying we should get rid of wolves only that some realism need to be applied.

Well, if you want realism, wolves are one of the really select club of species of animals known to readily protect, nurture and adopt a lost human children if some circumstances occur. This is a fact, not a feeling.

Do you know what other animals can be dangerous for a small children in a close encounter?: Buffaloes, mooses, deers, bulls, rams, bears, rats, horses, rhinos, donkeys, chimps, coyotes, pigs, snakes, racoons, big cats, snapping turtles, electric eels, lots of arthropods, and most of all other humans or machines created by humans. This is the reason for small children never should walk unprotected by unsafe areas. For children there is a change at least of surviving a close encounter with a wolf, that will not enjoy if is a buffalo instead.

Curiously today the local press tells a story about a man that died after four years fighting lyme disease caused by a deer tick bite. For some arrogant interplanetary alignment, lyme disease cases are increasing in my country at the same time as wolves being culled regularly.

Some of the most fantastic environmental fails were incubated in the local pub

For some arrogant interplanetary alignment, lyme disease cases are increasing in my country at the same time as wolves being culled regularly.

Oh how ironic. In which pub were you when you decided these two must be causally related?

Tick numbers are increasing because the climate is getting warmer. Also, ticks regularly use mice as hosts so the mice population may affect the tick population. But neither explanation has anything to do with wolves. In fact, wolf numbers in The Netherlands have doubled over the past year, and we're still seeing an increase in ticks.

> ticks regularly use mice as hosts so the mice population may affect the tick population

True, (well, shrews are preferred in fact to mice), but only when young. Adult ticks feed mainly on large mammals, specially herbivores, and die if can't find a host in a few days, therefore is easy to understand that the recruitment of new ticks, the number of tick eggs released by surviving adults, is directly linked with the role of wolves as predators.

In the other hand, to put your "population of wolves has doubled between 2014 and 2015 but ticks had not changed" claim in context, we need to note that wolf population in the Netherlands between years 1869 and 2013 was composed of zero wolves.

Then, in 4-Jul-2013 something very strange happened. A she-wolf was found dead in a roadside next Luttelgeest. The first confirmed case of a "dutch" wolf in 140 years. A study in the journal Lutra covered the issue concluding that:

1) The animal was a purebreed wolf genetically related with East Europe populations [discarding a dog-wolf mix or a sarloos dog], was unchipped, and between 1.5 and 2.5 years old.

2) She fed on beaver in either the Carpathian mountains or the Eifel which is too far for the animal to have walked (9Km/h) from by itself within the 24 hours needed to digest its last meal (Genetic analysis from the remains of the beaver and the wolf linked both animals with populations living in this areas).

3) Bullet impacts and shattered fragments where found in the chest and flank indicating that the animal was shot twice before being hit by a car.

4) No car accident involving an animal was reported to local emergency services in the previous hours to the discovery of the corpse.

5) A discrepancy between the timing of the post mortem and rigor mortis intervals indicated that this wolf was shot prior to illegal transport to the Netherlands, from a distance within 2 days.

[To fake a car accident, running over a previously killed animal is a common procedure to cover environmental crimes against protected species].

Source:

The first wolf found in the Netherlands in 150 years was the victim of a wildlife crime. Lutra. 2013. 56(2): 93-109. Gravendeel, de Groot, Kik, Beentjes, Bergman, Caniglia, Cremers, Fabbri, Groenenberg, Grone, Bruinderink, Font, Hakhof, Harms, Jansman, Janssen, Lammertsma, Laros, Linnartz, van der Marel, Mulder, van der Mije, Nieman, Nowak, Randi, Rijks, Speksnijder & Vonho

Link to the article: http://www.kora.ch/fileadmin/file_sharing/5_Bibliothek/51_KO...

... So in 2013 there was still zero dutch wolves.

Then in 9-march-2015 a single wolf was photographed in Hunze.

So, unless you can show us new data, yes, wolf population was doubled in Netherlands in the last year... but you forgot to mention that is from zero to one animal. Here have your answer to the lack of changes on tick population.

Yup, that was meant as tongue-in-cheek, but I should probably have left it out. I didn't look up the specifics, but I know a second wolf sighting was claimed in Limburg, raising the number of wolves in NL from 1 to 2.

... Or maybe the same wolf was seen in two different places. Is relatively common with this species.

At least in the United States, a non-rabid wolf has never killed a person in the lower 48 states. Ever.[0] And there used to be millions of wolves in the US.

[0] from Vicious: Wolves and Men in America by Jon T. Coleman, Yale University Press, 2008

It's possible, but statistically the likelihood these days is very low.

Typically (not always, but usually), a wolf attack is linked to either human habituation, or disease (rabies), or loss of natural resources (wolves will attack humans if they are "food of last resort"). Humans are, um, kind of dangerous to wolves in general, so typically they do their best to avoid us. There's only two known fatal wolf attacks in North America, and both are linked to habituation. In other areas there was probably more wolf attacks in the past (probably due to encroachment), but at present there's little reason to fear a wolf in North America.

Domestic cattle actually are far more deadly (about 20 fatalities a year in North America). And we haven't even crossed into the territory of the deadliness of, say, automobiles.

Balancing livestock / ranches in areas with wolf populations is definitely a real issue and a far more pressing concern. I think many who engage in both ranching and environmental management do understand the dual need to both balance the environment and make a living off the land. (http://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Wolves-...)

My "gut feel observation" is that a lot of the really overtly binary debates in these sort of "environmentalism vs. hunting" debates comes from people who don't live in rural areas at all. Such as sport-only / pure recreational / trophy type hunters (many who are urban and well off... after all, isn't fox hunting traditionally associated with the UK upper class?) versus strict cute-and-fuzzy-animal environmentalists (many who also are urban and well off). So I'm not sure if the local farmers and hunters at the pub really are the ones you should necessarily point the finger at.

> Radically new ideas (like for example that wolves will generate money and provide basic services valued in millions of dollars, or that if you kill the alpha wolf in a pack there is an increase, not a decrease to cattle damages, or that to cull badgers will spread faster the cattle diseases that you want to stop and thus is a questionable investment of public money)... all those knowledge is generated normally in universities, placed in big cities, after years of painfully slow research done by experts

Actually, the big agricultural research universities are generally not located in big cities, because that makes it difficult for them to do their research.