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Comment by PrimalDual | Hacker News Reader

I frankly don’t understand why we would want to reintroduce a predator like this. From the article it seems the only benefit they bring is to control deer populations at the expense of farmers and causing discomfort to the general population. Instead of having wolves why not simply have humans hunt the excess deer? If you can test the game for undesirable pathogens it could even be a good business opportunity. Ultimately humans are always in control of the environment even if we choose to do nothing. Our technology and resources are too great to claim we have “unmanaged wilderness”.

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One issue is that hunters hunt differently than wolves and other natural predators. Predators go after the old, the sick, the weak, the young. Hunters almost exclusively go after the health. Not only is that changing the distribution of the gene pool, it also isn't effective population control. We'd need to force hunters to go after a bunch of fawns instead.

There can also be unintended consequences to human culling, besides long-term genetic changes. There's one example of when they started culling a elephants in Kruger National Park. The Park had too many elephants and so they had to kill some of the herd. However, they tended to kill only adults, leaving a lot of juveniles around. The problem is that, once juvenile males reach adulthood, they leave the family herd and hang out with an older male. The older male teaches the younger males about surviving in the wild. And, importantly, self-control. Male elephants periodically go through an extreme spike of testosterone (called musth) that can cause very aggressive behavior. The young males learn from the older male to control themselves. If there aren't any older males around, they don't get this knowledge, and will be prone to violence. After that culling, there was a large spike in incidents of these rogue elephants attacking villages and rhinoceroses. In short, culling can change the behavior of the animal population immediately and for the worse. Not sure how relevant that is to white-tailed deer, but it's something to consider.

https://www.yellowstonepark.com/things-to-do/wolf-reintroduc...

The video ("How Wolves Change Rivers") states that humans had previously failed to control the deer. You could pay more humans hundreds of millions of dollars a year to patrol every one of these areas. Or you could simply let the wolves do it.

I think yours is a very reasonable argument. I guess in the end it comes down to preference: do we prefer a world with wolves in the forests, where farmers have to keep guard dogs an maybe loose some animals, or do we prefer one where there a no predators in the wild, intensive farming is unhindered, and we cull herbivore population through established quotas to maintain some equilibrium?

Just to add, here's another developing unintended consequence of wolf absence:

https://www.denverpost.com/2019/06/03/wolves-coyotes-predato...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2019/06/0...

> Instead of having wolves why not simply have humans hunt the excess deer?

A possible argument would work like this:

1. Why not automate it by having drones hunt excess deer?

2. Why build drones when there are perfectly good natural ones, such as wolves?

1. I doubt we have the technology to automate deer hunting yet; however, it would be very useful to have drones hunt the deer and have humans pickup the spoils. I did say it would be great if we could buy hunted deer as long as it’s tested for the nasty pathogens wildlife tends to have.

2.Having humans hunt the deer is preferable because they obey laws, don’t scare people, wont eat the farmer’s animals and, again, we also get to keep the meat.

Hunting is decreasing in popularity, possibly due to awareness of CWD.

And I don't think there are people clamoring for venison. If you have friends or family that enjoy hunting, you can get quite a bit of venison for free. The best cuts are tasty, if your processor is good the summer sausage or hot sticks will be good, but I ate ground venison sloppy joes and chili not that many times before I personally never want it again.

> Having humans hunt the deer is preferable because they obey laws, don’t scare people,

Hunters are scary. Not that Hunters as people are scary, but I would avoid wilderness where I know there to be hunters active, even if I am wearing blaze orange. Accidents happen. Probably more often to the hunters themselves than to strangers, but they do happen.

> Hunters are scary.

How do you feel about wolves?

A few people saw a wolf a handful of few times in an area I regularly walked through one summer, and I started carrying a bat if I was alone, but mainly trying to walk with dogs or another person. Both can be scary, even though both are less likely to harm you then a car.

All hunters obey laws?, well, maybe sometimes, some of them

Exploit natural resources in a space created specifically to protect natural resources from been looted is perverse. If you kill deer and use its meat, suddenly Yellowstone is turned into another meat farm. There are thousands of meat farms but only one yellowstone. Soon, somebody will start pushing to chop some old trees to manage correctly the wood supply. There is no return from this ideology. Human greed is endless

Wolves with access to wild preys and stable groups will eat only a small percentage of domestic animals. If we pay local hunters for removing deer meat, we'll need to pay again a second time to the same hunters/farmers to compensate the increase in cattle deaths or to kill the sudden excess of wolves. With luck the same cow will not be reported as killed and re-killed again by wolves 5 times in its entire life (Paying the same animal several times has happened before).

Result of doing things complicated having a simple solution: You'll need to pay more taxes

We have the technology for spying millions of people day and night, managing home lights and closing doors from thousands of miles of distance. Why professional farmers (that do not have another thing to do in their journey as keeping an eye on their cattle), are still unable to watch for their animals, and keep them safe at night? Wolves can't open a padlock.

Because they aren't perfectly good. Humans eliminate predators around the world because they threaten our livestock and public safety. If we actively wanted to cull deer populations with minimum effort it takes very little effort trap or poison them en masse versus trying to track them with rifles.

But some people find it to be a fun activity to kill wildlife and thus the whole culture of huntsman persists. People pay for the recreation of hunting. It actually makes some communities money - private citizens cull the deer while paying for the privilege.

> Instead of having wolves why not simply have humans hunt the excess deer?

Because wolves are much smart for this job and provide benefical collateral effects in a miriad of ways that humans can't; and they do it 365 days a year. Is like comparing traveling in bullet train with a wheelbarrow.

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