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Comment by dmitryminkovsky | Hacker News Reader

Yeah it’s a shame because 84 percent of people don’t raise livestock and have no idea how it works, but some similar percentage of people do eat meat.

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I'm not convinced someone raising livestock "knows how it works" beyond their personal interests either.

Not sure what you mean. I’m talking about raising cattle. They know how to raise cattle. It’s in the stores, they produced it. You know how to produce whatever you produce. They don’t know how to produce what they produce?

Is raising cattle the only topic here?

Have they even raised cattle around wolves recently?

We are in Idaho. Our last two governors have been ranchers as well and have been "not friendly" to wolves. Idaho motto around wolves is "Shoot, Shovel, Shut up".

https://www.capitalpress.com/ag_sectors/livestock/record-num...

Their self interest is that they produce as much cattle as possible. There might be other reasons why wolves would be beneficial, if released into the wild in CO, though. Hence the conflict of interest, on the part of the cattle owners.

This does not fall within the normal range of meanings of "conflict of interest". Cattle owners are not in a position where their personal interests conflict with their official duties. Those are perfectly synched up.

By your standards, voting is a conflict of interest.

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

I don't think they meant the business-context "conflict of interest" rather the more general "conflicting interests".

Your interpretation is not a strong or plausible one. It would make the parent comment completely content-free ("cattle ranchers have multiple priorities, and just like everybody else, sometimes they pick one over another one") rather than just wrong.

If cattle ranchers know there there is a public good for having wolves, yet they argue against them, I'm saying that position is a conflict of interest between them and the public good. They will almost always choose their own self interest.

Voting? Well, people often vote against their own self interest, but it is hoped (by me, at least) that people will vote for their self interest, within reason. That reason is that you aren't voting for something that benefits your group more than another group. That would be a bad use of self-interested voting. A good use would be voting for "medicare for all" because you think it will benefit you and others.

They may see the costs of wolves without seeing the benefit, whereas other Coloradans would see the inverse. It's hard to say who has the correct full picture.

I'm an actual Coloradan. Very little livestock grazing is in the mountains where the wolves would presumably be. It's almost entirely out on the plains surrounded my a thousands of miles of barbed wire fences and desolate nothingness.

Even if the wolves do venture out into the plains, it would be much appreciated because my office currently smells like cow shit given that there's a north-easterly wind and Greeley is in that direction with it's horrendous feed lots.

I've actually worked on ranches in Colorado. Ranchers do graze their stock in the mountains. The other side of the coin is that the habitat for wolves is from sea level to approximately 9800' (3000m). They hunt wherever they can find herbivores. One part of ranching people don't seem to understand is that the rancher (by rancher I mean whoever is working on the ranch) is caring for living animals. That means he is looking out for these animals on a daily basis. I know their are ranchers who don't get attached to their stock, but they are definitely the minority. It's hard to care for anything daily and not get attached. I've seen ranchers in tears over the loss of a single cow, because they've cared for that cow since it was born. From time to time I would take a steer to slaughter so that we had meat in the freezer. The last thing I would do after unloading the steer would be to thank him for giving his life to feed my family. When a pack of coyotes take a calf, it is heart breaking to see the reaction of the mama cow. My neighbor last spring came upon a cow that was struggling to give birth and she was down. The coyotes had killed the calf and were eating it even though it was only part of the way out of the cow. Do you think that might have upset him a little? Now they want to release a much larger predator onto the land he is trying to care for. How do you think that makes him feel? There is more to caring for livestock than money.

You could work in Commerce City and be smelling the hydrocarbons all day, and maybe even getting cancer.

They do graze in the mountains, just not much compared to the rest of the state. Not really a fan of that either as the cows leave excrement all over trails and roads. If this prevented the practice and nothing else I'd still be for it. Cows aren't supposed to be part of nature, they're an environmental disaster themselves.

This seems to be mostly just an emotional appeal rather than a practical one.

Also, we should totally get rid of the refinery too, I'm all for equal opportunity environmentalism.

Ever heard of South Park? How about North Park? Kremlin is a Ranching community. So was Baily at one time and some of the ranchers still live there even though it is almost part of the Metro area now. Eagle is a ranching community. I could go on. Cow excrement is only fermented grass. I handle it with my bare hands. How long does an animal have to live in an environment before it becomes a part of it. When range and wild life management is turned over to voters and the educated managers are ignored, it becomes an emotional issue. Do you ride a bicycle to the grocery store?

Most of those areas are pivoting to tourism with the exception of maybe South Park which is desolate enough I don't see wolves making a habitat there.

Cow excrement is absolutely not just fermented grass. It contains pathogens that can be harmful to humans and end up in drinking water. Cows have existed in this area for less than 200 years, out of the millions of years the biome has existed. It's absolutely an emotional issue if you don't understand how ecosystems work.

I'd rather not give out too many personal details of my living situation but it's safe to say my little car doesn't get much use at all.

I don't know if you are still following this conversation or not. The snow stopped yesterday and I had to go do my work. In case you are, I found this conversation rather thought provoking and wanted to continue for a while. Here is a link to information on agriculture in Colorado: https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/AgCensus/2012/Online_... It does not break things out by ranch or farm, but it does show that overall in Colorado between 2007 and 2012 there was a 1% increase in farms. If you click on the map you can see the breakout by county. In some of the mountain counties farming has decreased close to 50%. In other mountain counties it has increased. But it does show that farming is still a strong industry in the mountain counties. I must confess that I have not spent much time studying ecosystems. But I live very close to one. I know this, if it takes millions of years for an eco system to evolve, the eco system in the Western United States is completely non-existent. Agriculture has only existed for 12,000 years or so. Most of the crops grown by humans can be viewed as invasive species, same as you are claiming cattle to be. Some studies conclude that the little ice age was caused by the dying off of native Americans (also an invasive species as so we are) after the arrival of Europeans. They were so devastated that the lack of Agriculture effected global climate, or so the theory goes. Now there are a great many invasive species in both flora and fauna that the ecosystem is not what it would have been even 15,000 years ago. The climate has not even been stable for the past million years. So a million year old eco system does not exist. There are those that point out that the bovine replaced the bison in the ecosystem of the American grass lands. While I can accept this to a point, I do think it at best a near replacement. This I know from direct observation, if you pull cattle off the land for a number of years, the quality of the flora suffers. I can't offer an explanation. The same can be said for over grazing as well. One of the gripes I have with climate change advocates is that they want everyone else to give up their petroleum habit, but they themselves still drive SUV's. When I had a city job, to support my ranching habit, I used mass transit, and supplemented it with a (TreK) bicycle. I didn't even live in the city! One last antidote. A Business man and a Rancher hit the same jackpot in the lotto. It was a large sum and they were to split it. A reported asked the Business man what he was going to do. He said he was going to retire and and travel the world the rest of his life, living in hotels and being waited on. The reported then asked the rancher what he was going to do. He replied that he was going to keep ranching until the money ran out!

https://criticalcommons.org/Members/JJWooten/clips/mitch-hed...

The market will figure out how to continue to raise livestock and adjust.

And then the environmental crowd will freak out upon the invention of cows genetically modified to be poisonous to wolves.

Whereas the non environmental crowd would be perfectly fine with the fact that their barbecue is now made of yummy poisoned meat?

If the previous justification for hindering a market (that it will figure it out) holds, then yes.

You could sabotage the market/product however you see fit, with the justification that it will get it figured out.

It's just not always figured out in the way regulators assume it will be.

Assuming that ranchers will want to continue to raise cattle amongst protected wolves is just as irrational.

>Assuming that ranchers will want to continue to raise cattle amongst protected wolves is just as irrational.

I wonder how humans living amongst wolves could raise and even create all races of cattle in the last 4000 years.

This a problem that we had solved yet with shepherds and shepherddogs. You can find people raising three thousands of sheep all alone and just with the help of a few dogs. They never lost a sheep and they live in one of the european areas with more wolves.

We solved it by killing the wolves and making them fear coming near civilization.

Reintroducing them undoes that, and if they're going to be a protected species, the same solution that's worked forever no longer will.

Different rules, different behavior.

And most dogs are primarily to alert people. One on one, a wolf is usually going to win. Packs of dogs evens things out some, but it's not a sure thing. Although if dogs end up being the main protection loophole, I'll be interesting to see if people move towards more aggressive dogs.

Not exactly. We solved it teaming with wolves for mutual benefit.

We're not reintroducing domesticated dogs to the wild. Or are you saying we should redomesticate wolves?

We have professionals able to cope with they in the best public benefit.

Managing key species as a bussiness only for a minority of the society leads often to lots of money lost for all citizens. We talk of species absolutely necessary for having a healthy ecosystem.

Wolves create economic damages but also pay generously for them. They clean lyme, keep cattle diseases under control in wildlife reservoirs, improve pastures and build forests and rivers. Wolf's work literarily create entire biocenosis with decens of new animals linked.

In Yellowstone the wolf build from nothing a $5000000/year bussiness in a few years. Those new opportunities attract and fix young human population and put children in some states that need it.

Alive wolves trigger a lot of unexpected benefits for both humans and animals. We could never pay its environmental services, or the lifes of humans saved by wolves directly or indirectly

But we don't want that money, of course.

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