Apex predator reintroduction is a good litmus test for how much conservation we can stomach, so I think it's important that we get this right.
Ah ha. A HN thread close to home (I live within earshot of wolves in Montana). So...we do [1], [2]. Ranchers (generalizing, of course) just don't like wolves. It's a really deep cultural thing. So if you as president want to take some step that will cause a bunch of folks in ranching areas to high five, you'd delist wolves. That they may not in fact be impacted by wolf activity is moot.
[1] https://missoulian.com/news/state-and-regional/montana-makes...
[2] http://liv.mt.gov/Attached-Agency-Boards/Livestock-Loss-Boar...
More sheep are taken by wolverines, lynx and bears yet the ranches are still keen on full extermination of the wolf population.
That the wolves, themselves, now have a deep-set fear of humanity and would only dare to do so if they're desperate and starving... is a distant second to that same deep-set cultural fear of wolves.
Unpopular Opinion Time: The ecosystem damage from not having apex predators is large enough that it might be worth a few human lives to avoid.
Unpopular Opinion Time the Second: But there are other apex predators, such as the lynx, which can take much the same role without being nearly as dangerous to megafauna like humans.
Though that's only a decent solution if you don't have problems with megafauna like elk.
The wolves didn't make any difference to the deer population.
https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/scientists-debun...
It still amazes me how often people think that biologists are stupid
Wolves return to Yellowstone has being ruminated, and I say ruminated, by scientists for 70 long years
All the possible results were examinated, there were lots of reports evaluating the project and all the benefits and cons were studied for decades, by lots and lots of well trained people. The effect of wolf in environment and its role as key species is described in conferences monographs and books.
Teams of scientists studied the populations of each single big mammal and bird in Yellowstone, before and after wolves. You can find their conclusions in the libraries of all universities specialized in ecology and animal management.
The results were even better than expected, but this was a big success because it was based in a entire life of previous hard work.
We talk about reviewed, easily verifiable and painfully verified facts, not about a pulp novel written on a weekend or somebody tossing a coin. Do you really think that somebody could just upload a fakebook video linking to a fake scientific article in this field without being detected and disclosed immediately?
I had some critics or a different opinion != widely disputed;
holy moly fakebook video != science;
You have found an internet link != I must read it ASAP;
Yellowstone: How Not To Manage A National Park https://kottke.org/15/01/yellowstone-how-not-to-manage-a-nat...
"By 1934, the Park Service acknowledged that whitetail deer, cougar, lynx, wolf, and possibly wolverine and fisher are gone from the Yellowstone.
What they didn’t say was that the Park Service was solely responsible for the disappearances."
It's very rare but it happens.
One guy was dragged out of his tent by a wolf while camping with his two kids and wife. That's extremely rare.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/wolf-attack-rampart-c...
There are also hunters that go missing in areas where there aren't known to be other predators. Some of those cases might be wolves.
There are also cases where we find the remains of a hunter surrounded by dead wolves that he'd shot in a savage fight to the death that he lost.
Again, it's rare. The most dangerous large mammal apart from us in North America is deer, because of people killed hitting them in cars or swerving to avoid them. More wolves might improve that.
"The first fatal attack in the 21st century occurred on November 8, 2005, when a young man was killed by wolves that had been habituated to people in Points North Landing, Saskatchewan, Canada[46] while on March 8, 2010, a young woman was killed while jogging near Chignik, Alaska."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wolf_attacks_in_Nort...
We might be afraid of them but that fear isn’t grounded in reality.
Well...I live in a place where we have (in my back yard, except for Bison) all the megafauna present since the ice age. In order of practical danger (most to least), they rank like this: Moose, Bear, Cougar, Snakes, ... Wolves. People are regularly attacked by Moose and fatalities have occurred in the past few decades. People are eaten by bears every few years and injured by bears annually. Cougars present a real danger but they're pretty wary of humans so attacks are more a theoretical risk we hear about from reports concerning mountain bikers in Los Angeles. I never heard of anyone being attacked by a wolf nor anyone being concerned about being attacked by a wolf. Same for Coyotes and Foxes.
I don't hear people suggesting that Moose be killed on sight.
Virtually every adult killed by snakes in America was asking for it. Rattlesnakes sure as shit know they can't eat humans and would never attempt it. They are named for the mechanism they use to scare us away and bite when that fails. A huge number of rattlesnake bites are to the face or hands because it happens when some moron ignores the rattle and picks up the snake.
Wolves, unlike rattlesnakes do sometimes deliberately attack humans with 'malicious' intent. Rattlesnakes never do.
They will often strike without warning. It’s important to pay attention where you put your hands and feet when you’re in rattlesnake country.
In the past 20 years in America, 30 men have been killed by snakes, vs 6 women. Dudes trying to be macho by fucking with snakes explains most of this gap; many of them were bitten on the hands and the circumstances of many of the cases make it pretty clear the snake was being fucked with. Only a handful of incidents were likely genuine accidents.
I was bitten on the ankle as a teenager (luckily as you said, it didn't use venom), at the time I was pretty surprised it was silent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_American_animals...
(The Holocene is the period after the glaciers last receded)
They're usually more specialized than wolves, especially in terms of prey, and so the populations of species they don't prey upon are left unchecked.
I don't know how that would work with the existence of dogs though, so maybe not.
Spain has 2000.
-Wolves won't go extinct anytime soon.
-There's no reason to think farmers would pick another "enemy" if they would.
-Livestock is actually important to farmers. No hidden agenda.
Some things money can't buy.
Even if I get good money as compensation, I'd resent it, and much prefer to have my possessions left in peace.
Weird thing to play with a bunny and eat it couple of months later. First lessons in the circle of life.
How dare nature be.... natural! Let's kill all the alligators!
They're not pets. You've just described livestock farming.
One of the main reason farmers hate wolves is because it's madness. A wolf kills 14 sheep in one night and only eats one, partly. That doesn't make it a very sympathetic animal.
The Netherlands is very densely populated. Everyone was doing fine without the wolf. Now a couple of environmentalists use public money to try to reintroduce wolves in habitat that isn't able to support them. They got subsidies based on reports that promised no livestock would be harmed. Wolves would just limit themselves automagically to wildlife when there is enough wildlife to support them. This claim is demonstrably false. It's fraud.
On top of that, the environmentalist arrogantly call everyone who doesn't love the wolf stupid, uninformed bigots.
Like that helps.
Taking in mind how well we are doing in the last years, maybe would be wise to stop making fun of the environmentalists for a while.
I'm still expecting the other part proposing a single valid solution that is not based in 'pay me because I'm unable to understand how to use a shepherd dog'.
Shoot the wolves is a single valid solution. But you don't want to hear it.
And I think you don't know how shepherd dogs work. Otherwise you would have dismissed that as a valid solution too.
> You don't know how shepherd dogs work
Sorry but the facts speak loudly.
Last month I had personally visited the area of Europe with a biggest density of wolves (excepting maybe Chernobyl). We tried, and failed, to see a single wolf. There were cows munching all around. There was deer scattered all around the valley. I walked the oak forest alone without any problem.
In this area a single human with a few dogs manages routinely 300 sheep without losing a single one by wolves. Not a single attack reported in the entire year. Humanity has being doing the same for 4000 years. Is perfectly possible.
You really think farmers should go back to being sheep herders.
You really think that’s viable.
Wow.
It’s Europe. The sheep herders you mentioned are heavily subsidized, either by the government or by NGO’s. That’s not a viable solution for farmers at all.
Until today, nobody has managed to teach sheep how to milk themselves in a machine and send the product by certified mail.
This path has been explored in Europe and is a mistake.
1) Killing a few wolves increases, not decreases damages (by altering the social structure of the pack). More paradoxical, killing all wolves in an area increases the attacks to small cattle in that area (even if there is not a single alive wolf anymore).
Because wolf attacks are a very special case. There is not a single wolf in UK. Despite that, they still suffer 40.000 attacks to small cattle each year. By abandoned pet dogs, the same species as gray wolf. When government starts paying wolf attacks, suddenly, each stray dog attack (non paid) will be automatically assigned to wolves (paid) and will appear in the newspapers. This creates 'ghost wolves' and panic in the population, and increases the pressure against the environment (that is exactly the opposite that you are paying for).
2) Is an incentive for local corruption. People learn that if they cry wolf receive free money. They became insatiable and will try to game the system again and again. We had documented cases of the same cow "dying" two times, four times in four different places in Europe. By wolves that for some reason always start "eating the cattle tags". We had documented cases of cows dying by a natural accident and being blamed to scavenger wolves visiting the area four days later.
3) Is bad for the real farmers. Losing a cow is not a problem, destroying the cow market with a flood of easy money is. Meat prices are disbalanced by outsiders that release old or diseased cattle in a ranch to die at zero cost and then bill the state for wolf damages. At the end the real farmers figure out that letting the cows die is more efficient than producing meat. Or their activity is destroyed by the spread of new cattle diseases, and are replaced by fake farmers living in a big city.
4) It quickly turns into a sort of acquired right also. People gets upset if you try to stop it (and poison appears).
Also, grazing cattle outside is desirable for better land use (usually grassland isn't good for much else) and keeping the current state of ecosystems (without grazing, bushes and trees will take over). Also, regions where cattle is grazed are typically also tourist hotspots, but cattle frequently scared by wolves is much more aggresive towards hikers. So basically, wolves screw over a lot more than just the few cows they eat...
Other people are telling farmers to get rid of all sorts of fences and just use ditches and hetches, because they like to see that on their Sunday stroll.
The amount of criticism and conflicting opinions that farmers face is unbelievable.
This is complete nonsense. Cattle grazing has been devastating North American habitat for a couple of centuries, and current BLM practices just continue the same abuse. The Texas Hill country is badly damaged from overgrazing, this had led to loss of topsoil, massive loss of groundwater, and completely altered habitat for native species.
It might be different in North America, it might not. I'm not really convinced that there should be much of a difference just because it happened over the last few centuries instead of millenia ago. Just preserve some small parts of the previous ecosystem, ignore the rest. The whole planet has been terraformed already anyways, undoing human presence is pointless to try...
I think the answer is that while there is not currently a federal program, many states already do pay ranchers for animals killed by wolves. Searching for "wolf depredation reimbursement" pulls up many details. Here's a High Country News article on the topic: https://www.hcn.org/issues/50.12/wolves-when-cattle-go-missi....
I mean, if it makes it more palatable it's probably worth it to pay farmers... but I viscerally dislike the idea that any industry has the right to:
1. Destroy the environment for their convenience
2. Be indemnified by the government for their inability to run an environmentally compatible business
Wolves remove wild grazers increasing the amount of pasture available for cattle. Wolves clean scabies in deer, lyme disease, and bovine tuberculosis in wild boars that would otherwise end in the cattle or the farmer. Wolves reduce the coyotes population. Reduce the car accidents against deer crossing the road. Wolves protect trees and allow forests to grow. Without mention that wolves provide huge and easily measurable economical benefits to tourism.
Maybe you didn't search enough
https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/action/doSearch?...
The argument would go: the government does not want the rancher to actually protect his cattle because that would involve shooting the wolves. That's why the wolves on the list in the first place.
If don't want cattle put in a barn all day, then you get cattle out in the fields.
So you have a group with common interests who are ready to act as an obstruction to the greater social good because it's going to financially harm them. You _can_ tell them to shove it, but that has political consequences and might backfire and undo your whole conservation effort. Or you can help them out financially while they transition to doing business in this new normal where wolves still get to exist.
Departments of game and wildlife tried to address this by issuing more hunting permits for whitetail. Didn't work. There are only so many hunters, and they hunt all they can. More permits doesn't do anything for them when the population is booming. They're not hunting anything that exists, they're looking for trophies at this point, and taking the best of the gene pool. A group of vehicle insurance companies were organizing events, leasing hunting land, and paying bounties in a couple counties due to the rampant whitetail population.
Wolves were reintroduced there to much benefit making for a healthy population of whitetail. Also, because the whitetail overpopulation has been curtailed, game law violations dropped in that rural part of the world. It takes a dedicated hunter to actually 'hunt', but attracts any idiot with a rifle when game in an area is rampantly overpopulated.
"Leopard suspected of eating 15 people in Nepal" https://edition.cnn.com/2012/11/03/world/asia/nepal-leopard-...
To put the farmer's perspective another way:
Everyone has a right to self-defense if you are being harmed. But imagine if the government says "actually, if the person harming you has blonde hair, then you can't defend yourself because we are protecting people with blonde hair right now. But don't worry we will make it worth your while if you just let the blonde person hurt you."
I know this sounds like a crazy example, but if you have ever spent time around farmers who deal with this issue, it feels exactly as crazy to them.
Empty slogans like "Build the fence" only work for politicians and activists.
Second, it hardly "destroys the environment for their convenience". Where I live the cattle graze down the grasses and prevent fires from spreading. In return, they leave manure which is super useful as a natural fertilizer for gardens and such.
Third, ranching is about food security. The areas where cattle are grazed are typically not much good for food crops, and it's a far more humane way to keep cattle. They got to roam around some pretty vast tracts of land, and you have a really healthy source of locally-sourced protein.
Finally, cattle are property. The idea that you shouldn't be allowed to protect your property is nutty. There are plenty of other wild animals for wolves to prey on, and there's no good ecosystem argument for why they should be permitted to slaughter cattle willy-nilly. Allowing ranchers to shoot wolves threatening their cattle would result in surviving wolves being much more reticent about going after cattle in the first place.
See: why bears and cougars rarely attack humans, even though their populations are healthy enough to be on the "hunt all year round" list for property owners in many areas.
Cows with calfs can join together and be defensive and pretty letal also if upset. If there is a bull protecting the whole herd wolves had nothing to do.
Wolves are a problem for sheep and goats, but will be need to be really desperate for attacking a group of healthy cows. The races of cows able to pass months alone in the mountain are perfectly able to hold their ground against a wolf.
People that claims to lose 600 sheep, year after year, (this guys have really bad, bad luck) are receiving 24.000 euros/year for the privilege of doing -nothing- to protect their assets. Why? Is the meat free?
Is: "pay me a ransom of 2 million euro each year... or I could start killing a protected species... or burning the forest, or burning your house, maybe your family also". Everybody giving money to a few people so they agree to respect the law is an interesting concept for sure. Is plain mobster blackmail. Each country that tried to appease criminals with money has deeply regretted it in the end.
We don't cover hotels by their loses when jellyfishes appear in a beach. Should we?
[0]: https://ballotpedia.org/Colorado_Proposition_114,_Gray_Wolf_...
The US has around 18,000 wild wolves. And another 60,000 wolves in Canada. In comparison, all of Scandinavia has maybe 400 or so. IOW, US+Canada has 200x the wolf population in 17x the land area (human population density is roughly the same). While apx 80,000 wolves does not seem enough to be considered "thriving" IMO, they're in no danger of extinction anymore. So while some care should be taken to maintain populations, it seems reasonable to take them off the endangered list.
There are also 10's of thousand mountain lions, 10's of thousand bears, and millions of alligators in the USA. The USA/Canada is not exactly lacking in dangerous apex predators.
Not saying the policy will ever be correct, but this is why you introduce thresholds, limitations, and requirements. For instance, using donkeys in the pasture to combat predators should be required. Promote smart farming, not just a pocketbook.
Great Pyrenees dogs are amazing defenders as well. I've seen those put the brakes on some prowling coyotes and put a chase on them so hard that they defy physics to get over a fence. Exceptionally friendly to humans, and other dogs, outside their pastures. One of the good boys used to visit for pets and treats. :)
Presumably this is a joke?
Rasmussen has the highest right leaning bias of any major pollster accounted for in Five Thirty Eight's pollster ratings:
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/pollster-ratings/
Beyond their biased election polls the site seems tailor made to provide links presenting cheap talking points as majority percentages. I won't bother linking anything else on their website.
And given my own biases, I'm not surprised about the results. The Works Progress Administration built a lot of infrastructure we still depend on today with unemployed people. Until we get to the point where all our roads, bridges, airports, etc are looking as good as the ones you find in other parts of the world, underpaying healthy people to run asphalt machines for 20 hours a week (or whatever), or provide childcare, gives us a return on the basic societal need to keep people from starving.
Why is it weird for someone to resent regulatory conditions that necessitate dependence on a handout?
Then isn't is obvious that people with a political philosophy of limited government would demand a higher payout to abandon the idea of limited government? And that people who favor government involvement would go along with government involvement even if they end up footing the bill?
It's the specific phrase and label of wealth redistribution/socialism that the US is allergic to the policies are generally individually pretty popular if they're broad based.
Sometimes it's not livestock. Many have horses or donkeys, or goats and sheep that they don't turn into meat.
Also it's about the rights of your own land. If wolves kill the lives you take care of, they cannot be allowed to continue. The fact they are killing your animals means they're not finding other prey and are overpopulated at that location.
https://www.humanesociety.org/sites/default/files/docs/HSUS-...
I’ve also seen it said that wolf populations do two positive things for livestock: keep grazing wildlife to manageable levels (so that fields are replenished for livestock) and outcompete coyotes, who are more likely to prey on livestock than wolves.