Wolves make roadways safer
pnas.org
pnas.org
In the US, deer-vehicle collisions make deer the deadliest animal for people that we have in this country.
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/10-deadliest-animals-in-...
In the US: Deer–vehicle collisions lead to about 200 human deaths and $1.1 billion in property damage every year.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deer%E2%80%93vehicle_collisi...
Part of my incomplete BS in Environmental Studies was a class in quantifying the economic value of natural resources. I did a case study on wetlands in the San Francisco Bay Area that are currently quietly being threatened by the county rail plan.
The US used to pay people to fill in swamps and create "productive" land and then learned that swamps do useful and valuable things of various sorts. We updated the name from swamp to wetlands, overhauled their public image and reversed policy. We now protect and restore such areas.
Quantifying the economic value to humans of a natural resource is a good means to convince people it needs protecting and it is in your best interest to protect it. This is not "charity" and shouldn't be viewed as a sacrifice.
We are cutting our own throats when we ruin the world because of fixation on some overly simplified idea that it needs to put money directly into our pockets for humans to care about it. One of the best ways to fight such entrenched ideas is to quantify just how much it costs us to think that way.
I happen to be living on a mountain in southern Tuscany. A place where wolf where hunted to the brink of extinction and the deer population is exploding. This essay resonates with me in profound ways.
The essay (PDF): https://www.ecotoneinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/aldo-l...
PS. the whole book is worth reading.
I want to say the organization was called Denali but that is now the name of a mountain in Alaska that was formerly known as Mt. McKinley. That change occurred in 2015. So searching for Denali gets me results for that specific mountain and things related to it, not for an environmentally oriented charity.
I am failing to find verification that there ever was such an organization. So I don't know if I am misremembering the name.
Well, some of them called it something kinda-sorta close to that. Other groups of indigenous people called it by other names. Alaska Natives aren't one homogeneous group, by any means.
It's quite large, so it was visible to many different groups (on a good day I can see it from here, and it's about 130 miles/200 km away).
But Denali is definitely better than McKinley, no question about that.
Since Alaska was already a state in 1975 I would say that the mountain’s name was officially recognized as Denali in some states from 1975. However it took until 2015 for the rest of the country to officially adopt it.
It's been a lot of years since I took the class, but those things can be valued. One of the things I did in my case study of Suisun Marsh was quantified how much the marsh cleans up the water and what it would cost if humans did it with a water treatment plant.
Suisun Marsh is also a historic birding area and the rails go through there for that reason. It brought tourism.
You can place dollar values on tourism, water quality and other things. It doesn't get done a lot but can be done.
A lot of places with such assets are small town or rural. Planning jobs tend to pay better in the big city so your best talent tends to end up designing cities and planners often hate their jobs because they don't get to do what they wanted to do.
Planning something good for people and the environment that makes economic sense and gets buy in from enough pertinent stakeholders is hard. So, all too often, "money talks" instead.
The sub branch is "environmental economics." My cousin got his PhD in it.
Eutrophication can occur from lawn maintenance runoff alone. For coastlines around larger bodies of water, chemicals and heavy metals can deposit near the coast, and concentrate in filter feeders and animals higher up in the food chain to the point that it is unsafe to eat things that are caught off the coast.
I saw a Nature study on HN recently and I think it called this thinking in to question? I’ll go search for it and update this comment if I find it.
EDIT: No luck finding it. EDIT2: found it! https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-01477-y
EDIT: found it https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-01477-y
The actual study is filled with it’s own problems such as ignoring land covered by water etc, but that’s largely irrelevant here. However the real issue is it’s looking at land use around cities which are rarely independent. The area around London for example isn’t a single city it’s a cluster of different cities of various densities that all bleed into each other. Is to use a US example is Patterson part of NYC? How about Stamford and or Newark? If not where exactly do you place the borders between each of them?
Looking at population in the heart of NYC vs the surrounding areas over time and they are fairly independent.
Parts of Australia have a deer problem, but despite cultivating a reputation for deadly animals, most of it lacks large terrestrial predators, so introducing wolves is an even harder sell than in the US.
It also has prior historical experience with introducing a species to address a previously introduced species, which then becomes a problem itself: foxes for rabbits; cane toads for cane beetles. cue Simpsons
I agree with your point, though.
Which by most peoples measure, was a success.
I don't agree with this "Swallowed a spider to catch the fly" approach though.
Interesting observation.
Just a clarification, the thing that the insurance company wanted the department in charge to do was issue (make available) more deer tags, not licenses. Hard to say more without knowing which state.
(AL)
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm USA annual number of deaths: 2,854,838. So, deer kill about .007% of USA population annually. I don't want to downplay the tragedy, but I wouldn't recommend spending a large amount of the budget on this.
I've always been skeptical of driving, since I lost my best friend to it in high school, and saw others lose their friends. But. Since I've had children, I've been completely radicalized, and find it hard to even discuss the issue with a lot of people because my views have diverged so much from the mainstream. I unintentionally offend people all the time, and seeing your attitude gives me hope for finding more productive ways to express my views, like danny_codes did here.
Check out some articles about the floods in Canada right now; a big factor is the draining (it needs constant pumping) of a lake for farming.
draining did produce a lot of really productive fertile land. So maybe the cost benefit makes sense maybe you can do the math for us!
but we're starting to see the true cost of our actions
I grew up in a rural area of New York - from age 16-20, I hit or was hit by 5 deer in vehicles, including one that jumped off an embankment and landed on and went through my roof.
That wasn’t a uniquely unlucky track record either. If I recall correctly NY State Troopers were involved in ~500 collisions with deer annually at that time (mid 90s)
But it's our #1 tool. So popular that we literally cannot imagine not using it 24-7.
And furthermore we invariably call that model of reality, "reality".
I mean that's just how it is.
Possible antidotes for this ubiquitous plague of profound blindness : drugs, art, disaster, meditation... What else?
As opposed to part of your complete BS? :D (Sorry, couldn't resist!)
a wolf wrote it.
joking aside the Yellowstone phenomenon gets often cited. We have a long way to go in Europe (cough cough Switzerland, Austria) where the wolf by the rural community is still seen as a huge problem to the way of life (hunting and farming). I wonder if some modern solutions where wolves that are tagged anyway can be combined with trackers on cows/sheep/goats that subscribe to this data, so that the shepherd knows that a wolf is about to approach the herd. The bigger problem in these communities is that hunters have been doing this for generations, I myself come from such a family, my gramps, even my mother my uncle everyone was a hunter. They all believe that the hunter plays an important role in keeping a check on population of deer etc. As Yellowstone has shown reintroducing the wolf hasn't just solved that issue but also brought back types of trees, flowers and biodiversity that was previously lost. All because they allowed apex-predators back to where they were. But try to convince somebody in the countryside about this ... going to be a tough sell.
here wolves are highly political fights, to kill or not to kill.
usually they get killed.
i think wolves are just part of the political apparatus here, i have no idea how deep the hunter lobby goes..., but it is a fact that for every government, be it green or far right, the trigger is easy. we don't like wolves here, keep your paw out of our peaceful country.
(if you are a wolf that specializes in oil / food / ore trading, please be welcome in our country! did you know we are famous for chocolate?! you're office is waiting for you , it has a nice view on Zürich's iconic Bahnhofstrasse.)
100% the same situation in Scandinavia. Wolves would also probably help with the wild Boar problem in Sweden.
> Many Swedish farmers are affected by wild boar that cultivate arable land and eat crops.
> According to an action plan from the Swedish Farmers' Association, LRF, this involves
> damages of SEK 1.1 billion per year.
https://www.tellerreport.com/news/2020-09-25-wild-boar-a-bil...
> The main threat to wild boars are humans, but sometimes wild boar also fall prey to lynx,
> bears and wolves but only the later is of greater importance. In some areas in Italy for
> example wild boars are the main prey to wolves, but since the distribution of wild boar and
> wolves are not really overlapping in Sweden this has not been demonstrated in Sweden yet. In
> future, if the wolves are spreading southward and wild boars continue to spread up north, we
> may see this happen in Sweden as well.
http://files.webb.uu.se/uploader/271/BIOKand-13-025-Duck-Lov...
Don't be silly. That's clearly my grandmother.
All traditions related to wolf cults and werewolf stories are more or less related to local people having to deal with wolves as animals on a daily basis.
Or so I've read :).
This landscape of fear is interesting concept.
There are many projects currently underway, introducing these dogs to America, Europe and Africa, as an alternative to killing on sight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangal_Shepherd_Dog https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/blog/kangal-soldier-of-the-s...
Probably because unlike America this continent doesn't have wild nature anymore just carefully curated,designed and scripted parks.
“In Europe and North America we only found evidence for 12 attacks (with 14 victims), of which 2 (both in North America) were fatal, across a period of 18 years. Considering that there are close to 60.000 wolves in North America and 15.000 in Europe, all sharing space with hun- dreds of millions of people it is apparent that the risks associated with a wolf attack are above zero, but far too low to calculate”
1: https://brage.nina.no/nina-xmlui/bitstream/handle/11250/2729...
Steven Rinella talks with Dr. Kevin Monteith, Dr. Matt Kaufmann, Jared Oakleaf, and Janis Putelis.
Subjects discussed: genetics that rewrite our understanding of animals; big game guts; learning how to migrate; who pays for wildlife research?; brain scrambling, extreme sports, and wildlife capture; advancing modern wildlife management; etc.
I only read the abstract but I wonder if this was accounted for in the article. Sure, it’s plausible that wolves lead to fewer deer-vehicle collisions, and that is a economic benefit. But what is the cost of decreasing humans’ willingness to enter the woods?
I'm not saying no one is afraid of going outdoors because of the wolves, but that fear would be completely irrational. Your chances of twisting your ankle badly enough that you get caught out and die of exposure are many orders of magnitude greater.
Edit to add: as an additional anecdote, we get a ton of tourists coming here to head outdoors because of their interest in the wolves and hopes of seeing one.
Significant dog bites affect tens of millions of people globally each year. It is estimated that 2% of the U.S. population, 4.5–4.7 million people, are bitten by dogs each year. Most bites occur in children. Between 2005 and 2018 approximately 471 people were killed by dog bites in the United States, averaging 37 deaths per year.
- A black bear suddenly charge toward me around a blind bend, stopping maybe 15-20 feet away, staring for a while before it took off down the side of the mountain
- A moose walk calmly by me, not much more than an arm’s length away
Both were absolutely terrifying experiences. Objectively, the bear encounter was probably the more dangerous (it was clearly startled so potentially unpredictable), but both the proximity and the casualness of the moose’s approach scared me much more.
Wolves are really shy around humans so I don’t think there is any real threat to humans or our pets (as long as we keep our pets close to us). There is only the perception of threat but humans tend to adopt, and I don’t think this perception would last longer then a year or two and soon enough outdoor activities would resume to previous levels.
Less really expensive wildfires.
This made me laugh! I think this applies to any animal that is prey.
We were driving on a semi-wilderness highway when a medium-sized deer staggered up from a deep drainage ditch on the same side of the road, about 50 yards ahead. Managed to slow from 65-70 to 50 mph before hitting the animal, which slid along the highway and into the deep ditch on the other side.
The slowdown helped limit the van's damage to $10,000, but it was undriveable. Even if we somehow removed the hood (bent in two over the unbroken windshield), all the fluid had ran out of the crushed radiator and into the semi-wilderness ditch.
Luckily it was a hot July afternoon, and a truck going the opposite way came along in 15 minutes. The driver put the deer out of its misery. Had it been in the winter, after sundown, it might have taken hours just to be found.
Happened in the 1990s (no mobiles), so we waited for a vehicle heading toward the nearest little town to find a tow -truck. With the van towed to that town (no repair shop), it was another hour before relatives arrived from the bigger town (that tow-truck had a repair shop).
The insurance company paid for the repair, then dropped the policy. I never drove that route after noon again.
Deer are the second most deadly animal in North America. Thats because about 100K of them throw themselves into the paths of cars, trucks, motorcycles and bicycles every year.
The most deadly animal is the honey bee. After these two come the usual suspects: snakes, bears, mountain lions, spiders, etc.
Why did the insurer cancel the policy?
Contrary to movie magic/political posturing, these devices only decrease the report by about 10 decibels, generally just under the hearing damage threshold, but still very loud.
A suppressor does the same thing that a muffler does on a car. It takes what would be an awfully loud noise and makes it bearable. Its a safety device. Are cars stealth and silent? Of course not. Neither are suppressed guns.
But yeah Hollywood quiet is mostly a myth. It is possible to achieve a very quiet gun but you have to take some heavy compromises to do so. Two such guns were developed by the British in WW2 for commandos. The Welrod and Delisle. They have both been featured in media. Some key aspects are the use of sub sonic ammunition, massively oversized suppressors that not only have baffles but also consumable rubber wipes, and also using repeating actions instead of semi auto. They are very quiet by gun standards but even they aren't Hollywood quiet.
The other aspect of them that's usually less broadly appreciated (and part of why "suppressor" is preferred to "silencer") is that they're also effective at reducing muzzle flash, which is sometimes relevant, especially with short barrels.
The closest to movie silencer requires using sub-sonic ammunition in addition to the "silencer".
That will remove the crack from the bullet passing trough the sonic barrier and some of the gas explosion noises.
But even then it won't be "movie silencer" levels of silent, as the action of the firearms mechanic are usually also still quite loud if the weapon is not specifically designed to prevent that.
I thought it was more like 30db of reduction, though. Still, simply below the point of hearing damage, not like Hollywood.
Clarifications would be much more welcome than downvotes, I think
Yes, I personally knew him.
Yes, he was a first responder and I saw him leave a number of times to respond to calls for first responders. Given the area we were in, some of these calls certainly would have been for cars hitting deer.
Yes, I saw the spear in the vehicle he took to those calls.
I do know from others in his family that he sometimes acquired a roadkill permit & brought back a deer carcass.
I do concede that this guy was fond of telling tall tales so he might have embellished a bit, but nothing seemed terribly implausible about this story to me at the time. As nothing of import hinges on its veracity, I think it's fine to categorize this under "quite probably true" and let it be. =)
Never go up to a deer you're not 100% sure is dead. They're big, hurt, and can decide any moment to flee or attack.
But that's going to not be popular with a lot of people because it means deciding what area we get to live in or don't. Some towns are going to be removed for lack of sustainability.
For this to work, we would need to also improve our land use policies in the towns and cities we currently live in.
2. Deciding where people can live is extremely tyrannical. Many people own this land, what’s the plan, take their ancestral home? That didn’t work out well any time in history.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2017/december/a-primer-...
Every time I see comments like this I come to the same conclusion. My bet: you’re from a city, young, white collar, perhaps grew up in suburbs on a coast?
Nothing wrong with that, but there’s a disconnect between those living in urban environments vs the country.
We are already deciding where people can live. It's called zoning, and zoning laws restrict how we can build our homes, where we live, and what transportation options we can use.
My proposal seem tyrannical, yes, but I paired it with improving human welfare in the land we didn't cede to nature, and probably more freedom to build and live overall.
essentially you would be creating a inverse-gentresizing where the middle class leaves then upperclass leaves creating a ghetto.
Zoning is done in higher density areas, because it has to be. It's one of the tradeoffs you make when you choose to live in a higher density area.
In rural areas, or even in smaller towns, you won't find much zoning. And people who choose to live in such areas are making different tradeoffs (for example, lack of easy access to many kinds of services that are easily available in higher density areas).
Trying to command people who want to live in either kind of area to live in the other kind does not work out well. It's much better to just make sure that people who choose to live in each kind of area bear their share of the costs, and get their share of the benefits.
Your proposal is upside down.
We turn the suburbs into sprawl and take over nature because of restrictive zoning. People want to build a ten story building near the city, can't because it's illegal, so then they build ten one story buildings and use up ten times more land/nature.
Mostly in urban areas. You go to the rural places we're talking about, you might find the zoning is minimal to non-existent. Implementing zoning would absolutely be a new restriction on where people can live, what they can build on their property. People in those areas are often used to doing nearly whatever they like on their own property - short of things that'd be illegal wherever they did them. You're proposing to take that away?
You have got to be joking, right? Just open Google Maps, switch to satellite mode, turn off labels and look at the US midwest, particularly Illinois. Any zoom level. Nebraska, Iowa, Wisconsin, Indiana, pretty much everywhere. It's a patchwork of farms. Basically all flat parts of the US look like this, except for extremely arid areas.
654M acres pasture/range (35%)
538.6M acres forest (28%)
391.5M acres crop (21%)
168.6M acres special use (9%)
69.4M acres urban (4%)
68.9M acres miscellaneous (4%)
Here is an article with a pretty graphic: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/
"Natural" is a black hole for the purpose of debate. Pasture is natural if the number of livestock are controlled, otherwise look out. Monoculture forests (have you driven through the western mountains and seen the beetle damage) have issues. Crop land- a massive issue to consider, if you want to see the impact just surf the satellite views of the US on Google maps, huge swaths of land with not enough "natural" in between. It would take very little proportionally, but significant (impossible?) effort to build in true swaths of "natural" habitat throughout impacted areas.
You don’t even need to turf people off the land they own - just choose to manage more of the land we already own as wilderness versus as a resource to be leased to ranchers and loggers.
I am working on setting up my off-grid sustainable farm. Cattle are relatively easy to keep if you have some average for grazing.
It’s still massive open space with lots of wildlife.
Why let perfect be the enemy of good?
Can I live in your house?
I mean, most of the land ownership in the US was obtained by ethnically cleansing the native inhabitants from their ancestral lands just a couple centuries ago, so...
* The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, or TRCP, is a non-profit 501(c)(3) coalition of conservation organizations, grassroots partners and outdoor related businesses, the main goal of which is increased federal funding for conservation while preserving access for hunters and fishers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Roosevelt_Conservatio...
* MeatEater’s Land Access Initiative (designed to raise money so we can find properties that will provide more access for regular folks to hunt and fish) https://www.themeateater.com/pages/land-access
(Disclosure: no affiliation)
Towns are not the problem, highways are. Specifically interstates and other roads built to that standards.
Highways and interstates are problematic, yes, but they often take away lands in suburban areas as opposed to the wilderness.
Speaking as someone who ran over a deer a few months back on a smaller road that connects these community. All kinds of animals cross these roads regularly and usually without impediments, can't be said for an interstate.
Cars are often driven at 40mph and faster on dirt roads around here. Bigger dirt roads would see increased speeds.
To Blue Tribe nature is a beautiful park we need to preserve and keep untouched. Work is done in an office, producing documents.
To Red Tribe nature is a source of raw materials to produce food, metals, power, etc. Work is taming and harvesting the resources of nature.
Blue Tribe keeps adding wilderness restrictions, which keeps taking away ways for Red Tribe to make a living, increasing rural poverty, and feeding resentment.
I hope that makes sense.
Your "Blue wilderness restrictions", writ large, are exactly based on a recognition that
> nature is a source of raw materials to produce food, metals, power, etc.
I think the policy differences arise downstream from that. Questions like, how to handle competing resource needs; how to manage current or future scarcity; and ultimately some disagreement about whether these questions even need to be asked (i.e. is scarcity of X actually a problem?)
The "Blue wilderness restrictions" I think of are banning logging, banning mining, banning new farming, banning dams, etc.
The "competing resource needs" are balanced in favor of keeping rural areas pristine, so city people can go hiking there and marvel at the untouched nature.
Most people live in cities, so when legislators decide these things, the city people priorities win.
Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He’s not breathing and his eyes are glazed, so his friend calls 911. “My friend is dead! What should I do?” The operator replies, “Calm down, sir. I can help. First make sure he’s dead.” There’s a silence, then a loud bang. Back on the phone, the guy says, “OK, now what?"
What surprises me more (I guess I’m a bit jaded), is that the title suggests that nature is there to be economically exploited. Does a species run up a loss? Extinction is its fate.
Nature will do what it wants, so I can't speak for the wolves. Humans on the other hand, at least in US and Canada, operate under North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, whose core principles are elaborated upon in the seven major tenets:
* Wildlife as Public Trust Resources
* Elimination of Markets for Game
* Allocation of Wildlife by Law
* Wildlife Should Only be Killed for a Legitimate Purpose
* Wildlife is Considered an International Resource
* Science is the Proper Tool for Discharge of Wildlife Policy
* Democracy of Hunting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Model_of_Wildli...
IOW, humans in US and Canada are less likely than ever to hunt animals to extinction, mostly because `Elimination of Markets for Game` makes it illegal to sell wild game.
I sometimes think many environmental issues could be resolved with sufficient bribery. And if the benefit of the policy is really that large, the bribes are affordable.
On some level, this system tells you the wolf is more important to society than you.
I speak from absolutely no experience, imagining how I might feel.
As opposed to when they goto slaughter?
Paying them a lot of public money for not doing their job well, would be like Apple having a bad year an asking Microsoft to cover for their loses. Ranchers are private companies.
After the new data coming day, after day, after day... it seems that people commit a few really suicidal moves a century ago. We still are trying to fix the industrial revolution effects.
Paying some people a bribe with money from other people, so they agree to respect the laws... it never ends well. Is blackmail. The concept is stupid and a magnet for troubles.
With sexy results. Lets see some curious discoveries in the biology of Spanish wolves:
1) Wolves start eating its preys by the most delicious part of the cattle: the livestock ear tag. A plastic piece that grants that the animal has been legally breed and registered, (and is often missing in the corpses). Having in mind that tag remains don't appear in the wolf scats, It seems that wolves love to collect them for the cubs.
2) Some cows were killed by wolves three times in three different places. The cow remains teleport mysteriously each time to another location.
3) Some farmers act as black holes for cattle. There is a strong suspicion that their entire business model consist into buying cheap foals and decrepit old goats in another province, let them alone and unprotected in the national park and wait for the corpse to be found. Some of this professionals of producing meat haven't sold a single animal or put a single sausage in the market... in decades.
4) It is suspected that scabies killing the endangered Pyrenean Chamois in the national park was introduced with those diseased goats.
5) Statistics about cattle dying by natural causes drop when government start paying wolf damages. Suddenly there is not more cows dying after giving birth, or from old age, or falling from a cliff. Is a well known secret that when you have an animal that needs an expensive veterinary procedure, borrowing a mastiff from a friend will fix the problem... and then you cry wolf, of course.
6) After introducing saliva analysis in Pyrenees looking for wolf DNA in the attacked cattle, the number of wolf attacks dropped from 100 to 7 in the next year. The analysis found that shepherd dogs owned by farmers were the real culprits in practically all attacks. Shepherd dogs had being videotaped feasting on cows and sheep. They respect its own herd, but will attack other herds. Everybody knows this.
7) Some farmers manage somehow to lost 600 sheep year after year without a trace, by the attack of magical wolves driving a van. We pay them up to 24.000 euro/year with tax money so they can be happy again. But they aren't, and ask for more.
And well, "You know how flammable is the forest, do you?, Everything could start burning some of those days if you don't allow us to put cattle here..."
In Jun 2021 a team of six farmers in the North of Spain were accused of scamming 60.000 euro of public funds. They claimed to have lost 170 animals between 2019 and 2020 but were caught putting food for attracting wolves and then removing small foals from its mothers and abandoning them in the same place so the wolves do their thing. They also killed 6 wolves that are a protected species.
In a classic 'The Goodfather' style, head wolves and wolf corpses have been found hanging from road signs in several parts of the Cantabric mountains.
2016: https://www.rtpa.es/noticias-sucesos:-Hallan-la-cabeza-de-un...
https://www.lavanguardia.com/natural/20180827/451495603526/d...
... and after a farmers protest in Infiesto, somebody trow a decapitated wolf head in the public pool (2018).
Politicians in environmental positions, have been harassed and pressed to gimme-more also.
In 2014, more than 300 farmers were accused of scam after being caught billing twice for each animal to insurance (that was paid in part with public founds) and then to the government.
https://www.rtpa.es/noticias-asturias:Mas-de-300-ganaderos-a...
Some forest guards had being accused to turning a blind eye when filling the reports of attacks and report all as wolf attacks to benefit farmers from their own family. Other guards received death threats and found their cars scratched for not willing to bend and do the same.
etc, etc, etc...
In resume, free money leads to bad apples gaming the system. If USA follows the same path there is a strong possibility that will end facing exactly the same problems.
For humans males, 300 pounds is in the 97th percentile for weight: https://dqydj.com/weight-percentile-calculator-men-women/
You're not wrong, but since it's not really made explicit in the paper, I'll mention that since they are measuring these weights at the check-in stations, these are almost certainly the "field dressed weights". After killing a deer, the hunter usually removes the internal organs from the chest cavity before moving the deer. The actual live weight of the deer is will be about 1/3 higher. A 55 kg (120 lb) deer at the check in station will thus actually weigh closer to 70 kg (150 lb) when live: https://www.pgc.pa.gov/Wildlife/WildlifeSpecies/White-tailed....
Visit a Walmart. Or go to Walt Disney World. Or a Las Vegas casino. You'll see what he means.
Over here it most likely is a total loss for the car.
Because that isn't how [highly polarized] democracies work. The fact that environmentalists are aghast is a bonus for those in favor of wolf culls. But, even those politicians think with their wallets. Wolves aren't going to get out the vote. In reality, this is going to come down to how politicians personally feel about wolves, and how persuasive rancher, livestock insurance and car insurance lobbies are in making their respective cases.
But committees sit around and think, "here's a way we can further justify and generate some press."
How much human effort is wasted by group politics and general shrugging?
evidently not, otherwise there wouldn't be endangered species.
>Why do we need to point to the economics of it? Are they not worth conserving unless they help the bottom line?
to get all the non-conservationists on board.
Of course, we live in an age where the nominally "fiscally responsible" people show declining interest in intellectual consistency and coherence, so maybe this argument is moving into the "elegant weapon for a more civilized age" category.
I grew up in a wolf re-intro zone and have had to deal with all the changes to the forest that came with it, many, if not most, of them bad. It wasn't until I was older I went back and re-read the justification papers and they were absolutely horrid science. There is quite a history of wolf related papers being used to justify political actions far outside what the papers support. Please don't fall into that same trap here. This is an interesting paper about the Wisconsin wolf population from a particular angle of study (not a holistic study), that's it.
How and why? Are Wisconsin wolves somehow fundamentally different than other wolves; a different species or something? I find your thesis hard to swallow. Occam's razor suggests that since they're wolves, they behave like other wolves.
Not sure about terrain and population density in Wisconsin, but at a guess, they probably behave much like wolves in central Sweden or Finland then.
Or at least, deer feel unable to register sounds there and thus avoid it
(Simple example in our own backyard. Some plants in pots, some plants in the ground with vegetation around them. The birds completely stripped the ones in the pots but didn't touch the ones in the ground. There was no cover near the pots, a cat would have no cover. With the ones in the ground a cat would have lots of cover. While we do not have a cat multiple cats sometimes come around.)
Deer hang out wherever they find food and cover. If there happen to be busy roads in the vicinity then you find them on busy roads.
Busy roads also have lights; deer make use of available illumination. The frequency of deer collisions increases with the full moon because of this[1].
I have a light pole on my property and deer hang out near this. Almost every night I step outside I startle a few; there were two does under it last night.
[1] https://www.popsci.com/animals/hit-deer-time-of-day-year/
I hate driving country roads because I've had way too many close calls with deer that seem hell-bent on appearing suddenly from off to the side directly in front of you. I once had three separate deer crossing in front of my car incidents in just 48 hours before. 2 extremely close, one I'm surprised I didn't hit and I swerved in a dumb and potentially dangerous way to miss it (probably shouldn't have, but that's what happened in the moment, thankfully I was the only person on the road then).
So yeah, bring on the wolves. I don't want deer to go extinct or anything, but I wouldn't mind being able to loosen my vice grip on the steering wheel and having total vigilance whenever I drive down country roads (especially at night).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wolf_attacks
I'm not very comfortably hiking in wolf territories.
Lots of predators are far more dangerous to people than wolves but wolves provoke a visceral reaction because they've been demonized in a way bears, etc haven't.
I was around 24 and kept wondering why most people didn’t read my emails.
(I know they mostly leave humans alone but it’s still unsettling.)
Oh, yeah, forgot to mention the Alaskan frontier town that I call home: Redmond, WA. It’s not Australia, but there are a few things around here that will give thought to killing you and eating you, even in town.
I think that's the price of living close to the nature, but it may be a hard pill to swallow after several generations growing up in rural areas barren of wolves.
Wolf attacks on people are pretty much proportional to the amount of other food they have available and how many people they come into contact with, just like any other predator.
That's a big assumption.
> here there are wolves, you change your behavior ( let kids out on their own much less).
Kids are already let out so much less than they used to be, so that might not be necessary.
> Wolf attacks on people are pretty much proportional to the amount of other food they have available and how many people they come into contact with, just like any other predator.
The constant you multiply the proportion by matters a lot.