This is horse shit. Do NOT interact with wolves. They're beautiful and majestic. They also absolutely don't deserve the damage that can come from food from humans or habituation, and you don't deserve the risk (from attack, from disease, from a park ranger who's pissed that yet ANOTHER tourist is ignoring all of the postings to leave wild animals alone.)
Bison near you? Get the fuck away. Wolf? Get the fuck away. Chipmunk? Seriously, stop interacting with wildlife. If you feed wildlife, you're an asshole. If wildlife is put down because a TikTok video got you attacked, you're an asshole. If yet another bear is relocated because you helped habituate it, you're an asshole. (And if you're wondering, there are usually a lot of laws around how people shouldn't interact with wildlife. For good reason.)
Leave no trace. Let wildlife be wild. Leave it the fuck alone.
Move to a new house near wild fauna and flora ? You’re an asshole, leave it the fuck alone.
Expending suburbs and creating new one is taking over some life territory.
Can you find a quote you disagree with, and then explain why you disagree with it? That usually clarifies situations like this.
For example, the “when cared for” is an important qualifier in my statement.
Dogs might have descended from wolves and can even interbreed with them, but they're not the same.
I’m trying to let the insults roll off me, but saying I’m horse shit and ignorant for two things I didn’t say is a bit much. I think that’s enough HN for the day. Have a nice weekend.
This would also apply: "lions are closer to house cats than they are to humans or bears." So would you say "lions are basically large house cats" ?
I can see how your comment is not about habituating wolves, but it feels like I have to be extra charitable to read it that way even knowing your intent.
You don't have to fear wolf attacks because we just aren't something they are familiar with, but if they're really hungry they'd have no qualms over turning a couple humans into lunch, and you can't just scare them off.
Find the treat that the human points at. The dog puppy follows the cue, while the wolf does not.
That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the wolf, but it's genetically less likely to defer and learn from the human.
It was in some dog documentary on Netflix. Wish I could remember the name!
Anyway I think that tendency to attune to us, generalized to other contexts, is part of what makes dogs so wonderful. It's not just a matter of being able to direct them explicitly, but the fact that they're interested in what we're doing, how we're feeling, what we want, etc.
All of that varies with each individual dog, of course. But it's obvious that generally, wolves and humans aren't as fit for each other as dogs and humans are.
Even wolves that have been crossbred over several generations with dogs to get a more wolflike appearance tend to be exceptionally difficult to manage, have been well-known to attack other pets, can be very destructive, and ultimately most people want them because of how they look.
People who believe that wolves will reciprocate human affection and somehow magically ignore all of their instincts are people who tend to overly anthropomorphize what are at heart wild animals.
In general, unless you know what you’re doing, just don’t.
Most of the time, you’re just fine handling a tame wolf if trained properly. It’s that time you make the mistake of thinking you can ignore what they want that will get you hurt.
Bears are sometimes pretty cool. There’s a lady on tiktok that scratches one behind the ears with a rake whenever it shows up. Which is apparently a frequent thing for her. https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRv5qd55/
Somehow she trained it to sit… https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRv5yDQk/
But I don’t think bears are domesticatable through selective breeding, whereas there’s some evidence that wolves are.
You say that like it's shameful for them to feel that way.
Pet owners really don't like it when wolves kill off their dogs & cats, either.
The people who have lived here a while pay no nevermind. But new locals always fill nextdoor with coyote sightings. I mean, yeah, you can hear them basically every night.
> He went to jail for hitting her
> He went to jail because she didn't like that he hit her
This makes it sound like she would or should sometimes like to be hit, rather than being straightforwardly the victim of a crime, or straightforwardly because the person committed a crime
so, "bad reputation" is unfortunate, X caused it, but it's unwarranted to read that as "X is unfortunate"? It seems like a reasonable inference.
Right. I have some affection for wolves and coyotes because of their resemblance and relatiom to domestic dogs... but I also don't want them near my home any more than they have to be, and I avoid them at parks, because they will 100% kill and eat dogs like mine. They do it all the time.
But the growls are kind of cute, and probably sound a lot more ominous than they are. https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRv5LQGC/
(If this is a “citation needed” situation: https://www.mayoclinic.org/first-aid/first-aid-human-bites/b...)
there's no wilderness... it's all somebody's backyard.
I don't know anything about wolves really, but with dogs, most individual components of body language are pretty ambiguous. For example,
- many dogs will rapidly wag their tails just before getting into a vicious fight (it doesn't just mean 'happy')
- dogs will generally bare teeth as a warning/threat, but some will also show their teeth as a greeting (Google 'heeler smile')
- some stress/calming signals (e.g., pulling ears back or lowered tail) can occur as normal parts of safe, mutual play
All of that is to say that if someone who works at a respectable wolf habitat/rescue tells me that a growl-y vocalization from a wolf is not always aggressive, I don't have a hard time believing that.
(I'd love to learn more about wolf body language and how it differs from that of domestic dogs!)
My dog has played a few times with a rescue mutt (bit of rottie in there?) who growls pretty loud in the heat of the moment. Was frightening to hear, but shes not aggressive at all.
The most damaging thing you could ever do to soil is expose it to direct sunlight. The whole point of annuals is that they come up to protect the soil from the harmful radiation that kills the soil ecosystems. That's why annuals seeds can survive in soils for sometimes even decades. They're not meant to displace anything. They're meant to be there when there's some sort of "disturbance" (in nature this could be a fire or a mudslide or a windstorm that knocks over some important shade-providing trees, but in Western agriculture this is basically all of our farming) and kickstart the process of ecological succession
If you let your lawn get overgrown by weeds it might look terrible the first year (tho I personally think it looks much more beautiful than the green deserts we spend so much money trying to maintain). But the second year you'll start to get some perennials and a lot less of the weedy annuals. Maybe some grasses will start. Eventually the soils will have developed so that they transformed from bacteria-dominated to fungal dominated and mycorrhizal networks will allow much more hardy plants to grow including shrubs and eventually even trees. These advanced soils hold up to 50x as much water and plants who've made mycorrhizal associations are much more resistant to pests, droughts, freezes, etc and have access to a much larger network of nutrients. So that means you'll have to spend much less time maintaining, watering, fertilizing, etc. In fact fertilization with nitrogen impedes the formation of mycorrhizal associations so, if your goal is a long term garden, "leave it the fuck alone" is actually a very effective strategy.
Those weedy annuals depend on nitrogen that comes in easy to access forms but fungal dominated soils tend to have nitrogen in harder to access forms like ammonium (mainly due to the advancement of the soil food web into more complex organisms) so that means that the "weeds" will eventually work themselves out of a job (or at least until the next major "disturbance").
It's really a problem that solves itself and the more you fight that harder you need to fight.
I might've strayed from the original point but I think there's a similar lesson with wolves. Wolves drastically decrease the number of disease vectors (e.g. rats or deer with ticks) in an ecosystem and also balance out other predators that take their place like birds of prey. The more we fight them the more we have to come up with solutions for all the side effects of their absence (e.g. large deer populations leading to reduced vegetation that stabilizes river banks or the increase in diseases)