Comment by adrian_b | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adrian_b | Hacker News Reader

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Attacks against humans from non-rabid wolves are extraordinarily rare if they have ever existed.

I have lived in a part of Eastern Europe where wolves had been abundant, but no attacks against humans from non-rabid wolves have ever been recorded, for centuries.

Even supposing that attacks from wolves might exist, they must be many orders of magnitude less frequent than attacks from the existing dogs.

Attacks from rabid wolves exist, but they are still much less frequent than the attacks from rabid dogs or rabid foxes. Because rabid animals usually just bite and then run away, such attacks are really dangerous only when it is not possible to reach quickly a hospital, for treatment against rabies.

The wolves are a serious danger for sheep and goats and other domestic animals, which must be properly guarded where wolves exist, not for humans.

Therefore "I don't want to be attacked by wolves" is a completely unrealistic fear, unlike the fear of dogs, including stray dogs, for which there may be valid grounds in certain places.

Possibly there are other wolf subspecies that are more aggressive; there are many (anecdotal) stories of non-rabid wolf attacks e.g. in Canada and Alaska, and Wikipedia [0] seems to bear this out.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wolf_attacks_in_North_...

Assuming that the causes of death have been correctly identified (because wolves will not hesitate to eat the body of an already dead human), that list contains only 2 attacks in North America during the last century (not counting rabid or captive wolves).

While this supports the supposition that the wolves from Alaska and Canada might be more aggressive than those from Europe, when starved during cold winters, this still shows that an attack from wolves is one of the least probable dangerous events that can happen.

Did you read the article linked? I don't know why you're talking about Eastern Europe.

If some random fuck was voting for my domesticated animals to die, I would reasonably object.

>In 2022, gray wolves attacked domesticated animals hundreds of times across 10 states in the contiguous U.S. including Colorado, according to an Associated Press review of depredation data from state and federal agencies. Attacks killed or injured at least 425 cattle and calves, 313 sheep and lambs, 40 dogs, 10 chickens, five horses, and four goats, according to the data. Other times livestock simply goes missing, such as two calves that Mr. Gittleson said disappeared after wolves had passed through.

> Such losses can be devastating to individual ranchers or pet owners. However, their industry-wide impact is negligible: The number of cattle killed or injured in the documented cases equals 0.002% of herds in the affected states, according to a comparison of depredation data with state livestock inventories.

>“95% of ranchers in Colorado will never have a problem,” said Ed Bangs, a former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who led the reintroduction of wolves in the mid-1990s to Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho. “4.5% will have the occasional problem every couple of years maybe, and maybe one or two guys will have a problem like every other year. I don’t think it’s enough to put them out of business.”

>“But if it was my cattle and my business, I’d be pissed,” he added.

This is just the gun control holy war with the sides flipped.

It's the same war, no sides are being flipped. Step (1) increase populations of dangerous animals. Step (2) remove self-defense capabilities. Step (3) refuse to let the refugees build denser housing in the cities. Step (4) profit from mind-boggling real estate prices.

Or something like that. I jest, but wants and needs, lived experiences, and whatnot do tend to divide fairly cleanly on population density boundaries in the US (statistically, obviously not everyone), and it's very much not just those two topics where you can see that voting divide.

>voting for my domesticated animals to die

You can guard and fence them, just like in every other place with predators the farmers haven't driven to extinction.

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