Wolves are reconquering Europe. Can people learn to live with them?
science.org
science.org
https://wildlifesecurityinnovations.com/projects/wolves-belg...
With the most wolf videos here.
We have a solar powered thermal local AI wolf detection system that’s been in a field in Belgium for more than 8 months now, monitoring the wolves there. Thermal image motion detection can detection them at much greater distances than PIR sensors and of course in complete darkness.
The biggest barrier at the moment to living with wolves, if you true away the human resistance to the idea, is reliable detection for early warning prevention.
This is not such a hard problem with computer vision at the level that it is these days. We’ve made it more effective by coupling it with thermal imaging camera modules.
Now we just need people willing to want to want to work with such pilot project, which turns out to be a pretty big problem.
However, it’s possible that a few influential success stories can bring change to the situation. But there has to be a start first and certainly when this started to be a problem, anything along the lines of prevention was seen as a barrier towards killing them which is what the solution in many people’s eyes is.
And no, it's not a glorified trail camera. Very different.
Everyone wants to kill before trying measures to keep people and their animals apart.
I don't think you can say it does nothing to help people live with wolves because it's not being tried. It's not being tried, because people being convince the only thing that helps is killing everything that requires a bit of effort to live with. I realize it's very human to destroy and kill, but I think we should strive to do better.
Humans have already stolen so much from nature and the animals, don't you think a little effort to do better would be a good thing?
We really don't deserve a place on this planet
And they provide premium ecological services all night that would be really expensive to cover by ourselves.
Wikipedia says wolves are more likely to attack humans if they've been living around humans for a while - they learn that humans are viable prey, not that humans are harmless.
Finnish people traditionally respected bears but were not afraid of them. Historical records mostly tell of two kinds of bear attacks. Either children / old people herding cattle in the forest accidentally got too close to a bear cub, or adult men were hunting bears and something went wrong.
Do you not understand how ecosystems work? Or how populations of predator/prey are in various (usually) oscillatory states?
> Humans have already stolen so much from nature and the animals
I'm confused, are you saying humans are somehow not part of nature?
So I'm just a little empathy would be well placed here. A little effort to try and co-exist with the other inhabitants would not be out of place and as a bonus you can think a little better of yourself.
The systems I developed are. It based on microcontrollers. But secure boot Linux systems. They detect wolves within 2 seconds on pi based version, sub second on the jetson based ones.
Then websocket connected subscribers speak a loud alert to wake the person up and auto load the camera view over the permanently up VPN.
The person monitoring can then verify on how ever many cameras are connected and illicit many different kinds of responses.
This is not a standard wild camera setup. I’m using high resolution 640x512 res thermal modules to see night and day.
Our system is already being used in Greenland for polar bears and has detected bears three times now from a long distance and the safety group were able to chase it away. There it’s monitoring 22 cameras with a single jetson.
And indeed, the idea is very rapid detection and validation and then potentially remote active response. It has all the necessary controls.
I really don't understand how people can't just look at how farmers in areas with wolves handle it and how we handled it in the past.
Eliminating all predators is also not that great then you get tons of hogs and deer etc.
People in other regions are still alive with way more dangerous predators than here in Europe I personally think it's more an education problem that people get way too close to wild animals just have a look at any social media and you see that most people have no basic education about how wild animals should be handled.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/child-bit-coyote-whit...
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/orleans-park-closed-coyote-at...
> free-roaming wolves are more important than people
I'm sure that nobody said that, ever, in the Netherlands.
Note: https://youtu.be/hmVowVaWUms about the German shepherd (in Dutch, but CC can help to understand). Just search on YouTube for Wolf Germany or Europe. And yes, the place I am from these wolves have started to enter urban areas (Veluwe).
Farmers are also heavily subsidized in Europe.
This subsidizing is not a EU standard practice, and not for all sectors of agricultural development. This idea that subsidizing offsets the loss of livestock sounds weird to me, as is the risk of a human attack. Europe is far more densely populated than most other places that have to deal with bears, coyotes or so, plus... You are allowed to take precautions, that we are not; a spray might harm the animal.
The [EAGF] consumes a large part of the general budget of the European Union.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Agricultural_Guarante...
It's a heated debate because farmers are considered such an important part of historic & cultural identity. And thus have a strong lobby & much public support. This is ignoring their dwindling % contribution to GDP.
https://www.rtvutrecht.nl/nieuws/3929221/jongetje-6-dat-bos-...
The worst part is, often the problem wolf is known to people (multiple incidents), but there is no permit to deal with it, or just difficult even when permit is granted. There is no real plan for this
Forest rich areas are close to urban areas, and they have been spotted in border regions already.
Most of the people living there are elders. People roam alone the shady paths of the oak forests to pick mushrooms. Shepherds with 300 animals don't lost a single one by wolves. This place has one of the healthiest deer population with bigger trophies in the country, because the wolves. Many young families could make a live here from nature tourism, also because the wolves. Absolutely spectacular place. Until it was left burn entirely a few years ago in a very suspicious chain of events
And... guess what?. No one man, women or little child attacked for a century. More people are killed by hunters each year than by wolves. More people are maimed by bulls and cows with calves. The smaller subspecies of Iberian wolves don't want to hang with us or to be near us in any way.
As I said before, this is the healthiest wolf population in the entire European Union [1], the place with a greater density of wolves. To add context the Romanian Carpathians have 2.35 wolves/100 Km2. Sweden has one single location with 3.3 wolves by 100 Km2 and between 0.5 and 1.5 wolves in the rest of Norway plus Sweden
Well. This Spanish place has 5-7 wolves by each 100 Km2. This alone proves that nobody is hunting wolves unofficially here [2].
And is not just a place with a lot of wolves, is a place where the deer populations flourish and thrive incredibly well [3]. The wolves are more valuable alive and don't attack humans at all. So, it can be done.
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[1] Chernobyl could be the only part of the European continent with more wolves by 100 Km 2, but is not a place really inhabited by humans and is not in the EU.
[2] The species is managed as a game resource. Some wolves are auctioned when needed but respecting the hierarchy on the packs.
[3] Moreover, after the place was burnt, the deer started to die massively by diseases until predators population were stabilized again.
In the Netherlands there are 14 wolf packs and 144 wolves in a geographical small area where the surrounding farms are often full of a lot sheep.
But it’s also easy to imagine that if you can become aware of the presents of wolves sufficiently early enough and reliably enough before they attack your animals then you have a chance to prevent an attack. And if you prevent enough attacks it becomes maybe harder than sticking to natural prey.
Wolves don't like taking risks. Interacting with humans is definitely risky. Detecting wolves reliably early and responding, either in person if that can be done quick enough, or setting off responses, ideally followed up by a human visit could well result in the wolves avoiding that farm in any case. The extend to which this can work in practice is something that needs to be determine through research and pilots. Wolves are very smart, so if tech is going to be able to help here, then the tech has to be very capable. The start with pilots and research two elements are needed. People with tech, but also people in the affected areas with a willingness to collaborate.
The current highly polarized environment is throwing road blocks against such collaboration.
The current situation is such that owners are unaware of the presence of wolves at their borders, so there is currently also not a lot of perceived risk associated with attacking live stock. A useful goal is to start to change that. And the people who read hacker news I'm sure that think of many ways to change the status quo. My system is one example.
Sadly, a lot time went by without trying these methods. None the less, one should try.
I the past I have offered free equipment to people to test who had been publicly expressing concern about the arrival of the wolf but they would not accept it.
But maybe that can still change.
Both times I alerted the farmer who went out in his car and then a little while later they dispersed.
And I also don’t believe those two times they were a threat to the horses, more likely just curious. But I didn’t have the full visibility enough to be sure as there was just one camera. So I called the farmer to be in the safe side.
Now I think there are no more wolves there. It’s been weeks since Insaw them. They have either dispersed or killed on the roads.
Are you kidding? Humans often had a fear of wolves throughout history. And rightfully so.
But the reverse is also true. Hence wolves tend to stay away from people so encounters are rare. But where not, human-wolf close encounters can end deadly sometimes. Even for the humans (especially children).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wolf_attacks_in_North_...
https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/historyculture/wolf-managemen...
This map shows how now there are nearly 7,000 in the contiguous states of the USA:
Looking the other way for a really long time results in crazy situations.
"The country with the most extensive historical record is France, where nearly 10,000 fatal attacks were documented from 1200 to 1920.[1][2][3] A study by the Norwegian Institute of Nature Research showed that there were eight fatal attacks in Europe and Russia, three in North America, and more than 200 in south Asia in the half-century up to 2002.[4] The updated edition of the study revealed 498 attacks on humans worldwide for the years 2002 to 2020, with 25 deaths, including 14 attributed to rabies."
As another commenter noted, this is most likely due to wolf populations decimated by hunting and/or habitat destruction.
In North America, those numbers make sense as eg. US is relatively sparsely populated compared to other developed countries. And most wolves will reside in areas less-populated still, and/or national parks. So encounters are rare. US != rest of world.
So it's in same order of shark attacks. Which is not how most humans die.
Personally I'm not scared of wolves. Maybe throw some stones at one if encounted, to keep it wary of humans. Rather than try & be friendly, and have it attack a child later on.
But don't be naive about them. They're among the biggest canines, and not used to / bred to be human-friendly. Give them space.
I've heard from my farmer friends that not all sheep declared to have been bitten by wolves have in fact been bitten by wolves. There is some insurance fraud with that. Not sure how widespread
Suddenly statistics will show that no sheep or cows die anymore by illness, accidents, old age or pregnancy gone bad, after government starts paying for wolf attacks in some area.
Every single time, farmers will soon realize that paying for medicines for an old cow is a worse deal than borrowing a mastiff from a friend and being paid. People tried to be paid for the bony rests of a barbecue. (Yep. really). People tried to be paid twice or thrice for the same cow, just moving the corpse around. For some reason wolves always start eating the most yummy parts of the cows first: the plastic identification tags in the ears.
In Spain some farmers never ever sold a cow or paid taxes. Their entire activity for decades is: buying foals in a province by 50 euros, moving to another and leaving then alone in isolated places known to have wolves, to cash 150 euros of our taxes by each foal. Rinse and repeat. Ka-ching.