Wolflandia: The Fight Over the Most Polarizing Animal in the West | Hacker News Reader

Wolflandia: The Fight Over the Most Polarizing Animal in the West

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28 pointsdaddy_drank15 comments

Strange timing. I just contributed to Pacific Wild's campaign to save the wolves in British Columbia. Our province recently re-opened the wolf hunt with the goal of protecting caribou populations. IMO reducing the pipeline and LNG explosion in the province would also have a positive effect on the wolf population.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/save-b-c-wolves

In the past when livestock owners had to contend with wolves they'd often use mountain dogs who would live with the livestock, sometimes they'd wear "wolf collars"[0] It's pretty intense and I have mixed feelings about the collar especially, but it goes to show that there have been solutions for this very old problem that don't involve killing all the wolves.

3 or 4 big mountain dogs out with the livestock are apparently enough to deter the wolves. Though I'm not sure if you expect to lose any of the dogs to the wolves and how you'd weigh that aspect of it.

[0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_collar mountain dog example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyrenees

The mentality of people who support this kind of environmental destruction is baffling. "I have the right to a profitable business even if it means slaughtering an entire species to the point of extinction and ruining ecosystems nation-wide." Human arrogance at its finest.

Tragedy of the commons. That's why the solution is to privatize everything. You'd care about people killing your wolves.

What exactly would you do with the wolves you own?

Presumably collect payments from the people who kill them.

There's also tragedy of the anticommons. Remember the Vogons from Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy?

Your solution to the wolf problem involves figuring out how to assign ownership to every molecule of air and every rock on the sea floor, the wolf problem is probably easier to solve.

That assumes the wolves would stay on your chunk of land. But of course they wouldn't as their range is typically much larger than any individual property. Privatisation ignores things like ecosystems.

I hunt elk in the Idaho panhandle and have witnessed the changes that the wolf packs have brought to the area over the past ten years.

The current situation with controlled hunting of the wolves is vastly preferable to the previous state of affairs where locals felt the need to take matters into their own hands because the Fish and Game authorities were not able to control things (and when given license to do so the state authorities manage the animal populations admirably). The destruction the wolves brought to the elk population isn't as big of an issue (though in our area the total numbers dropped by half when the wolves arrived in force) as the damage they were doing to animal husbandry in the area. Wolves are like humans in that they sometimes kill for sport - in one case a rancher had over 100 sheep killed over the weekend by three wolves, throats ripped out but not eaten. This was an extreme event but not surprising given the extensive low-level damage that farmers and ranchers experienced in those areas.

There was also a growing discomfort in the area due to the wolves' general fearlessness around humans and several threatening incidents which thankfully didn't result in any injuries. They can grow to be seven feet from nose to tail and weigh over 150 pounds - and when you hear two dozen of them howling around you in the woods it will chill your blood in a very special way, no matter how well armed you are. Thankfully now they are much more skittish and are not as aggressive towards people - they are quite intelligent and know that the rules have changed for us. It's actually incredibly hard to fill a wolf tag, the actual success rates for the hunters were at least an order of magnitude lower than predicted in the first seasons. Wolf hunting success rates are less than 1%, whereas elk hunting success rates average more around 20% [1]

One issue is that these aren't even the right variety of wolves that used to roam these areas, before the era of human game management. It would almost be like environmental activists bemoaning the loss of black bear territory in Virginia and replacing them with grizzlies. Once a few wandered into the D.C. suburbs the locals might get a little upset.

Ultimately it boils down to trade-offs. How much economic activity and tax revenue would we mind foregoing in order to maintain an abstract good of environmental balance? This is a hard problem when both sides of that equation are well-defined, but in this case the definition of environmental balance varies radically, especially when trying to reconstruct some unmeasured (by comparable modern methods) pre-existing state.

1 - https://fishandgame.idaho.gov/public/docs/fgNews/2012feb.pdf (page 3)

You say that population decreased by half, but that may not mean much if they were overpopulated by 100%. What about the incidence of disease among elk populations and livestock? One of the supposed benefits from reintroducing wolves is the positive effects for bears and coyotes as well as keeping overpopulated prey species populations down.

I'm obviously a proponent of the reintroduction of wolves to their traditional habitat where possible, but I do have some sympathy to the concerns you've expressed.

I'm not a wildlife conservation expert by any stretch, but it was my impression in 2006/2007 (before wolves came in significant packs to the Idaho panhandle) that the elk population was stable and on sustained slight growth without any overpopulation.

When the Rocky Mountain states were debating opening up a wolf season (circa 2008-2010) one of the arguments was that the early studies had indicated a balanced and desirable wolf population of around 700 or so - but current population estimates were an order of magnitude larger, around 6,000 wolves. An apex predator population of that size would (and did) tear through a large and unadjusted prey population and tend towards overpopulation, starvation, and disease themselves. Putting a human control on their spread is the only thing that was sensical both for the wolves and for the whole ecosystem. The only thing worse than 10,000 wolves running through the Rockies is 10,000 starving wolves running through the Rockies.

I'd also point out that by putting the wolves on the list as a hunted species their long term survival is all but guaranteed - hunters of a particular type of game tend to be very active when conserving populations of "their" game animal, put massive personal resources towards supporting that game's environment, and pass those values on to others.

Which wolves live there now, and which wolves lived there in antiquity?

They reintroduced Northwestern Wolves (Canis lupus occidentalis). Use to be Northern Rocky Mountain wolves (Canis lupus irremotus). The population originally to reseed Yellowstone was from Canada (Alberta). Also, I wouldn't quite put it as antiquity - the last confirmed wolf kill in Yellowstone was in 1926.

Oh, and I have no idea how significant the difference in subspecies is. Apparently they are both amongst the largest subspecies.

A little research reveals A) people are very emotional about wolf classification and B) some argue the 24 subspecies of Gray Wolf should be consolidated: http://howlcolorado.org/2010/04/22/detangling-the-subspecies... It's certainly not comparable to black bears vs. grizzly bears.

Especially of interest was

> The average weight of the 188 wolves killed in the 2009 Idaho wolf hunt was less than 100lbs.

If wolves are not scared of humans, that is a huge problem. The last recorded wolf attack on human in my country is from 14th century.

In Europe we try to reintroduce them as well. But after any serious accident, we would probably wipe out local population, and start over.

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