We can agree that wolves are highly social and intelligent animals. But they are very efficient killers. That makes them suitable for wilderness areas and remote country but problematic near where people live. In order to deal with wolves around livestock operations and communties, we need to de-list wolves from the Endangered Species Act. Same with grizzly bears. We need to make hunting them acceptable under some circumstances and predator control a possibility instead of a Federal crime.
@ppine I completely agree with your first two paragraphs and much of this one. I get nervous when people start talking about 'predator control' because I think in some cases that's been used as an excuse for sport slaughter. But, I'm not opposed to hunting wolves or protecting livestock (though there've been some interesting efforts lately about non-lethal methods of protecting livestock from wolves, like
fladry and guardian dogs).
Per your comment about National Forests and wilderness areas, you're right of course. I was merely pointing out that human impacts extend over pretty much everywhere these days, in one way or another. Those lands all host roads and human recreation, as many NFs host grazing (as I'm sure you know). I agree with you that there's room for wolves to roam in the West, and that wolves aren't suitable for heavily developed areas. There's a lot of nuance on the spectrum between legal Wilderness and cities. Does a lone rancher's cabin near thousands of acres of National Forest grazing land count as 'near human habitation' when it comes to where wolves should be? While I think the human footprint does cover most of the land, I'm not going to sit in NY and tell folks in Billings or Boise how close they should live to wolves.
I'm just trying to promote a serious and interesting conversation, even if controversial.
Same. I'm answering in depth in the spirit of serious and interesting conversation.
I'm also not aware of any "great ecological harm" that has befallen the world because of the extinction
Many of the famous examples were lost before much info was collected on the species, like the auk and the dodo. But there's a lot known about the impacts of extirpation of species like the wolf, beaver, bison, and alligator. They're all keystone species, which alter and create habitat for other species. Of course what's 'better' is a matter of opinion. If you like red cedar and oak scrub more than prairie, maybe you'd like bison to be extinct. If you like invasive shrublands instead of eastern forests, maybe deer should thrive until the native trees are gone and there's nothing but thickets of honeysuckle, rose, and bittersweet. If you like flashy streams that erode banks and leave Western lands parched and susceptible to catastrophic wildfire, than maybe you think beaver should stay extirpated from much of the West. But the impacts can and have been studied.
I also firmly believe that no government employee or scientist has any understanding of what the near infinite combinations and permutations of possibilities are of removing an individual species from the world's ecology. It's all wild speculation.
I'd argue that the greatest danger to nature is the arrogance and hubris of men who ignorantly believe they understand nature and know how to control nature on grand scales.
While I'd agree whole-heartedly that the natural world has near infinite combinations and permutations of possibilities, I strongly disagree that it's all wild speculation. There's a lot we don't know. There's a lot we can't know. But we can study and we can learn. Ecology is infinitely complex. We get some things wrong. The science evolves over time as we know more. For example, in the article in the OP, they note that while it seems like this relationship between wolf-predation risk correlates to tree distribution via beaver travel distances, there are other factors that could be at play. It's complex.
But I think the idea that it's
all wild speculation and that scientists don't have
any understanding discounts all of science and everything we have learned. And we have learned a lot.
At the same time, I do share skepticism in our hubris and arrogance. I see it in the confidence of many developers who bulldoze a wetland here and create a wetland there as mitigation - the human-made wetlands often don't function like the naturally made ones do. Ecology is a very inexact science, and restorations sometimes don't pan out as intended.
But, we keep changing the natural world at a dizzying pace. I'm not going to throw up my hands and say 'well, it's too complex to understand so we might as well just drive whatever species we feel like to extinction because there isn't a clear impact.'
is quite capable of reducing the population of deer from its lands if Hobbes' Leviathan government would just get out of the way, instead of in the way.
Humans, unregulated, nearly drove deer to extinction. Deer were brought back in large part through legal conservation, enacted by the government. I think we do need to hunt more deer in the eastern US, and government regulations are one of many barriers to that in some ways. But, there are other barriers to hunting deer that are likely much more pressing, like a lack of access to huntable land, residental densities that proclude safe hunting, and many modern Americans being too dang busy and plugged in to get outside and hunt (or paddle), at least where I live. We have deer tags going unfilled in this area.
But no hunting regs at all leads to extinctions in many cases. Moderation, of individuals and government, is key, I think. Unfortuntely neither individuals nor government seem very good at moderating themselves.
Personally, I'm doing my part to reduce deer population & I'm hoping to continue that reduction on Sat when the regular rifle season opens here.
As for coyotes, bobcats & bear; I seriously doubt that any of them would actively hunt deer. They might, occasionally, eat a fawn or some road kill but the main impact of coyote in this area was to decimate rabbit & pheasant populations and push the foxes toward humans. I've seen more foxes in & around barns in the past 5 years than I ever have. Seems coyotes eat baby foxes too so the foxes move toward humans and use us as human shields.
Glad to hear you're getting out and hunting up some deer, Gamma! A colleague here in southern NY document with a trail camera a lone coyote taking on an adult buck, so it does happen. And fawn predation is still predation, though we could question whether it's compensatory or additive (i.e., does killing fawns really impact the overall population?). I agree that coyotes, bobcats and bears probably aren't killing enough deer, but in areas where hunting isn't practicable, they're better than nothing if you ask me.
The fox-coyote dynamics are certainly interesting, and pretty well documented in several scientific papers that came out in the last few years (though clearly you're on the land enough to see the phenomenon for yourself).
