Another Take On Wolves

[santaman2000]

We get wolf skins for the reenactors. Some from North America, but those are the ones that are shot because they've bred with domestic dogs gone feral, and there are attempts to keep the wolf/wolf, iimmc. Those come to use declawed as evidence….no idea why. Most come from Mongolia where the horse breeders are killing the wolves because they were losing half of their young foals to wolf attack every year.

Easy for urbanites to say, "Bring back the wolf, they'll remove the deer problem"…..y'know what ? get the Farmer's Union to tell us that they want the wolves back, and then listen.

Easy for Americans who have not exterminated their wolves and bears to say that it won't be a problem. We have not had free roaming wolves in the UK since 1745. We haven't had bears for even longer. In that same period our population has grown from c7,000,000 to over 64,000,000 people. That's over nine times as many people, and their animals, on the same restricted landmass.

Nice idea; whether it's a good one or not is still under debate.
M

American ranchers are complaining too Mary. The most voiciferous support for re-introduction here is from urbanites ad well. I have a mixed opinion. I like wolves and want to see them thrive, but as a country boy I completely understand the objections of farmers and ranchers.

 

[Toddy]

I think that sums up my opinion to it too; I would like to see them thrive, but we live on islands, and the British Isles (over 6,000 of them) are overcrowded with no expansion possible.
Any large mammal predator is always going to be under threat. They have no escape routes, no lands inaccessible to humans, no way of connecting with continental populations to expand their gene pool. 20 miles of sea separate the British Isles from the European continent.

This kind of wipe out of island fauna has been going on for literally millennia. The islands in the Mediterranean used to have giant swans, pygmy elephants and hippos, before humans wiped them out.
Dead as the Dodo, or the Tasmanian marsupial wolf….nothing new there.
The huge human population growth on this set of islands though, is an enormous factor, and unless we start culling ourselves (though going by the past four thousand years of human history, and the constant drift of people to these islands despite migration from them, even a cull wouldn't last long) the reintroduction of predators is always going to be contentious.

M

 

[nettles150390]

One species evolving and displacing another isn't evolution? Why not? if you accept that humans are just another evolved species, then of course us displacing another species is evolution.

Exactly displacing. Evolution is the process of genetic traits being passed from generation to generation with the best adapted traits helping the life form to survive and so pass on those genes/ traits. Wolves developing bullet resistant skin would be evolution. And displace ment happens when a species out competes another species for resources by dint of these more adapted genes. We didn't out compete wolves we activity tracked and exterminated them. If anything we are an environmental factor that forces evolution. But the only real evolution we have had on wolves is turning them into dogs, everything else is/was just mass genocide (right word?)

 

[santaman2000]

Exactly displacing. Evolution is the process of genetic traits being passed from generation to generation with the best adapted traits helping the life form to survive and so pass on those genes/ traits. Wolves developing bullet resistant skin would be evolution. And displace ment happens when a species out competes another species for resources by dint of these more adapted genes. We didn't out compete wolves we activity tracked and exterminated them. If anything we are an environmental factor that forces evolution. But the only real evolution we have had on wolves is turning them into dogs, everything else is/was just mass genocide (right word?)

We displaced them by hunting them to extinction (or nearly so) in the exact same manner as they displace coyotes and coyotes displace foxes. yes, that IS displacement.

We evolved passing on superior genes of intellect which allowed us to develop tools, weapons and tactics that allowed us to track and hunt them thusly. Yes, our superior intellect IS evolution.

Like it or not, we are part and parcel of evolution; not separate from it.