The Real Reasons Why Idaho Plans To Kill 90% of Its Wolf Population
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Idaho has just passed legislation allowing the killing of wolves by any means necessary, resulting in about a 90% loss in population. What is wrong with people? Do wolves really kill that many domestic stocks? I doubt it, but these farmers and ranchers donate billions to the state coffers, and the politicians they have bought do their bidding, virtually Republicans.
The centuries-old fear and loathing of wolves, featured in fairy tales, including the greatest fairy tale of all, the bible, has driven the desire to wantonly destroy these magnificent creatures for virtually no reason beyond the senseless emotion of it.
A recent study has demonstrated how the presence of wolves can actually reduce car/deep auto collisions often resulting in death, not only of the deer, but the drivers, not to mention the billions of dollars in damage they cause.
Rolf Peterson, an ecologist of some renown, remembers driving remote stretches of road in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and seeing areas strewn with deer carcasses. That landscape changed, however, after gray wolves arrived in the region from Canada and Minnesota. “When wolves moved in during the 1990s and 2000s, the deer-vehicle collisions went way down,” said the Michigan Tech researcher.
In case you missed it: Sad—Wolves to the Slaughter In Wisconsin
Most recently, the AP reports, another team of scientists has gathered data about road collisions and wolf movements in Wisconsin to quantify how the arrival of wolves there affected the frequency of deer-auto collisions.
Dominic Parker, a natural resources economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-author of their study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences said:
It created what scientists call “a landscape of fear,” they found. “In a pretty short period of time, once wolves colonize a county, deer-vehicle collisions go down about 24%,”
According to Newser:
Both thinning of the deer population by wolves and behavior changes in fearful deer are factors in the drop-off, Parker said. “When you have a major predator around, it impacts how the prey behave,” he said. “Wolves use linear features of a landscape as travel corridors, like roads, pipelines, and stream beds. Deer learn this and can adapt by staying away.” Gray wolves, among the first species protected under the Endangered Species Act in 1973, were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in 1995. But in other regions of the US, gray wolves have dispersed naturally; the population in the lower 48 states now totals about 5,500. The study said the presence of wolves, maligned by ranchers whose livestock suffers predation, also can save money by indirectly reducing deer-vehicle collisions. In 2008, a study for the US Department of Transportation estimated those crashes cost more than $8 billion annually. “If anything, the researchers underestimated the value of the deer-vehicle crashes,” Peterson said, pointing out the cost of medical bills and even human fatalities.
Man has never been satisfied with what he has, he always wants more, and it doesn’t matter if these are creatures on two legs or four, the human condition dictates survival, and enrichment, not necessarily in that order, so sadly, the wolves will have to go.
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Humans know only one answer to something they see as a problem. Kill it. Here in my neck of the woods the problem is with snakes. Never mind that there are only about 6 species that are dangerous to people and while more people are killed by lightning than snakes, the people want to kill them all. What they will do when the rodent population overwhelms us no one knows. The vast majority of snakes, especially in the South are harmless to people and even those that are not prefer to get away from people. But like all wildlife, we are continually moving into their areas and then complaining about them. Soon there won’t be any of them left and we will be next.
Reminds me of what Chinese author Han Suyin wrote in Birdless Summer about the Maoist government campaign to eliminate birds in order to boost grain crops. The theory being that birds eat the grain. The results were predictable: a plague of insects that would soften a Pharaoh’s heart (but not a Republican’s.
Our Trumpist Republicans have so much in common with the Maoists, you’d think someone would notice. Total and cruel disrespect for animals, domestic and wild has long been endemic in the far east and it sickens me to see it here.
My words have escaped me, but I do have this weird water on my eyes. I wonder if the feds can do anything about this through the dept of whatever it is, pink wriggly things. Why I prefer my animals. Some humans don’t know how to human anymore.
It broke my heart as well. When I first read the article I couldn’t believe my eyes, and then I did the research and knew I had to say something. Fuck people.