Wolf pup peering out of den
Keywords: wolf, wildlife, stock
| Aug. 25, 2017 – Update on the Harl Butte Pack ODFW killed the fourth Harl Butte wolf, a non-breeding adult female, this morning (Aug. 25). A third wolf was killed on Aug. 17, also a non-breeding adult female. The pack is now believed to number six adult wolves plus at least three pups. ODFW will continue to monitor the situation to see if the removal of four wolves has been effective in limiting further wolf-livestock losses. Livestock producers will continue to use non-lethal deterrents including daily human presence, removal of potential attractants, and hazing. More Information. |
|
WAKE UP OREGON…. youll have more depredation problems next year!!!
Source: ODFW moves to lethal take for Harl Butte wolves to limit further livestock losses
Comments
STOP IT How dumb are you Oregon Wildlife? Your job is to protect Wildlife nt kill it
The problem with lethal response to predation on domestics, is that once entered into, it self-perpetuates. Humans see it as a valid way of life, and following the usual process in our symbolic, imaginative brains, rationalizinng psychopathic dissociative violence becomes the norm.
This is, however, a cultural norm, even though it be ubiquitous across the present world, excepting only the determined holders of traditional tribal nations (not formally regarded as nations by even the UN, they are called “indigenous”; some have limited treaty rights and territories.
I’ve spent years studying the human characteristic of living in the imagination and illusion , kids – nearly all of us are taught by the present worldwide culture to live more in our mental processes than in the real world. Even the technology is a positive feedback, both generated by and increasing focus on fantasizing.
Some experience with some ways of original cultures and their wise, immersed in reality, will allow you to live more often within the reality of earth, and you also have it in your personal nature. For we aren’t and cant be different from nature itself.
Only active life alone or near-alone in that real world, nature, returns one to proper natural functioning. Having also spent a decade with a wolf in that nature, sharpening up sensory awareness in an effort to match that of this superior species brought me to full awareness of our alternative; and the experience of communication without fantasy is another component. I suggest learning native north american sign language as a third method of avoiding illusion. But here, because of the fantasy of “wildlife management”, and the imposition of death as control, we have to deal with a fourth way: the scientific method.
Protect the Wolves acts to inform readers of the events created by those who seek to make war on and genocide on the wolf, along with other restrictions.
This comment is intended to help readers and advocates more conversant with predator science, so that you can become more effective and gain a clearer understanding, so:
Lethal management questions.
Meta-analysis is the critical study of numerous experiments to find large-scale statistical evidence either supporting or contradicting the validity of the experiments or practices.
A most famous one is Wielgus and Peebles 2014: Wielgus, Robert B., and Kaylie A. Peebles. “Effects of wolf mortality on livestock depredations.” PLoS One 9, no. 12 (2014): e113505.
Their data showed that in the year following lethal response to predation, increased predation occurred.
Other studies and data show increased predation results from human-imposed mortality – hunting and trapping and poisoning. When the social structure and teaching capacity of adults are eliminated by their deaths, the offspring must get food in any way they can.
The reason that Wielgus and Peebles (they had previously done a similar one concerning mountain lions) is not accepted by wildlife management agencies, is the problem with which I began this note, combined with a criticism published in Science mag by some statisticians, showing that lethal response does in years following the first, is effective.
But that effectiveness results from the cascade of mortality of the young . dispersing wolves suffer over 75% mortality (yet other studies have shown this, and the fact that siblings disperse, and avoid inbreeding (many more studies show the wolf avoids inbreeding. This issue is yet another layer, and having studied it, I can tell you it must take you into hormonal, evolutionary, and cognitive sciences) , means that the original family territory is vacated, and then repopulated by others.
So, lethal management imposes severe disruption, including upon the human occupiers and their domestics.
Nonlethal methods then, assist learned peaceful coexistence, for every animal involved is social – cows, sheep, humans, wolves.
ODFW and WDFW operat using both lethal and nonlethal methods. Of course, both prioritize the human economic interests ove all else without question. Some biologists in service to livestock interests emphasize that both are necessary (there is of course a failure in logic in light of the disruption resulting from killing the wolves, but that merely shows another facet of the problematic positive feedback into more wolf-killing-as-management)
I am failing to avoid complexity here, and apologize. All management, even of endangered species recognizes that predators have alternative prey, and so there’s a positive feedback of excuses to kill predators, or any natural species or guild negatively affecting the survival of the target species.
Adrian Treves over in Wisconsin has worked on such issues, and although he personally advocates for nonlethal response, his work is from the human-centered value basis, as are all employed scientists. My position is closer to but on the other side from that of Protect the Wolves. Having to favor the wolf, for personal and cultural reasons leads one into advocacy, even when unprepared for the violent arrogance of the human animal.
But here is Treves, et al. in another meta-anaysis out last year.
http://www.faculty.nelson.wisc.edu/treves/pubs/Treves_Krofel_McManus.pdf
Humans have used guard dogs and human presence for millennia effectively, to deter personal losses from predators. Ranchers complain about the work to train dogs (you’ll have to explore this – the dogs must bond to the sheep, etc. and not to humans or even other dogs), and complain more about the idea of remaining onsite themselves. In the modern culture, you see, there are too many toys, paperwork, fences, and distractions with which they desire to amuse themselves. Thus lethal response – kill those who disagree.
This is characteristic of social primates like baboons, chimps, humans.
Regardless of my own bias, the wolf-killing issue must be addressed in a manner acceptable to the humans occupying the continent, as a considerable majority of US residents (through statistical polling) prefer that wolves be allowed to survive. Those residents, of course, are employed in perpetuating the present culture (and the Coleville indigenous tribal government, while perhaps related to the tiny proportion of original cultures that I vaguely mentioned in another comment as being culturally anti-wolf. For Identification, you’ll have to explore on your own, as I’m not going to dredge up this astonishing difference from ALL others indigenous or earliest-arrived to the continent) express preference for wolf survival and presence.
As do biologists; here’s an intro by Brad Bergstrom to a february issue of the Journal of Mammalogy, an asm publication, seeking the cessation of lethal predator response by humans: https://doi.org/10.1093/jmammal/gyw185
Readers may have learned that most scientific work is not reachable by the public for free, due ot the expertise and work necessary to review and publish, and sometimes support research and researchers.
But being on the side of the wolf, I recognize that one needless death is worth far more than any human concerns, I’ll direct you to a website that a wonderfully principled Russian scientist created. It’s called sci-hub.cc .
There you can enter the formal citation of any scientific work, or just the DOI (a number by which all published science is listed). If, upon entering the citationn or DOI, it doesn’t go directly to the scientific article, and instead you should encounter a confusing Russian text, just notice that it means enter the given password to prove you’re not a bot.
Here’s a short comment from Canada on the slow cultural change toward coexisting with wolves:
http://wolvesontario.org/are-we-acting-on-wolves-or-are-they-acting-on-us-too/
Bob Ferris at Cascadia Wildlands wrote the following on the limitations of lethal control. There’s far more literature on wolf behavior supporting his comments than he cites, and no valid disputational science. It’s worth your read, as it skims also what Canadian Provinces are doing wrong – a universe of hell itself, and referenced by many US state wildlife agencies for their practices and models:
http://www.cascwild.org/tag/predator-control/
Here’s yet another recent meta-analysis on conflict prevention methods suitable for ranchers. Although it covers material you may have read before, it’s worth going over, if you choose to advocate personally or influence agencies and livestock interests:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-02323-w#Sec2
there’s much more espousing the idea of combining lethal and nonlethal response, and I included the last because it gathered a few guard dog studies.
The reality is that because wolves can only be safe on public lands, it’s likely necessary that ranchers be excluded from usage of our remaining public lands. This in itself is a violently political issue, as I’ve mentioned previously – when livestockinterests came (to various areas from about 1620 on, and in the west, when immigrants flocked to Oregon, etc, and worse, after the wanton killing of the bison and the use of bushmeat by goldseekers), they awarded themselves “ownership”, a European cultural phenomenon stemming from only the late 1600s, as feudalism in its pure form slowly broke down in the face of technology.
I digress; ranchers and others of the present culture believe that only humans are “persons” and can “own” and be “responsible”, while all else is property, and if wild, vermin to be extinguished.
This is the culture with which you, I, the wolf, the lion, the very rodent and every lifeform take issue. Mosquitoes and plants are thoughtlessly poisoned, the innocent all dispossessed and made victim of the aggrieved human taker.
I really think, if the bovine and ovine domestic understood that 100% of their lives would be taken early, as they are by humans, no domestic economic animal would submit or choose to serve the human above their own kind. They wold most likely choose to return to their variable natural survival, use their muscle and minds, seasonally migrate and live with their natural integrity. It is possible that only when all humans without exception are taught enough to be able to weigh this possibility, will a return to complex, beautiful, resilient individuality and ecosystem occur.
I don’t really NEED this thing I type on, and go through much pain and sorrow because I feel it necessary to choose to use it. No food comes from it, only yearning for what I know and had and could return to. Escaping from it periodically, and having lived largely within nature, it’s clear to me that almost all technology debilitates me – as it surely does you.
I think back to when the indigenous observed the metals, the manufactured clothes, the premade implements brought into their ken by the massive culture. In every case, they only took on the fictive religions and dissociated deities, of those invaders BECAUSE of the perceived conveniences. They really reported that the spirit of nature must have favored those who had such great STUFF as the things that killed at long distance from safety.
So too many lost their trust in the ancient way of careful and caring coexistence with all other life and the invisible – the tiny organisms which we still translate by the words “spirit, fate, powers”. I can go on for hours about effective practices which once protected properly dispersed and unsaturated densities of populations, but the essence is that convenience and dissociation conquered the soaring and beautiful life. Just to remind you, if I had never mentioned it: human brains of 10,000 years ago averaged 20% larger than do today’s. THe wolf’s brain is about 20% larger than any domestic dog of the same body size. The wild cat conspecific to the domestic ones you know has also the SAME brain size difference.
This should indicate that modern life is not more complex, but merely more submissive and dependent. That pain the I mentioned, is in part a deep recognition that this way of life, this culture is not fulfilling. We ourselves are domesticated as fodder for the operation of a culture so violent that it attacks all life worldwide.
Once, among myriad encounters, traveling by and through humans with my Brother the Wolf, a woman said to me,” I wish I had a wolf.” So tired of years of explaining that you can NEVER “have” a wolf, and explaining the ways in which they are equal or superior, I just said, “his head is bigger than yours.”
By that I meant that his senses, his perceptions, encompassed more. His world larger, if seemingly evanescent. His lightning attention may have been what attracted the sudden love or fear of men. They choose far more carefully to bond than we, more vulnerable and open to every moment, detecting more, learning faster; finally, his young and ancient eyes told me, knowing .
Those blazing lives, which I think of every time I see a meteor flash across the sky – pretty often! – are beyond our understanding and like the sky, vaster than our selfish judgment can ever be.
My Brother, I realize, took in atoms, and released them throughout his life, and it’s likely that at least one has become by now a temporary resident, a momentary constituent of you. It will pass, or has, for this is what the wolf teaches:
All that is, is change. You cannot be separate from the wolf, any wolf. We are all just travelers, gathering and giving, like the black wolf who watched him and me on the day he first learned the trick of ferrying – swimming upriver at only a slight angle, letting it pull him to the other side.
I saw her inquisitive yellow eyes; she chose carefully to melt away into the richness of the day. We too walked on, in the wildness that someone said is the preservation, the whole , of the world.